Better known for his novels, Roberto Bolaño shirked from the nomen of NOVELIST. . . until a hungry first child forced him to think about making some money--ergo the novels. But it seems that even then he liked to think of his business as POETRY (himself, a detective of poetry)--with or without much white space on the page. But what is so entrancing about the protean referent ‘poetry’ that it might lead a writer to forensically seek poetry beyond the mediocre logic of literary terminology?-- into and through the silence of the universe when we call out the name, POEM? Bolaño’s first collection of poems translated to English, The Romantic Dogs, generates a response (if a response can be offered in aether) by cleaving the high reactivity of volatile friends, lovers and poets, to a solvent flow of poetry in its unconstrained-because-uncontained sense: the silence of the universe when we . . .
Imagine, as Bolaño does in the last poem of the collection, the poets of Troy:
Poetas troyanos
Ya nada de lo que podia ser vuestro
ExisteNi templos ni jardines
Ni poesiaSois libres
Admirables poetas troyanos
The poets of Troy live in a cosmos of silence and still, Bolaño’s poem tells us, they live. And they not only live--but they live in liberation. But liberation from what? What keeps a poet from liberation?--so that we might seek to avoid the same . . . Names, in the swarming overgrowth typical to his novels, link Bolaño’s celestial musings to his heritage and associations on this planet: Juan Ramon Jimenez, Dario Galicias, Ernesto Cardenal, Mario Santiago, Orlando Guillen, Nicanor Parra, Archibald McLeish, Archilochus, Anachreon, Simonides, Edna Lieberman, Dino Campana, Lupe, more Mario Santiago, Roberto Bolaño. These are the names of the people of a lifetime; there are places too: Loch Ness, Lake Balaton, Northern Mexico, el hotel Trebol, el bar Los Marinos in Barceloneta, D.F., the kingdom of Heaven, the lecture hall of Hell. But if such saturation collides against the liberation in silence, of the poets of Troy and of poetry uncontained, why disturb the silence? Why collide upon the infinite with a world amassed in particulars?
Because, the poem “Musa” reveals, we cannot collide upon the infinite; the infinite collides upon the poet:
Era mas hermosa que el sol
y yo aun no tenia 16 anos
24 han pasado
y sigue a mi lado.. . .
Musa, adonde quiera
que yo vaya
tu vas.. . .
En las relaciones enfermizas
y en la crueldad,
siempre estuviste conmigo.
Y aunque pasen los anosY el Roberto Bolaño de la Alameda
y la Libreria de Cristal
se transforme,
se paralice,se haga mas tonto y mas viejo
tu permaneceras igual de hermosa.
Mas que el sol
y que las estrellas.. . .
Musa,
mas hermosa que el sol
y mas hermosa
que las estrellas.
I have left the poems in the original Spanish, although the published translation works--Bolaño’s voice so strong that it transmits despite a fuzzy effort of carrying it over.
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