Latin American Literature

[madupont]

martinbeck3

Okay, so how is life treating you, are they reading your computer e-mail yet like they have done with ours?  How's the economy?

How did you work out the white on white furniture? How's the family? All of it. Think I don't know? So much for class differences.

When did you start riding a horse?  I started when I didn't like it, so I stopped. Then I got on again. Then, I quickly removed my feet from the stirrups and got out of the way.

Didn't you like my poem about the Cuban brothers?
That is called a revisionist viewpoint.

Well, you know what Arnold says--'asta la vista,baby.

[pugetopolis]

PUGE,i enjoy your poems, specially the one about the Cuban twins.

Thank you, Martin. I liked the Cuban Twins very much too.

I learned a lot about Cuban music, dancing, food and culture.

Two semesters worth.. and then some.

Cubans are hot!!!

BTW I'm reading T. J. English's Havana Nocturne .

About Cuba in the 1950s.

Unbridled gambling, exotic showmansip, hot music, brash sexuality.

Sounds like my college days!!!

[pugetopolis]

Didn't you like my poem about the Cuban brothers?
That is called a revisionist viewpoint.
Well, you know what Arnold says--'asta la vista,baby.

Oh yes, Martin, before I forget—I simply loved Madame Madupont’s satirical version of my "Cuban Twins" reminiscence back in ‘60s after the Cuban Revolution.

Isn’t Maddy one of the most talented satirical writers that you’ve ever met!?!

Up here in the North American Fiction and Celebrity Forums, we all love her long exquisite postings about all the Rich and Famous People that she’s so intimately “known” over all these years—so many of them in Hollywood, Europe and around the World…

In fact, Maddy is so talented at Fantástico Ersatz Lit and Secondaire el Realismo Mágico Literatura that all of us admirers here on the Internet call her “The Queen of Cut and Paste!!!”

La Reina de Corte y Pega!!!

Cheers, Puget

[S2B]

Hi everybody !

Here is Saramgos´s blog for those that can read Spanish.

http://cuaderno.josesaramago.org/

nice ! gracias

[pugetopolis]

                                                                    

Blanco
—after Octavio Paz

a stirring — a steering
a seedling — sleeping
the word at the — tip of the tongue
unheard —  unhearable
matchless
fertile — barren
ageless
she who was buried — with open eyes
stainless — promiscuous
the word
speechless — nameless

Blanco

el comienzo — el cimiento
la simiente — latente
la palabra en la punta — de la lengua
inaudita — inaudible
impar
grávida — nula
sin edad
la enterrada con — los ojos abiertos
inocenta — promiscua
la palabra
sin nombre — sin habla

Thanks to Hoffman for this Paz proto-cleave poem. To make it even more “cleave”—I joined & cleaved the lines together from the original Paz text.

According to Paz: “Blanco is a composition that offers the possibility of variant readings: a) in its totality, as a single text; b) the center column, excluding those to the left and right, is a poem whose theme is the passage of the word from silence to sill; c) the left-hand column is a poem divided into 4 moments; d) the right-hand column is another poem in counterpoint to the left; e) each of the four parts formed by the two columns may be read, ignoring the division, as a single text—four independent poems; f) the center column may be read as six separate poems; those of the left and right as eight.”

“The typography and format of the original edition of Blanco were mean to emphasize not so much the presence of the text but the space that sustains it: that which makes writing and reading possible, that in which all writing and reading end.”

What makes “Blanco” relevant to the poetry forum and the Latin American forum—is that the Mexican Nobel Prize poet Octavio Paz was working with this “cleave” form as early as  the ‘60s. And that this cleave form is the form of the poetry of our forthcoming Cleave Anthology.

http://cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/cleave-anthology/

[Lhoffman]

Paz is important in this context also because his essay, Labyrinth of Solitude, seems to have informed Bolano in his writing of 2666.   You begin to get the idea somewhere in the second book, further develops in Book 3 with Bolano's story about Fate; then in the fourth book, Bolano references the work by name.  Almost finished with Book 5....waiting to see where that goes.

