FSG released two gorgeous editions of the late Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño's posthumous opus 2666 on Tuesday, and New Directions released his first collection of poetry to be translated into English, Romantic Dogs, last month. Both have caused quite a stir in what Books sections we have left in the weeklies and dailies of America this week, as well as in the onlinosphere.

The PoFo feature this week is an in-depth essay by Ben Ehrenreich on Bolaño's relationship with poetry--the poets who populate his fiction as well as the Chilean's own "Infrarealist" dossier.

This is fast on the heels of Jonathan Lethem's lengthy postmortem in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, which the Old Gray Lady complimented with another appraisal by Janet Maslin today (accompanied by a photo with a weird Taliban-esque doctor job. W, may I ask, TF?) .

The Village Voice chimed in with their own glowing review. New York speculated the book could be the best of the year, and the Boston Phoenix one-upped that by saying it could be the next great American novel.

(I'm going to add more fuel to the fire right here by announcing that the poet trapped inside A-Rod's body? It's Roberto Bolaño's. Fact.)

The LA Times chuckles about all the hubub on its blog here, and it should be noted that I had all of these suckers beat with my story in Paste back in October, but whatever.

The first hundred pages of Bolaño's Savage Detectives are a romantic boho poet's dream creation myth, and I highly recommend anyone unfamiliar start there. Or, if you just want to dip a toe in the Bolaño, then the short story collection Last Evenings on Earth is always available for short flights, bus trips, and coffee/cigarette insomnia jags. I've only started in on Romantic Dogs this week, but I'm sure others have taken more time with it and might offer some opinions here. Maybe? Yes? Well, whenever you're ready, the comments section is open, so feel free.

UPDATE: Finishing Romantic Dogs I turn to the back cover and belatedly read this appraisal:

"A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called 'unimproved'--lacking the polish of a shiny commodity. With Bolaño, we encounter not only 'fist-fucking' but 'feet-fucking' in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker. With Bolaño, the explicit description of a sexual encounter is fragmented by temporal disjunctions, heuristic leaps of thought and a barking dog; in the end, God and an author show up . . . The poems shine their beery light on life's romantic dogs: dreamers, detectives, and poets who do double time as saints and martyrs."
--Forrest Gander, The Nation

Yes.

"What's left to say after this seemingly endless campaign? The Op-Ed editors asked five poets to answer that question."

John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler, Joshua Mehigan, Mary Jo Bang, and J. D. McClatchy in the New York Times

A quick roundup of Election Day poetry news, for anyone not spending every waking hour looking at exit polls or listening to the punditocracy bloviate.

If, in the next twelve or so hours, anyone hears Katie Couric quoting Jerome Rothenberg or some such, please pipe up in the comments below. I will either be too deliriously happy or too wretchedly sad to type.

Robert Pinsky recommends Whitman on Election Day in the Boston Globe.

The Guardian looks at Obama's Inner Poet.

Castro weighs in on "poet" Obama's place in the "parasitical and rapacious empire."

Huff Post tries its hand at pundit poetry.

The Montrose Press quotes Ogden Nash

Poetry Politic self destructs.

Mary Jo Bang in the New York Times

And after the jump, Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again."

Fernando Perez, Tampa Bay Rays outfielder and Columbia University grad, tells the the St. Petersburg Times what's on his World Series night stand:

"Are you staying away from heavy plots during the playoffs?

Actually, what helps me a great deal right now is poetry, like Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. "

This isn't the first time the "baseball beatnik" has stepped up to the plate for poetry.

Perez was the subject of a New York Times profile earlier in the post-season, and there he expressed admiration for Herman Hesse, Annie Dillard, and Howard Zinn. In a Columbia alumni magazine article from 2007, Perez extolled the virtues of Lyn Hejinian's "My Life."

Perez is the first Columbia grad to play in the majors since Lou Gehrig and is primarily a speed and defensive replacement (though with Joe Maddon's Rays, you never know what might happen). In the minor leagues, Perez kept an online journal.

Here's a taste:

"In this way I see baseball as an 'anti-modernity.' It feels as though the men who play and stay in the game indulge in a counter culture, the lifestyle in which all you have to do each day is play. It's rustic. These are reasons why I'm here."

