I’ve been taking Ron Padgett’s translations of Blaise Cendrars on the train with me. What intrigues me about Cendrars is his notion of â€?poetry without metaphorsâ€?, a writing that breaks distinctions. He strove to create what Peter Nicholls called “an instantaneity which discourse [could] never properly expressâ€?.

By calling into question the boundaries of high art and mass culture, Cendrars worked towards solving a problem that he strove to answer throughout the body of his poetic work — a problem that I struggle with on my commute into work everyday; no joke!

That is, how to break through the flood of sensations and associations of a rapidly changing life to achieve contact between the noumenon, the essence of the self and that of phenomenon, the world around.

How does one make one’s poetry authentic, if one has difficulty, in this day and age, of making one’s life feel authentic?

Cendrars strove to produce, what he termed, “poetry without metaphors�, a writing that breaks down the distinctions between the subjective and objective, mass culture and the “modern�, the inside and outside. In order to achieve this contact Cendrars forced an exchange between conventionally opposed discourses; namely, the poetic and the emerging discourses of mass culture.

Tomorrow I am taking his Prose of the Trans-Siberian on the train with me:

So many associations images I can’t get into my poem
Because I’m still such a really bad poet
Because the universe rushes over me
. . . . . . . . .
I don’t know how to take it all the way
. . . . . . . . .
But why compile a bibliography
I give up
Bounce back into leaping memory

The most amazing thing is that Cendrar’s discourse started close to a century ago, and it has become exponentially more relevant as time has passed.