Adrienne Rich on René Char

“History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grandmaster narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions...In Midnight Salvage there's the poem drawn from René Char's resistance journals”

“In that poem "keeping vigil" for René Char means writing the poem. The poem is the vigil. Sometimes one wants to hold up a lighted wick before a certain name. In the case of Char it has to do with the fusion of poetry and active resistance to fascism, in his life, with no loss to the poetry. Leaves of Hypnos is also a record of an unusual masculinity caught up in war but not deluded by it.”