Writing, madness and anarchy

"Writing for (Artaud) wasn't a means of modifying or falsifying experience through the medium of language, it was the chace to communicate directly with his sense of outrage. It was a form of primal anarchy. If we all communicated without the selective process of language identifying with thought, the world would be reinvented."

"Madness is the perogative term that capitalism applies to vision."

"Literature died when it became a saleable commoditiy."

Jeremy Reed, Chasing Black Rainbows: a novel based on the life of Artaud, Peter Owen, 1994

Where else is there to go?

"But principally my theme is one I have explored in my own life and through the personae I have adopted in two previous novels, Isidore and When The Whip Comes Down, which is belief in the poet as one who changes the universe and risks everything by this undertaking. It is not a romantic ideal that the poetry sacrifices his life to madness, it is often the truth. Artaud savaged the status quo through the powers of his imagination, and this novel looks towards the creation of a world in which imagination becomes reality. Where else is there to go?"

Jeremy Reed, Chasing Black Rainbows: a novel based on the life of Artaud, Peter Owen,1994.

Poetry and the future

"Writing poetry involves a fictitious leap into the posthumous.The poet has to anticipate a language, a mode of thought that will intersect with the continuous future."

Jeremy Reed, Isadore, Creation Books, 1991.