That giddy delirium of the belly’s veriest reaches seemingly erupting through the mouth—maybe you know the sensation? Half-reversing oneself with pleasure, like a sock peeled off a narrow (though somewhat spatula-shaped) foot? I think I experienced it reading Joe Brainard’s collected I Remember (1975) in the original Full Court Press edition (“I remember the several rather unusual ways ‘Pouilly-Fuissé’ has come out of my mouth, trying to order a bottle of wine in restaurants . . .”) Maybe, too, with Edwin Denby’s 1975 Full Court Collected Poems (“The shoulder of a man is shaped like a baby pig . . .” is a line still liable to make me un-torque with glee). Or there’s George Hitchcock’s Kayak-printed James Tate volume called Row with Your Hair (1969), with the Mel Fowler woodcuts. Yuri Olesha’s Envy (“A huge cloud with the outline of South America loomed over the city . . .”) Countless, the fevers. Is it, the unleashed bursting glee, the result of mounting admiration and undiminished anticipation warring with each other? One cannot read quickly enough to assuage a ravenous need. I sense something of that untamable and foolish cupidity—it is what makes poetry a dangerously fleet and uncompromising force—in opening Roberto Bolaño’s Tres (New Directions, 2011) and reading “around in” its final sequence, Un paseo por la literature (translated by Laura Healy as “A Stroll through Literature”):
. . .Excerpts, out of fifty-seven total (number of Heinz’s varieties of tomatoes, and isn’t there a scene in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) where Sen. John Yerkes Iselin spies at a catsup bottle and uses it for the number of “card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense”?). Bolaño’s piece is dated “Blanes, 1994.” “A Stroll through Literature” is, in some sense, written under the sign of Georges Perec (it begins: “1. I dreamt that Georges Perec was three years old and visiting my house. I was hugging him, kissing him, saying what a sweet boy he was.” And ends with Perec again, “three years old and crying inconsolably.” Formally, I suspect Bolaño’s riffing off Perec’s Je me souviens (that Perec took off Brainard, that may “explain” my initial outburst . . .) Bolaño’s “I dreamt” (Soñé que), compared with either of the Perec / Brainard confabs, is less quotidian in its riches, more literary in its thrust: it works to insert its writers into elemental, quasi-mythic landscapes; there’s a chilly godliness (and god-awfulness) behind the muttering humor of it all. I think of some of early Dylan: isn’t the rather sere rambunctiousness and primal insistence of “A Stroll through Literature” akin to both “And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers . . .” (“Desolation Row”) and “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’ / I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’ / I saw a white ladder all covered with water / I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken . . .” (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”)?
9. I dreamt that Macedonio Fernández appeared in the sky over New York in the form of a cloud: a cloud without nose or ears, but with eyes and mouth.
. . .
18. I dreamt that Archibald MacLeish was crying—just three tears—on the terrace of a Cape Cod restaurant. It was after midnight and even though I didn’t know the way back we ended up drinking and toasting the indomitable New World.
. . .
25. I dreamt that Archilochus was crossing a desert of human bones. He was encouraging himself: “Come on, Archilochus, don’t falter, keep going, keep going.”
26. I dreamt I was fifteen and was going to Nicanor Parra’s house to say goodbye. I found him standing, leaning against a black wall. Where are you going, Bolaño? he said. Far from the Southern Hemisphere, I answered.
27. I dreamt I was fifteen and was, in fact, leaving the Southern Hemisphere. When I put the only book I had (Trilce by Vallejo) in my backpack, the pages went up in flames. It was seven p.m. and I chucked my scorched backpack out the window.
. . .
29. I dreamt I was translating Virgil with a stone. I was naked on a big basaltic flagstone and the sun, as fighter pilots say, hovered dangerously at 5 o’clock.
. . .
31. I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the death. From a wrought-iron bench in Central Park, Kafka was watching the world burn.
. . .
36. I dreamt I was 69ing with Anaïs Nin on an enormous basaltic flagstone.
. . .
40. I dreamt that a storm of phantom numbers was the only thing left of human beings three billion years after Earth ceased to exist.
. . .
43. I dreamt I was a prisoner and Boethius was my cellmate. Look, Bolaño, he said extending his hand and his pen in the shadows: they’re not trembling! they’re not trembling! (After a while, he added in a calm voice: but they’ll tremble when the recognize that bastard Theodoric.)
44. I dreamt I was translating the Marquis de Sade with axe blows. I’d gone crazy and was living in the woods.
. . .
Tres contains two other early Bolaño pieces: the 1981 Prosa del otoño en Gerona (“Autumn Prose in Gerona”) and the 1993 poem Los neochilenos (“The Neochileans”), the narrative of a band (Pancho Relámpago y los Neochilenos becoming, mid-tour Pancho Misterio y los Neochilenos) relentlessly going north, playing small towns in Chile, into Peru, into—road doings left behind (“And dawn would find us / At a table in the back / Discussing the kilo and a half of gray matter / In the adult / Brain”) finally, Ecuador: “One happy day in January / We crossed / Like children of the Cold, / Of the Unstable Cold / Or of the Ecce Homo, / The border of Ecuador.” One notes here Bolaño’s mounting sense of capaciousness, writing’s pouch capable of stretching to contain anything, an ever-unconsummated and workable zone of resistance. In two of the pieces he writes the phrase nec spes nec metus (“without hope, without fear,” said to be Caravaggio’s motto). A woman’s perfume is called Carnicería fugaz (“Fleeting butcher shop”). Someone asks what the relationship is “Between Morpheus, god / Of Sleep / And morfar, slang / To eat?” I think of Bernadette Mayer’s often-quoted and rarely-heeded “Work your ass off to change the language & don’t ever get famous,” and think of the twenty-eight year old Bolaño of “Autumn Prose in Gerona”—“a Chilean with permission to live in Spain, without working, for three more months”—writing, persistently, devilishly, foolishly writing:
It makes no sense to write poetry, old men speak of a new war and sometimes the recurrent dream comes back: author writing in dim lit room; faraway buzz of rival gangs fighting for a supermarket; rows of cars that will never run again.
