In 1990 I toured England and Europe for the first time. It was an epic three month trip. There’s so much to say about it, but I’ll limit myself to the part where I visited the town of Charleville in northern France. It was a deliberate destination, a kind of pilgrimage for me you might say, because that was where the poet Arthur Rimbaud had lived and died in the previous century. I had to see Charleville. I had to see the park by the railway station called Station Square that contains the bandstand he wrote about in a poem, and which still stands. I had to see the statue of the man that resides there, bearing the titles of his four most famous pieces: Illuminations, A Season In Hell, The Drunken Boat, and Vowels. I then did the Rimbaud tour of the town, seeking out the places where he lived and wrote. I visited the Rimbaud Museum, which was a refurbished old mill situated directly above the Meuse River. Bought some great souvenirs there, including postcards and a book of Rimbaud posters by Ernest Pignon-Ernest. And after that, as it began to rain, I visited the cemetery where he was buried. I stood in the rain looking down on the grave and the bust of Arthur, and remembered his strange poetry, his strange life.
from Ernest Pignon-Ernest
My own strange life had brought him to me chiefly through a radio documentary I heard about him in 1984. It was a fine piece, the narrator recounting the Rimbaud story from his early days as a troubled but brilliant youth in Charleville, and then his various wanderings to Paris that were both disastrous and successful. He enters Paris at the time of the Commune and writes revolutionary poems about it. He is raped by soldiers – and, yes, writes a poem about that too. He encounters the poet Paul Verlaine, who recognises his brilliance, and they become lovers. He writes the ‘letter of the seer’ to Verlaine, a letter that speaks of the ‘disorientation of the senses’, 
an idea that would influence others, even Jim Morrison of the Doors. All the while he keeps writing his brilliant symbolist expressionist poetry. But then abruptly it stops; dramatically he turns his back on the literary world and loses himself completely in the heat of Africa as a bureaucrat and, allegedly, a gun runner. He never writes another line of poetry. It was all interspersed with readings of his poems, taken from a new Complete Edition of ‘creative’ translations by Paul Schmidt. It was heady, intoxicating stuff.
I must have already known about him by this point. There had been that reference to ‘Verlaines and Rimbauds’ in Dylan’s You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. There was a reference to his ‘Illuminations’ in the graphic story Ballade by Moebius in the magazine Heavy Metal. And the Tom Conti film Reuben Reuben had come out in ‘83, containing references to Rimbaud and his life through Conti’s poet character. The same year also saw the release of Eddie and the Cruisers, a film about a brilliant early rocker who goes ‘missing’ while at the height of his band’s popularity, which also referenced Rimbaud. Anyway, the story of the famous poet who gave up his art to go adventuring was definitely in the air, which is probably why I sat down and listened to that radio broadcast. I taped it on cassette and took a walk the next day in some wild scrub near my old high school, re-listening to it on my Walkman. It was a sunny March day, and as I listened to the show again in a clearing in that scrubland the legend of Arthur grew larger in my mind. It was the start of another obsessive Phase.
(first two) from Ballade by Moebius
It goes without saying I searched out anything I could find on Rimbaud from that point on. I found the Paul Schmidt collection in a bookshop in Melbourne. Reading the poems, I recognised the ones that had been featured in the documentary. I grabbed another copy of the Complete Works, this time translated by Wallace Fowlie, and noticed his translations were much more dry and literal, whereas Schmidt’s had been more poetic, retaining much of the rhyme and meter of Rimbaud’s French originals. I found the poems, when stripped of the context provided by the radio documentary, were often perplexing, obscure, baffling. His celebrated long poem, The Drunken Boat, was full of striking imagery – but what did it all mean? For all my enthusiasm, I confess, I am not a Rimbaud scholar.
But it was fun catching all the references. The long prose poems, A Season In Hell, reportedly his last works, started off with the line, ‘If my memory serves me well’. Where had I heard that before? Oh yes, Dylan! And the references kept coming. In Eddie and the Cruisers, the group are working on their second album when Eddie goes missing, presumed dead, after an argument with the manager at the studio. The name of the album? A Season In Hell! The rest of the film is all about finding those lost tapes of the album, because they went missing with Eddie, and presumably contain musical magic. I love that film. The sequel was good too.
But I digress. After collecting the Complete Works, happy circumstance, I found a copy of Enid Starkie’s fabulous biography Arthur Rimbaud in a second hand shop. I devoured it. It was one of the most enjoyable books I ever read. Rimbaud’s life was fascinating, sordid, troubled, triumphant, and ultimately, tragic. Many years later another biography was written, this time by Graham Robb, and simply called Rimbaud. It added more layers to the Rimbaud story and was another fantastic read.
In the end, Rimbaud’s life was just as interesting to me, if not more so, as his poetry. The fact that, in a way like Greta Garbo (another Favourite Phase), he turned his back on it for a life of relative oblivion has always haunted me. Why Arthur, why give up your greatest gift? I think of Rimbaud’s life as a kind of cautionary tale. He’s an idea of what might have been, a lesson to us all that a life can either be squandered, or saved. In the end I don’t know if Rimbaud squandered his talent, his life. Maybe that second half of his life was his happiest? The biographies hint that it probably wasn’t – but who’s to know? It’s not for me to say, or judge.
One thing’s for sure: his life and work has inspired many of us. It inspired me to go to Charleville on what I pretentiously call a ‘pilgrimage’. After visiting the cemetery I went to a bank to exchange a traveller’s check (remember those). A teller who worked there caught my Australian accent and immediately became interested in me. His name was Jerome, and as a spontaneous act of friendship he invited me to stay with he and his family in nearby Rethel. Jerome’s brother was now living in Australia, so I got to sleep in his room. I met his sister, Christelle, who had an Australian boyfriend. They were into Australia! I met Jerome’s friends, including his girlfriend. 
We went out dancing, and later Jerome’s other girlfriend (on the sly – very French!) took me to a military museum while he was at work. Even when I left Rethel and went to Reims, Jerome showed up there too. We had a meal with more of his friends and then visited the famous Reims Cathedral. Then, cruising a record store, I asked Jerome and his friends for a good French album I should buy. They recommended the album Sarbacane by local hero Francis Cabrel. I bought a tape to play on my Walkman and listened to it almost non-stop for the rest of the trip. It was a terrific album. I had a great time and Jerome’s friendship was astounding. To this day if anyone bad-mouths the French to me, I shut them down quick smart with my story about Jerome and his family. And it all happened because I was in Charleville checking out the Rimbaud connection. It brought me new friendship and music.
Recently, I walked that scrubland again where I’d sat down and listened to that documentary tape all those years ago – the one that had got me into Rimbaud in the first place. It’s now a well-manicured park with a nice magic circle of trees situated roughly around the clearing where I had stopped to listen to the program. It looks like a good place for elves or fairies to frolic in the moonlight, or for pagans to hold a Summer Solstice dance. Or for the God Pan to sit down and play his flute – a hymn to Arthur Rimbaud.
(first) Thiers Street, where Rimbaud lived (fourth) Rimbaud Museum (sixth) Charleville Cemetery (seventh) Hostelier Pascal & wife Valerie