If we try to assure ourselves by calling it fantasy, we have to ignore the scalpel which is playing about our insides. The world of his poems bears some relation to that of everyday, but it is hard to determine what. Without the slightest concern for any ‘ism’, he produced strange but original little fables, apparitions in poetry or prose or paint, pictures of fantastic predicaments and fantastic inventions and desires, coldly objective descriptions of strange voyages and places (as in the celebrated prose poem ‘ I Am Writing to You from a Far-off Country’). The great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges liked his writings and considered ‘his work is without equal in the literature of our time’. Allen Ginsberg venerated him as a master and genius. John Ashberry described Michaux as ‘hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience-the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living’. He thus gives us another being, shows us another way of thinking, observing and writing-vital skills that one deeply desire these days. He can be an anti-poet, anti-God or a sort of Buddha tossing us into a new awareness. Henri Michaux is a perfect antidote for the winter blues and I am glad that I chose to read him early this year.

They stick out so sharp and sublime against the dull poems that one regularly encounter that I have the feeling of being reborn when I read it. I have grown fond of reading his outlandish poems. If poetry can be a wonderful tool to render exceptional or extreme experiences, then the hallucinating poems of Henri Michaux will top that list. Whether in poetry or prose, his weird visions seem to emerge as messages from his inner space. He has authored more than 30 books of poems, prose poems, essays, journals, and drawings. In 1948, Michaux's wife died after accidentally setting fire to her nightgown: devastated, he began to take mescaline, a hallucinating drug, painstakingly recording his experiences in prose-poems accompanied by distinctive calligraphic line drawings. He finally settled in Paris, where he began to write and paint. His voyages inspired two travelogues on Ecuador and Asia. A painter as well as poet, he travelled widely in Africa and Asia and also supported himself in Paris as a teacher and secretary. He contemplated entering the priesthood then enrolled in medical school before abandoning his studies and becoming a merchant seaman.

He was educated at a Jesuit school in Brussels. Simplicity: The Prose Poems of Henri Michauxīorn in Belgium in 1899, Henri Michaux (1899-1984) defies common critical definition.

Selected Writings by Henri Michaux