The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France

The raw material was autobiography, upgraded: Sauser really had been shipped to Russia as a teenage apprentice, really had watched the 1905 revolution's smoke from a train window — and the poem compresses those years into one hallucinated ride, war and snow and rocking wheels, with Jeanne, the frail Montmartre girl beside him, asking her question like a bell. The verse invented a travel-rhythm French poetry didn't have: clattering, cinematic, tender and apocalyptic by turns, the whole modern world boarding one train.

The object was the second revolution. Sonia Delaunay's pochoir colors don't illustrate the poem — they run beside and through it, two meters of simultaneous contrast folding down to pocket size, painting and poem read in one act. The 1913 prospectus did the math proudly: the full edition, unfolded end to end, would equal the Eiffel Tower's height. Fewer copies than that were finished, and survivors now live in museum cases — but the gesture stands as the era's purest fusion of avant-garde word and image, and the poem inside remains one of the century's great journeys. It is also a landmark of the collaboration culture — poet and painter, one artwork — that Paris made possible.

One long poem, one long train: Moscow at sixteen, the merchant's strongbox, the Trans-Siberian rolling east through the 1905 war's wreckage — armored trains, burning stations, snow — while memory and fever intercut Paris, and Jeanne asks, again and again, whether they are far from Montmartre. The journey ends where all his journeys end and begin: Paris, 'city of the incomparable Tower,' the wheel still turning.

Read it in a facsimile if you can find one — the Delaunay colors are half the poem — but the verse survives any page it's printed on.