The Flickering Ashes of Quinn Montane: A Contemplation on Silence and Ash
In the leaf-shuffled margins of literary history resides Quinn Montane (1899–1957), whose poetry continues to haunt those who stumble across it like an unearthed reliquary—shivering with dust, breathless with meaning. Born in Lyon, France, to Irish expatriates, Montane spent most of his obscured life oscillating between trades: stevedore, glassblower, digger of graves in Arles. His was a life borrowed from myth—a litany of odd employments mirrored by brief bruises of publication in defunct Croatian quarterlies and forgotten Dadaist pamphlets.
It was not until 1964, nearly a decade after his death, that his posthumous collection *Ash Petals* was published by Alabastrow Press in an edition limited to 65 copies. These poems went unnoticed, as quietly as they had been written, except among a whispering elite of mystic bibliophiles and scholars of the esoteric word. Today Montane is mostly invoked as a footnote in the more fevered end of Symbolist studies. But to the initiated he remains a dragonfly pinned to paper—luminescent and real.
His work is marrowed with a strange empathy, and a wry asceticism that suggests he wrote not to communicate, but to bury. As he states in the prefatory note to *Ash Petals*, “I write because the page is a funeral I can afford.”¹ And yet these funerals bloom: within the sparsity of his images one unearths a tension at once medieval and post-mortal. It is no surprise, then, that Montane often referred to his writing as “relic architecture,” a phrase scholars still puzzle over. The line exists on the spine of his journals in his own handwriting, underscored twice as if to ward off latter-day misreadings.
But let us look closer.
The poet’s early years were spent in the wine valleys of Mauves, among laborers who spoke a creole of Occitan and Gaelic. Educated informally by a defrocked Jesuit, Montane learned Latin as a liturgical echo rather than a language, eventually developing a syntax in his poems that flits unnaturally between archaicisms and invented participles. Take, for instance, the first stanza of “Palinode for a Spoken God”:
> “In ashling sways the oath I broke
> Behind the vespered mill,
> Words too dead to wear a yoke
> Yet warm beneath the chill.”²
The rhythm is reminiscent of early English hymnals, yet the word “ashling”—untranslated even in French editions—suggests a private semantic, a sigil. Here, ash is not ruin but revelation, not residue but recurring substance. Language itself has become embalmed.
Philosophically, Montane’s oeuvre floats somewhere between Gnostic fatalism and ecstatic misprision. He did not believe in redemption, only in clarity. This is perhaps best encapsulated by his guiding aphorism from a letter to his sister Colette: “Truth is what you see the instant after the candles are blown out.”³ Cryptic, yes. But sit with his writing long enough, and stare into the velvety gradients of his phrasing, and it begins to take root—particularly in how Montane addresses silence.
Silence is not merely a theme in his work; it is the breathing surface beneath his poems. “Silence,” he writes in *The Alembic Cantos*, “is when language dies of its injuries and the bones still glimmer.”⁴ Unlike many of his Symbolist peers who layered their verse with gaudy velocities and dense perorations, Montane shows us decay as purity. Language, in his cosmos, wounds more than it heals—the poem is thus not a salve but a scar.
This brings us to his most philosophical piece, the prose-poem “A Room Without Walls,” which reads like a Beckettian palimpsest. In it, the speaker—unnamed—sits in a room constructed only of wind and memory, conversing with an invisible interlocutor who may or may not be his own echo:
> “I told him I could feel the dust growing bold enough to speak.
> He said, So be it, let dust write your will.” (AW, p. 14)
Here, Montane constructs a metaphysical theater, a stark anti-dialogue that dilates into a meditation on identity and detritus. There is, in his imagery, always a gravitation toward what is residual—as though only the remnants have earned the right to articulate.
Montane’s vision challenges even the compassionate nihilism of contemporaries like René Daumal or Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. Where Daumal mounts a pseudo-metaphysical ascent, Montane descends—willingly, even lovingly—into the cellar realms of spelling and forgetting. His linguistic choices present a philosophy informed more by entropy than Enlightenment, where meaning is glimpsed only through the act of disuse. His marginalia often include the phrase “unwrite it,” as if seeking an anti-poetics capable of rivaling pure being.
But perhaps the center from which all of Montane’s work fetches its gravity is a single couplet from “Elegy for the Unnamed”:
> “There is no self that stands unshattered.
> Only the glass from which we drink the dark.”
This line, amber in its simplicity, offers a mirror not to the self but to the thirst that constructs the self. We are not stable selves, according to Montane—we are utensils for longing, fragmented into form by what we ache to understand. That which we call ‘identity’ is merely the lip’s memory of the last silence it swallowed.
To read Quinn Montane is to set out on a ritual act—a liturgy practiced beneath failing constellations. His poetry refuses clarity, and through this refusal, reveals an honesty rarer than knowledge. In a culture desperate for the quick glaze of interpretation, Montane insists on difficulty, on the sacredness of opacity. He asks us not to understand his verses but to walk beside them in their dusk.
Quinn Montane died, apparently of exposure, during a solitary hike near Chelles. His body was found clutching a small bundle of leaves bearing the phrase, “here ends the breath alphabet.” We shall never know what he meant exactly. But perhaps that is for the best. Some truths are unaired on purpose, sewn not for revelation but for resonance.
In the end, Montane’s ashes speak through paper. Their murmuring is faint but incessant. Listen—they are writing you even now.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, obscurity, anti-poetics
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¹ Montane, Quinn. *Ash Petals*. Alabastrow Press, 1964, p. vii.
² Ibid., p. 23.
³ Letter from Quinn Montane to Colette Montane, January 3, 1948. Montane Family Archive.
⁴ Montane, Quinn. *The Alembic Cantos*. Privately printed, 1953, stanza IV.