I'm not familiar enough with the entire works of Bolano to make further connections, but perhaps others have made these connections?

[madupont]

I'll make a connection on Octavio Paz, communist poet, as the Labyrinth of Solitude is other than an essay but a full length book, given me by a "Wing-nut" German artist who did found objects like Joseph Cornell and Paintings that were sublime when not drunk.

Surely, you know, we read Bolano at the nytimes.com possibly four or more years ago, while speedo was swooping into random  forums to raid the discussions so he could make bucks from the vast right wing conspiracy. To his credit, he also attempted to discuss the Mexican period of Graham Greene  but he had someone on hand in that Book Discussion forum who was of a Latin background, a doctor if I recall.

[madupont]

I think that people forget that after Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the trend in Mexican circles of artists and intellectuals was influenced by Russian communism  via the great muralist Diego Rivera who was married at the time to another Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo. They were visted by Leon Trotsky who was assassinated.

This was probably an ideological counter to the fact that Morrow had been appointed US ambassador to Mexico while he was an attorney for J.P. Morgan.

[Lhoffman]

I know what the Paz is, as I am re-reading it.  It is classified as essay....as in a collection of several relating to Mexico, character, history, issues of gender, religion.

From modern perspective, some of his writing is stereotypical, but he published this back in 1950 (further commentary following the events of 1968 and another commentary in 1979) and so we can't expect him to look at these issues from a contemporary skew.

It's nice that you discussed Bolano four years ago, but it's doubtful that you could have discussed 2666, Savage Detectives, or The Romantic Dogs.  

I'll make a connection on Octavio Paz, communist poet, as the Labyrinth of Solitude is other than an essay but a full length book, given me by a "Wing-nut" German artist who did found objects like Joseph Cornell and Paintings that were sublime when not drunk.

Surely, you know, we read Bolano at the nytimes.com possibly four or more years ago, while speedo was swooping into random  forums to raid the discussions so he could make bucks from the vast right wing conspiracy. To his credit, he also attempted to discuss the Mexican period of Graham Greene  but he had someone on hand in that Book Discussion forum who was of a Latin background, a doctor if I recall.

[madupont]

It's doubtful that you can,as well. Stop shuckin and jive-in.

[madupont]

You guys are nothing but right wing propagandists who do your own mock ups and then spread the calumny that others cut and paste. You should be ashamed of your performance.

[pugetopolis]

Rexroth and Bolaño — Two Political Poets

http://www.snarke.com/2009/02/cleaving-rexroth-and-bolano.html

Thank you, Hoffman, for sending me the Rodrigo Fresan essay “The Savage Detective—The Only Protagonist of Roberto Bolaño’s Work—The Authentic Heroine of His Books—Is Literature Itself," translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.

It’s probably one of the best Bolaño essays I’ve read. Some of the topics discussed have helped me a great deal in understanding this excellent writer and poet: Barcelona, Borges, the Tlatelolco Massacre, Philip K. Dick, Pinochet, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Big Brother, The Boom, Blade Runner, etc.

What I like about Bolaño is that he’s more contemporary than Borges or Pessoa or Paz. I’ve enjoyed reading the poetry of Pessoa thanks to Mringel and I understand certain technical aspects of Pessoa poetics such as his use of heteronyms.

The same with Paz—the poem I posted for the Latin American Literature Forum is technically very close to the “cleave” form we’re publishing with The Cleave Anthology.

http://cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/cleave-anthology/

Both Paz and Pessoa are interesting poets to study from a technical point of view—something that may not interest all Latin American Literature or Poetry readers.

However, there's definitely a political POV to poetry as well—there always has been. It goes back much further than Ginsberg’s Howl or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Pound’s Cantos.

And it continues into the future with poets like Roberto Bolaño and his excellent The Romantic Dogs New Directions (2006).

Speaking of Poetry—we’re having a fascinating discussion over in the Poetry Forum about Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry published by James Laughlin’s New Directions. The same Press publishing Bolaño today.

