Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos, trans. Lewis Warsh, Winter Editions, 2023

Winter Edition’s lovely new volume, Night of Loveless Nights, by Robert Desnos, translated by Lewis Warsh, is a must-read for students of Modernism and of how its torch has been passed on to Postmodern poets. Desnos, pal of Benjamin Peret and an active member of the Surrealist group in Paris between the wars, was a dynamo of literary activity among the literary vanguard, publishing three novels, several books of poetry, writing reviews of jazz and cinema, working in radio and collaborating on screen plays. He was known in particular for his automatic writing. Apparently, Desnos would fall into a dreamy half-sleep and thus take dictation in order to create his poetry. He was practicing what the manifestos were preaching. He isn’t a poet advocating automatic writing; he is doing it, and doing it beautifully. Night of Loveless Nights, like Crane’s poem, a sustained and wildly inventive meditation on the difficulties of Love, is a pivotal work of Surrealism. As the title suggests, the poem is a compression and compendium of all love-lorn tropes, the whole tradition going back to the 12th century in one poem, all the nights into one night. It’s a summing up and taking stock and emptying out so that at the end it can move on and call for revolt. As the book’s informative afterward by David Rosenberg suggests, the extra-ness of Desnos’s poem is a way of pruning the tradition of all its falsehoods:

In a similar vein, the poem is notable for the war between the perfect surface of its alexandrines and neat rhyme schemes and the chaotic and excessive energy of its mysterious turns, hyperbolic sensibility, and strange imagery (“the beautiful mouth with the man-eating teeth”). The poem is both supremely rational and supremely irrational, completely sincere and totally campy (“... what we used to call deadpan”). It is this ambiguity, this having it both ways, that one can see the attraction for Warsh, a second-generation New York School poet, a young man coming into his power during Woodstock and Vietnam. Desnos’s poem offers a kind of real excellence and discipline and achievement in the context of wild freedom. He shows this 60s poet how they can still be an authentically reimagined part of the tradition, late and messed up though it may be.

The publishing history of the book is also instructive. The New American Poetries of the 50s through the 70s were all about revolution, taking over the means and modes of production. Poets became printers and publishers and organizers, not waiting for a counter-revolutionary establishment to affirm their work. The tradition had become dysfunctional, unable to absorb vital new energies, and they had to proceed by any means necessary. Thus, David Rosenberg, pal and peer of Lewis Warsh, devotes a whole issue of his magazine, The Ant’s Forefoot, to Warsh’s translation. The magazine’s name of course refers to a section of Pound’s Cantos, a quintessentially modernist work, wherein the narrator seeks redemption from their vanity and their wrongs. In this passage the tiny and insubstantial ant’s forefoot is what saves the narrator; and thus, by extension, it is the ephemeral and fleeting mimeograph machine that saves poetry, that brings Desnos to these new and eager readers. At the same time, Warsh publishes Rosenberg’s first translations of the Psalms. This kind of mutualism and collaboration, this ethos of poetry helps those who help themselves, introduced by Modernists as an alternate survival strategy, becomes a central way of life for poets in the bloated consumerist society of the 70s. The handsewn chapbook gives Poetry a safe, off-the-grid residence, an alternative to Levittown, which, of course, is everywhere.

Lewis Warsh was a great poet. I remember hearing him read in the early 90s with Wang Ping at Granary Books and how he opened my eyes to the sentence, how it could simultaneously be a vehicle of continuity and discontinuity, how, freighted with both everyday specificity and otherworldly mystery, the sentence could sing and restore us to a place of seeing. Thirty years later, at a Brooklyn Rail reading, Lewis batted clean up, bringing the audience with him on his swervy mind-trips, wowing us with his psychedelic clarity. Lewis was also a good fellow poet, taking the time to converse at events, gracious and sly and light, always receptive and always encouraging. I always looked forward to seeing him at readings, symposia, AWP, book parties, and especially at the Poetry Project. He was a kind of poetry glue, holding communities together with his presses, Angel Hair and United Artists, and teaching creative writing at LIU, encouraging both students and teachers. His passing to cancer has been a terrible loss to the poetry community, and so it is timely that Winter Editions has republished this lovely translation which exhumed Desnos thirty years after his death in a WWII camp, and now exhumes the youthful Warsh, with all his ambitions for poetry and freedom and community. If, as Pound says, all literary history is hero worship, then Desnos and Warsh are two such deserving heroes, and let us hie to the temple of poetry and buy this book!