The Poetry in the Prose: Part One (and If You Haven't Read The Savage Detectives Consider Yourself Spoiler Alerted)

The only piece missing from The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño’s 648-page puzzle of a novel about avant-garde poets in Mexico, is, oddly enough, their poetry. In an online conversation with David Orr and Marcela Valdes, Carmine Starnino points out that this poetry “is, quite likely, terrible,” especially since Bolaño’s poets spend most of their time making mischief, manifestos, these sorts of things. Orr, however, argues that the mythical poetry of Bolaño’s bards, through its very absence, retains the possibility that it is good. In general, it’s probably best for mythical works of art to stay mythical – that is, unmade but unmarred.

Our libraries are poorer for having only scraps of Sappho’s body of work – but our imaginations aren’t. Thomas Pynchon's late novels were much better when they were mere rumors, metastasizing away in the relatively silent seventeen years following Gravity's Rainbow. And face it, Brian Wilson’s Smile and Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy – two long-mythologized long-players that were released, finally, to mixed reviews – were always going to sound better in our minds, where mixing boards know no limits. Cleverly, Bolaño – who was a poet and could’ve ghostwritten some poems for his fictional poets Belano, Lima, and Madero – leaves the poems between the lines, where they can only raise expectations in the audience, especially its more adolescent constituent.
And it is often the young who invest the most in the idea of art, which doesn’t always return a profit. Bolaño’s poets, particularly their younger incarnations, invest so much in the idea of the poetry of Césarea Tinajero (a modern day Sappho with almost none of the scraps) they fail to notice the idea is a Ponzi scheme that will never pay off their lofty expectations. But wouldn’t you know it, in following their search for the lost Tinajero, I, too, got caught up in the sheer adventure of it all. Just what will happen if they actually find Tinajero? I found myself wondering. Will she recite a poem so spectacular everyone in earshot, myself included, will spontaneously combust? (Probably not since the only poem of hers that exists is, it turns out, an unrecitable concrete poem; nevertheless, I remained riveted until the very end.) Of course, when Bolaño knocks off the aged Tinajero almost as soon as she’s found, and, worse, denies the reader access to her notebooks, he knows what he’s doing: preserving by cruel twist of plot the myth of Tinajero, not to mention that small, sentimental part of his more romantic readers, which needs such myths preserved. Who wants her actual poetry? Her life is poetry enough.
Your reaction to The Savage Detectives will reveal something about your tolerance for the sort of fiery, youthful rebellion that doesn’t always require a lot of fuel – the sort that often runs on fumes. Poet and critic Evan Jones, who’s quite partial to surrealism (one of the reference points of Bolaño’s poets), doesn’t see a satire in Bolaño’s novel, but, rather, a loving, comic portrait of youth’s, and maybe poetry’s, necessary pretensions. Those with a soft spot for the idea of the avant-garde (the sort for whom any old ‘garde’ will do, as long as it appears sufficiently ‘avant’) may just see a loving portrait, period. Starnino sees “poets whose lives are long on convention-flouting and short on art—[who] have brought to their calling all the creativity that should, by rights, have gone to their writing,” echoing his own writings on the self-mythologizing Canadian poet Susan Musgrave. I see these poets, too. And I see my peers in my creative writing classes of yesteryear, kids who were mad for anything that seemed remotely edgy (like sound or concrete poetry) regardless of whether it actually was edgy – kids who organized themselves with the zeal of guerrillas, usually against those elements they deemed too conservative.
Finally, I see a younger version of myself, daydreaming about the stories I imagined J.D. Salinger was stockpiling in secret. I didn't really want the stories, I now realize; his hermit's life was story enough. But to this day, it’s still safe to buy me a record if the artist who made it is some reclusive perfectionist. It’s an even safer purchase if the artist is dead and her one release a compromise, a murky demo, a poorly recorded hint of what could have been. So when Bolaño, with barely a blink, kills Tinajero and closes the book on her oeuvre forever, some small, sentimental part of me is glad. But not the part of me that knows I better stop daydreaming and get to work if I’m ever going to write a decent poem. But then that part of me is never much fun.