In the years leading up to the First World War, Blaise Cendrars had the idea of
writing a big poem, and he succeeded, with La Prose du Transsiberien et de la petite
Jebannede France. Similar to Apollinaire's Cubist poems, in which punctuation is
jettisoned and ideas allowed to flow backwards and forwards ambiguously in their
syntactical settings, La Prose is a tour de force of energetic motion -- the train ride
from Europe to Asia, with its wilful disruptions of time and place, forging a powerful
metaphor for the artist's desire to be free from bourgeois limitations. With its
contemporary language and images and freedom from literary reference, Cendrars's
poetry, it can be argued, is even more modern than Apollinaire's. He believed La
Prose would find its appropriate home in a visual setting, and therefore contacted
Sonia Delaunay, a Russian émigré living in Paris, whose work had an appropriate
openness. Delaunay later recalled her reaction to the poet's idea: "I proposed that
we create a book that, unfolded, would be two metres high. I sought inspiration in
the text for colour harmonies that would parallel the poem's unfolding. We chose
characters of different fonts and sizes, a revolutionary procedure at the time."
Together they produced the printed edition of the poem with Delaunay'spochoir
counterpart. The publishers (Les Hommes nouveaux, a journal and press founded by
Cendrars and Emile Szytta) called it the first livre simultané, meaning one saw the
whole thing at a glance, like a painting or billboard, a comparison Cendrars himself
underscored. La Prose was published in 1913 and had the desired result. Presented
in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Moscow and St Petersburg, it brought Cendrars
the acclaim he desired. As the critic Marjorie Pertoff notes: "It became not only a
poem but an event, a happening." — Vincent Katz