Reviewed:
Elsewhere
for Robert Delaunay
Tour Eiffel
Guitare du ciel
Guitar of the sky
Attracting words
to your telegraphy
like a rosebush its bees
At night
the Seine stops flowing
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The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) is one of the few poets of the century whose life deserves a fat biography, which has never been written. In the thick of modernist “isms,” he created his own—Creationism—of which he was the only member, and which instructed poets not to sing of the rose, but to make it bloom in the poem. He collaborated or fought with nearly everyone in the international avant-garde, participated in the Irish Liberation and the Spanish Civil War, made paintings of his poems, was a screenwriter in Hollywood, a candidate for president in Chile, and never recovered from the wounds he received as a correspondent in the Second World War. His book-length poem of an “antipoet” hurtling through Einsteinian space, *Altazor*, is surely the fastest-reading, most entertaining long poem of modernism.
Eliot Weinberger is the editor of the Calligrams series published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and New York Review Books and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his books of essays are An Elemental Thing and the forthcoming The Ghosts of Birds. (February 2016)