Jacques Vaché

With murder and suicide you ended what Rousseau began.
The break with the classical tradition was complete.
It was not enough to go trading in Abyssinia:
The romantic movement had been a reaffirmation
Of life against art, in the narrow sense, but the revolution
Once started went headlong, it was not enough
To say: l’art est une sottise, the sickness spread
From member to member, until life itself became
Suspect, rejected, the ultimate sottise.
By what curious process did revolt against the neo-classic
Begin with Rousseau and with you, Jacques Vaché?

When you killed your friend with much applauded wit,
And yourself with an admired gesture, a sly overdose,
You negated everything once and for all; your disciples,
The dadaists, not wishing to die, were shown up as pikers:
Pierre de Massot said that he went on living
For love of death, which was rhetoric. He went on living,
Having his picture taken with hat on one side,
A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, tough as all hell,
But living and writing and becoming a communist,
Just as if everything were not a sottise, just as if
You had never negated everything, Jacques Vaché.

But perhaps you were right after all, say you ended
Art based on the conscious and the subconscious mind,
Seeing that there was nothing more to be done on those levels.
Below the subliminal mind of the individual,
The world of dream and hypnogogic illusion,
Lies the clear anima mundi without boundaries.
It has no language, none that we can spell,
But nothing less will content us in the end.
Are you laughing, Jacques Vaché, you that now share
The great unconsciousness of the minerals
And the omniscience of the universe?

From Seventy Poems (Alan Swallow, 1965.)