Symbolist Poet Shoots Boy Toy Paramour | The Write Stuff Symbolist Poet Shoots Boy Toy Paramour On this date in 1873, after a brief, passionate affair, French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine shoots his lover, fellow French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud was slightly injured in his wrist; Verlaine served two years in prison for his crime. Share this: How 555 nights in jail helped to make Paul Verlaine a ‘prince of poets’ | Books | The Guardian The Observer How 555 nights in jail helped to make Paul Verlaine a ‘prince of poets’ A new exhibition in Mons recalls the drunken row with fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud that led to a charge of attempted murder Paul Verlaine in 1893.

Saturday 17 October 2015 19.05 EDT Last modified on Saturday 17 October 2015 19.06 EDT Close This article is 1 year old Sitting in prison cell number 252 in Mons city jail, Paul Verlaine, the then little-known French poet, drew sketches and composed what many literary critics consider to be his finest poetry. Unlike his contemporary and friend Oscar Wilde, who was sentenced to hard labour in Reading jail, the Frenchman – who had been convicted of shooting his fellow poet and lover, Arthur Rimbaud – had a relatively easy incarceration. Away from the Parisian cafes, the beer and, particularly, the absinthe that was to destroy his health, Verlaine converted to Roman Catholicism and spent his 555 days behind bars reading, and writing work that would later earn him the title of “prince of poets” among his peers. Now Mons is staging what is claimed to be the biggest ever exhibition on Verlaine , including many privately owned manuscripts, photographs, letters and documents that are rarely, if ever, on public display.

Bernard Bousmanne, curator of the Verlaine exhibition, said: “Verlaine wrote some of his best, if not the best, poems while in prison. Verlaine knew Oscar Wilde and they liked each other a lot, and there are parallels in their stories. However, while prison destroyed Oscar Wilde and he never wrote anything significant again, prison was a key time in Verlaine’s life in terms of creativity.” On the outside, little has changed at the public prison in Mons. On 25 October 1873, it was a relatively new building when the horse-drawn police wagon transporting the convicted poet was driven through the massive wooden gates at the start of a two-year sentence. In what became known as L’Affaire de Bruxelles, Verlaine, just 28 years old, was convicted of attempting to murder Rimbaud, then 18, for whom he had abandoned his beautiful young wife, Mathilde, and only child, Georges. The men, who had a violent, drink-fuelled relationship, had recently returned from self-imposed exile in London, where they had enjoyed the delights of the French quarter in Soho.

They were staying in a seedy hotel in the Belgian capital. After yet another drinking session, a row erupted. In the drunken altercation that followed, Rimbaud said he was leaving and Verlaine pulled a pistol and fired twice. One bullet hit the floor; the other Rimbaud’s wrist. Pinterest Paul Verlaine’s sketch of Arthur Rimbaud smoking a pipe in 1872. Photograph: Coll. Charleville-Mezières Mediathèque – Musée Arthur Rimbaud Voyelles Verlaine was arrested as he pursued Rimbaud to the railway station. When police searched both men, they found letters written to each other and Verlaine was subjected to a humiliating body search by a police doctor who wrote: “P. Verlaine bears on his person traces of habitual pederasty, both active and passive.” Other police reports stated: “In morality and talent, this Raimbaud (sic), aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster.

He can construct poems like nobody else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive.” According to Bousmanne, “Verlaine was not convicted because he was homosexual, because this was not a crime, though it was considered deeply inappropriate behaviour. On the face of it, he was jailed for ‘attempted assassination’ because he had shot his lover, but he was clearly not trying to kill Rimbaud, who in any case never complained and did not want him convicted, so this was clearly an excuse. In my view, what counted more against him was that he was homosexual and a Communard [someone who took part in the 1871 Paris Commune insurrection against the government].” Once jailed, Verlaine wrote to Victor Hugo asking him to intervene. Hugo replied that Verlaine should show “patience”, but in writing to the poet he inadvertently helped him. “Of course, Hugo could do nothing, but when the prison governor saw that Verlaine had a letter from Hugo, a true giant of French literature, he would have been impressed and it would have made life easier for Verlaine,” said Bousmanne.

Bousmanne has spent five years combing Europe for Verlaine-related material and is particularly proud of a previously unseen photograph of the poet as a 22-year-old, which he found hanging in the kitchen of a Belgian farmhouse, and the revolver that Verlaine used to shoot Rimbaud, having bought the Le Faucheux 7mm six-shot revolver for 23 francs (the average monthly rent was six) just weeks before the shooting. “This has to be the most famous gun in French literature,” Bousmanne said. The exhibition also includes 80 documents from the police and court files. “We can see from the legal documents that the judge, Théodore ‘t Serstevens, focused on his homosexuality,” Bousmanne added. On his release in January 1875 from Mons jail, where he was met by his mother, Verlaine travelled first to France and then returned to England, where he worked as a French, Latin, Greek and drawing master at various schools. He returned to France where, officially separated from his wife and son and missing Rimbaud, who had gone abroad, his life became a slow descent into poverty and alcoholism.

“Twenty years after he was released from Mons jail, Verlaine came back to Belgium at the request of the biggest writers here to give a series of conferences. By then he was an alcoholic and in a terrible state,” Bousmanne said. “Here was someone considered the most important French poet, and people were expecting the messiah to arrive. Instead here was this old man dressed like a down-and-out who was drunk. It was a shock to them.” The end of his life was spent in a drunken and destitute state, wandering between slums, hospital and cafes, countering treatment for diabetes, ulcers and syphilis with absinthe. He died of pneumonia in January 1896 at the age of 51. Bousmanne says Verlaine has emerged as one of France’s four greatest poets – along with Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Rimbaud – but his violence towards his wife and mother suggest he was not a pleasant character, but a man who appeared to seek out misery and melodrama. “He is often moaning in his letters, but it was always someone else’s fault, never his.

He often writes that he is going to kill himself or end it all, but doesn’t.” Verlaine, Cellule 252: Turbulences Poétiques is one of the closing events of the Mons 2015 European Capital of Culture year. The exhibition opened yesterday 17 October and runs until 24 January Lydia Loveless – Verlaine Shot Rimbaud Lyrics | Genius Lyrics #ixzz3BVzmd880 As described in Radio.com : The Richard Hell-esque track was written about French poet Paul Verlaine shooting his fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist after a lover’s quarrel. Verlaine’s passion was something Loveless could definitely connect with. “He’s angry and wants to fight all the time, which is very similar to me,” she said. “I love conflict and getting a rise out of people and I don’t really like to be content all the time because I’m a person who just causes problems in my life.” Loveless says the song–her favorite on the record–is an “insane, crazed song” about a power struggle in a relationship and plays off her own downtrodden attitude.

