FSG released two gorgeous editions of the late Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous opus 2666 on Tuesday, and New Directions released his first collection of poetry to be translated into English, Romantic Dogs, last month. Both have caused quite a stir in what Books sections we have left in the weeklies and dailies of America this week, as well as in the onlinosphere.
The PoFo feature this week is an in-depth essay by Ben Ehrenreich on Bolaño’s relationship with poetry–the poets who populate his fiction as well as the Chilean’s own “Infrarealist” dossier.
This is fast on the heels of Jonathan Lethem’s lengthy postmortem in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, which the Old Gray Lady complimented with another appraisal by Janet Maslin today (accompanied by a photo with a weird Taliban-esque doctor job. W, may I ask, TF?) .
The Village Voice chimed in with their own glowing review. New York speculated the book could be the best of the year, and the Boston Phoenix one-upped that by saying it could be the next great American novel.
(I’m going to add more fuel to the fire right here by announcing that the poet trapped inside A-Rod’s body? It’s Roberto Bolaño’s. Fact.)
The LA Times chuckles about all the hubub on its blog here, and it should be noted that I had all of these suckers beat with my story in Paste back in October, but whatever.
The first hundred pages of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives are a romantic boho poet’s dream creation myth, and I highly recommend anyone unfamiliar start there. Or, if you just want to dip a toe in the Bolaño, then the short story collection Last Evenings on Earth is always available for short flights, bus trips, and coffee/cigarette insomnia jags. I’ve only started in on Romantic Dogs this week, but I’m sure others have taken more time with it and might offer some opinions here. Maybe? Yes? Well, whenever you’re ready, the comments section is open, so feel free.
UPDATE: Finishing Romantic Dogs I turn to the back cover and belatedly read this appraisal:
“A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called ‘unimproved’–lacking the polish of a shiny commodity. With Bolaño, we encounter not only ‘fist-fucking’ but ‘feet-fucking’ in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker. With Bolaño, the explicit description of a sexual encounter is fragmented by temporal disjunctions, heuristic leaps of thought and a barking dog; in the end, God and an author show up . . . The poems shine their beery light on life’s romantic dogs: dreamers, detectives, and poets who do double time as saints and martyrs.”
–Forrest Gander, The Nation
Yes.
Hey Travis,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on November 13, 2008 at 3:30 pmFabulous to see this explosion of interest. Poets as fictional stars… And no doubt soon to be star characters in epic movies.
I have a piece coming out in January, or so, that discusses Bolano’s fraught “relationship” with the great Chilean poet Raul Zurita, who’s actually a much more significant *poet*, most anyone in Latin America will tell you, than Bolano…
I think I mentioned here (bragged might be more accurate) that my former roommate, the stellar Mexican composer Javier Alvarez, was close to Bolano during the 70s in Mexico, DF. Some of those escapades that RB restages in Savage Detectives– Javier was telling tales of them at Axel’s Bar in Milwaukee, back in ‘83 and ‘84!
To say that makes me feel sort of special.
Kent
Report this comment
I object to the PR promoting of prose fiction
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 13, 2008 at 4:28 pmon this site——
please reserve it for poetry.
Prose fiction has more than enough sites already for
flackery like this to appear——
you shouldn’t allow it here.
Report this comment
anyone know where you can get a good copy of the spanish version of any of his fiction/poetry?
Posted By: andrew on November 14, 2008 at 8:17 amReport this comment
Bill,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on November 14, 2008 at 9:21 amBolano was a poet (he thought of himself first and always as such) who wrote fiction to pay the bills. It turned out that fiction was his great talent. Most of his novels and many of his stories have poets in starring roles. A novel like The Savage Detectives offers a fascinating view of what serious young Latin American poets were reading, thinking, and debating in the 70s and 80s (bpNichol anyone?). In fact, the novel shows how much more sophisticated and consequential, generally speaking, the life of poetry is in Latin America, in comparison to our own po-biz-ridden (mainstream and avant) environs. One thing the book reveals, too, is how very much more “they” know about “us,” than we know about them. To what should be our shame and remorse… In that regard, and speaking of our po-biz economy, this would be something important Bolano’s work can teach us, as well.
So this isn’t just any old fuddy-duddy Prose Fiction, Bill. At its best, the work’s kind of like an advance guerrilla column of Poetry operating deep inside the territory of El Regimen de la Prosa!
Kent
Report this comment
I agree with Kent that Bolaño’s poetry isn’t quite as stellar as his fiction. The two late novels are his masterpieces. Also, I’m convinced that “The Savage Detectives” and “2666″ are a form of poetry, two original approaches to the epic. With those books, Bolaño was attempting to write ambitious, convoluted epics that speak directly to our situations in the late 20th century/early 21st. It’s wonderful to see Bolaño so loved by English-language readers. I hope this will open the floodgates for younger, post-Boom generations of Latin American writers here in the U.S. There’s so much to be translated.
