Forms, Themes, Verbs: Incarnations of Poetry in Los detectives salvajes, by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

The work describes and analyzes the intensely corporeal consistency that the presence of poetry charges, in the first part of the novel Los detectives salvajes, by the writer Roberto Bolaño, based on three axes: the staging of the false diary of the young poet García Madero, in which scenes also occurring in the poetry that Bolaño wrote for the time are replicated, in a register, on the contrary, vitalized. Second, the subject matter of the poems that he and his realvisceralist colleagues write, and, finally, the effect (visceral, eschatological, urgent) that the reading and writing of those poems seem to have on the characters who read them. Thus, a Close Reading exercise is proposed in which the vicissitudes surrounding García Madero are exhibited, in dialogue with other moments in the narrative and poetry of Bolaño himself, as an allegory of the poet as a living body, of which It will emanate a poetry also alive.