“I can be very negative and I think my band knows that more than anyone,” she said. “My guitar player calls me a bowl of sunshine, very sarcastically.” But the young singer found a commonality with Verlaine, who she says had an influence on 80% of the album and whose poem “Aspiration” also found its way into the album’s liner notes. “I just sort of related to that need to sort of be throwing pots and pans and then go write a poem.” Hidden This page is accessible to Verified artists on the song Locked This song has been locked and is considered "done." You need 600 IQ to add annotations to locked songs. "Verlaine Shot Rimbaud" Track Info Poets 101 Poets 101 French Poet – Paul Verlaine April 26, 2010 Paul Verlaine was a French poet born in Metz (France) on Mars 30th, 1844. He died at age 51 in Paris (France) on January 8th, 1896. His family belonged to the French bourgeoisie of the 19th century ; his father was a captain of the French Army.

He was used to go in typical cafes and literary salons and this is where he met a lot of well known poets and writers of this time, who inspired him to become a poet, and put in writing in vision of life, love and death. But France declared war to Prusse (ex-German territory), then the French Second Empire collapsed and was taken over by the German Empire, proclaimed by the Castle of Versailles. So, Paul Verlaine decided to leave France with his wife, Mathilde Maute, and moves in his in laws’ house in the middle of the country. But then, he met with Arthur Rimbaud (another very famous French poet) and got disrupted for the rest of his life. He fell in love with him, left his wife, and left France to go to England, then Belgium. During his trips, he wrote a big part of him well-known work. But in 1873, after an argument with Rimbaud, he fired his gun on his lover, and shot him in the wrist. Verlaine immediately regretted his gesture, but Rimbaud informed the police. After a media-related trial, Verlaine got convicted for a two-year prison sentence.

The reason was ‘”attempt of murder on the person of Arthur Rimbaud”, but also “homosexuality” that was reprehensible at that time. During his prison sentence, his wife got a divorce, and Paul Verlaine wrote a work that he will never publish. After his release, he converted to Catholicism and moved again to England for a few years. He spent the majority of the last ten years of his life at the hospital. He had diabetes, ulcers and syphilis, and he was an alcoholic. He died prematurely at age 51 in Paris (France). The following night after his death, a curious event happened : The Statue of Poetry, that is right in front of the Opera on Paris, lost her arm that was holding a lyre. And more strangely, the hearse containing Paul Verlaine’s body drove by this side of the statue the day before, on its way to the cemetery. Paul Williams authored “With No Regard For Truth” and “Butterfield 7.” His background includes both research and smart enterprise seo .

He is considered one of the few literary figures with a solid background in search engine optimization (SEO) – the science or art of getting your search keywords to the top of a Google search. This skill set is critical to any web based business that relies on the search. He blogs constantly on several forums including re1y.com where he has joined forces with an odd fellow named dirtsgood, a very well known optimizer based in Charlotte, NC with whom Paul has a partnership in the SEO agency Find You. The combination of Paul’s literary knowledge and his computer skills means that his literary posts are almost always the ones that rank the highest in the search. Who is Arthur Rimbaud? Who is Arthur Rimbaud? Last Modified Date: 25 December 2016 Copyright Protected: 10 most extreme places on Earth Arthur Rimbaud was a French Symbolist poet whose work has had extensive influence on poetry, art, music, and even film. He is considered one of the most important French poets in history, despite the fact that he was not considerably prolific and his literary career ended at the age of 21.

His poetry, including the first free verse poems in French, paved the way for the Surrealist movement and the Beat poets, and references to him are rife throughout all kinds of literature and popular music. Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, France to a middle class family. His father, a soldier, left the family when Arthur was six years old. He was a brilliant student who began composing original works in Latin by the age of 15. His poetry quickly improved after his professor, Georges Izambard, became his mentor in 1870, though his personal life was chaotic. He frequently ran away from home and began drinking heavily and leading the life of an anarchist. Ad Rimbaud met poet Paul Verlaine, who was to become his lover and a significant influence throughout his poetic career, in 1871. For a while, he lived in Verlaine's house along with the latter's pregnant wife and in-laws. In less than a year, Verlaine had abandoned his family and the two moved together to London. They spent their time between London and France over the next year or so.

During his relationship with Verlaine, Rimbaud began to supplement his drinking with absinthe, hashish, and probably opium. Around 1873, the relationship became stormy, the older man subjecting Rimbaud to the drunken rages he had formerly visited on his wife and child. When Rimbaud announced his plans to return to Paris, Verlaine shot at him twice, hitting him in the wrist. Verlaine made a scene at the Brussels train station when Rimbaud was leaving and was arrested at Rimbaud's request. Although he later withdrew the complaint, Verlaine was fined and spent two years in prison. The two met once again for the last time, in Stuttgart, Germany in 1875, after he had abandoned the literary life. After his return to France in 1873, Rimbaud completed the lengthy prose poem Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), arguably his most valuable work. He returned to London the following year with fellow poet Germain Nouveau and finished Illuminations, a volume of poetry, shortly thereafter. It was to be his last work of literature.

He began to travel throughout Europe at the age of 20, often on foot. He enlisted in the Dutch Army in 1876 in order to gain free passage to Java, but deserted upon his arrival. He also lived for a time on the Greek island of Cyprus, in Yemen, and in Ethiopia. Throughout this time he had numerous affairs with native women and eventually became a gun merchant. In 1891, Rimbaud returned to France after developing cancer in his right knee. His leg was amputated in May, just days after his arrival in a Marseille hospital. His sister tried to nurse him back to health in her home, but in August, he returned to the hospital and discovered that the cancer had spread throughout his system. He died on 10 November at the age of 37. Though his time as a poet was brief, he will no doubt continue to serve as an inspiration to artists of all kinds for decades to come. Ad The Cursed Poets and Their Gods by Algis Valiunas | Articles | First Things The Cursed Poets and Their Gods The tortured lives and spiritual anguish of three great modern poets.

by Algis Valiunas February 2012 The term poète maudit, or “cursed poet,” was coined by Paul Verlaine. His little book Les poètes maudits (1884) interleaved his own honorific prose with poems by some of the poets he most esteemed but whose very greatness assured that they were known only to the cognoscenti. It was their obscurity—society was indifferent to them because they were hard to understand—that prompted Verlaine to speak of them as cursed. This cultivated sense of neglect, even oppression, at the hands of the bourgeois philistines became the classic pose of the avant-garde. But the curse seemed to be as much moral and spiritual as social, contributing to the presumption that a true artist must suffer agonies of genius. Verlaine himself happened to be about as cursed as they come: alcoholic, wife beater, child abuser, jailbird, syphilitic, down-and-outer.