Posted By: Guillermo Parra on November 14, 2008 at 10:12 amI’ve been translating a few of the poems that don’t appear in “The Romantic Dogs” at my blog, stuff from “La Universidad Desconocida” (Anagrama, 2007). Here’s one of them, which reflects Kent’s observation about Latin American poets knowing much more about the U.S. than the U.S. knows about them. Maybe Bolaño will help American readers open up to the world.
A Sonnet
It was 16 years ago Ted Berrigan published
his Sonnets. Mario carried the book around
the leper colonies of Paris. Now Mario’s
in Mexico and The Sonnets are on
a bookshelf I built with my own
hands. I think I found the wood
near the retirement home in Montealegre
and made the bookshelf with Lola. In
the winter of 78, in Barcelona, when
I still lived with Lola! And it’s already been
16 years since Ted Berrigan published his book
and maybe 17 or 18 since he wrote it
and on certain mornings, certain afternoons,
lost in a neighborhood cinema I try to read it,
when the movie ends and the lights come on.
Report this comment
Guess Bill don’t like Pasternak, neither?
Posted By: Doodle on November 14, 2008 at 11:14 amReport this comment
i wouldn’t object to the promotion of Bolano’s poetry
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 14, 2008 at 11:28 amon this site——nor to any other verse being featured here——
but i do protest the hawking of prose fiction here—
Hey: the media cited in the original post above—NY times, Village Voice, LA times, Boston Phoenix, et al——
and all the venues that publish book reviews——
what’s the ratio of prose fiction they provide coverage of, as opposed to poetry——
what is it, fifty pages to one? A hundred to one?
Prose fiction gets at least fifty times more ink (or cyberspace) in the Literary Press than poetry does——
(and the Literary journals published by universities have a similar disproportionate bias, for the most part—)
Poetry is the least supported of the arts,
the least funded,
the least rewarded—
Our society our culture provides fewer resources to poetry than to any other major art——
I hope the folks on this site will agree that poetry IS a major art——
(though i seem to remember one of your bloggers responding to an earlier post of mine about the underfunding of poetry, with
the observation that, on a comparative scale, poetry merited the same funding as vase-painting and basket-weaving—!)
(maybe they were trying to be ironic)——
I repeat: I don’t see why this site shouldn’t be restricted to considerations of poetry alone——
there has to be some sanctuary some eden those damn serpentine prosewriters aren’t allowed to overrun——
Report this comment
Bill,
Posted By: Guillermo Parra on November 14, 2008 at 11:42 amYour final sentence above makes me suspect you’re just having some fun:
“there has to be some sanctuary some eden those damn serpentine prosewriters aren’t allowed to overrun——”
“The Savage Detectives” and “2666″ ARE poetry. Call them epic prose poetry, if you’d like. But poetry nonetheless. Bolaño is blurring the distinctions between forms.
Report this comment
Guillermo, thanks for posting that poem. I think it speaks to the cross-over between Bolaño’s poetry and fiction (that could have easily been a paragraph from Savage Detectives, save the line breaks, don’t you think?).
Posted By: Travis Nichols on November 14, 2008 at 11:44 amThough, I do agree with Bill in some respects that this site should be a sanctuary of a kind where poetry is treated differently than it is in the “real” world (ha!), but I also think that genre is the least interesting thing about most writing. Who cares if it’s in lines or in paragraphs? If it ain’t a pleasure . . . So Bolaño does to my brain what Berrigan often does, that’s poetry enough for me (though perhaps I’m not poet enough for Bill).
Report this comment
“I agree with Kent that Bolaño’s poetry isn’t quite as stellar as his fiction.”
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 14, 2008 at 1:09 pmIn other words, he’s John Updike. Or Joyce Carol Oates, or
Margaret Atwood.
As for the theory that [fill in the blank] transcends its genre and is really poetry,— isn’t that an ancient argument that has never prevailed anywhere in the history of literature—it’s certainly
not a new proposition, is it . . .
as to whether genres are important, they obviously are to all those literary media that chose to review Bolano’s “fiction” instead of his poetry book, “Romantic Dogs”——they made that choice, not me——
I detest Ted Berrigan’s poetry, but I won’t deny it is poetry—it’s poetry alright, failed poetry.
Or maybe it’s successful prose!
Or hey, it should get a Grammy! because
if Bod McDylan is really a poet, then Ted Berrigan is really a songwriter!
But why stop there in the melding of the arts,
give Louise Gluck an Oscar and Meryl Streep a Whiting—
Report this comment
Travis,
Posted By: Guillermo Parra on November 14, 2008 at 2:36 pmYeah! That poem could have definitely been a fragment from “The Savage Detectives.” Totally agree w/ you: it’s the content that matters most. What are you thinking, by the way, saying good things about Ted Berrigan’s “failed poetry”?
*
Bill,
Your sarcasm is dull. And your frame of reference regarding Bolaño is provincial. Updike? Please, Bolaño is about as far from Updike as can be. A more accurate analogy for Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” and “2666″ would be the two late albums by The Clash, “London Calling” and “Sandinista!” Massive, eclectic, poetic and all of them masterpieces. The U.S. needs more poets like Ted Berrigan.
I’m not in the mood for polemics. I’d rather be reading Bolaño, helping him terrorize you in your battle against the invasion of the fiction writers. Yes, we poets are definitely under attack by the conspiracy of fiction & its peddlers. I bet the CIA is involved somehow.
Report this comment
hmm, the Clash——
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 14, 2008 at 3:09 pmdoes that mean you’re going to nominate Bolano
for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Report this comment
Clash = nominate Allen Ginsberg for RR Hall of Fame, since he sang on Combat Rock!
Posted By: Doodle on November 14, 2008 at 3:13 pmReport this comment
and of course i wasn’t comparing Updike’s writing to Bolano’s,
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 14, 2008 at 3:23 pmI was responding to your statement that
“Bolaño’s poetry isn’t quite as stellar as his fiction.”
The writers I mentioned—Updike, Oates, Atwood—
have all published verse whose stellar qualities have
been overshadowed by their fiction . . .
Report this comment
Bill,
Posted By: Guillermo Parra on November 14, 2008 at 3:51 pmYou’re being very un-dude.
Good luck with the war against fiction.
Report this comment
ON SIZE MATTERS
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on November 14, 2008 at 4:52 pmIt is not polite to speak of the crotch of the question.
Erik Satie
Although my poem will not be very big,
It’s working just as hard on an epic theme—
The greatest perhaps. But since John Updike
Is the “penis with a very large vocabulary”
What I want to describe is so small I don’t want
You to misunderstand when I say, Less is more.
Report this comment
” The U.S. needs more poets like Ted Berrigan”
Posted By: Mickey O'Connor on November 15, 2008 at 3:10 pm’nuff said !!!
Report this comment
The Savage Detectives is prose
Posted By: Mickey O'Connor on November 15, 2008 at 9:21 pmit’s poetic prose
buts it’s not poetry
bob dylan is not a poet because he doesn’t write poems
he is a songwriter
his songs can be poetic
but they are songs not poems
his songs don’t stand up if you read them on a page
they need music with them
p.s. i despise literary awards & poets talking about them
if you are a poet & write for awards or the possibility of awards
odds are your poems aren’t gonna be very interesting
Report this comment
>anyone know where you can get a good copy of the spanish version of any of his fiction/poetry?
Posted By: Daisy Fried on November 16, 2008 at 2:10 pmAndrew–
The new New Directions translation of The Romantic Dogs is bilingual.
Daisy
Report this comment
Travis said “Though, I do agree with Bill in some respects that this site should be a sanctuary of a kind where poetry is treated differently than it is in the “real” world (ha!),”
Posted By: Daisy Fried on November 16, 2008 at 2:13 pmI think poetry needs less sanctuary-treatment, not more.
Daisy
Report this comment
Daisy,
Posted By: Travis Nichols on November 16, 2008 at 6:12 pmCan you elaborate a bit? Why does poetry need less sanctuary-treatment?
T
Report this comment
I like to think of the difference between poetry and fiction as rooted in the respective writers’ approach or attitude toward Time.
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 18, 2008 at 10:54 amPoetry is an Event in the Now, the Present. It is Vertical, from the ordinary Now to Eternal Now. Poetry is essentially a verbal Action filling the Now, the immediate Contemporary.
Fiction is a kind of retrospective elboration or ornamentation around those intense moments of Now (now, Past). Proust’s novel is classic example of this. It’s a kind of memorial to Wordsworth’s “Spots of Time”. I haven’t read Bolano, but maybe this is relevant somehow. Maybe.
Report this comment
p.s. in other words… poetry is the presence of the living person; fiction is the script, the letter, the signpost, the index, the shadow, the memory of the living.
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 18, 2008 at 11:06 amReport this comment
I agree with Daisy so often I’m starting to wonder whether I shouldn’t disagree with her now and then, on principle. Nevertheless, and current bad publicity for the free market notwithstanding, poets could stand to see themselves in real competition with representatives of the other arts. It might go some ways toward helping to understand why poetry readings and poetry books attract the relative numbers they do. It might inspire poets to make more of their poems. Of course getting off the game preserve is just as likely to lead poets down crackpot directions — videos, talk shows, instant-message novels etc. Still, as what they call a learning experience, failure probably beats workshops nine times out of ten.
Posted By: Jordan on November 18, 2008 at 12:10 pmReport this comment
I’ll add that establishing the site as a “poetry-only” zone would then require the site’s editors be the gatekeepers of what does and does not count as poetry– a task I think would be a terrible use of their time when they can be using it to otherwise promote the work of poets in a general sense. No one seems to be willing to deny Bolano’s status as a poet, so for the Poetry Foundation to give space to discuss his work seems appropriate. I doubt we would be having this discussion if Travis had posted links related to fiction by James Tate or John Ashbery.
Posted By: Monica on November 18, 2008 at 2:57 pmPlus, one of the great things about the internet is that it lacks the space/time restrictions of print media– unlike a fiction book review in the NYTBR, posting about a poet’s fiction does not take up space that could have otherwise been reserved for a poetry review. That is why, I think, poetry reviews tend to be given a greater percentage of space in online review venues like Bookslut– it doesn’t have to compete; it can just coexist.
Report this comment
. . . but in that case, “Monica,” where are the puffs
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 18, 2008 at 4:36 pmon this site about Marge Piercy’s latest novel, and/or
all the other contemporary poets’ novels——where
are the links to promotions of their prose fictions?—
aren’t they as deserving of notice as Bolano?——
Report this comment
and Kim Addonizio’s novels
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 18, 2008 at 4:52 pmReport this comment
and Laura Kasischke’s novels . . .
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 18, 2008 at 5:09 pmReport this comment
As soon as this tedious list of poet/novelist hybrids runs its course, can we look back and see how many of those listed have written a novel with poets as main characters in the time that this site has existed? Once those are pointed out, I’ll gladly write some “puffs” on those books here on this site, since they will no doubt be interesting to both poets and poetry-readers.
Posted By: Travis NIchols on November 18, 2008 at 5:29 pmReport this comment
I hope it’s not too tedious for me to add Tom / Thomas M. Disch. Back to your regularly scheduled thread on Bolaño!
Posted By: Don Share on November 18, 2008 at 9:45 pmReport this comment
. . . that RB’s prose fictions are being huckstered here and Piercy’s, Addonizio’s and Kasischke’s haven’t been (to my knowledge) similarly featured seems kind of sexist on the face of it,
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 19, 2008 at 6:41 ambut be that as it may . . .
One of RB’s admirers above said that reading his prose was like reading Ted Berrigan’s poetry,
which for the enormous number of us who dislike Berrigan’s poetry is not an endorsement for RB . . .
and given Berrigan’s sales figures, I doubt RB’s publishers will use that comparison as one of their blurbs——
I speak of course for the hundreds of thousands who over the past three decades have bought and read poetry books by Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins et al,
and who during that same period chose to not buy the books of Ted Berrigan,
whose Collected Poems had therefore the necessity to be funded by the taxpayers of California,
who are doubtless glad to be garnished for his glory.
But huh, maybe in the three decades to come a Selected Berrigan in paperback will outsell Oliver/Olds/Collins et al,
the “O Gen” poets might like his vervulant verse . . .
Report this comment
Travis–
Posted By: Daisy Fried on November 19, 2008 at 6:53 amI just think that the treatment of poetry as something special, other, in need of special protection, just increases the sense that it’s not for every day use.
Jordan–
surely we can find something to disagree on! but not this: “Still, as what they call a learning experience, failure probably beats workshops nine times out of ten.”
I think crackpot poetry is a great idea.
Daisy
Report this comment
Travis,
Posted By: John Latta on November 19, 2008 at 8:51 amFor “a novel with poets as main characters” written “in the time that this site has existed,” look no further than Forrest Gander’s little masterpiece, As a Friend (New Directions, 2008). I just post’d a few words about it here.
John Latta
Report this comment
Daisy -
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 19, 2008 at 9:58 amI, for one, want it both ways. I want poetry to be understood as very special, very other – but NOT in need of special protection.
I want to accentuate its difference from prose. I see what Bill K. is getting at underneath the cantankerous nonsense. There’s an area of agreement there with you & Jordan : poetry should stand up for itself, & not be afraid to challenge prose in the marketplace or anywhere else.
I also just happen to feel that when poetry becomes more like prose – when the urge to mimic everyday jive outweighs the urge to make something unique, uncanny, and perversely LITERARY out of said jive – you end up with mostly ersatz poetry (ie. prose jive beaded out in short lines).
I don’t mean to be doctrrinaire or programmatic about this however. The exceptions are the rule.
Report this comment
Daisy, looking at any po-blog’s comment field it would be hard not to conclude that the phrase “crackpot poetry” is redundant.
Posted By: Jordan on November 19, 2008 at 10:01 amReport this comment
& isn’t one of Bolano’s major themes – to get back to Bolano – the comedy of the troubled conscience of art – the “whorishness” of literature in the face of suffering and political injustice – and the difference between poets and prose writers as some kind of marker, or crack in the edifice, or fault line revealing that insistent moral quandary? It’s clearly a Borgesian theme, too.
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 19, 2008 at 10:09 amIt goes back to the prohibition against graven images & idols, if not further. Plato on the Real and the Simulacra. There’s something of this in the distinction between prose and poetry. The poet as sacred clown or yurodivy (Russian sacred fool).
There’s an impulse which makes poetry-making a search for authenticity in the very midst of the idols. Something of this in Celan, for instance. His insistence that his writing was a search for truth, or a form (a hesitant, imperfect form) of truth-telling. The truth in impending silence.
Report this comment
Humboldt’s Gift. QED.
Posted By: Doodle on November 19, 2008 at 10:18 amReport this comment
“the enormous number of us who dislike Berrigan’s poetry”
Posted By: Matt on November 19, 2008 at 11:06 amBill, you should start a facebook group with that theme. Then we’ll see how many of your “us” there are.
Report this comment
Speaking of poetries and sanctuaries, I suggest a look at Dale Smith’s call for contributions at his blog, today. As I mention in a comment beneath it, I think it’s the most thought-provoking and potentially useful “manifesto” to appear, in quite some time, in the poetry world.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on November 19, 2008 at 11:56 amhttp://www.possumego.blogspot.com/
Kent
Report this comment
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/publishing/bestsellers.html
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 19, 2008 at 11:59 am… the list from August 08——
maybe when it’s updated, Berrigan will be on it . . . in which case,
i’ll eat my words . . .
hey “Matt”—— you should hack Amazon and divert all those
orders for Jane Hirshfield and Franz Wright
to your Piss-Avant faves . . . that’s the only way your gang
will ever sell enough books to make the list——
Report this comment
Agreeing with Henry: “I want poetry to be understood as very special, very other – but NOT in need of special protection.” Socially, poetry is special. Often in the condescending sense of “isn’t that special?” But also in the sense of a specialized interest. In college I met a small-town high school teacher near retirement who had published two books of marvelous, witty poems. He was a straight-laced looking fellow, and I was a hippie punk kid, but we somehow hit it off — we must have read on the same bill, but I have no memory as to how that could have come to be — and he urged me to keep writing, saying, with quiet intensity, “People are going to say to you, ‘Oh, you write poetry, that’s nice.’ And as you get older they’ll say, ‘Oh, you write poetry.’ And then they’ll say, ‘Why are you still writing poetry?’” At this point my memory falters. Did he quote a LeRoi Jones poem? He might have. I would not have read the Jones poem by that point, so I wouldn’t have recognized it, and my later memory of the line may have blended with my memory of the conversation. It makes a good line in any case. He said something to the effect of, “You have to remember the magic words. The magic words are, ‘F*** you.’” I am confident that at least those last two words were part of his advice. Said with a smile.
Posted By: john on November 19, 2008 at 12:04 pmReport this comment
And here’s something quite Bolanoesque: John Tranter has posted an irate comment by Clayton Eshleman beneath a review at Jacket of my book I Once Met.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on November 19, 2008 at 12:44 pmIs there no sanctuary? (Though I’m perfectly fine with the unusual intervention!)
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-johnson-met-rb-cralan.shtml
Kent
Report this comment
Better than any “manifesto” of recent (or unrecent) years:
Posted By: Matt on November 19, 2008 at 3:17 pmhttp://jacketmagazine.com/36/oppen-hawkins.shtml
Report this comment
Why does Bill Knott put people’s names in quotes even when they link to their actual blog?
Posted By: Former Berkeley Girl on November 19, 2008 at 4:47 pm“Former Berkeley Girl”
Report this comment
“Why does Bill Knott put people’s names in quotes even when they link to their actual blog?”
Posted By: john on November 20, 2008 at 12:14 amHey, I wrote a poem that addressed, among other things, that very topic!
The relevant portion:
The political blog scene with which I’ve overlapped a tiny
bit and the music blog
scene with which I’ve intersected a
lot both don’t care that
I don’t post my last
name.
The only people who have ever
cared have been denizens of
the poetry blog
scene. It’s really
weird. And funny! Especially when the guff comes
from poets associated with the fetish of
“the death of the author” — not that Barthes’s essay is
worthless — or from a poet — and this happened
once — who first made his
name
under a pseudonym! And I admired — and
continue to admire — his old pseudonymous
poems. So it was flattering to be argued with
by him, and to be challenged about my
name
and be referred to as
“John”
in quotes as
if that’s not my
name!
It is my
name!
(Only a few people have ever called me
“Johnny”
and fewer still
“Jack”
though I always liked
“Jack”
and briefly used the radio
pseudonym
“Big Jack”
and my attempt 16 years ago
to give myself the nickname
“Babe”
failed pitifully.)
When I started this
blog it was on a whim and an
ambition to write and think and take part in
interesting conversations and I
wasn’t sure whether I’d want my last
name
associated with it so I
kept it off, and whenever anybody challenged me I
always said that the last name is findable on
the links on the blog — specifically on
the “My Band”
link — and that if people were so
concerned about
it
they could look it up.
http://utopianturtletop.blogspot.com/2008/04/sardines-by-michael-goldberg-1955-why-i.html
“John”
Report this comment
Somebody’s vocabulary did this to them.
Posted By: Doodle on November 20, 2008 at 9:33 amReport this comment
Doodle,
Posted By: Former Berkeley Girl on November 20, 2008 at 10:15 amDid what to whom? I’m confused.
Report this comment
Jack Spicer joke – don’t be confused. Hey, he was from Berkeley!
Posted By: Doodle on November 20, 2008 at 10:19 amReport this comment
Bill, what happened to your genius, its vast generosity and playfulness, its poignancy and power to inspire? What caused such radical regression? When did it get replaced by all these petty and paranoid and utterly inconsequential preoccupations. I don’t know how many times I have come across these adolescent rants of yours–over nothing! And the constant attacks on other poets! What happened to you. Because whatever it is has happened to your work as well.
Posted By: Franz Wright on November 22, 2008 at 3:39 amFranz
Report this comment
Dear Franz, i thought i was defending poets like you, in my comment above——
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 22, 2008 at 10:57 amyour books (and those of Hirshfield, Olds, Oliver, Collins et al)
deserve to be on poetry’s best-seller list, i meant to imply, because you have bravely remained open to the potentials
of that “great audience” which Whitman declared US poets must address, or try to address——
i apologize for not making that clear——
i have great admiration for poets like you who somehow are able to allow the possibilities, who
manage to not trap themselves in a dead-end corner of coterie coziness, in the confines of some spurious “school” or posturing avantgardism——
*
. . . as for what happened to my “genius”! Come on, Franz, i never had any to begin with; all i had was desire and that fizzled out with age: as you rightly observe, all i have left are empty gestures, formalist fumerie like this tanka:
31 SYLLABLES
even the wisest
(even the esteemed poets
who when I was young
acclaimed me as promising)
have at times been proven wrong
*
Report this comment
Well, now THERE’S a comment that Bill Knott (who, I’d wager, is sure to be much more read and discussed down the road than Franz Wright) will want to add to his Bolano-like collection of mean-spirited blurbs…
Posted By: Kent Johnson on November 22, 2008 at 11:46 amKent
Report this comment
i’m not saying that poets like Wright and Hirshfield who can reach a wider audience than most of us
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 22, 2008 at 12:54 pmare the only important and valuable poets around,
but in a country founded (in theory if not in practice, as Prop 8 most recently bitterly reminds us) on the principle of equality,
surely such poets who are able to bring their verse to the people, and who embody the ideals of the democratization of poetry,
surely they should be particularly praised and honored?
i think such poets (make your own list if you want to, but in actuality the list is not made by you, it is made for you—)
are on the whole more important and valuable than coterie poets like Berrigan——
Report this comment
It never ceases to amaze me how people have such hatred toward what Bill calls “coterie poets”. What is so offensive about this? What is the problem with writing poems about people you know? I mean, it’s cool if it’s just not your taste, but why the snarling self-righteous comments against it?
Posted By: Matt on November 22, 2008 at 11:20 pmRather than shutting out the reader, I think Berrigan’s (and others’) name-dropping is a way of making a human connection with the reader, which if I’m not mistaken is what Bill always claims to want from poetry. I think Berrigan is a lot more engaging than the majority of poets out there.
Report this comment
Matt, come on, are you really “amazed” that the poetry-reading public hates
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 23, 2008 at 2:13 pmyou Avants, and doesn’t buy your books,
opting instead for poets like Wright/Hirshfield/Oliver/Olds/Collins et al,
poets whose books run into multiple printings——
poets who, in my opinion, are among the best now writing in the U.S.—
but forget my opinion, think about WHY these poets are able to connect with that “great audience”
which the poets you admire are incapable of reaching——
Matt, if Berrigan was really “making a human connection with the reader,”
as you put it, why, then, over the past two or three decades did his books not
achieve the readership of Oliver, Olds, Collins et al——don’t the sales figures of these latter prove
that THEY are the ones who are making a connection with the reader?
THEY are the poets (and the younger Wright and Hirshfield, and others I’m not listing) who are reaching readers——
Matt, if Berrigan and you other Avants really aren’t, to use your phrase, “shutting out the reader,”
then why aren’t YOUSE on the Poetry Foundation’s bestseller list
instead of THEM?
You can refute me, Matt, but you can’t gainsay the numbers.
Report this comment
Hey Franz, Bill, Kent -
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 23, 2008 at 11:17 pmin answer to your questions -
it’s ALL democracy.
I mean the desire to speak to everybody, sine qua non. Hence Bill’s huffs, Franz’s squibs, Kent’s ego-trips. MY ego-trips.
& the hopes for poetry, with a non-capital “p”.
What unites all 3 of you chaps is an animus against the coterie – the insider, the name-dropt cachet. What makes Berrigan, for example – or Ashbery – somewhat slack sometimes, in spite of their good points.
But this is a strictly literary problem, n’est-ce pas?
I mean, what will last? & what DESERVES to last?
Report this comment
William Dunbar dropped a bunch of names in “Lament for the Makirs,” and that poem still packs a punch, even though many of the names mean nothing to me, not being a scholar. Not to mention Dante . . .
Posted By: john on November 24, 2008 at 1:57 pmThe question isn’t the name-dropping, it’s how the names work in the poems. O’Hara and Berrigan aren’t Dunbar & Dante, but I love them still, and it’s fine if anybody else doesn’t. A recent O’Hara review connected his name-droppings (sorry!) with elegy, which made sense to me; the sense, in diaristic writing, of time’s ceaseless flow, and its inevitable drowning of each of us in the sea of the past.
Report this comment
I don’t think Bill is complaining about the names, per se, but about the wink wink nudge nudge insider nature of New York School (and other true abstractions!) poetry, or at least of its current followers. Have we all been to the reading where a poet gets up and makes little smirky allusions to New York School writers and poems and then struts back to his/her seat king/queen of the who cares club? Yes. But what are you gonna do? Start busking?
Posted By: Travis Nichols on November 24, 2008 at 2:35 pmReport this comment
I thought about busking poets when Daisy and Jordan were praising the de-sanctuary-izing of poetry last week! I’ve met poet-buskers, and Thoth bless ‘em.
Posted By: john on November 24, 2008 at 3:29 pmReport this comment
The idea that poets should know their place as determined by sales figures calculated in the low four digits, that’s a joke, right?
Posted By: Jordan on November 24, 2008 at 3:48 pmReport this comment
Um, Bill… If contemporaneous sales figures were some real index of poetic worth, we’d have to say that Whittier was greater than Whitman, no?
Posted By: Kent Johnson on November 24, 2008 at 4:22 pmThese “great” poets you name who “reach” the “public” today: Possible they may turn out to be our Longfellows and J.R. Lowells?
Kent
Report this comment
It’s important to remember that the poet and the blogger-commentator are 2 different people. 2 different people, inhabiting the same life-form.
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 24, 2008 at 8:58 pmThe poet simply loves his/her poems; the world will do what it will. The commentator tries (unsuccessfully) to correct all errors of experience. There’s something of a mismatch there, a dissonance.
If poetic value is measured in sales figures… oh, forget it.
It’s simply a dream, an ideal of consonance or harmony (between the poem and the public). Bill’s knotty dream for today. Don’t try to hold him to it, like some kind of critic-accountant. Are you guys critics or accountants?
Two kinds of equivalent irkdoms :
the irk of coterie poetry, complacent, satisfied with its’ chronical of parochial malice;
& the irk of public poetry, clever, satisfied with its simulated bonhomie.
These are two kinds of irksomes of style, very prevalent.
Why? Because poetry, like public architecture, is pretty darn rhetorically whatever, you know? Not easy!
Report this comment
p.s. sorry, typo toward the end : should read : “chronicle”
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 24, 2008 at 9:00 pmReport this comment
on the other hand, it doesn’t follow that because they’re popular they’re no good, either, right?
Posted By: Daisy on November 24, 2008 at 9:16 pmDickens was very very popular.
Daisy
Report this comment
I’d be very pleased indeed to think I’d ever written anything as good as my favorite Longfellow.
Posted By: john on November 24, 2008 at 10:31 pmLewis Carroll and Baudelaire got my back on that one.
Whittier remains worth reading too. Lowell, I don’t know.
Report this comment
. . . they have a wonderful emporium——
Posted By: Bill Knott on November 25, 2008 at 4:25 ama charming store——i’m particularly amused by the way
they change the name of their store so often——
one week it’s called “Post-Ahole”
and the next week it’s “Barf”
and the week after that it’s “Slo-Po”——
and next week, well, who knows, the Avants never run out of novelties——
their only problem (and it’s a joke alright, but the joke’s on them)
is that the poetry public won’t shop at their shore——
the poetry public prefers the store where they sell
Oliver/Olds/Collins/Hirshfield/Wright et al——
the poetry public won’t buy their wares,
no matter how loudly they sneer at the poetry public.
Report this comment
How dreary to be somebody. How public. Like a frog!
Posted By: john on November 25, 2008 at 12:39 pmNow, to me, the public isn’t a bog, it’s just that . . . it’s a mythical beast. Like many mythical beasts, it has real powers, but they’re at best marginally relevant to the experience of a poem. If poetry were a mass-popular medium, then, yes, standing around the water cooler talking about the new Alice Notley book like people talk about the new episode of American Idol, that would be a cool experience (I’ve only seen American Idol a few times, and I’ve enjoyed it, and part of the enjoyment has definitely been talking with my coworkers about it); but, given that the poetry experience is usually solitary — with occasional public readings, some of them quite large (Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and John Cage drew the largest crowds of any readers I’ve seen) — given that it’s usually solitary, it really doesn’t matter that nobody for probably about a century had read an anonymous satire of “White Man’s Burden,” which an unknown ancestor of mine had clipped from the Kalamazoo newspaper some time around 1900, and pasted it in a family scrapbook, until I found it on a long-ignored bookshelf at the ancestral family cottage a few years ago — it doesn’t matter that the satire had never been famous, it still blasts any justification of imperialism to smithereens.
Or, in other words, yes, while I happen to love Longfellow, I love Dickinson and Whitman more.
Report this comment
This is wild to just by chance stumbleo n this
Posted By: david chirot on November 25, 2008 at 3:42 pmabout fifteen minutes ago my character El Colonel who has appeared in many journals on line–just finished a paiting which is called simply “Homenaje Roberto Bolano por El Colonel”!
I have written for some now re Bolano at my blog and some essays on line–
i think his most interesting and best written works from what I have read (which is up to half way through 2066 and including Romantic Dogs–)
are By Night in Chile and Distant Star
By night iin Chile is theone aboard and also in English translation which is considered his masterpiece in writing, in the writing itself, and thelayers of what he is exploring about the relationships of poetry with fascism.
Perhaps this is why in The usa the lamer and tamer Savage Detectives is so popular–it does not get involved with the darker sides of the American involvements with Chile’s 9/11–and the following tortures, disappearances, the gutting of the economy as the first “laboratory” for the Friedman “Free Markets” economics.
Distant Star, which was originally the last entry in Nazi Literature of the Americas–is also a brilliant “dive” into the poetry-fascism connection.
These aspects of Bolano’s work I have written a far amount on so far and now a longer series of pieces which has more esp re By Night in Chile, as part of my ongoing series of essays “The New Extreme Experimental American Poetry and Arts” which is an investigation into what poetry is in relation with torture, Guantanamo, the vast secret prison systems and a great deal more i the US since 9/11 in NYC.
Sections of 2066 have a great deal to do with the American-Mexican “connections” occurring in the border areas of factories, hundreds of women raped and murdered, the interweaving of drug cartels, the police, government officials and the Americans across the border.
It also has anenigmatic author whom his followers are looking for, as in Savage detectives–but at more complex level–
I think the works of Bolano that deal with the hypocrises of relationships of institutions and insitutions of the writing world, poetry, criticism, are vey appropriate to this time i the USA, which is celebrating a great change in its history and the same time supports with billions Apartheid, and shows no signs yet of doing anything about the rapidily growing system of “Gitmos across the USA” reserved for illegal workers and their families, and those who at any moment can be arrested for no reason other than by a decree of the President..
In By Night in Chile and Distant Star as well as some of the short stories and in Nazi Literatures of the Americas to a smller extent, one finds an examination of poetry as party to and with the events of the times,which includes so much massive oppression, while it in itself may try to tel itself that is free, disinterested, not at all part of things which exist all around one.
I think since these are tpoics and questions which are unpopular, there has been the massive promotion of Savage detectives, and of a kind of one dimensional Bolano for the American public.as well as its poets and writers and critics.
Report this comment
I’m sorry, Bill–I always have had the greatest admiration for you–but your roundabout insults (comparing me to B. Collins, Mary Oliver, &c.)–have a little respect for Christ’s sake. I’ve lived through something like what you have most of my life (in spite of the stupid prize a few years ago, which I never asked for) and there is NO resemblance,no comparison, nothing, between my work and those people. You sly putdowns–it’s like dealing with a highly intelligent 15 years old, and basically, get off the subject of me as one of your pathetic punching bags, will you. Split. Franz
Posted By: Franz Wright on November 30, 2008 at 11:32 pmReport this comment
Franz, calling you an “important and valuable poet” as i did
Posted By: Bill Knott on December 1, 2008 at 10:38 amabove—is that really a roundabout insult, a sly putdown?
if i say that your work merits its popularity and its prizes, then i’m punchbagging you?
if you interpret my praise of you as a litotes, what can i say—
whether you allow it or no, you are one of the poets i admire, and the fact
that your books have gone into extra printings shows that i’m not
alone in my admiration—
(and by the way, can’t i like other poets too? what’s the syllogism here: If i praise X or Y, ergo that invalidates my praise of you?)
Report this comment