By Patrick Doyle

I’m a big fan of the risqué French poets . . . y’know, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Verlaine. They all had visionary, oftentimes macabre, dazzling verses with a specific “moodiness” that I identify with. Also, their lives were an embodiment of something, some sort of instinctual nature that simply speaks to me and echoes within my living constantly. To put it simply: these aforementioned poets had it going on and influenced me profoundly.

If the lives’ of those poets was enough to keep me interested, then Francois Villon is the hook, the line, and a sinking ship full of innocent people. The guy was a thief, career criminal, convicted murderer (of a Priest, although his charge was lessened due to “self-defense”), and most of all a poet. The Poems of Francois Villon, translated by Galway Kinnell, is a collection of Villon’s works: his satirical lengthy work The Legacy, the scathing full-length The Testament, and a collection of his shorter works, featuring one of the most translated lines in poetry, Where are the snows of yester-year?

His poetry is sarcastic, observant, embittered and at times gruesome. He was a product of his environment, so the criminality of his life appears to filter itself into his work, which gives the work a very contemporary edge, especially given the time in which it was written. The only real drawback of his work is he was writing a lot about Paris and the outlying areas he vagabonded, so there are a variety of “in-jokes” and cultural references that have frustrated and stumped scholars for years, but that aside, this work is some of the best I have read in a long, long time.

While we have the work of Villon still kicking, a biography is next to impossible. The only information that is really available is that he was arrested a variety of times for crimes as I mentioned above, which lead to him being banished, where it is presumed he died alone and in poverty. There are accounts of his escapades, primarily crafted by the poet Francois Rabelais, which are frequently disregarded as myth.

Although the work can appear dense, Villon’s work is a stunning representation of an almost “punk rock” bohemian poet from the Middle Ages, who lived on the medieval skid row and reflects themes that are revered by audiences of all mediums today.