Homage to Mexican Poets Painters Musicians

Infrarealism and Surrealism and a little Norteno on Cinco De Mayo

I helped a friend move to Oaxaca and upon arrival observed him destroy all hope he had of residency by ignoring the green light at customs. Murray presented his neatly typed list instead for his forty boxes of life. Thus consternating the police who were happy to have nothing to do except comb through each box offsite at his expense. Murray was in his mid-70’s. He had been covering the Oaxacan art scene as a writer since the 70’s in Oaxaca. We happened to land in the middle of an almost civil war and I was not sanguine.

Oaxaca city as a world heritage site decays behind the iron protecting the shops. New town Oaxaca next to the University was nicer but everyone hung out in the Zocalo. I hung out for one week with enough money to be there but nowhere else I wanted to go. No Zapotec ruins. No coastal sun burn. Just the damn rotting world heritage site in a time of brutal military repression.

Still I do have this peculiar love hate relationship with Mexico. Culture transcends the dismal day to day.

https://launiversidaddesconocida.wordpress.com/manifesto-of-infrarealism/

In 1974, the poet Mario Santiago brought a group of friends who’d been expelled from an UNAM poetry workshop—they’d tried to force the resignation of a poet-professor unwilling, or unable, to teach Spanish Golden Age poetry of the sixteenth century and classical poetic forms—to visit his friend Roberto Bolaño, who lived in an apartment in the center of town. At that meeting Bolaño came up with the idea of forming a poetry movement “against the official culture,” which he named the Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia. The Infrarealists’ obvious heroes were the Beats, Dadaists, maudits such as Rimbaud and Lautréamont (“the two absolute adolescent poets”), and also more obscure figures, such as their “adored Sophie Podolski,” a Belgian poet who’d committed suicide in 1974 at age twenty.

Their declared enemy was the poet and intellectual Octavio Paz, in their eyes the representative of Mexico’s “official culture,” the politically powerful gatekeeper to the Mexican literary establishment. Infrarealists interrupted Paz’s public readings with shouts and once, supposedly, threw wine on his shirt.

Bolaño’s Infrarealist manifesto is one of his earliest writings available to readers. Titled “Déjenlo Todo, Nuevamente” (meaning, “Leave Everything Behind, Again,” after a poem by André Breton), the manifesto is a free-associative, exuberant verbal torrent—”Dancing-club of Misery. Pepito Tequila sobbing his love for Lisa Underground…. Rimbaud, come home!” Rather than prescribing any particular aesthetic principles or commitments, it urges infrarrealistas to leave their narrow bookish circles, see the world, and find their rebel poetry in their own uncompromising lives. Some of its exhortations, such as the twice-repeated “The poem is a journey, and the poet is a hero who reveals heroes,” seem especially striking in light of Bolaño’s mature novels, which would repeatedly describe the fateful journeys of poets. In at least three of those novels, Distant Star, The Savage Detectives, and 2666, the central plot would involve a literal search by “detective” poets (or literary types) for mysterious or vanished poet-writers, some of them heroes, some villains.

https://www.chicagoreview.org/reprise-infrarrealistas/

https://www.artandobject.com/articles/magical-mexico-meet-new-surrealists-redefining-psychedelia

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity Tip what you can if your heart resonates.