With thanks to Dr Connie Ruxich for reminding me I had not yet posted about Benjamin Péret on my weblog
When the First World War began, Benjamin enlisted in the French army's Cuirassiers, to avoid being sent to prison for defacing a local statue with paint. He saw action in the Balkans, before being deployed to Salonica, Greece.
During a routine movement of his unit by train, Benjamin discovered a copy of Pierre Albert-Birot's avant-garde magazine “SIC: Sons Idées Couleurs, Formes”, which was founded in January 1916, lying on a bench on the station platform. It contained poetry by Apollinaire and sparked Péret's love for experimental poetry. SIC was the second Parisian magazine, after “Nord-Sud”, to distribute the texts of the Zurich Dadaists, namely those of Tristan Tzara. By the end of its publication in December 1919, SIC had published 53 issues.
Towards the end of the war, while still in Greece, Benjamin suffered from an attack of dysentery, which led to his repatriation and deployment in Lorraine in FRance for the remainder of the war.
After the war, Benjamin joined the Dada movement and in 1921 he published “Le Passager du transtlantique” – his first book of poetry before he abandoned the Dada movement to follow André Breton and the emerging Surrealist movement, working alongside and influencing the Mexican writer Octavio Paz.
Read Benjamin Péret’s poem “Petit Chanson des Mutilés” (Tr. Little Song of the Maimed) on Dr Connie Ruzich’s wonderful website Behind their Lines : :https://behindtheirlines.blogspot.com/2016/02/song-of-verdun.html
