Forgot to add this. Looking over the Bolano background since it's one of my assignments for class.Read this awhile back, in an afternoon or two I think. It's a fine collection. Often wild, a little shocking, rich in language and imagery exact and voluble in equal measure. Like the prose but more adulatory and uninhibited, though of course its very strange to say that in respect to the dire, earthy, brimmingly apocalptic 2666, for one example. It's funny- I totally get that he insisted on considering himself a poet, despite writing a bulk of novels and achieving what seems to be his greastest work in that genre. Sometimes the novelist is a failed poet (Faulkner, Melville, etc) and I can absolutely appreciate that p.o.v in the sense that it's not only the influence of another writer that propels you forward but it's the influence of another genre. Everybody "wants" to be somebody or something else- Conor Oberst wants to be Bruce Springsteen who wants to be Dylan who wants to be Woody Guthrie who wants to be Lead Belly who wants to be...uh...free?But genre is the same way. Poetry can be such a hermetic, ascetic, rivitingly disciplined art form (fuck what the detractors say! If you aren't aquainted with it, you don't realize how hard it is to do. If you think that anyone can do it, well you're right about that, but like anything else anyone can "do it"- cook, sing, design with legos, perform surgery on a computer- but do it WELL, that's a whole different kettle of fish) and I don't blame anyone for swerving from it, the better to evolve and open their talent to the world. Fiction is poetry at 32 frames per second, if you know what I mean. This isn't even to say that I think Bolano fails as a poet, but I think the captivating, wholly unique, ragingly raw, absurd, and vivid world he summons in his fiction is where his true talents thrived. Maybe swerving from poetry (vagabond existence put on hold because of young'uns to feed? I buy it, for a dollar. I don't think his wife initially married him because she thought he was going to trade stocks and buy a beachfront property in Malibu) was a way to sort of maintain an auxilary grasp on poetry and to simultaneously open a creative space which was seperate from it. I like the sound of that. Very glad I was exposed to his writing, trendy as it might have been a few years ago, and there's really nothing quite like his voice- unavoidable, unmistakeable, and unmissable. Truly the mark of a true artist in any field, no? Forgot to add this. Looking over the Bolano background since it's one of my assignments for class.Read this awhile back, in an afternoon or two I think. It's a fine collection. Often wild, a little shocking, rich in language and imagery exact and voluble in equal measure. Like the prose but more adulatory and uninhibited, though of course its very strange to say that in respect to the dire, earthy, brimmingly apocalptic 2666, for one example. It's funny- I totally get that he insisted on considering himself a poet, despite writing a bulk of novels and achieving what seems to be his greastest work in that genre. Sometimes the novelist is a failed poet (Faulkner, Melville, etc) and I can absolutely appreciate that p.o.v in the sense that it's not only the influence of another writer that propels you forward but it's the influence of another genre. Everybody "wants" to be somebody or something else- Conor Oberst wants to be Bruce Springsteen who wants to be Dylan who wants to be Woody Guthrie who wants to be Lead Belly who wants to be...uh...free?But genre is the same way. Poetry can be such a hermetic, ascetic, rivitingly disciplined art form (fuck what the detractors say! If you aren't aquainted with it, you don't realize how hard it is to do. If you think that anyone can do it, well you're right about that, but like anything else anyone can "do it"- cook, sing, design with legos, perform surgery on a computer- but do it WELL, that's a whole different kettle of fish) and I don't blame anyone for swerving from it, the better to evolve and open their talent to the world. Fiction is poetry at 32 frames per second, if you know what I mean. This isn't even to say that I think Bolano fails as a poet, but I think the captivating, wholly unique, ragingly raw, absurd, and vivid world he summons in his fiction is where his true talents thrived. Maybe swerving from poetry (vagabond existence put on hold because of young'uns to feed? I buy it, for a dollar. I don't think his wife initially married him because she thought he was going to trade stocks and buy a beachfront property in Malibu) was a way to sort of maintain an auxilary grasp on poetry and to simultaneously open a creative space which was seperate from it. I like the sound of that. Very glad I was exposed to his writing, trendy as it might have been a few years ago, and there's really nothing quite like his voice- unavoidable, unmistakeable, and unmissable. Truly the mark of a true artist in any field, no?
