One day in the spring of 1961, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson met in Paris to extinguish poetry. Or at least to eliminate a certain overly mythified conception of poiēsis. If you were going to do that anywhere, it really ought to be Paris. This was, after all, the city of Victor Hugo, of Rimbaud and Verlaine, and specifically the privileged location of the flâneur. It was here that Charles Baudelaire had encountered the heartbreaking woman passerby celebrated in “A Une Passante”, and borne witness to a decomposing corpse (which reminded him of his lover), and watched a fugitive swan gliding through the gutters. It presided over the Tableaux Parisiens, the central section of his outlawed but now classic collection, Les Fleurs du mal. In particular, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson wanted to take down (as you might do in wrestling, for example) Baudelaire’s Cats, the ones contained in his sonnet, “Les Chats”.