Apollinaire's artistic instinct for the natural simultaneity (rather than the unity) of intelligence is a constant in his work. . . .
Writing becomes the work of making art of an intelligence, of a life, of using an era as an illustration of an emotion, of isolating the mutations and implicit historic metamorphoses of an era to record them. . . .
The affect of intelligence is inevitable plasticity. . . .
[T]he conditions of reality inscribed the plane of the poet's fact. . . .
The inclusive sense of its intelligence is historical only in the immediate sense of ubiquity. . . .
The intelligence attracting the data of vicissitudes . . . favorable to the formative desire of the ambient. . . .
. . . a sense of mutation as a constant . . .
A poet's matter was not to be less than that of the daily paper.
from "The Musician of Saint-Merry":
He continued on his way terribly [He just kept walking it was terrifying]
And somewhere else What time will a train leave for Paris
At that moment [Simultaneously] Spice Island pigeons made nutmeg droppings At the same time [Simultaneously] Catholic mission of Boma what have you done with the sculptor
Somewhere else She crosses a bridge joining Bonn to Beuel and disappears across Pützchen
At the same moment [Simultaneously] A young girl in love with the mayor
In another neighborhood Emulate poet the labels of perfumers
partial contents of a market stall in the International Trade City in Yiwu, China, as recounted by Bill McKibben in "The Great Leap: Scenes from China's Industrial Revolution," Harpers, Dec. 2005:
