Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques
One of 40 réimposé copies on Hollande paper (no. 18), with a second plate portrait of Cendrars by Modigliani, reproduced in black (as for the 10 other réimposé copies on Japanese paper).
At least two other copies, réimposés on green paper, with the second portrait, are also known.
1919 was a fertile year for Blaise Cendrars: alongside the birth of his daughter Miriam, he published three major texts: Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques with Au Sans Pareil, the poetry collection Du Monde entier with Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue française (NRF), and La Fin du Monde filmée par l’Ange Notre-Dame with Éditions de la Sirène, with landmark compositions by Léger.
Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques was the fourth volume in the Littérature collection at Au Sans Pareil, with a title-page vignette by André Derain. For this volume, the illustrator chosen for the frontispiece was Amedeo Modigliani. The title followed Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie by Arthur Rimbaud (with a portrait by J.-L. Forain), Mont de Piété by André Breton (with two drawings by André Derain), and Lettres de Guerre by Jacques Vaché (with a drawing by the author).
In his afterword, Cendrars wrote this curious note: “Born out of a meeting, a friendship, a painting, a polemic or a reading, the poems that precede belong to the much-derided genre of occasional poems. With two or three exceptions, they were published by foreign reviews, Le Mercure de France, Vers et Prose, Les Soirées de Paris and Poème et Drame — meaning that my elders, the already established poets and the so-called avant-garde, refused my collaboration. At that time in France, it was not easy to be a genuine young writer among “the young.” B.C.” These isolated poems, revealing of Cendrars’s modernism, are relatively short. Tour, the second poem, pays homage to the Eiffel Tower, to which the poet attributes an extraordinary power of attraction. Carefully disheveled in form and written for the most part before the war, these poems are animated by the frenzied breath of the modern world, while paying tribute to his friends Apollinaire, Delaunay and Léger.