Complete Poems

``It's as if the brushes and palette of a painter / Had used colors stunning as gongs. . . .'' Along with Apollinaire, the French writer Cendrars (1887-1961) virtually created the modernist poem in 1913. Born Frederick Louis Sauser, he counted as his friends in Paris Leger and Chagall when the great revolution in painting took place. By breaking lines of verse to emphasize the jaggedness of conversation, Cendrars and Apollinaire structured events and images in their poems to coexist simultaneously; they adapted colloquial language to the planes and multiple viewpoints of cubism. But this was not a modernism that sacrificed the human to the machine. In ``The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France,'' Cendrars wrote of Paris: ``Great warm hearth with the intersecting embers of your streets and your old houses leaning over them for warmth / Like grandmothers.'' Nor was his process of composition like automatic writing. On Chagall: ``He takes a church and paints with a church / He takes a cow and paints with a cow.'' This volume, ably translated by poet Padgett, is the first to contain the all of the poet's work rendered in English. (May)