What do You think about Romantic Dogs (1993)?
Roberto Bolaño is currently a posthumous literary star. I understand why. His writing oozes pessimistic realism, condensing the dreamlike voice of one of my favorite authors, Asturias, into the basic building blocks of life. Here is a writer/poet who writes to the tune of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, placing the guttural essence of his life in the free verse of his poetry. It is remarkable.The poems themselves are at times, however, difficult to relate to. Bolaño writes like I imagine a rock star lives his life, which is kind of my point - I find that difficult to relate to. Additionally, like all poetry, some of the magic is lost in translation, especially what I'm guessing is specific wordplay that just doesn't translate.That said, there is plenty of magic to go around in this slim volume of 44 poems. From the opening lines of "The Romantic Dogs" when he starts, "Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty / and I was crazy. / I'd lost a country / but won a dream", Bolaño takes us on a journey of decline from what we imagine the world to be like to what it really is. I love the wit of the passage from "Visit to the Convalescent" where he writes, "But first we speak with his parents, two people getting on in / years, Mr. and Mrs. Squirrel, who, from a green branch / suspended in dreams, contemplate how the forest is burning."The entire poem of "Rain" requires no commentary in its notes of warning:"It's raining and you say it's as if the cloudswere crying. Then cover your mouth and speed upyour step. As if those emaciated clouds were crying?Impossible. So then, why all this rage,This desperation that'll bring us all to hell?Nature hides some of her methodsin Mystery, her stepbrother. And so, sooner thanyou think, this afternoon you consideran afternoon of the apocalypse, will seem nothing buta melancholy afternoon, an afternoon of loneliness lostin memory: Nature's memory. Or maybeyou'll forget it. Rain, weeping, your footstepsresounding on the cliff-walk. They don't matter.Right now you can cry and let your image dissolveon the windshields of cars parked alongthe boardwalk. But you can't lose yourself."And, if one sentence can distill into a few words the overall tone of these poems, it would be the finish of "The Last Savage" - "I'd seen death mate with sleep / and I was spent."This is a slim, and utterly fantastic volume. I just wish the publisher had included more than these 44 poems.
—Starrlite13
I must admit that I struggle with poetry. Of all the literary forms, it seems to take the most work. I think that I am perhaps too lazy—either unable or unwilling to expend the energy required to get poetry’s message or messages. It is not that I haven’t worked at understanding poetic conventions. I spent a semester in college in a course on modern British and American poetry in general. And I have taken both undergraduate and graduate courses dealing specific poets (Ruben Dario and the modernistas; Garcia Lorca; Vicente Aleixandre; Juan Ramon Jimenez; T. S. Eliot). I also studied with Carlos Bousoño, working through his “Teoría de la expresión poética”. But with all of that, I still struggle with the art form.My son-in-law first introduced Robert Bolaño to me. I am not certain exactly how I missed his emergence into the forefront of contemporary Spanish letters. But that introduction—“By Night in Chile”—did not leave me overwhelmed. I have added several of his other works in fiction to my reading list, convinced that I need to keep an open mind. It was that conviction that let me to his poetry, where he made his first marks.“The Romantic Dogs” is a collection of some 44 poems written by Bolaño between 1980 and 1998. It is a bi-lingual publication with the Spanish translated into English by Laura Healy. Understanding my own struggles with the medium, the poems are not easy. One reviewer characterized them as “intimate, moving, and witty.” They are certainly intimate and perhaps moving but, for me, not witty. I see them as dark, raw, probing. Many left me uncomfortably numb. Here the opening stanza of “El Ultimo Salvaje”: Salí de la última función a las calles vacías. El esqueleto pasó junto a mí, temblando, colgado del asta de un camión de basura. Grandes gorros amarillos ocultaban el rostro de los basureros, aun así creí reconocerlo: un viejo amigo. ¡Aquí estamos!, me dije a mí mismo unas doscientas veces, hasta que el camión desapareció en una esquina.I spent time with the poems, generally reading and re-reading one or two over several days. Time did not make them any easier for me. Apart the feeling they left me with, I really don’t know if I truly understood them.
—Dejhanee
The fiction is somehow infinitely better.
—shishilenlen