As I read more of Rexroth’s poetry—the more “political” his POV becomes. The similarities between Rexroth and Bolaño’s “political poetry” are quite startling and it’s amazing how much Rexroth saw into the future of Big Brother and the Pinochet Planet we live in today.

Thanks to Madupont, Incadove as well as The Selected Letters of Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin, Morgan Gibson’s online Letters from Rexroth and Linda Hamalian’s fascinating biography Kenneth Rexroth: A Life (Norton: 1991)—I now see Rexroth and Bolaño as two of the most radical political poets of the Twentieth Century.

Thus, comparing and contrasting Rexroth and Bolaño—studying them and moving back and forth from the Poetry Forum to the Latin American Forum—has for me been very enlightening and gratifying.

To have been a close friend of Bolaño like Rodrigo Fresan to the very end and to have known the poet intimately during that time must have been an incredible experience for Fresan.

I’m sure it was something very similar to being Kenneth Rexroth’s personal secretary Dianne Jarreau or his 4th wife and executor Carol Tinker.

The UC-Santa Barbara Archives with Morgan Gibson’s files, letters and Rexroth’s material is something Hoffman and I are researching now.

Politics and Poetry are like two sides of the same coin. How does Bolaño and Rexroth’s political poetry compare and contrast?

[Lhoffman]

I like the term Fresan uses for Bolano's writings, Unreal Realism. 

And this is it, especially when you read the endless Book of the Dead Girls, page after page of bodies found in the desert.  And the overriding thought for me is the idea of memory and the image of Dali with his "Persistence of Memory."  If these girls could only talk, they would have far more to tell us about the nature of evil than they would about the identity of their killers.

[madupont]

Excuse me but Carol Tinker Rexroth is not executor. She received nada.

The man who took care of him was appointed literary executor, Bradford Morrow. As I've mentioned before Gibson has nothing to do with the UC-Santa Barbara archives. That would be in the frame of something I tried to suggest to you but writing seriously in here is like blowing smoke. If you really wanted to have gotten through in California with domestic partner raised to the fine art of right to Marriage, you would have looked for a coalition. I tried to tell you that Rexroth had Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver for neighbors at the usual weekly soirees during the face-off between the two factions of the Black Panther parties, Oakland versus San Francisco.  With Urban Renewal, Rexroth who had intended to take the girls to England and teach there was offered a house in Montecito, so took a position with Santa Barbara where at least he'd have somebody to talk with, Marcuse(plural). I can't imagine Morgan Gibson having archives at Santa Barbara because he is off floundering in a British church mission, with all these British colony type guys like he is, sitting around  having whiskey and tea and discussing poetry as British colonials do.

The library and archives of a personal nature went off to a different area of Japan entirely as I've previously explained to at least a couple of people here who might be wondering what this is all about recently. Bad taste, I should think.

Anyway, the major influences beyond Marcuse and Rexroth at UC Santa Barbara would be Angela Davis and the Panthers as such. Eldridge is now dead, Kathleen divorced him a decade previous but she is still alive and very academically together.  Not there, however. Too bad Huey didn't survive, he was brilliant;but the Oakland area has erupted again.

You would be better off just going to Montecito, going to Charlie Chaplin's hotel, have lunch and meditate on what it was like to make movies there on the beach, you will find the local inhabitants relatively bland compared to Robert Downey,jr.

What I'm saying is that if you don't grasp the political implications and the coalitions that were formed and are formed in order to make progress with whatever you think is being denied you by the West Coast's inevitable double standard, unless you aren't sincere anyway,you'd have the sense of understanding coalitions with other people who are in the same position, to get done what you say ought to be, instead of saying broad remarks that for some reason the Black Churchgoers of California weren't for your Proposition.  That's all California has, Propositions. Why insult the people you need as in the case of the domestic partnership goes to the next level of rights. You go to the people who have had reason to fight for their rights. If you find that impossible from your own background, what can one say?

[Lhoffman]

I got an e-mail tonight from that Library and was told these had been moved.  Apparently the Santa Barbara link was an old one.  The papers can now be found here:

http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf5p300700&chunk.id=c01-1.2.8.2&brand=oac