In no small part because of Verlaine’s own harrowing life, the meaning of maudit has come to include not only the troubles such poets suffer from society but also the troubles nature inflicts on them and the ones they inflict on themselves, body and soul. The paradigmatic poète maudit was Baudelaire (1821-67). His Les fleurs du mal (1857), or The Flowers of Evil, is the most famous book of nineteenth-century French poetry and one of the most famous in world literature. The poems, which were revolutionary in their intermixtures of the sordid and the beautiful, reflected a spiritual extremity that the modern era has long savored, one both hell-bent and heaven-storming. Baudelaire knew his share of hell on earth, much of it self-inflicted. In his youth he took as his mistress a bald, frightful-looking, broken-down prostitute. From her he contracted the syphilis that would ravage and kill him. As he wrote to his mother at the age of thirty-three, his was a life “damned from the beginning.” Blighted loves were only part of the story.

As a young dandy he tore through an inheritance that would have set him up comfortably for life, and his family appointed a legal guardian to supervise his finances, an insult that galled him to no end. Laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) became an addiction. He was a virtuoso at wasting time, and he loathed himself for the irremediable injury he did to his talent. Damned from the beginning? The man who believes himself cursed tends quite naturally to blaspheme in outrage. What more does he have to lose? The section of Les fleurs du mal titled “Révolte” opens with a sad mockery of Christ, who was so credulous as to think his Father suffered with him in his agony. Quite the contrary, the poet declares in “Le reniement de Saint Pierre” (“Saint Peter’s Denial”): Ah! Jesus, remember the Garden of Olives! In your simplicity you prayed on your knees To the one who in his heaven laughed at the sound of the nails That ignoble executioners drove into your living flesh.

The final line of the poem trembles with Baudelaire’s bitter rage: at the Father so cruel toward his trusting children, and at the children so foolish as to trust him without question. The poet finds what satisfaction he can in brazen defiance: “Saint Peter denied Jesus . . . he did well!” The next poem in the series, “Abel et Cain,” goes a step further. To turn one’s back on God is insufficient; the true unbeliever must overthrow him. “Race of Cain, ascend to heaven, / And hurl God down to earth!” And “Les litanies de Satan,” the third and last poem in “Révolte, ” serves as a hymn to the master of the cursed. Damnation on earth confers rich privilege, the poet claims. For what greater privilege can there be than to know the truth about God’s injustice, which the insipid Christian believers hide from themselves? Baudelaire did find something better in the end. Suffering cleanses, even sanctifies, he came to believe, and he turned away from Satan and toward God.

“Bénédiction,” which he wrote years after the Satanic verses but which is the second poem in Les fleurs du mal, relates the abuse the Poet (the capital is his) endures from mother, wife, and indeed everyone else he turns to in hope of finding his love reciprocated. All comes out right in the end, however, for God reserves a place of honor in heaven for the gifted and gentle soul he has chosen for this odd fate. Be blessed, my God, who gives suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities And as the best and purest essence That prepares the strong for holy delights! Yet Baudelaire gave a peculiar slant to the notion of purgative suffering, one that became a reassuring consolation to countless dissipated and morally corrupted artists. Baudelaire’s supreme hero, Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales he translated and whom he memorialized in two major essays, killed himself with drink, but according to Baudelaire he also enjoyed artistic triumphs lubricated by alcohol. Poe was the archetype of the poète maudit, embodying a fateful combination of creative power and self-destruction.

Baudelaire had to believe in this fateful combination because his self-love demanded it. He was a hashish and opium addict who came to hate his habit but could not give it up. Yet if the visions or raptures induced by drugs enrich a poet’s consciousness, then the damage they also cause would be an acceptable price to pay. The Poe he imagines intoxicated himself partly because he could not stand himself sober. Baudelaire writes in Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Works, 1852), “I am told that he did not drink like an ordinary toper, but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he were accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill, ‘a worm that would not die.’” Poe’s drunkenness—and by extension Baudelaire’s—thus becomes a spiritual discipline of sorts. In Baudelaire’s telling, the intoxication made Poe a superior poet, which is to say, a superior man. Killing the worm gave the writing life.

“I think that very often,” Baudelaire wrote, “Poe’s drunkenness was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature. Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes.” In Baudelaire’s understanding, alcohol loosed imaginative forces in Poe that sobriety did not offer. “One part of what delights us today was the cause of his death,” and Poe’s spiritual heroism, indeed his poetic sainthood, rested in his embrace of the life-poisoning alcohol for the sake of his art. This is how legends, and cults, get started. Baudelaire’s version of Poe’s life, which is in large part Baudelaire’s concoction, became bohemian gospel.

In the eyes of Baudelaire, Poe was downright holy: “I am adding a new saint to the martyrology; I have the story to tell of one of those glorious unfortunates, too rich in poetry and passion, who came into this lowly world, following in the footsteps of so many others, to perform the rude apprenticeship of genius among baser spirits.” Venerating Poe, Baudelaire was establishing his own claim to sanctity. He is a man who rises above others to attain creative beatitude. “A tendency to mysticism,” he claimed, had been part of his character since childhood.

The overwhelming tendency at this stage of his life, however, as syphilis began its final assault and he knew little time remained, was a frantic desire to change his ways”above all, to work hard every day, “blindly, without aim, like a madman,” and to say his evening prayer without fail, like “a captain posting his sentinels.” The final journal entry lists some “immutable rules” that he hoped would bring order and comfort: “To pray every morning to God, the source of all power and all justice; to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe, as intercessors; that they may give me the necessary strength to fulfill all my appointed tasks.” Time was sadly running out. Baudelaire hoped Mon coeur mis nu, his final work, would be his summa; it is in fact a scattering of fragments. Paralysis struck him; he could not move; he could not speak. If life denied him, however, perhaps death did not. On his deathbed he received the last sacraments, and he died in his mother’s arms, peacefully, it is said. Perhaps his life, damned from the beginning, proved blessed at the very end.

