Literary Life

Pablo Neruda & Roberto Bolano

Minutes ago, still morning, a man came into the bookstore. Within a matter of moments we were engaged in a dialogue regarding the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolano. The brief discussion was considering the means by which each writer expresses and constructs an image(s) in a poem.

Pablo Neruda appears a much more methodic poet, wherein his poems contain an apparent structure that resonate his deliberate thought; whereas, Roberto Bolano writes away from Neruda in that he’s attempting to overthrow any evident structure or intent of a poem with an almost whimsical writing style.

Neruda is extremely descriptive, his poems containing a form that acts as a skeleton for the organs within. Bolano’s poems are scattered bones in which a reader can attempt to puzzle together; Neruda strives to do this for the reader to allow them to see the image of each organ and feel its function. Bolano’s poems, being bones, are barren in their imparted images, but are linked together by a lively, pulsing thought.
It’s as though Bolano, in his poetry, is spontaneously responding to beauty at its surface; and, Neruda is contemplating the reason behind the response to understand the beauty below.

These conjectures are simply that, opinions based on incomplete information; they’re unedited and stem from an impulsive insight branched by conversation. More over this is “An egg in a nest of twisted shackles”, to use a Bolano line. This is an attempt to capture an instant. Maybe one day this will flower away from immediacy. Either way I imagine you may be able to gather something from them. And, if you’d like to continue this conversation come on in and we can talk.