Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic

[Santiago Papasquiaro] didn’t believe in countries and the only borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics. -Roberto Bolano

Built from the collision of ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture-of police brutality and drunken ranting with Modernism and German phenomenology-it is a testament of resistance to political and artistic repression comparable to Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’ -Cole Heinowitz

Readers might recognize Mario Santiago Papasquiaro as the eccentric and renegade Ulises Lima in Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. Fierce and visceral, Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic is canonical to Infrarealism, a poem that renders poetry inseparable from politics. It was published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antologia Poetica, 1974-1997. This is the first widely available English translation of Santiago Papasquiaro’s work.

the thesis & antithesis of the world
meet like 1 white-hot meteor & 1 UFO in distress & inexplicably they greet each other: I’m the 1 who embossed on the back of his denim jacket the sentence: The nucleus of my solar system is Adventure

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement with Roberto Bolano. During his lifetime, Santiago published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de Cisne (1996). He died in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1998.

Cole Heinowitz is an associate professor of literature at Bard College.

Alexis Graman is a painter and translator living in New York.