If so, Baudelaire took a perilous and crooked road to get where he wanted to go. Paul Verlaine (1844-96) adopted Baudelaire as his intercessor. “It is to Baudelaire that I owe the awakening of poetic feeling, and what is deep in me,” he wrote, and his youthful discovery of Baudelaire brought sensual craving and artistic ambition surging to the surface. At the age of twenty-one Verlaine wrote, “It is Charles Baudelaire who presents the sensitive man, and he presents him as a type, or, if you like, as a hero.” He is a seer “with his sharpened, vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind, his intellect steeped in tobacco, his blood burned up by alcohol.” Cursed indeed—but therefore blessed. Verlaine abandoned himself to Baudelaire’s heroism. Drink, to which he became addicted, made him insanely violent. He could not be trusted with absinthe in his system and sharp objects at hand. One night, when Verlaine wanted to go on drinking and his closest friend thought he’d had enough, the poet charged after his companion with a swordstick.

Coming home drunk on another occasion, he demanded 200 francs from his mother and attacked her with a saber when she didn’t deliver. She got out of town, but there were other women to abuse. Threats against and attempts on the life of his wife, Mathilde, were standard poetic procedure. Verlaine couldn’t be trusted with matches any more than with swords: He tried to set his wife’s hair on fire. Not even his infant son was safe from his maniacal rages. Put out by a cross word from Mathilde, he picked up the three-month-old boy and hurled him against the wall. Verlaine was twenty-seven, with a wife and a substantial poetic reputation, when the sixteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, the most precocious literary genius ever, wrote to him from the provinces and sent him some poems. Verlaine invited him to Paris, and the pair soon became lovers. Violence was in Rimbaud’s line as well: He would carve up Verlaine’s arms and legs with a knife just for sport. Supercharged, Verlaine wrote a spate of love poems.

The two men combined their genius on a fragrant encomium to the anus as cynosure of beauty and sexual pleasure. Verlaine bolted from Mathilde, headed with Rimbaud to London, quarreling with him repeatedly. One quarrel prompted Rimbaud to say he was leaving Verlaine for good; Verlaine shot him in the wrist. The wound was not grave, but, probably in part because a medical examination showed evidence of recent sodomy by Verlaine, the court gave him the maximum sentence of two years of hard labor. Prison changed Verlaine utterly; or sort of, off and on. There he wrote many of the poems in Sagesse (Wisdom, 1881), the book that proclaimed his religious conversion and made him one of the most celebrated Catholic poets of France. Like Baudelaire, Verlaine thanks God for the suffering that raised him out of the darkness. The poem “Écrit en 1875” (Written in 1875) apostrophizes the prison where his soul was put right.

O be blessed, fortress which I left Ready for life, armed with sweetness and provided With Faith, bread and salt and a coat for the road So lonely, so hard and so long, no doubt, On which one must strive for the innocent heights. And may the author of grace be loved, forever! Later in life Verlaine described the dynamic of his conversion. Christ’s agony called out to Verlaine’s own and made the suffering savior real and absolutely necessary for the cursed poet. “For me, Jesus is The Crucified. He is my God because he suffered, because he suffers still. I see Him before my eyes, covered with dreadful wounds, sweating in his final agony, as the peasant women of Judea actually saw him.” Verlaine knows Jesus with the radiant intensity of a poet’s vision. He sees him with a cursed poet’s intimate embrace of life’s horror. But Verlaine was prone to backsliding. He rushed to see Rimbaud a month or so after his release from prison. Bar-hopping and fierce arguments revived the beast in Verlaine. He was not a hypocrite; he wanted to be holy, but he was too far gone in his alcoholism and his sexual passion for Rimbaud.

Drunk, he attacked Rimbaud, and Rimbaud knocked him out cold; peasants found the unconscious Verlaine by the riverside the next day. In a letter to a friend, Rimbaud registered his satisfaction in having separated Verlaine from his newfound odious piety: “The other day Verlaine arrived in Stuttgart with a rosary in his paws, but three hours later he had denied his God, and made the ninety-eight wounds of our Blessed Lord bleed again.” Verlaine struggled mightily for spiritual purchase. He read St. Teresa and St. Thomas Aquinas and John Bunyan. He translated English hymns. He taught at a Catholic boarding school and was so demonstrative in his religiosity that the students nicknamed him “Jesus Christ.” Literary critics called him the most Christian poet of the nineteenth century. But he went on drinking like a drunk. Continuing to teach became impossible. He fell in love with one of his pupils and lived with him after his graduation, until the young man died of typhoid fever”another reason for Verlaine to propel himself toward oblivion. Verlaine yearned for a chance at normality, but he dragged his ugly past wherever he went.

When he sought reinstatement as a Parisian civil servant—a job he had despised in younger days—the authorities disqualified him for moral turpitude. Poverty, degeneracy, and decrepitude were his lot from then on. Angel and brute, he wrote, exist simultaneously in every man—Baudelaire had written in his journal of the soul pulled between God and Satan—and the religious poems would give way to the sensual, “because I must also give voice to the Beast within me.” The poet knew he was cursed, and Verlaine tried to take pleasure and pride in being among the distinguished company of heroes. In the sonnet “À Charles Baudelaire,” from the 1892 collection Liturgies intimes (Intimate Liturgies), he addresses the dead poet whom he did not know but to whom he feels himself bound by ties of sanctity and sensuality.

And if I have any right to be among your witnesses, It is because, in the first place, and it is because somewhere else, near the Feet joined FILM REVIEW -- `Total Eclipse' Less Than Poetic / DiCaprio misfires as rebellious Rimbaud - SFGate FILM REVIEW -- `Total Eclipse' Less Than Poetic / DiCaprio misfires as rebellious Rimbaud EDWARD GUTHMANN, Chronicle Staff Writer Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 3, 1995 TOTAL ECLIPSE: Biographical drama. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis . Directed by Agnieszka Holland . Written by Christopher Hampton . (R. 110 minutes. At the Lumiere, Shattuck in Berkeley, Aquarius in Palo Alto, Northgate in San Rafael and Camera in San Jose.) In her new film "Total Eclipse," Agnieszka Holland ("Europa, Europa") casts Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud , the 19th century French symbolist poet and renegade.

