Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian poet, writer and painter who wrote in the French language. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with drugs, the latter resulting in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.
14 Books Written
A collection from one of the great figures in modern French poetry. This selection is from L’Espace du Dedans , which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror––where Chaplin meets Kafka––a world of pure and rar
Stroke by Stroke is a pairing of two of Henri Michaux’s most suggestive texts, Stroke by Stroke (Par des traits, 1984) and Grasp (Saisir, 1979), written towards the end of his life. Michaux’s ideogrammic ink drawings accompany his poetic explorations of animals, humans, and the origins of language. This series of verbal and pictorial gestures is at once explosive and contemplative. Michaux emerges
“ Un bárbaro en Asia , escrito entre 1930 y 1931, es un clásico moderno. Diario de viaje, cuaderno de ruta, ofrece al lector, en forma de ensayos o de reportajes, una ojeada sagaz de la India, de China, del Japón y de Malasia. Notará el lector que Michaux hace siempre turismo espiritual y quedamos estupefactos ante la personalidad secreta del escritor. Michaux traza sobre todo un retrato pintoresc
In this absorbing book Henri Michaux investigates the operation of the human mind under drugs. The analysis of the author's own experiences links the disturbance induced by drugs with parallel states of mind afflicting the mentally alienated. His observations illuminate and dissect the machanics of human thought and feeling in the normal and abnormal states. Michaux has an extraordinary capacity t
As if they were dictated at the "front line," so to speak, Tent Posts is a book of theoretical urgency, ideas written down quickly (and brilliantly) by the great Belgian author.
Previously available only as a limited editon, Henri Michaux's Ideograms in China is now available as a New Directions paperback. Peerlessly translated by the American poet Gustaf Sobin, this long, beautifully illustrated and annotated prose poem was originally written as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Pound and
Henri Michaux (1899-1984) is one of the notable travellers of modern French not only to the Amazon and the Far East, but into the strange hinterland of his own inner space, the surprises and shocks of which he has never ceased to explore as a foreign country in their own right, and a language to be learned. Fired by the same explorer’s appetite, he has delved into the realm of mescaline and other
Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux “genius,” and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work “is without equal in the literature of our time.” This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux’s major works, most never before published
One of the key works of the poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) whose original approach intertwines the written word with his visionary paintings and drawings. First published in 1972, this English language translation of Henri Michaux’s celebrated book Émergences- Résurgences has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux organized by The Drawing Cen
"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior
tr Elizabeth R Jackson, bilingual
Life in the Folds , originally published in French in 1949, is the Belgian-born author and artist Henri Michaux's (1899-1984) most direct exploration of the many forms of suffering, a laboratory of fantastical, destructive energies in which the poet presents his methods for dealing with the world around him. The first two sections offer such items as the Slapping Gun and the Man Sling (in the sect
Thousand Times Broken brings together three extraordinary, previously untranslated books in which Henri Michaux’s art and poetry merge in ways never seen before, composing a journey in which we––with the great visionary Michaux as our guide––are invited to hover between reading and looking, between the ineffable and the known, between body and spirit into a realm where it is possible to perceive “
A bilingual edition of the most famous of Henri Michaux's poetry collections, now in a new translation from the French.The figure of Plume preoccupied the great Belgian poet Henri Michaux throughout his career. Plume, meaning feather or pen, is a character who drifts from one thing to another, losing shape, taking new forms, at perpetual risk from reality. He is a personificatio