Writing Problems: Crime / Poetry

Villon, Wright, Ignatow

In 1455, François Montcorbier—known as Villon (1431-1463?)—got into a fight with a priest and killed him. A year later Villon and three accomplices broke into the College of Navarre and stole some money, 500 gold crowns. He was not imprisoned until November 1462, but they accepted bail and he was released, but on January 5, 1463 he was punished with banishment and there is no record of him after that. He is presumed to have died when he was 32 on a mat of straw, drunk in a tavern, from syphilis, or in a street fight.

Villon is like the French version of Chaucer. His criminal life coincided with his life in poetry. Unsentimental, erotic, satirical, and insightful about degradation and despair. Villon lived at the very edges of experience: “I feel my thirst coming on / White as cotton I spit…”

His most famous line of poetry was: “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” [Where are the snows of yesteryear?] Still as fresh as the morning even though he wrote it more than 560 years ago. He’s been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell.

The margin between criminality and poetry was stitched together in Villon. Poetry has to come from the periphery. It can’t come from the center. To write poems seriously contravenes social expectations and a “normal” life. Because of the impracticality of devoting one’s attention to poetry, the attendant forces of alienation, isolation, and dislocation are inevitable. Poets are exiles.