"Sincere messages are my form of expression."

I can't write poems. I mean, I can't sit to consciously construct, edit and type a poem. I can sit with coffee or smoke and write in my notebook, hear or feel the lines take my hand, depending on automatic writing for ink to fill the page. But the writing isn't mine. Maybe it's the notebook dragging the flow from a Pilot G-2 07, just like I've seen mountains pull rain down from the clouds passing through their peaks in Anzoátegui more than a decade ago.

When I go back to the entry in my notebook from that period in Barlovento, the poem written for those rain-pulling mountains is not mine.

Try to imitate the silence of others who might teach me. Hope to rid the poem of this self.

*

Through Iván Thays, I found a great review of 2666 by Christopher Domínguez Michael in Chile's El Mercurio newspaper ("La literatura y el mal"). I agree with him and Santiago Gamboa that 2666 is a book that marks a before and after.

From what I can tell at the Editorial Anagrama website, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has bought the U.S. rights to Los detectives salvajes and 2666.

*

Méndez Guédez concludes the novel nicely. Esther appears only in writing and even that arrival could be read as a hallucination or imagination. My search continues for his other books.

Now I'm back to Cristina Rivera Garza's novel and starting to read Juan Villoro, El testigo (Anagrama, 2004). Another reason for silence is the long list of books I need to read. Reading as a communal form of writing.

I believe Ashbery when he writes of sincerity in Where Shall I Wander, even when I think he's also mocking himself and his readers.

*

I've been reading fellow Allstonian Mark Lamoureux's manuscript Astrometry Organon. I'm jumping around the pages, pulled by verses such as these: "When I was / under the river a / ghast sang / in the drastic / hours, sang / a thing I won't / tell you"

I think this is the silence I'm trying to describe above. A refusal to speak, since listening is already so much. I've got to print the pdf version of the manuscript out so I can fully see the poems on the page, particularly since Mark's stanzas often emphasize concrete, sculptural aspects of verse. There's a precision to his stanzas, finely crafted & sharp.

*

"Supe que un buen silencio en ocasiones salvaría el mundo. Un respetuoso silencio. Sólo estar, permanecer en los inmediatos territorios del otro."

(El libro de Esther)