JOHN M. BENNETT Reviews
Poetry Comes Out of My Mouth:
Selected Poems
by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro
Translated by Arturo Mantecón;
Introduction by Ilan Stavans; Artwork by Maceo Montoya
(Diálogos
Books, 2018)
Going back to long before the
European invasion, there is a history of major literature and poetry in Mexico,
much older than such history in the United States. Readers may be familiar with the poetry of
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and of Octavio Paz.
But there is now available in English a generous selection of a very
different kind of poet from Mexico, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, 1953-1998. Readers who have read the Chilean/Mexican
novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño's great novel, The Savage Detectives, have met him as the character Ulises Lima.
Papasquiaro and Bolaño were close friends.
Papasquiaro's poetry has echoes of
César Vallejo and Bolaño, but he is a unique poet, with a strong, authentic,
and complex voice. His work, full of
rapidly shifting references, languages, and tones, is so rich and multi-voiced
that readers will each encounter a different poet, a poet that seems to be
speaking to you quite specifically. It
is, however, you as if you were both
coming apart and coming together, as if you were in a rapidly moving mirror:
A Mural of alcoholics the day
Explosion: the night eternal
The wind incarnate in flowering
woman bone
In slothfulness of children behind
the dreams of the flautist
The rest is death in life
Cohabitation of rats &
scorpions
/ at different times &
different spaces /
But tethered to the stench the
rainbow traces from 1 oven to another
crematorium
-from “Unmirror”
Translator Arturo Mantecón's large
selection (229 pages) includes some of the poet's most striking poems, and is
everything a translation should be: for starters, the translations themselves
are excellent. I tend to believe that it
is impossible to translate poetry at all, since it is so deeply embedded in the
particularities of a language and a particular personality using that language,
which is very much the case with Papasquiaro, but these translations are an
exception. They really do get much of
the voice, or voices, of Papasquiaro, and I would even say that they sound like
the poet might have written them this way if he had written in English. Quite a feat: Mantecón, a poet himself, is to
be congratulated. In addition, the book
includes the Spanish originals (always essential for translated poetry), an
excellent introduction by Ilan Stavans, a bibliography, notes, a biography of
the poet, and great paintings by Maceo Montoya.
The book is a model of what a collection of translated poetry should be.
Papasquiaro's voice swarms with
multi-cultural and international references (Stéphane Mallarmé and Leopoldo
Panero, for example), many of them referring to USA culture (William S.
Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, and many others), more so
than any other Mexican poetry before him (except perhaps for the
Estridentistas, an early 20th-century avant-garde group). But his poetry is deeply Mexican; full of
multiple references to Mexican culture and history, Mexican words, expressions,
and slang, and words in Nahuatl (the most wide-spread indigenous
language). It also uses metaphor in a
manner very reminiscent of metaphorical structures in indigenous works such as The Books of Chilam Balam, in which
metaphor is not just a way to make things sound pretty, but to add layers of
unexpected and enriching meaning to the things referred to: “Our tongue has
been a sharp barb / it is a watermelon...” (from Already Far from the Main Road)
Of course these kinds of associations are also found in much 20th-century
surrealist writing from Europe and Latin America. His poetry will at first seem chaotic,
darting off in multiple directions, but it is actually carefully constructed to
find the perfect voice and structure for a complex and fleeting
experience. A complete experience of
life and consciousness in fact, and not at all the kind of narrow, moralizing
posturing so frequent in North American poetry.
For example, consider the
following passage:
Some filthy pants & death in
one's breast
Órale!
We'll see each other at the wall
/ crossing the ford /
the winds crystallizing to the
left
fins of dust : your fins
an oasis harpooning dry land for
us
In the daughter of your eye / the
cemetery
: Peyote button shoots out flowers
:
The Earth & its opposite : deer
as hushed as noises in their weddings
You shouldn't go / but you must go
- from “Already Far from the Main
Road”
On the surface, this passage is
quite clear as an invocation of a voyage toward a border, from a condition of
“filthy pants” and desperation, and from a position of consciousness of the
vastness of reality and life, of sea and land, of wind and water, of “The Earth
& its opposite”. But this universal
point of view or consciousness says that “the wall” is not just a border, but
the limit or culmination (the ambiguity is deliberate) of life and
consciousness itself. These are in no
way chaotic ramblings, but a deliberately constructed recreation (through
revision and condensation) of a kind of visionary experience emotionally
perceived. Thus a phrase like “deer as
hushed as noises in their weddings”, which combines life (deer) with the
joining (weddings) of opposites (hushed as noises). This is the kind of
totalizing experience that can only be understood, or partially understood,
through the careful positioning of metaphor and indirect allusion.
In the book's first poem, an
auto-descriptive text titled “Carte d'Identité”, Papasquiaro refers to himself
as an “Antipoet & incorruptible idler / fugitive from Nothingness / giant
salamander in a cascade of wind.” That phrase is constructed on contradictions:
assertive “antipoet” and “idler”, “fugitive from nothingness”, “salamander
[ajolote] in wind”. (In the original, “salamander” was “ajolote” or axolotl,
the unique Mexican acquatic salamander with external gills). This makes perfect sense, as Papasquiaro is
in a tradition of mold-breaking poets that includes the likes of Vallejo,
Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Nicanor Parra – the latter being the poet most
identified with the term “antipoet”. Papasquiaro
was certainly not part of the rather stuffy atmosphere (as Stavans points out
in his introduction) that had developed in Mexican poetry during the poet's
lifetime. He, Bolaño, and a few others
formed a group they called Infrarealism, as a challenge to the literary
establishment. (“...infrarealist from
the very start...he let out his Swan's Howl in Mexico City...” speaking of his
birth by incorporating references to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and to a famous poem
by Mexican poet Enrique González Martínez,
“La Muerte del Cisne” (Death of the Swan), which announced a rebellion against
what had become the stagnant preciousness of late Modernismo, a late 19th-early
20th century aesthetic style in literature, that was revolutionary
in its own time.) I should point out
that there are and have been other non-establishment poets in Mexico during
Papasquiaro's life; for example the dynamic work by César Espinosa and Araceli
Zúñiga in the areas of visual and experimental poetry, including the numerous
international literary biennials they organized in Mexico. Or the experimental writer and artist Ulises
Carrión, 1941-1989, who lived much of his life in Amsterdam.
Stavans' introduction gets at an
important paradox regarding Papasquiaro's work: that perhaps he is best served
by being left as an underground, mythical poet, maybe as the poet Ulises Lima
in Bolaño's work. Papasquiaro is so
protean, so complex and intense, so resistive of definitive interpretation that
putting him in a “canon” would tend to severely limit how he is experienced by
readers. This is a conundrum: for he is
without doubt one of Latin America's - or the Spanish language's – or the
world's – most compelling and necessary poets.
He is not to be ignored.
& I grew up a Toltec / even
though dazedly
beset by slow cemeteries
…..
May fog no longer be
may my eyes be reborn
The moon harpooned we will row at
intervals
never mind the twisting course /
the scorpion of wrath
Where magic flows the droplet
falls standing on end
dew hums in the rags
& if there are opposing paths
/ the magnet of the dawn unites them
- from "The Moon Harpooned"
*****
John M. Bennett has published over 400 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. He has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Founding Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him “the seminal American poet of my generation”. His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin American Literature. His latest books are Select Poems, Poetry Hotel Press/Luna Bisonte Prods, 2016; The World of Burning, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2017; Poemas visuales, con movimientos con ruidos con combinaciones (with Osvaldo Cibils), Deep White Sound, 2017; and The Sweating Lake, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2017.
