Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud (Kenning Editions)
Poet of logical revolts, of sexual freedom, inveterate modernist, Symbolist, and inspiration to beatniks, conceptual artists and punks, Arthur Rimbaud wrote some of the most enduring poems of world literature. Here is a collection of all of his poems in verse, in a new English translation by American poet Brian Kim Stefans. With Rimbaud's sense of song craft in mind, Stefans has retained the French meters in his English versions. He is the first to have done this. The book opens with a Latin poem that Rimbaud wrote more than a year before his first known French poem, and it ends with a short poem he wrote a few years after leaving Paris, one which became a touchstone for Surrealist Andre Breton.
Brian Kim Stefans' recent books of poetry include "Viva Miscegenation” (MakeNow Books, 2013), Kluge: A Meditation (Roof Books, 2007), and Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (University of Alabama, 2017) about new media / experimental poetry and poetics. His poems and essays have been translated into Icelandic, Spanish, Norwegian, French, and other languages. He's currently working on a web archive titled "Extremes and Moderations: Los Angeles Poetry 1850-1985" which will launch in September, 2022 and a book of music criticism, Scavenged Luxury, on the Los Angeles punk and post-punk scene from 1975-1987. His website, where you can find his digital poems, is arras.net. He is a professor of English at UCLA.
Praise for Festivals of Patience -
"Brian Kim Stefans sets us ablaze with his astonishing new Rimbaud, proving it takes a worldly, genius poet to translate another. This book is a masterpiece." -- CA Conrad
