He can be an anti-poet, anti-God or a sort of Buddha tossing us into a new awareness. Henri Michaux is a perfect antidote for the winter blues and I am glad that I chose to read him early this year. They stick out so sharp and sublime against the dull poems that one regularly encounter that I have the feeling of being reborn when I read it. I have grown fond of reading his outlandish poems. If poetry can be a wonderful tool to render exceptional or extreme experiences, then the hallucinating poems of Henri Michaux will top that list. Whether in poetry or prose, his weird visions seem to emerge as messages from his inner space. He has authored more than 30 books of poems, prose poems, essays, journals, and drawings. In 1948, Michaux's wife died after accidentally setting fire to her nightgown: devastated, he began to take mescaline, a hallucinating drug, painstakingly recording his experiences in prose-poems accompanied by distinctive calligraphic line drawings. He finally settled in Paris, where he began to write and paint. His voyages inspired two travelogues on Ecuador and Asia. A painter as well as poet, he travelled widely in Africa and Asia and also supported himself in Paris as a teacher and secretary. He contemplated entering the priesthood then enrolled in medical school before abandoning his studies and becoming a merchant seaman. He was educated at a Jesuit school in Brussels. Greater than opium or German philosophy to Coleridge will the scent of her being be to me.Simplicity: The Prose Poems of Henri Michauxīorn in Belgium in 1899, Henri Michaux (1899-1984) defies common critical definition.

From now on I will recite sonnets to girls seen in the street, and on the subway I will recognize the signs of desire in her eyes still sleepy with last night’s dream, and in the evening I shall lift a glass and arrange for the ex-partners to embrace after years of bickering: They shall be happy, and I shall cross the little bridge east into the Bronx on 207th Street or the one going north on 215th Street and I will visit her at night, every night. But in those days I was reading Rousseau, who put the craziest notions in my head, and I memorized them, bowing to my fate as to an audience clapping its hands after the play. Nature was a goddess, and I was her slave.

That was my way of being, and I couldn’t change it any more than a boy can recover his innocence after the invention of sex.

And I would stand there and let them do it to me.

My enemies used to annoy the hell out of me with their fake cheerfulness, their pathetic need to be liked, or their drive to dominate every conversation.

Selected Writings by Henri Michaux