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Google meet link will be provided at Open Link Night on Thursday. 

It’s Monday and, here at the dVerse Poets Pub, we are writing Prosery, the very short piece of prose or flash fiction that tells a story with a beginning, middle and end. It can be in any genre of your choice, but it does have a limit of 144 words; an additional challenge is to hit 144 exactly. The special thing about Prosery is that we give you a complete line or two from a poem, which must be included somewhere in your story, within the 144-word limit.

It was reading Patti Smith’s poetry and autobiographical books that first sparked my interest in the French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, who was known for his transgressive and surreal themes, and for his influence on modern literature and arts.

Rimbaud was an autumn child, born on 20^th October 1854 in Charleville-Mézières, and he died at the young age of thirty seven on 10^th November 1891 in Marseille. He started writing at a very young age, but gave up his education and went to Paris where, during his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced most of his work, but stopped writing literature at the age of twenty after completing his last major work, Illuminations.

Rimbaud was a libertine. He had a sometimes violent relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which lasted nearly two years. It began when he wasn’t quite seventeen and Verlaine was twenty-eight.

He was quite the linguist, speaking and writing five European languages: French, Italian, Spanish, English, and German. He also knew Arabic, Amharic, Harari, Oromo, and Somali.

^{By the table, an 1872 painting by Henri Fantin-Latour. Verlaine is on the far left and Rimbaud is the second on the left.}

I found his poem, ‘Novel’, by chance, and it took me back to when I was seventeen and living in Germany, in Cologne, a city which was much influenced by the French, who took charge of it from 1794 until 1815.

^{Rimbaud at seventeen}

‘Novel’ is a fresh, exuberant poem, which celebrates young love, and evokes a summer evening when the scent of linden trees fills the night air and the pavements are littered with its tiny flowers – anything is possible. Very different to Rimbaud’s other works, which often deal with darker themes, it is less experimental in form and language, with a more traditional rhyme scheme and meter.

I have chosen the following lines to include in your prose:

“There you can see a very small patch
Of dark blue, framed by a little branch,
Pinned up by a naughty star”

I love the idea of a naughty star!

Here’s how to take part in Prosery:

• Write a piece of flash fiction of up to or exactly 144 words, including the given line in the order in which it has been given. You may add or change punctuation, but you may not add words in between the given ones.
• Post your Prosery on your blog and link back to this post.
• Link it up to our Mr. Linky.
• Don’t forget to check the little box to accept use/privacy policy
• Visit other blogs. Enjoy some amazing writing, and don’t forget to comment – and have fun.