Michael Sohn

Noir

Epigram English translation:

“I have only my night to give. My bit of day is in this gift.”

After Giovanna Sandri

Postgram English translation:

"— Justly I don't think anything, ever, and if I give in, I unite this meditation with my cigar smoke to the point of following them, satisfied, diminishing together before sitting down to write a poem where all that will reappear, perhaps, underneath the veil — and offering the visitor the cigar, exclusive, that will enliven all interviews. '.. What do you think of Punctuation.' — 'Sir' with gravity 'no subject is certainly more imposing. The use or the rejection of such signs indicates prose or verse, namely all of our art: the latter doing without through the privilege of offering, without this typographical artifice, the vocal repose that measures the impetus; on the contrary, with the former, a necessity, so much so, that I prefer according to my taste, on a blank page, a spaced drawing of commas or of periods and their secondary combinations, imitating, naked, the melody — to the text, advantageously suggested if, even sublime, it wasn't punctuated.'"

Michael Sohn grew up in the Massachusetts town that spawned “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. He has lived in Chicago, a whole lifetime in New York City, a few years in Marseille and presently in Utah. For too many years he taught Freshman Composition in NYC while working on his own poems, reading and writing about contemporary French poetry, and thinking about the relationship between text and image, the visual arts and poetry. He currently teaches in the Honors Program at the University of Utah. He has published articles on French poets Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and André du Bouchet (1924-2001). He recently published a book of visible poetry, Still Forms, with Wet Cement Press. A book of experimental and shaped prose about the French painter Pierre Tal Coat (1905-85) is forthcoming from L’Atelier contemporain. He is currently working on a book of critical prose poetry around André du Bouchet and the problem of writing painting.