THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES will be, I bet, one of the big literary books (in English--it's already well into its life in Spanish) of 2007. And the world will be hungry for 2666, Bolano's last book, in 2008.

It's, as I said, a strange book, but enormously satisfying to read. Reading it, I have that sensation of reading a book that doesn't quite work like any other book I know. Not much happens, in a way, and yet, a lot happens: absurd encounters between slightly ridiculous characters, lots of promiscuous sex, and constant talk about poetry: how to publish it, which literary movements are cool, and who are the cool poets in the neighborhood. All the while, the political unrest in Chile flows through as an undercurrent. It's really an astonishing book.

Today I'm excited about Roberto Bolano, who became one of the most important Chilean writers of his generation, then died, at fifty, a few years ago. New Directions published his early books--short novels and stories--and now FSG will bring out the major book he published during his lifetime--THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES--this April, to be followed by his INFINITE JEST-sized postumous novell, 2666, in 2008.

I read some of the stories in LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH while riding the subways today, and tonight I started THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. Bolano is a strange writer. He's not much interested in things happening. He writes a lot about poets, these poet characters he likes, tortuted, self-obsessed, melodramatic. He may be a kind of spiritual cousin to Sebald. Susan Sontag liked both writers. But Bolano is also related to his Latin American forebearers like Garcia Marquez, though there is no magic, per se, just a slippery sense of what constitutes a book.

So far in the novel--and I'm only up to page 11--the main characters, who narrates the book as a kind of journal, talks about how he rebelled in his poetry workshop and joined a group of renegade poets called the viceral realists. There is some time spent waiting for these poets in a bar, a pretty waitnress, and a bad poem, which sends the protagonists into a fit of masturbation. And what is exciting or satisfying about this? I'm not quite sure, but it is certainly satisfying. There's an energy about it. More soon.

I'm reading this book, REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy. Vintage bought it from an English publisher. It's pretty good. Wants to be a bit more whimsical than it is, I think...

Also, check out this very thorough analysis of Rosemarie Waldrop's CURVES TO THE APPLE, by Ben Lerner, in Jacket issue 31. I wrote a bit about this book before when I was head over heels for it last fall. I've been reading some older Waldrop (both Keith and Roesmarie, actually), and have been no less stunned. They really are two of the best and strangest writers working in America right now.

Technology!

How crazy is technology. The reading Brenda, Wayne and I did on sunday is now available in its entirity in streaming web-audio at the Speakeasy website. See, you no longer have to do anything to do anything!

Yesterday's reading went very well, and was actually extremely well attended, especially for superbowl superday, and the coldest day ever.

A few books from the future that I'm interested in:

NOT FOR MOTHER'S ONLY: edited by Rebecca Wolf and Catherine Wagner, published by Fence. An anthologhy of women poets--ranging from Jean Valentine to Elizabeth Robinson--writing about "child-getting & child-rearing." Out in May.

FATA MORGANA by Reginald Shepherd. Out this month. Very intense.

THE NIGHT by Jaime Saenz, translated for Forest Gander and Kent Johnson, published bu Princeton. Book length poem by major bolivian poet, in English for the first time. Looks really good. March.

So, like many of you I'm sure, I did not win the APR book prize. But the thing that really annoys me is that there were no finalists listed on the letter, meaning I don't even have the satisfaction of cursing their names. Anyway, congrats to Gregory Pardlo, the winner. I look forward to seeing your book this fall.

Other books--old and forthcoming--which I am excited to dip into this weekend:

WAKEFULNESS--John Ashbery: Robert Hass wrote one of his poet's choice columns about a poem from this book way back in the late 90's or early aughts--his columns are about to come out in book form--and I liked the poem when I read it, so I got hold of the book. It's time for Ashbery and me, it really is.

FRAIL-CRAFT--Jessica Fisher: Gluck's forth yale pick, due out in April. A seemingly unknown (except, as it happens, to Robert Hass) poem--unknown, at least, to me--who writes compact, intense, mournful lyrics. Looks promising. Gluck has been the best Yale judge in decades.

ONE BIG SELF--CD Wright: this book really kicks ass. I expect we'll all be talking about it come april when it's out and about.

"I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free."

How good is that line? It's so odd, and yet right on--we want things that are "immortal and free," don't we? I've had a difficult relationship to reading Ashbery. When I first discovered "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" in college, I was spellbound. The poem thinks so hard and so obsessively about its many subjects. But there are no other Ashbery poems like it. It took me years to learn how to read his more typical poems, the ones that range everywhere and anywhere, held together only by the bemused, somewhat kermudgeonly voice that utters them. But he's inescapable, and for poetry that thinks its way through itself, there's nothing better. But so many of the poems are unsatisfying. Or are they? I'm never sure what I think when I pop out the end of one, which, perhaps, is a testament to their, as Kafka said, "indubitableness."

Next week his new book, A WORDLY COUNTRY hits stores. It's not unlike his last few--full of that same Ashbery product--but there are a number of standout poems, especially the first one, which is rhymed. And maybe there's something about those trademark poems that we still need. Maybe he's still struggling to say something that needs to be said, and that struggle is important to bear witness to.

What I'm reading this fine, wild thursday:

Still finishing PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. In some ways, I think this is one of those books that must have been incredibly radical at the moment it was published, and is now a bit sleepy because its innovations have been completely digested into the culture, those being the repressed Jewish character (who Woody Allen subsequently developed and popularized completely) and the sex, which is now as common as cracks in the sidewalk.

Also finishing NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU, filmaker and performance artist Miranda July's forthcoming book of stories. If you like her work, this book will seem perfect to you. It's sweet, unabashidly sentimental at times, and sad in that satisfying way that sad can be sad.

And CD Wright's ONE BIG SELF, a revised, poems-only version of her collaboration with a photographer. They went into a handful of southern prisins and made work based on the experience. The book was only available as a fancy art book for a few years, and now Copper Canyon will bring out a handy paperback. This'll be one of the much talked about poetry books of the year, not that that will mean much talk.

I'm three years late on everything, I know, especially on sensitive-person-soundtracks, but I can't get enough of Sufjan Stevens. Especially the album Seven Swans, which was my constant companion at MacDowell.

Let me say this: the nice thing about going to an artist's colony (or on a vacation or something of that nature) is that when you're there, you don't have any problems. At all. The trouble with not being there, then, is of course the fact that problems abound. Who knew?

New Poem on Verse Blog

Check it out. And come to the reading on sunday. and and and