The greatest Parisian poem was not written by a Parisian — at least not a “Parisian,” per se. I am talking, of course, about the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s “Black Stone on a White Stone,” an airtight sonnet that neatly encapsulates the entire thrust of Paris’s swallowing-whole approach to housing a poet. The city is, as Vallejo intimates, a site for delimiting death in life. Like Rimbaud before him, Vallejo understood that Paris was as much the enemy as the hero of her poetry.
When I moved to Paris, I was embarking on a book of sonnets, one that eventually emerged, warts and all, as a singularly nightmarish volume called Cargo Cult. Vallejo was all over the earlier drafts. In fact, one of the strangest pieces in the book, a poem called “Noyade,” was written at his grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse on a particularly Parisian morning.
I say “particularly Parisian” because it was gloomy but also because it was a morning characterized by extraordinary coincidence — the lifeblood of many Parisian mornings. It was already sweltering and I was sweating my face open even before I stepped out of the oven of the Metro. Strolling into the Cimetière du Montparnasse more liquid than solid is probably why I had such an impossible time trying to locate the grave of Vallejo — it was certainly why I needed to pause and rest on a bench. I spent 15 minutes or so scraping one of my “no one does this, no one does that” poems into my notebook, musing on my daily severed heads, before my ear was caught by a conversation in Spanish somewhere just immediately north of vision, hidden by the arcing spines of tombs that prattle toward infinity down the yawning lawns of the cimitière.
I caught the word “Vallejo.” There were something like six or seven distinct voices involved in the conversation. And then they evaporated, scattering in several directions. When I rose from the bench and ambled a little way past the grid marker that divides the cimitière, I realized that I had finally hit upon the grave quite by accident — through eavesdropping.
Surely, I must have passed it seven or eight times on that first hunt. But it was clearly the grave of Vallejo. A woman was draping a Peruvian flag across the stone. I didn't approach because I didn't want to interrupt her. But it did not matter because another figure emerged from the teeth of tombstones and stood a moment at her side before attempting to address her in German. This was unsuccessful, but I did hear this new voice mention “Vallejo” and that drew a response from the woman setting out the flag.
Then something very odd happened: A parade of people began approaching the grave, most of them speaking Spanish. They were each setting objects on the grave. Stones, pennies, metro tickets, a photograph, and finally a volume of Vallejo's poetry. One woman began reciting a poem. The German was the first to leave, recitation concluded, and then the entire party dissolved amid the graves in a curious procession. I speak French and have a limited understanding of simple Spanish, and I was delighted by what I had just witnessed: A tour bus of Peruvians had made the trip to Montparnasse simply to visit the grave of Vallejo. Americans have scant respect for our poets, so this seemed an especially moving event. And in fact, the sheer coincidence of it was the only reason I was able to locate Vallejo's grave at all.
I approached the plot of my beloved poet, now festooned with profuse Peruvian bric-a-brac, and read out his exquisite “Black Stone on a White Stone.” The giboulée — a kind of sudden, lavish rain shower — had come and gone earlier in the day and the stone was still damp with moisture. When I finished the poem, I smeared the scrap of paper I had scribbled it out on across the wet of the tomb and tucked it in my pocket for a memento. I gathered a few pebbles from the foot of the grave to gift to friends in the United States. Finally, I pulled out my notebook and began writing the poem that became “Noyade.”
There is a cemetery for everyone in Paris, but the best of them call out particularly to writers, musicians, artists, and thinkers. At the Cimetière du Montparnasse, besides Vallejo, one can visit Baudelaire’s grave (alongside a beautiful cenotaph), as well as the graves of Cortàzar, Sartre, Man Ray, Baudrillard, Beauvoir, Huysmans, Sontag, Tzara, Gainsbourg, and — as of 2023 — Jane Birkin. At Père Lachaise — famously — one finds Wilde and Stein, but also Chopin, Delacroix, Marcel Marceau, Modigliani, Piaf, Perec, and Sarah Bernhardt. In Montmartre, one can pay respects to Pierre Cardin, Berlioz, Gautier, Degas, Gustave Moreau, Zola, Truffaut, Picabia, and the man who chopped Louis XVI’s head, Charles Henri Sanson.
This list might go on and on.
Paris is unusual in her capacity to eat the living artist alive while honoring — like no other city — the corpse. The graves of Baudelaire and Wilde are famously covered in lipstick prints, to the extent that Wilde’s tomb has been sectioned off from visitors by a plexiglass fence (which can, with dexterity and an exit plan, be hopped — not that I would know anything about that). While there are plentiful museums, galleries, and cultural centers to be found in Paris, trawling her cemeteries is the readiest formula in this entire city to engage with “art” in a sense that is intimate, immediate, and not easily shaken.
As an exercise, and certainly as a more interesting souvenir than another Hermès scarf or ridiculous key chain, I would encourage visitors to crawl through the rosters of burials and find a suitable personality to visit. Bring a notebook. Write something. In fact, write anything. You will be more remarkably Parisian in those minutes than any Parisian living in Paris today.
Jourdain Barton is an American poet, performance artist, and art historian based in Paris, France. Her first book, PHANTASMAGORIA, is available in print through SIAMB, while her forthcoming collection, GRAND MAL, is slated for summer ‘24 release through the same house. She is a co-owner of Chicago-based TEMPER Press and earned her MFA at the School of the Art Institute.