Orphic Paris

by Henri Cole

Overview

A poetic portrait of Paris that combines prose poetry, diary, and memoir by award-winning writer and poet Henri Cole.

Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Cole writes of Paris, “For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.” Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus—mystic, oracular, entrancing—Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681372198
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published nine collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection of poetry is Nothing to Declare. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.

Editorial Reviews

01/29/2018
This impressionistic paean to Paris from poet Cole (Nothing to Declare) bypasses conventional memoir or travelogue to give readers a captivating collection of his memories. Born to an American father and a French mother, Cole discusses family recollections of occupied France, his first trip to Paris as a small child, and a long-ago Christmas dinner in Marseille with his uncle’s family, along with more recent travels in Paris. He shares conversations with friends, notably the late biographer James Lord, and observations on artists and poets, such as Paul Cezanne and Rainer Maria Rilke, but his love of Paris remains the main note. Smitten with the city, Cole is as comfortable taking the reader to off-the-beaten-path spots like a taxidermist’s shop, “where one can buy a butterfly, beetle, baby lamb, or black bear,” as to landmarks like the Pompidou Center or Montparnasse Cemetery. In one of the most memorable passages, he celebrates France’s legalization of same-sex marriage by drinking champagne, while “on the horizon, the top of the Eiffel Tower kept me company with its sparkling lights that suggest freedom.” Paris lovers and Cole fans will rejoice, but so will any reader who delights in fine writing. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Henri Cole always has seemed to me the central poet of his American generation. Orphic Paris is a meditation both on Paris and on the inward spirit of Henri Cole. What emerges is a vision of reality worthy of Paul Valéry." —Harold Bloom 

"This impressionistic paean to Paris from poet Cole bypasses conventional memoir or travelogue to give readers a captivating collection of his memories….Paris lovers and Cole fans will rejoice, but so will any reader who delights in fine writing." —Publishers Weekly

“Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris is a remarkable work—a poet’s most intimate diary, written entirely in Paris, in a sequence of visits that take us into the interior of the city as into the interior of the questing poet’s soul. The voice of the poet here is confiding, erudite, tender, unexpected in its sympathies and discoveries; like Henri Cole’s extraordinary poetry, it is both finely crafted and yet—seemingly—artless, unpretentious.  One of the great pleasures of Orphic Paris is the poet’s  delight in the work and words of others—fellow poets, artist-friends, Parisians who drift into his ardently observant life, and move on.” —Joyce Carol Oates

"[A] lustrous, autobiographical book of musings, memoir, and artistic reflections….A masterful example of the ambulatory narrative, à la W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn." —Diego Báez, Booklist

"A delicate, affectionate, and reflective memoir...A wise, astute, and luminous literary commonplace book." —Kirkus Reviews

“For a foreigner Paris can be the loneliest city in the world. But loneliness makes us good observers, and Henri Cole, this great poet, is alert to everything outside and inside himself, to his thoughts and impressions, to his memories and aspirations. We can watch poetry being born!”  —Edmund White

"He has the voluptuary’s fastidious preoccupation with sensation—rather, say, an almost Japanese vocation for connoisseurship. But what is most striking in this work is its composure. Henri Cole’s poems do not strain for attention; for all their casual, anecdotal worldliness and natural diction, they project an eerie gravity. The poems’ shimmering, enigmatic tranquility coexists with intense feeling: they are clear without being stodgy, striking in their poise and delicacy and formal beauty without seeming, ever, mere exquisite diversions.  He is an artist of the greatest gifts." —Louise Glück, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New Member Citation

From the Publisher

2018-01-08
Self-portrait of a prizewinning poet in search of himself in entrancing Paris."In part, I come to Paris because I am a dreamer. It is a place where I am able to escape the shadows," writes Cole (Literature/Claremont McKenna Coll.; Nothing to Declare: Poems, 2015, etc.) in this delicate, affectionate, and reflective memoir. Originally serialized in the New Yorker, the book's 17 parts are mini-essays exploring the Paris landscape, family, friends, films, being gay, and the art of poetry. One of the many questions the author poses throughout the book is, "why am I writing all this down, dear reader?" He answers, "I don't want to conceal anything, or be surreptitious. Instead, I want to reveal something…that might otherwise remain dormant behind the intense beauty of Paris." Cole visited a number of graves, including Baudelaire's and his very good friend James Lord's. While visiting Susan Sontag's in Montparnasse, Cole describes himself as a "literary tourist….Cemeteries, after all, are for the living." Stylistically, the book has a strong aphoristic feel to it. The text, a "landscape self-portrait," is quietly understated in its reflections. Not surprisingly, at the heart of the book is poetry, Cole's own and that of others, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. I want my poems to seem rebellious…definite, self-sufficient," he writes, "and true in what they represent, like expressionist paintings." When "so much American poetry feels emotionally tepid and almost suburban," Cole revels in the "organized violence" of Sylvia Plath's poetry, which "extended the boundaries of the lyric." For Cole, Paris is the "city of the beloved. Some say a man goes mad if he is without love." The book's ending, with its series of sentences all beginning with "J'aime," is exuberant, Whitmanesque, Orphic: "and in this place, I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew."A wise, astute, and luminous literary commonplace book.

Kirkus Reviews