Rumors: Mallarmé
Comme des Garçons makes Mallarmé shirts to give to organ donors
Kurt Cobain’s sweaters flexed green but should have flexed azure
Azure is a harsh toilet cleaner sold at Aldis
Mallarmé despised Miami Beach
Mallarmé’s favorite movie was New Jack City
Mallarmé once said the best way to get yourself out of a poem is to turn into a bunch of white balloons
Mallarmé understood that being one of a long line of civil servants, he would become a poet
Mallarmé sd to Sarte: “An age of bourgeois poets is like a carton of rice filled with blood”
Mallarmé sd to Manet: “Yes, but I often feel like I’m out of it”
Mallarmé sd to Yeats: “Take me a-, take me a-, take me a-, a-way”
Mallarmé sd to Verlaine: “Disaster!”
Mallarmé sd to Stefan George: “It’s not a matter of playing the madman”
Mallarmé sd to Wilde: “I’m not dead”
Mallarmé sd to Rilke: “Terrible, awe-inspiring, uncanniest”
Mallarmé sd to Valéry: “I should have been a painter”
Mallarmé sd to Whistler: “Let me see what I can do”
When Van Gogh died, Mallarmé took two Tuinal and went running
Mallarmé knows what you mean when you say “Technotronic”
“There is no getting rid of Mallarmé,” said Mallarmé
Mallarmé’s sailboat was called “Cirrhosis of the River”
Mallarmé wrote the first ever self-help book, Crisis: Coming Out of the Tube
Mallarmé on dandyism: “Dandy is the symptom, poet is the disease”
Mallarmé’s favorite poets were Tasso and Vallejo, Huidobro and Roquette-Pinto, Bolaño and João Cabral de Melo Neto
Mallarmé once gave Carlos Castaneda a perm
Mallarmé’s favorite actor was Bill Duke
Mallarmé’s favorite actress was Elizabeth Peña
Mallarmé’s shadow skimmed the water like a huge violet-colored mosquito
Mallarmé’s death smelled like Drakkar Noir and tar
Mallarmé: “I am perfectly dead…I am now impersonal and no longer the Stéphane you have known, but an aptitude the spiritual universe has to see and develop itself through what was once me”
Originally Published September 11th, 2015 at The Poetry Foundation.