What's It About?
These words were music to the ears of BookTrib Assistant Editor Lee Pelletier: “We have published your poem.”Pelletier, who has been a part of the BookTrib team since July, heard from Bangalore Review this morning that they had published her work, “Another Life,” which she wrote for her Gothic Fiction class at the University of Iowa. She had to submit a portfolio for her class final, and decided to write a series of poems on history and art.
It’s the first time a poem by Pelletier has been published.
“The ‘Gothic’ part was that I imagined myself as the person who the artist Henri-Fantin Latour had painted over and thus trapped in the painting By the Table,” she says.
She added that she was inspired by her love of Arthur Rimbaud and the Musée d’Orsay description:
“At least two figures are missing: Charles Baudelaire, to whom the painting was initially to have been a tribute, who died in 1867, and Albert Mérat, who did not want to be painted in the company of the diabolic poets Verlaine and Rimbaud and was reputedly replaced by a bunch of flowers.”
Verlaine and Rimbaud were considered diabolic because Rimbaud was an atheist and the two had an affair (in the late 1800s). Rimbaud was later shot by Verlaine after an argument.
You can read Pelletier’s poem here.
Congratulations!