It seemed like perfect casting: Who else but the intuitive, facile DiCaprio -- surely his generation's great acting promise -- to play the world's original angry young artist? Strangely, despite a literate script by Christopher Hampton ("Dangerous Liaisons"), a handsome production design and Holland's rigorous, meticulous direction, "Total Eclipse" (opening today at Bay Area theaters, and not to be confused with "Eclipse," which opened yesterday at the Castro) is a stinging disappointment -- in large part because of its star. DiCaprio may have conjured the right measure of insolence and volatility -- they're not difficult emotions for an actor to summon -- but his Southern California accent is so incongruous, and so ill-matched to British actor David Thewlis ("Naked"), who plays his lover and fellow poet Paul Verlaine , that you never surrender to the idea that he might be Rimbaud.

Like Al Pacino , who stained the disastrous "Revolution" with his working-class New Yorkese, or Nick Nolte , who tried but failed to act high class in "Jefferson in Paris," DiCaprio is what he is: a Los Angeles kid who talks like he just blew his quarters at the video-game parlor and has a date with his skateboard. He's a fine actor in the right part -- but totally wrong for Rimbaud. "Total Eclipse" opens in 1871, when the 19-year-old Rimbaud has sent his poems to Verlaine, and the elder poet, recognizing "the voice of the future," encourages him to leave his rural home for Paris. Full of cheek and bravado, oblivious to convention or courtesy, Rimbaud arrives at the home of Verlaine's in-laws, belches and smokes at the dinner table and refuses an invitation to read aloud from his poems.

Verlaine, married to the beautiful, dull and pregnant Mathilde ( Romane Bohringer ), is immediately taken by the self-possessed Rimbaud, and sees in him not only a genius and visionary, but a vessel for the kind of sassy, unbridled spirit that's so lacking in himself. When Rimbaud issues his pontifications ("I couldn't care less about getting published; the only thing that matters is the writing itself"), scoffs at love as "attachment for personal gain," and disrupts the poetry reading of a pompous, stilted hack (drunk on absinthe, he urinates on the floor), Verlaine seems to swoon from the heady whiff of fearless arrogance. Verlaine's attachment makes sense, but we never learn what Rimbaud sees in the obsessed, self-pitying Verlaine, or what draws them into a relationship, or what keeps them from calling the whole mess off when it turns violent and destructive.

Inevitably, like Salieri in "Amadeus," or Kenneth Halliwell , the doomed older lover/mentor of British playwright Joe Orton in "Prick Up Your Ears," Verlaine realizes that his own talents and ambitions are eclipsed by Rimbaud's and that his own fire, whatever its value, is stilled under Rimbaud's shadow. Hampton, who was a Rimbaud scholar at Oxford and adapted his screenplay from an earlier play, scatters his script with overly expository statements that spell out Rimbaud's fierce world view and the effect it has on Verlaine. What's lacking is an explanation for the relationship, and some insight into the origins of Rimbaud's art. The other big problem, aside from DiCaprio's twang, is his lack of chemistry with Thewlis. These are two fine actors, working in vastly different styles, who might as well be walking through different movies. At the end of the handsome, frustrating "Total Eclipse," you'll be wondering who these two men were. Latest from the SFGATE homepage: Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond.

Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page. Dial 555: Mons Museum Dials Back to Paul Verlaine’s Time in Jail : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation By Harriet Staff The French poet Paul Verlaine spent 555 days in jail after shooting his then-lover Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist following an argument. He composed his best poetry there, argues Bernard Bousmanne, the curator of a new exhibition in Mons that looks back on Verlaine’s time in cell 252. More: Unlike his contemporary and friend Oscar Wilde, who was sentenced to hard labour in Reading jail, the Frenchman – who had been convicted of shooting his fellow poet and lover, Arthur Rimbaud – had a relatively easy incarceration. Away from the Parisian cafes, the beer and, particularly, the absinthe that was to destroy his health, Verlaine converted to Roman Catholicism and spent his 555 days behind bars reading, and writing work that would later earn him the title of “prince of poets” among his peers.

Now Mons is staging what is claimed to be the biggest ever exhibition on Verlaine, including many privately owned manuscripts, photographs, letters and documents that are rarely, if ever, on public display. […] On the outside, little has changed at the public prison in Mons. On 25 October 1873, it was a relatively new building when the horse-drawn police wagon transporting the convicted poet was driven through the massive wooden gates at the start of a two-year sentence. In what became known as L’Affaire de Bruxelles, Verlaine, just 28 years old, was convicted of attempting to murder Rimbaud, then 18, for whom he had abandoned his beautiful young wife, Mathilde, and only child, Georges. The men, who had a violent, drink-fuelled relationship, had recently returned from self-imposed exile in London, where they had enjoyed the delights of the French quarter in Soho. They were staying in a seedy hotel in the Belgian capital. After yet another drinking session, a row erupted. In the drunken altercation that followed, Rimbaud said he was leaving and Verlaine pulled a pistol and fired twice.

One bullet hit the floor; the other Rimbaud’s wrist. Verlaine was arrested as he pursued Rimbaud to the railway station. When police searched both men, they found letters written to each other and Verlaine was subjected to a humiliating body search by a police doctor who wrote: “P. Verlaine bears on his person traces of habitual pederasty, both active and passive.” […] Edmund White on the French 19th-century poet, Arthur Rimbaud | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Arthur Rimbaud, one of the most revolutionary poets of 19th-century France, grew up in a small town, Charleville, in the north-east corner of the country near the Belgian border. As a child he'd been obedient to his strict mother (his father was a soldier who'd vanished after rapidly siring four children) and he'd been the best student in the region, excelling in the classics and French. But Rimbaud's real interest was poetry. He haunted the local bookstore and read all the latest poetry coming out of Paris.

So attracted was Rimbaud to the capital that he ran away from home, arrived in Paris on 30 August 1870 - and was instantly arrested for not paying the correct fare on his train ticket. He was put in prison, and only his favourite teacher from back home was able to get him out. Despite this ignominious beginning, Rimbaud - who was 16 going on 17 - made several other attempts to reach the capital, even though the Prussians had invaded and Paris had declared itself a commune between 26 March and 30 May 1871. The penniless and friendless Rimbaud could never survive for long away from home during these chaotic times. But in the early autumn in 1871 he fired off a letter to Paul Verlaine, his favourite poet. Without waiting for a response, Rimbaud sent off a few more poems to Verlaine two days later. Then came the fateful response from Paris: "Come, dear great soul, we call you, we await you." Verlaine enclosed the train fare. Verlaine was a homicidal alcoholic.

