"[Michaux's] work is without equal in the literature of our time" -Jorge Luis Borges
“Henri Michaux is 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.†—John Ashbery
“Michaux travels via his languages: lines, words, colors, silences, rhythms. And he does not hesitate to break the back of a word...In order to arrive: where? At that nowhere that is here, there, and everywhere.†—Octavio Paz
“Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of stange things.†—Andre Gide
“Michaux is the poet laureate of our insomnia.†—The New York Times Book Review
From http://www.kalin.lm.com/michaux.html
"When in 1941 Andre Gide published the lecture he never delivered, Decouvrons Henri Michaux, the poet was far from being unknown in France. It is true that he had not reached a large public, but already by that time he was one of the most highly esteemed poets, the one who has created in his work a world totally different from the real world. Maurice Blanchot calls him, in the few pages he devotes to Michaux in Faux Pas, "l'ange du bizarre," a most apt title for one of the really authentic poetic talents of today who is taking his place beside those writers who investigate the strange and the unusual and who, therefore, more than others, transpose or even upset the literary perspective. The relationship which Michaux has established between the natural and the unbelievable has created a surreal world which has become the familiar world of his poetry. More than any other contemporary writer, far more than the authentic surrealists many say, he has willed the invention of a new land, and unlike Swift, never uses it for any edifying or didactic purpose. His is a gratuitous creation, one that invites no comparison and no justification. it demands of the reader that they enter this extravagant world without any hope of discovering its meaning, that they enter it as if they were entering the void."
From "Introduction" by David Ball,
in "Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984.
Henri Michaux died in 1984 at the age of eighty-five. He was an author of more than thirty books of poems, prose poems, narratives, essays, journals and drawings; his writings were translated into more than half a dozen languages, his paintings amply displayed in the major art centers of Europe and the United States. His place in world literature and art was secure, but difficult to define. Michaux stood alone.
When people who know his work try to relate Michaux to some movement or tradition, they don't come up with schools of poets, but with a range of great individual figures in literature and art: Kafka, Hieronymus Bosch, Goya, Swift, Paul Klee, Rabelais.... His strangeness has occasionally led him to be classified with the Surrealists (some critics feel they have to put him somewhere), but he never used techniques: no cadavre exquis, no free association, no abstractly formulated attempt to destroy tradition and logic. A sentence like Andre Breton's "The color of fabulous salvations darkens even the slightest death-rattle: a calm of relative sighs" could never have been written by Michaux, who tries to render his dangerous, magical world as clearly and concretely as possible. Whether in poetry, prose, Indian ink, or paint, his weird visions are not the result of some theory about the nature of art: they are messages from his inner space. In a sense he inhabits the realm the Surrealists merely longed for.
No group, no label for him. John Ashbery defined him 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." Wild and druggy enough to be venerated in the sixties by a poet like Allen Ginsberg (he called Michaux "master" and "genius")
