Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

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Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic

Excerpt:

The world gives you itself in fragments / in splinters:
in 1 melancholy face you glimpse 1 brushstroke by Dürer
in someone happy the grimace of 1 amateur clown
in 1 tree: the trembling of birds sucking from its crook
in 1 flaming summer you catch bits of the universe licking its face

the moment 1 indescribable girl

rips her Oaxacan blouse

just at the crescent of sweat from her armpits

& beyond the rind is the pulp / & like 1 strange gift of the eye the lash

Maybe not even Carbon 14 will be able to reconstruct the true facts

The days are gone when 1 naturalist painter
could ruminate over the excesses of lunch
between movements of Swedish gymnastics

& without losing sight of the rose-blue tones of flowers

he wouldn’t have imagined even in his sweetest nightmares

We are actors of infinite acts

& not exactly under the blue tongue

of movie spotlights

co-edition with Ediciones Sin Fin

Most readers have never heard of José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda (1953-1998). A few might know him by his pseudonym, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. But many readers know (and even love) the quasi-mythical character he inspired, Ulises Lima, from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives: “a ticking time bomb” who wrote incessantly “in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing,” but who “never wrote poems.” The real Santiago did, in fact, fill every page he could find with his words. And he may indeed have been “a ticking time bomb.” But—for the record—he did write poems. It was only with the posthumous publication of the collection Jeta de Santo (2008) that the stunning extent of this writing became apparent

COLE HEINOWITZ

Carte D’Identité - By the Author

If you can be a legend
Why be 1 common grave?

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro / frontline infrarealist ((who has fought in this wavering movement since its inception in 1975)) released his primordial Swan’s Howl in Mexico City—capitol of the subsequently disgraced—in the midst of 1 electrical storm / at dawn the morning of December 24, 1953—the year of the death of Dylan Thomas & Jorge Negrete.

The echoing string of this a cappella tour de forceps ((1 bison engraved in the placenta of Altamira)) resounds in the Ingres violin of these pages / which as a rule of thumb barely contain 10% of his principle opera’s red blood cells.

Water serpent in the Chinese horoscope / Ocelot in the Náhuatl / Capricorn in the occidental / was a child follower of the wonders of the Holy Flock of Guadalajara & in his early youth he rose & fell ((delirious & without a rudder)) among the Escherian snakes & ladders of the Dialectics of Nature—that composite & uneven pandemonium—with such force / that only the revelation transmitted by the Aztec gnome brigadier José Revueltas: The tragedy of the human species is its lack of itself kept his winged feet supporting the drained weight of his open cerebellum.

Today / tomorrow & always.

Incorruptible anti-poet & vagrant / fugitive from the Void / salamander in 1 waterfall of air.

What he most loves in the tidal wave of life:

The frisbee women always undermining the mythic more marrow of the citizens of this Oliverio Girondo—galaxy.

His profession is noticing.

His truth / there isn’t 1.

His theosophical number: is 69.

Edmond Dantès / The Count of Monte Cristo.

His grandest illusion: to score 1 corner kick goal against the

flagrant absence of Triumphant God’s wind.

He writes like he walks / to 1 frantic rhythm.

With 1 firm unbending stride.

Between 1976 & 1978 he lived like 1 hummingbird / scenting the cardinal points of his laboratory-apprenticeship: Paris / Vienna / Barcelona & Jerusalem.

His wife affectionately says: The eyes of 1 otter / The mouth of 1 foreskin.

Cole Heinowitz

Cole Heinowitz is a poet, scholar, translator, and Professor of Literature at Bard College. Her poems have recently appeared in Letters to Olson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), In/Filtration (Station Hill, 2016), and in journals such as Aufgabe, Across the Margin, and Clock. She is the author of the critical study, Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburg UP, 2010), and numerous essays on poetry from the Romantic Era to the present. Her translations include A Tradition of Rupture: Selected Prose of Alejandra Pizarnik (Ugly Duckling Press, 2019), and two collections by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, Beauty is Our Spiritual Guernica (Commune Editions, 2015), and Bleeding from All 5 Senses (White Pine Press, 2020).

John Burns, Translator

John Burns is a poet, translator and scholar who lives in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. He has
translated numerous poets from Chile, Mexico, the United States and Spain. He and Rubén Medina
collaborated to edit and translate an anthology of Beat poetry into Spanish, Una tribu de salvajes
improvisando a las puertas del infierno (Aldus/ UANL, 2012).