Comments on: Bolaño Blitz

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:38:35 +0000

Franz, calling you an “important and valuable poet” as i did
above—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?)

By: Franz Wright

Franz Wright — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:32:31 +0000

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

By: david chirot

david chirot — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:42:00 +0000

This is wild to just by chance stumbleo n this
about 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.

By: john

john — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:39:02 +0000

How dreary to be somebody. How public. Like a frog!
Now, 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.

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:25:27 +0000

. . . they have a wonderful emporium——
a 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.

By: john

john — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:31:58 +0000

I’d be very pleased indeed to think I’d ever written anything as good as my favorite Longfellow.
Lewis Carroll and Baudelaire got my back on that one.
Whittier remains worth reading too. Lowell, I don’t know.

By: Daisy

Daisy — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:16:19 +0000

on the other hand, it doesn’t follow that because they’re popular they’re no good, either, right?
Dickens was very very popular.
Daisy

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:00:01 +0000

p.s. sorry, typo toward the end : should read : “chronicle”

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:58:55 +0000

It’s important to remember that the poet and the blogger-commentator are 2 different people. 2 different people, inhabiting the same life-form.
The 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!

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:22:40 +0000

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?
These “great” poets you name who “reach” the “public” today: Possible they may turn out to be our Longfellows and J.R. Lowells?
Kent