Former Cellist for The Books on Books

Paul De Jong, cellist for the now disbanded The Books, offers up his "Readings" over at The Believer. He likes prose poems, as this short list makes clear. Here's his take on Max Jacob:

Max Jacob - Selected Poems

Not much of Max Jacob’s opus has been published in English or in any other language than its original French. I know of two small American editions, one translated by William Kulik and published in Oberlin in the 1990’s. Jacob, poet and painter, was one of the main group of Cubist painters and writers in Paris during the 1910’s and ‘20’s. His friends included Picasso, Modigliani, Apolliniare and Braque. Jacob’s prose poems marry the mystical and absurd, the symbolic and surreal. His texts always give me the strange sensation of reading something that appears to have been written a few millennia back with a 20th century fountain pen. Jacob never made much of anything from his writings or paintings, and remained equally poor after turning Christian, having had a vision of Christ on the wall of his room in 1909. He entered a monastery which did not keep the Nazis from seeking him out because of his Jewish origin. He died in a concentration camp in 1944.

Go read the rest of his choices!