He was also an extremely gentle, sensitive poet with a distinctive tone and a remarkable musicality. These two aspects of his character had set up a pitched battle over his anguished destiny; he would always be susceptible to one impulse or the other. Like Rimbaud, Verlaine had been a brilliant student in classical languages and written dazzling verses in Latin. But there the resemblance ended. Verlaine was a lazy, always dirty boy who barely squeaked by in most of his classes. Whereas Rimbaud was striking if strange in his looks, Verlaine was indisputably ugly, resembling the popular idea of Socrates while possessing none of the philosopher's equanimity. His skull was too large, his face pushed in, his eyes oblique, his pug nose too small and tipped up. He'd lost most of his hair at an early age and compensated for it by growing sparse, wispy whiskers. The mother of Verlaine's best friend said after meeting him, "My God, your friend made me think of an orangutan escaped from the zoo!" Whereas Rimbaud seems to have shown no erotic interest in his own sex before meeting Verlaine, the older poet was notorious at school for groping his classmates.

After high school, Verlaine enrolled as a law student in Paris but seldom attended classes. He spent most of his time reading poetry old and new and getting drunk on absinthe. Verlaine drank so much that he soon succumbed to a special form of crazy and violent alcoholism called absinthisme. Eventually he withdrew from law school and began working a boondoggle his parents had found for him at the city hall, where he showed up at 10 in the morning, took a two-hour sodden lunch, lurched back to the office for an hour or two of shuffling papers, and was ready for aperitifs at the Café de Gaz by five. Notwithstanding his habits, Verlaine remained intensely interested in the arts in general and in poetry in particular. He became the art critic for one journal and defended Baudelaire in print, announcing - in the spirit of Art for Art's Sake - that "the goal of poetry is the Beautiful and the Beautiful alone without any reference to the Useful, the True or the Just". By the mid-1860s Verlaine was one of the 37 Parnassians in good standing and published from time to time in their poetry journal.

His work was largely ignored by the general public, but was acclaimed over the next few years by fellow poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Victor Hugo. Curiously, Verlaine, who would be known in his life as a brutal husband and an impious wretch, as a writer became celebrated as the greatest Catholic poet in the French language (for his collection Wisdom), and as an ardent defender of married bliss (The Good Song). Verlaine was full of contradictions - by turns wildly exalted and deeply depressed, leading one friend to remark that he was both a clown and an undertaker. In the autumn of 1869 he met a 16-year-old girl, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, to give her full (and probably invented) poetic name. She was prettily chubby in the approved fashion of the day, and painfully innocent. She saw Verlaine two or three times at a literary salon and a musical evening before he noticed her. By the time they spoke she was used to his ugliness and greeted him with a friendly smile, and he was charmed by her freshness and kindness. She noticed how gentle and radiant he became around her.

As she later recalled, "At that moment he ceased to be ugly, and I thought of that pretty fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, where love transforms the Beast into Prince Charming." Quite sensibly, Mathilde's father did not want his daughter even to consider the suit of a much older man. He urged her to wait two years, but she was smitten. By carefully regulating his excesses, Verlaine managed to woo and win Mathilde. They lived with her parents in Montmartre and soon enough had a little boy. But this paradise of sobriety and domesticity was interrupted when Rimbaud arrived. On 24 September 1871, Rimbaud took the train from Charleville to Paris - less than a month before his 17th birthday. All he had with him were his manuscripts ("The Drunken Boat" taking pride of place) and a change of clothes. No one was there to greet him at the station in Paris. Verlaine kept running back and forth between the Gare du Nord and the nearby Gare de L'Est, accompanied by a young comic poet named Charles Cros.

At last Verlaine and Cros gave up and went back to Montmartre and Mathilde's parents' house, a 15-minute walk away. There in the small cosseted salon they found the young, belligerent poet with his sunburned face and large hands, his piercing blue eyes, unsmiling mouth, uttering monosyllables in his heavy Ardennes accent. Twelve years later Verlaine would recall, "The man was tall, well built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile, with unruly light chestnut hair and eyes of a disquieting blue." Elsewhere Verlaine wrote: "He had a real baby's head, plump and fresh on top of a big bony body with the awkwardness of an adolescent who has grown too quickly." Mathilde and her mother snobbishly ascribed the brutishness to countrified naivety. They were able to put the boy up for the moment only because Monsieur Mauté was away on a hunting party. When Monsieur Mauté returned, young Rimbaud would have to be hidden away as someone unsuitable for respectable company. Rimbaud was an impossible guest.

He took to nude sunbathing just outside the house. He turned his room into a squalid den. He mutilated an heirloom crucifix. He was proud of the lice infesting his long mane and even pretended he was encouraging the vermin to jump on to passers-by. Verlaine was delighted with Rimbaud's antisocial antics, which recalled to him his own younger excesses before his marriage. Verlaine introduced Rimbaud to his friends in the cafés where they congregated regularly. After the first encounter, one of Verlaine's friends, Léon Valade, wrote the next day to an absent member, "You missed a great deal by not being there. A most daring poet not yet 18 was introduced by Paul Verlaine, his inventor and in fact his John the Baptist. Big hands, big feet, a wholly babyish face like a child of 13, deep blue eyes!

Such is this boy, whose character is more antisocial than timid and whose imagination combines great powers with unheard-of corruption and who has fascinated and terrified all our friends." The modern reader can't help but smile at the readiness of Parisians of that epoch to be "terrified" by "unheard-of corruption". In fact, these poets would soon form the core group of the Decadents (a "school" that took its name from a line by Verlaine: "I am the Empire at the end of its decadence"). Valade concluded by calling Rimbaud "Satan in the midst of the doctors", as opposed to Christ among the rabbis at the temple. When one of the Goncourt brothers shook Rimbaud's hand, he claimed he felt as if he were touching the most notorious murderer of the day. When Monsieur Mauté was due to return, Charles Cros took the youngster in briefly - until Rimbaud used as toilet paper a magazine in which Cros had just published some poems.

Next the Parnassian poet Théodore de Banville offered to take in the young poet and lodge him in the maid's room above his apartment at 10, rue de Buci - just a few steps from the heart of Left Bank Paris, St Germain-de-Prés. His first night in Banville's maid's room, he stood in the illuminated window stark naked and threw down his lice-laden clothes into the street. Within a week Banville had asked the miscreant to leave, but only after Rimbaud had smashed the china in his room, soiled the bed sheets with his muddy boots and sold some of the furniture. Within a few short weeks after his arrival he was no longer being described as an angel or a devil but as an obnoxious boor. The only person who couldn't see his faults - or who delighted in them - was Verlaine. In the 14 months since he'd married, Verlaine had written no new poetry, though he had successfully curbed the excesses of his drinking. Now Rimbaud was encouraging him to live like a savage and stay drunk - and to write like the seer he was destined to be.

Moreover, Rimbaud represented Verlaine's sexual ideal, a dominant adolescent who appeared to be always available erotically. Soon enough Verlaine had given up his respectable clothes and returned to his slouch hat and dirty muffler, and although he and Rimbaud lived like beggars and Rimbaud was constantly being moved from one guest room to another, together the two managed to spend considerable sums of money. Rimbaud was so belligerent that the two lovers found their circle shrinking - especially since they made no secret of their "vice". They collaborated on a sonnet celebrating the asshole ("Sonnet du trou du cul") - Verlaine wrote the first eight lines and Rimbaud the last six. Rimbaud became still more difficult in November, when, according to a childhood friend, he tried hashish for the first time. Between hash and absinthe he was well under way in his long, immense and systematic disordering of all the senses, a project he was deliberately cultivating in the name of art. On 21 October 1871, Verlaine's son Georges was born. The birth seemed only to enrage Verlaine all the more.

Mathilde later claimed that Verlaine threatened her life every day between October 1871 and January 1872. One day in January, after Mathilde refused to give Verlaine money for drink, he seized the three-month-old Georges and flung him against the wall. And then he started to choke his wife. Until now, Mathilde had been successfully concealing her husband's brutality from her parents, even though they were all living under the same roof. But now they could see for themselves the marks on their daughter's throat and, in a flood of tears, she confessed all the horrors visited on her since Rimbaud's arrival four months earlier. Perhaps already foreseeing a separation (divorce would not become legal until 1884), Monsieur Mauté asked a doctor to examine the bruises and to sign a document attesting to what she had suffered. Mauté also decided that the couple must be separated and sent Mathilde and the baby off to a hiding place in Périgueux, where his family lived. Verlaine decided he needed time to salvage his marriage. He begged Rimbaud to leave town and return to his mother in the Ardennes.

Rimbaud saw himself as an archangel descended to earth to liberate Verlaine from his bourgeois temptations as a human being and the tendencies towards prettiness in his poetry. It was Rimbaud who made Verlaine reread the technically brilliant poems of Musset and Leconte de Lisle. It was Rimbaud who convinced him to write in 10-syllable lines (instead of the flowing, automatically eloquent 12 syllables of French tradition or the eight syllables of ballads). And it was Rimbaud who tried to banish human anecdotes, realistic sketches and sentimental portraits from Verlaine's work. Something of the tenor of their relationship can be deduced from "Vagabonds", one of the prose poems included in Illuminations. In it, Verlaine, "the pitiful brother" (but a paragraph later "the satanic doctor"), complains that Rimbaud's peculiar blend of bad luck and innocence has isolated them and led them into poverty and exile.

The "poor brother", with his mouth rotten and his eyes starting out of his head, wakes up every night shouting reproaches - his "dream of idiotic grief" - which prompts the offended, misunderstood Rimbaud to think: "Actually in all innocence I had undertaken to return him to his original state of Child of the Sun - and we kept wandering, nourished only by spring water and dry biscuit, as I urgently tried to find the place and the formula." What was this place and formula Rimbaud was so eager to discover? It undoubtedly had to do with a utopian future that would exclude the deadening effects of conventionality and would usher in a whole new era of love. Again and again he refers to "the new harmony", "the new love" and "the new men". He calls for a "departure" towards "the new affection". Historically, we have entered an era, Rimbaud tells us, that is one of both murderous and pitiless assassins, and of hashish-smokers - le temps des Assassins.

(The original "assassins" were a fierce Muslim band of hashish-smokers and bandits who flourished from the eighth to the 14th centuries.) Rimbaud could certainly be as pitiless as a real assassin. He once had Verlaine play a "game" in which Verlaine would stretch out his hand on the table and Rimbaud would stab at his spread fingers. Verlaine thought the point of the game was to show that he wouldn't flinch, that he trusted Rimbaud. But Rimbaud quite simply stabbed him in the wrist. By the beginning of March 1872, just six months after his arrival in Paris and into Verlaine's life, Rimbaud was heading home to his mother. He knew that he would be back with the older man as soon as Verlaine had straightened out his marriage. Verlaine also knew that the retreat was only temporary. Eventually Mathilde returned to Paris with their son, and for a while everything seemed back on an even keel. Verlaine was even looking for a job again. But soon he was writing Rimbaud passionate letters, asking for instructions about how they would live together.

• Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel by Edmund White is published by Atlantic Books (£16.99). To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop Interview: Lydia Loveless Strikes Fear in the Hearts of Her Exes on ‘Somewhere Else’ « Radio.com Interview: Lydia Loveless Strikes Fear in the Hearts of Her Exes on ‘Somewhere Else’ February 19, 2014 10:58 AM (Blackletter / Patrick Crawford) By Shannon Carlin Lydia Loveless doesn’t have a problem speaking her mind, which should make her ex-boyfriends very, very nervous. On her third album Somewhere Else , the 23-year-old Ohioan wanted to take a sophisticated look at love and heartbreak, all while taking the piss out of a few of her former flames. “I thought more about the lyrics and the pain this time around,” Loveless told Radio.com over the phone.

“I didn’t want to make the same album so I do think it was a conscience decision to be more eloquent and I guess, sexy.” She says this last part with a laugh, admitting that many have told her this new album is not sexy at all. But Loveless’ version of sexy is a little rough around the edges. On the mostly autobiographical Somewhere Else, she sings about her resurfaced feelings for an ex with wine-stained lips, mocks her Chris Isaak -loving high school beau and writes the most depressing song about oral sex aptly titled “Head.” “I just wanted to make an album that sounded like, not a diary by a whiney girl, but just something open and sort of pulsing,” she explained. “Like when I was writing it and still when I play the songs, I feel sort of cut open. I wanted to get that across without sounding too girly or me talking about my period.” With her previous two releases—2010’s The Only Man and 2012’s Indestructible Machine—Loveless said that she didn’t have much of a female audience, even though she was writing about very feminine topics.

