“THE PARANORMAL POET”

We could define Bernard Puy de Cabannes as a paranormal poet. In the sense that his verses were the result of automatic writing. You know how it works? It consists of placing the pen gently on the paper and let a disembodied spirit guide your hand. Some people affirm that Shakespeare wrote his immortal works in this way: limiting himself to holding the pen. Well, Puy de Cabannes belonged to this class of poets. Only that in his case there was an insoluble problem. The spirit that guided his hand wrote in a strange language, unknown not only to Cabannes but to all the linguists he consulted. In fact, these linguists pointed out that his writings lacked grammatical and orthographic rules. To which Cabannes replied angrily that there resided precisely the difficulty and the beauty of such language. To a linguist who dared to contradict him affirming that this was not a language but a string of meaningless words, Cabannes gave him such a slap that made him reconsider his opinion and describe his poems as masterpieces in a prologue that the poet forced him to write for the first edition of his poetic anthology. “Its verses are comparable to those of Homer, and Virgil’s “Aeneid” is a pamphlet at its side.” That’s what the prologue says about the book (So hard was the slap!). If only the secret code in which those verses were written could be deciphered! In any case, the book was widely spread among “la bohème”, whose members used to recite its poems loudly before the cabarets’ clientele, who listened in ecstasy: “Whrjiosnr klkdyue lkj manemr pdjkrn, kuanrl, ehjprn”, which the rhapsodist accompanied with great profusion of gestures to underline the unknown meaning of each word. This verse in particular (“Whrjiosnr klkdyue lkj manemr pdjkrn, kuanrl, ehjprn”) caused a real commotion in the “Chat Noir” when it was recited by Aristide Bruant with his usual grandiloquence. But “who was the inspiring muse of such wonder?”, the enraged audience cried out.

Who would it be but her, the secret mistress of the poet…the Green Fairy!

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