“…I’M ON THE WAY”
By:
December 21, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
…I’m on the way
I’ve always been on the way
I’m on the way with little Jehanne of France
The train makes a somersault and falls
back on all its wheels
The train falls back on all its wheels
The train always falls back on all its wheels
“Blaise, tell me, are we very far from
Montmartre?”
Far we are, Jeanne, you’ve been riding for
seven days
You are far from Montmartre, from the
Butte that nourished you, from the
Sacré-Coeur you’ve huddled against
Paris has disappeared and its enormous
blaze
Nothing’s left but a stream of ashes
The rain that falls
The turf that swells
Siberia that turns
The heavy sheets of snow on the rise
And the tinkle-bell of madness that shivers
like a last desire in the bluish air
The train throbs in the heart of the leaden
horizons
And your sorrow sneers…
“Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from
Montmartre?”
Worries
Forget your worries
All the stations full of cracks tilted
along the way
The telegraph wires they hang from
The grimacing poles that gesticulate and
strangle them
The world stretches lengthens and folds in
like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand
In the cracks of the sky the locomotives
in anger
Flee
And in the holes,
The whirling wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misfortune that bark at
our heels
The demons are unleashed
Iron rails
Everything is off-key
The broun-roun-roun of the wheels
Shocks
Bounces
We are a storm under a deaf man’s skull…
“Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from
Montmartre?”
— excerpt from “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jehanne of France” (1913). Translation from the 1995 book The Cubist Poets in Paris. The poem is about the poet’s epic (perhaps imaginary) journey through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express in 1905, during the first Russian Revolution. Intended as an edition of 150, only 60 copies were printed, of which about 30 are thought to survive.
From The Met’s website:
Widely considered to be one of the most important artist’s books of the twentieth century, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France is a celebrated example of Sonia Delaunay’s “simultaneous” abstract painting, which emphasizes the juxtaposition of colors and organic shapes to produce the simulation of lyrical movement. Her composition, rendered in an unusual vertical format, runs parallel to the accompanying text by Blaise Cendrars: a semi-autobiographical account of a poet’s journey (with his companion, Jeanne) on the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia and Mongolia. Cendrars’s prose, written in an erratic rhythm and printed in different fonts and colors, echoes the train’s trajectory through disparate landscapes, while the artist’s vibrant abstraction—with its overlapping and cascading forms—suggests the dynamic motion visible through a train window. This fluid unification of text and image gives visual form to the spatial and temporal dislocations of modern life effected by technological innovations.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.