Instead her bourbon-soaked brand of alt-country was attracting a lot of middle-aged men who were misinterpreting the message. “I feel like I’m being extremely feminine, but [men] hear it and go, ‘Oh, she’s really manly’ and ‘She’ll kick your ass,'” Loveless explained. “But no, I’m being extremely girly right now, talking about my feelings, but I happen to be really intense or upset about something. Men take that as sort of threatening.” Not that this is such a bad thing in Loveless’ book. “I like that being really feminine is threatening and scary,” she says with a raspy laugh that makes you feel like she might not kick your ass, but she definitely could. While Loveless speaks honestly about the men of her past, there is one man she isn’t talking about on this record, her husband Ben Lamb. One reason she says she married Lamb, who also happens to be her bass player, was because he never questions who her songs are about. “In previous relationships, the guys used to ask, like, ‘Is that about me?’ ‘Well, no,’ which they don’t like to hear,” Loveless said.

“I think a guy would rather hear a song is about him than not.” Lucky for some of those guys, they finally got what they wanted. And even luckier for Loveless it led her to make an album she’s completely in love with. “This time around I feel confident about every track, and I didn’t feel like there was anything I could have thrown away without crying and yelling,” she explained. “I feel like it’s a lot stronger of an album in that regard. So I’m a lot more excited about it. I found my place as a songwriter.” While speaking with Radio.com, Loveless shared the stories behind five songs off her latest album, Somewhere Else, including why she feels a kinship with French poet Paul Verlaine and which song she wrote with Swedish pop star Robyn in mind. One the next page , Loveless discusses “Wine Lips”, “Chris Isaak” and a battle twixt two French poets… “Wine Lips” Loveless wrote this one about an ex-boyfriend from New York City, who she had met at summer camp. “His family was a lot more well off than mine,” she said.

“I grew up on a farm…he was a little different from me.” She was looking to impress him and his family and actually lied and told his mom that she spoke fluent French. “She like got on the phone one day and started speaking French to me,” Loveless said laughing. That incident sparked the line, “Tell your mom, my French has finally improved,” which it has. “I ran into him eight years after that and hadn’t seen him in that long and we met up in New York,” she explained. “It was really weird and strange and I just felt really exhilarated and wrote that song about it.” When she saw him he was drinking sangria that had stained his lips. “I just liked the expression ‘wine lips’ and wanted to use it, but not really be a joke at the same time,” she said. Besides “sangria lips” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. “Verlaine Shot Rimbaud” The Richard Hell-esque track was written about French poet Paul Verlaine shooting his fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist after a lover’s quarrel. Verlaine’s passion was something Loveless could definitely connect with.

“He’s angry and wants to fight all the time, which is very similar to me,” she said. “I love conflict and getting a rise out of people and I don’t really like to be content all the time because I’m a person who just causes problems in my life.” Loveless says the song–her favorite on the record–is an “insane, crazed song” about a power struggle in a relationship and plays off her own downtrodden attitude. “I can be very negative and I think my band knows that more than anyone,” she said. “My guitar player calls me a bowl of sunshine, very sarcastically.” But the young singer found a commonality with Verlaine, who she says had an influence on 80% of the album and whose poem “Aspiration” also found its way into the album’s liner notes. “I just sort of related to that need to sort of be throwing pots and pans and then go write a poem.” “Really Wanna See You” The album’s opener was written at Loveless’ husband’s grandma’s house in the middle of the night while thinking about Robyn . She envisioned the track as a production heavy pop song, but soon realized she couldn’t make it work.

“I was just like, ‘Well, I can’t really do this because I don’t know anything about programming beats,'” Loveless noted of the guitar-layered number. People have asked her whether the reference to the Magic 8 Ball was a metaphor for drugs, which it definitely isn’t. “It’s actually literally about when I go to my parent’s house and go into my room and find my Magic 8 ball and ask like, ‘Will I ever do this right?'” she said. Though she did have a boyfriend who used to do drugs and call her, wishing they could get back together. “It was kind of making fun of him too,” Loveless admits. “Not necessarily to be like funny, but just to sort of say, ‘You do sort of realize you’re an idiot right?’ I just wanted to kind of rile him up a little bit.” “Chris Isaak” One particular old flame of Loveless’ inspired the majority of her last record and with this new one she started feeling like she just couldn’t write anything else about this same guy. “I literally sat down and was like, ‘I’m going to write one more song and it better be good and it can’t be some moody crap,'” Loveless explained.

So did she really spend a lot of time in this guy’s basement listening to Isaak’s 1995 album Forever Blue? “Yeah for sure, that was kind of our favorite pastime,” Loveless said. “It’s definitely an embarrassing line or it will be when I see him.” Loveless says the guy will be at her upcoming show in Cleveland show. “I think the guy knows it’s about him,” Loveless explained. “He’s also a huge fan so he’ll probably be a little upset by that song, but I had to get it off my chest. It was so many years of torture.” “Somewhere Else” “I remember just hearing it pop into my head in the middle of the night. And I’m really glad that for once in my life I didn’t go, ‘Oh I’ll remember it in the morning,'” Loveless said of her second favorite song on the record. “I jumped out of bed and made a little demo of it. And then I realized it was really simple so it was easy to remember.” Loveless wrote the title track, which she says reminds her of Fleetwood Mac , while she was in Austin, TX for South by Southwest. “It was just sort of about being discontent,” she said.

“I prefer to be traveling and in a new place all the time and always want to move away and I’m like, ‘No, I need to stay near my family.’ And I’m also kind of a b—-. I’m sort of always wondering if I should be in a certain place or be with a certain person and it’s just sort of about my restless and depressed nature.” “I just have a lot of discontent and restlessness. So it’s mostly about that, just about me being a jerk who wants to run away,” Loveless said laughing. On the song she also sings, “I just wanted to 867-5309 you, honey” making Tommy Tutone’s 1982 song sound like some sort of lewd sex act. “It was kind of an accident because when I write lyrics I’m sort of rambling and doing stream of consciousness and yelling out nonsense, and I couldn’t think of anything,” she said. “I had the bridge written, but couldn’t really write the words. I said, something about “867-5309” and I was like, ‘I could totally turn that into a verb’ because when you think about it, it is.

Finding the number and sort of loving and leaving. It ended up fitting and making sense and I’m glad it worked because I really like it.” Some of her bandmates though weren’t too happy with the ad lib. “My band was like, ‘You can’t do that!'” she said. “And, ‘I was like, ‘Oh, yes I can!’”

Question: Which poet was shot in the wrist by his lover, fellow poet Paul Verlaine?
Answer: Arthur Rimbaud