The Brooklyn Rail

From Television frontman Thomas Miller, who borrowed his nom de plume from the Parnassian Paul Verlaine, to David Wojnarowicz, who appropriated the face of Verlaine’s Symbolist lover, Arthur Rimbaud, the downtown demimonde of 1970s New York brimmed with phony French poets. Rimbaud in particular became the scene’s prescient patron saint. Embodying Richard Hell’s “blank generation” avant la lettre, his renegade verses were imitated by Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and countless others.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux, however, was the real thing. Unlike her American cohorts, she actually hailed from France—and spent her youth stewarding Paris’s fledgling punk scene with her boyfriend, Michel Esteban. Today, she is remembered as a musician whose unique blend of dance and punk paved the way for mutant disco. But she also maintained a distinct writing practice. In 1977, she self-published the chapbook Desiderata in Paris, with Esteban at the editorial helm. Desiderata compiles twenty-five feverish poems that Descloux wrote in French during a visit to New York in the winter of 1975 alongside drawings, collages, and photographs composed by Descloux herself, as well as artists she met during her stay, including Smith and Hell. Translated by Emma Ramadan, the text’s 2025 publication by Inpatient Press/Mercurial Editions marks the first time it is widely available in English.

Only eighteen when she arrived in New York, Descloux was an enfant like Rimbaud—though not as terrible. Her poems are wide-eyed and girlish, with baldly declarative titles such as “Let Me Go Perish” and “Raging.” They make me think of the refrain to Big Star’s 1978 song “Nighttime,” which was similarly written by a puckish transplant weathering a cold winter downtown. Meanwhile, the Desiderata cover depicts the writer deep in thought. Her elbows are perched as if on a desk, and she clutches her hair like a co-ed struggling through a problem set in calculus class. Behind, a collage of deep-sea divers appears to beckon her into the penetralia of lower Manhattan.

Restless and itinerant, Descloux was her own kind of deep-sea diver. The opening poem, “One Fifth,” finds Descloux climbing up stairs to a fifth-floor apartment. Secured by “an afternoon of anchors thrown through windows,” the building is a beacon of stability. But Descloux is unmoored. Exhausted, she collapses into a bag of dirty laundry after reaching her destination. Descloux knocks on the door and “a disorder of words to the beat of a cane” emerges from inside, implying that the occupant is elderly—and that she is likely not the person Descloux is looking for. In response to the woman’s verbal torrent, Descloux can only utter half-formed words. The name of a friend falls off her tongue: “bastil … Patt …”

Descloux stayed with Patti Smith when she visited New York, and I speculate that “One Fifth” dramatizes her first day in the city, that perhaps she had fallen off-track navigating her way toward Smith’s abode. Smith became Descloux’s social anchor in New York. She is also the textual anchor of Desiderata: the book opens with a foreword that Smith, a consummate Francophile, ostensibly wrote about filmmaker Robert Bresson. It takes aim at the American art world’s mid-century machismo, reimagining Ab Ex painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as “Son of Sam” style serial killers whose canvases were violent crime scenes. In some respects, Descloux was the Lee Krasner or Elaine de Kooning of No Wave, her own artistic accomplishments eclipsed by her intimate entanglements with the scene’s most iconic men.

The structure of Desiderata mirrors the disorientation of No Wave. For one, the text is literally upside down, a tête-bêche. The first half features the English translation, while the second half features the original French, flipped over. Much has been said about Descloux’s synesthesia, her knack for dizzying the senses with metaphors such as “peppermint eyes” and “water is a master singer.” But there are other boundaries blurred. The book teems with references to mammals, reptiles, and vermin, unsettling distinctions between species—as well as between animate and inanimate. In “Siberian,” a “blue synthesizer” transforms into a “shivering dog,” while “Earwig” configures “animal heads” and “human bodies” as “coincidences” that “spin around adventure of strange symposiums.” Associative poems such as these trap us inside the surrealist machinations of Descloux’s mind. But poems like “Hudson River” return us to a more concrete time and place. Here, Descloux imagines an “appalling dive” into the “green-chartreuse gouache” of the waterway following a disappointing one-night stand.

Opposite “Hudson River” is a black-and-white photograph of Descloux holding a camera, imbuing the accompanying poem with a documentary feel. Nearly every spread in Desiderata is flanked by some kind of image, whether it be a collage, drawing, or found material. Though many of her punk peers prized the cut-up method of William S. Burroughs, assembling disparate iconography seemingly at random, Descloux seems more deliberate in her approach. A hazy image of a man and woman in a rocky stream, reminiscent of Jean Cocteau, undergirds the poem “From Breme,” which dreamily meditates on heterosexual relations. Later on, a poem about the air force is juxtaposed with a military map.

The poems in Desiderata focus on New York’s present—and Descloux’s own. Yet many of its images gesture toward the future. Photographs of Descloux reveal a habitus that would have been out-of-place within the severity of the city’s No Wave era. She is something of a dandy: her hair is teased and dyed silver, her fashion flamboyant. Friends recall that Descloux was a magnetic presence within CBGB because of the exoticism of her French background. In one portrait, she plays with the archetype that the New York scene projected onto her by dressing as Rimbaud, cradled by Smith as the poet’s sister. Another image pictures Descloux reclining with a cigarette while wearing tight black-and-white checkerboard pants. Like seventies No Wave, the pattern is a dynamic clash of extremes. But it also portends a moment still to come: the 1980s.