Interviews – Week 4

WEEK 4.

This week’s poem is one I wrote. I am not an aspiring poet, nor do I get much pleasure out of poetry as I do with narrative prose and plays. But it is a path one must take to explore all facets of shiny, diamond, text. I came across the concept of spiritual coup as I read an essay by Boricua author and poet, Marya Santos-Febre: “Salsa as Translocation” (1990). As always, I am thankful this blog provides a thinking space.

Spiritual coup 

I heard about it on

A salsa song,

A robber, longing,

Improvising, yearning

to rumble down, four cardinal points

That sustained his cell,

To be in la calle, with the

vagos.

Thus his concept I embrace—

To break the chains, of principalities,

that bind,

a seed’s sprout,

Of dreams,

Disrobed, in the mist,

Among pines, that acidify the soil

And erodes any life.

Spiritual coup,

I transpose myself to my

gene(s)is, fruitful,

gene(t)ic, scorching,

Land.

Spiritual coup, through prayers and

Devotion— meekness; in the vigil of resistance,

I transpose bones and flesh in the coordinates of rain.

The second part of Savage Detectives coalesce many perceptions fluctuating around time and space, much like Earth does in space. Like always, reading Bolaño is a river stream flowing memories and sentiments. At its core; nostalgia in swirls of all emotions; a vehement stir of the self. I feel its text rupture into real life, much like many earth ruptures I have felt. Earthquakes. Is it weird? It is like this text touches on multiple inhibitors at once: a panacea for forgetting my own realities, insofar I avoid relating, if any, text parallels to my life experiences. I have read up until Chapter IV of Part II; the end of Auxilio Lacouture’s chapter. Although, I felt excited to read her perspective of Bolaño and Ulises Lima, I instead felt warm to read her again. The text only echoes the beginning of Amulet. Her story entails more, her visions are grandiose. I notice a pattern of the chapters:

Amadeo Salvatierra gives short accounts. And it seems that his temporality crescendoes as the short accounts at the beginning of chapters progress. I am still wondering where this is all leading to.

For some reason, I mentally picture the character of Cesarea Tinajero with the avatar of Salvadoran-poet, Lillian Serpas.

I wonder whether my thinking is symbolic. Both characters are mysterious; little are known of them; information is contradictory. Albeit, Serpas did publish a few poems. Many pictures are built: a fictionalized version of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Up until now, I believed Ulises Lima was a random character. But search engines are a deus ex machina to not knowing. To the unknowing. Apparently, there is a Ulises Lima.

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Mexican, born 1953. Petatió: 1998

*** TEMPORALITY FLASH.

Will I ever overcome my financial loss on books? I ordered a translation of Papasquiaro’s posthumously translated, Poetry Comes Out of My Mouth (2018). 

The cover depicts a matryoshka of an embodied grieving face,  evaporating an echo, reflecting its own echo. Apparently, the poet, (I) co-founded an infra-realist literary movement (collective auto-fiction with raw artistic expressions) and (II) hated Octavio Paz. Two particular scenes evoked laughter: the mythologizing of Opus Dei running the school and Luis Sebastian fearing the terrorizing kidnapping of Octavio Paz as Luscious Skin warned that the Visceral Realist were cooking up something. Moreover, I enjoy the picture of Arturo Belano the characters are weaving. He is serious about visceral realism…. and he is doing it out of love?  There is a narrative thread I am interested in: Jacinto Requena and Xóchitl García. Maybe their narrative thread will not be developed much, though I appreciate their account of Belano. Belano as affective and funny. I am excited to see how each accounts further develops a holistic picture of Belano and Ulises Lima, albeit I am afraid the narrative will feel like this with so many “interviews” to get through:

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Read the Poet Behind Roberto Bolaño’s Ulises Lima

1 Comment

Add Yours →

Leave a Reply