The Dice Cup - Max Jacob

Although Max Jacob’s life continues to be read in the shadow of his friend and colleague Pablo Picasso, and his work continues to live in the shadow of that of Guillaume Apollinaire, his role in French modernism was essential, and with this second volume of his work from Wakefield Press, can now be fully and properly assessed. First published at his own expense in 1917 (though most of its poems had been written between 1903 and 1910), The Dice Cup stands alongside Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Pierre Reverdy’s Prose Poems as one of the most important and foundational books of prose poetry: one that broke with the nascent tradition of the nineteenth century to give it a new, modern shape for the twentieth.

Jacob has been identified as a “cubist poet,” but this collection and its shifting style escape any such easy definition: dream accounts are rendered in playful prose that thumbs its nose at the fabular tradition of Baudelaire and Mallarmé along with the Romantic disorder of Rimbaud, and subvert both poetic and narrative expectations in favor of dream logic, allusion, transformed autobiography, and nonsensical parody. Surreal before surrealism, both mystical and burlesque, the prose poems of Jacob’s Dice Cup offer alternative versions of reality: consciously constructed, yet as unstable and unfixed as both Jacob’s personality and our own.

Wakefield Press, 2022
English
Softcover, 264 pages
136mm x 203mm