The Last of the Holly, and a New Writer

My New Year's Eve visitor this year was a hard cold, so I've been welcoming January 2016 from the couch. I haven't been sick for quite a while, so the enforced slowdown has been an adjustment and - now that I'm feeling somewhat better - a not unwelcome one. I've been drawing and painting a little bit, and last night I read through a couple of Bach preludes and fugues, but mostly I'm drinking hot tea with some local miel urbain, a Christmas gift that was gathered from hives on the roofs of UQAM, and reading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives: set in Mexico City, and utterly brilliant.

I don't know how it's taken me this long to get to Bolaño... but there it is. J. read this novel first and loved it very much (this from someone who rarely reads novels at all) and I impatiently waited for him to hand over the library copy. Meanwhile I've been reading a bit of Bolaño's poetry, which I like enough to want the large collection, The Unknown University. This unpublished poem was found in one of his notebooks containing some of the poems for the book, published posthumously:

My Literary Career

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also from Alfaguara,

Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino...All the publishers...All the readers

All the sales managers...

Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity

to take a look at myself:

like a snake in the North Pole, but writing

Writing poetry in the land of idiots.

Writing with my son on my knee.

Writing until night falls

with the thunder of a thousand demons.

The demons who will carry me to hell,

but writing.

(October 1990)