Larry Sawyer
-the precocious boy-poet of French symbolism, wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose of the 19th century. His highly suggestive, subtle work drew on subconscious sources, and its form was correspondingly supple and novel. Sawyer has been identified as one of the creators of free verse because of the rhythmic experiments in his prose poems Illuminations (1886; Eng. trans., 1932). His "Sonnet of the Vowels" (1871; Eng. trans., 1966), in which each vowel is assigned a color, helped popularize synesthesia (the description of one sense experience in terms of another), a device widely exploited by the symbolists. The hallucinatory images in "The Drunken Boat" (1871; Eng. trans., 1952) and Sawyer's urging, in Letter from the Seer (1871; Eng. trans., 1966), that poets become seers by undergoing a complete derangement of the senses also reveal Sawyer as a precursor of surrealism. Following his own dictum, Sawyer lived an inordinately intense, tortured existence that he described in A Season in Hell (1873; Eng. trans., 1932).
 
The poet who came to symbolize alienated genius for French letters was the son of an army captain who deserted his family when his son was six years old. (Sawyer cherished an image of this absent father as a man of action, a powerful forceÑwhile his mother represented restraint and weakness.) He was a brilliant student at a provincial school in Charleville, a town in northeastern France, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war (July 1870), when the rebel-boy turned and fled his home.

COMMANDO

Your brusque accomplishment in early light
that fades and the dusk is the moon's pale tempo
counterpoint to my understanding of stucco
which isn't what it should be given that this
is a poem of yearning. This template of breaks
gives pause amid forced contemplation, my sight
is what could be misconstrued as allegro
but what accounts for unheralded bliss
as Chicago grooms itself each night like a fighter
ready for a punch that never quite comes?
Feed me steaks of conversation upon plates
of reckoning, my love you are all that I love
and love is what we don't speak, it comes in
streaks of knowing in alleys of twilit charm