All of which serves as a reminder of "Sports," Kenneth Goldsmith's verbatim transcript of a 2006 Red Sox-Yankees radio broadcast, "Yo-Yo's with Money," Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff's UA book of drugged out play-by-play, and, of course, Marianne Moore.

UPDATE: A visit to Open Books reminds me (how could I forget?) that Kansas City Royals sidearm slinger Dan Quisenberry wrote poetry, and that Dock Ellis (not Bill Lee. Thanks, Ryan.) threw a no-hitter while on acid, which is sorta like writing poetry. Also: "The Crowd at the Ball Game" from Williams' Spring and All.

The poetry news website Choriamb announced it will be hanging up its press chapeau after five years of linking to all the verse news fit to peruse. The site had been a labor of love for Tanya Angell Allen since August 2004, when she co-founded the site with Becky Rodia, according to the site's info page.

In announcing the change from news and reviews to “something new,” Choriamb offered up the “Top Four Places to Find Poetry News” in its stead, including Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut, Poetry News Daily, and the Poetry Foundation’s own Dispatches page. In its description Choriamb suggested that the PoFo “seems to draw a lot from Google News,” which got me thinking about that particular new fangled clippings service, especially in relation to the previously (endlessly?) discussed Pirate Poetry Anthology.

Mount Holyoke professor Christopher Benfey has an essay up on Slate.com that posits the “wild nights” of Emily Dickinson may not have just been spinster fantasy.

"[Dickinson’s] exile on Main Street has seemed a necessary part of the Dickinson myth, so necessary, indeed, that contrary information—which happens to have been piling up lately—has often been discounted or ignored,” Benfey writes, “the notion of Emily Dickinson making out in her living room is so foreign to our conception of her that her autumnal tryst with Judge Lord has never become part of the popular lore about her.”

Do tell!

Let's begin with Sarah Palin.

This week, Hart Seely offers up examples of the Alaska governor's poetry on Slate, prefacing it with this analysis:

"In campaign interviews, the governor, mother, and maverick GOP vice presidential candidate has chosen to bypass the media filter and speak directly to fans through her intensely personal verses, spoken poems that drill into the vagaries of modern life as if they were oil deposits beneath a government-protected tundra."

The Los Angeles Times praises Carruth the farmer.

The Concord Monitor says, "No poet knew the hardships of northern New England as personally as Hayden Carruth."

Paste Magazine praises Carruth's jazz vernacular.

Vermont Public Radio claims Carruth for the Northeast Kingdom.

'Why don't you write a poem that will prepare me for your death?"

The New York Times calls Carruth "one of the most wide-ranging and intellectually ambitious poets of his generation."

The Washington Post praises Carruth's work "from the grandly formal to the bluntly vernacular."

"Everything Billy Collins claims to be, Carruth actually was," says Paul Constant.

A jazz tribute to Carruth in Vermont.

Remembering Carruth remembering Ray.

The family of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca says they will not stop authorities from opening the poet’s grave, despite previous protests.

Garcia Lorca is believed to have been buried in a common grave near Granada, along with two bullfighters and a school teacher who were part of his company in the Spanish Civil War. Relatives of the school teacher, Diascoro Galindo, shot for not believing in God, want his body exhumed so it can be given a proper burial.

Laura Garcia Lorca, the poet’s niece, told El Pais: “Even if we don’t want it to be done, we respect the wishes of the other parties involved.”

Right-wing rebels aligned with Franco’s army shot and killed Lorca in 1936, when the poet was only 38. The soldiers accused him of having “done more damage with his pen than others had with their guns,” and, according to Ian Gibson’s biography, spit on his body while calling its former inhabitant a “red queer.”

After Franco’s forces took over Spain in 1939, the dictator banned Lorca’s work for more than ten years, despite of (and perhaps contributing to) its massive popularity both in Spain and around the world.

The AP reports, “The request is part of a surging nationwide movement to give proper burial to the thousands of people known to have been killed by supporters of late dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and buried in mass graves.”

No one is quite sure if the gravesite actually holds the remains of Garcia Lorca, with some scholars claiming another site a few hundred yards away. The hillside reportedly holds the remains of thousands. If Locra is found, his niece told reporters “he could be taken to New York . . . Madrid . . . or Huerta de San Vicente.”

Poetry could soon have its own version of Disney World in Coralville, Iowa.

The Iowa City/Coralville Chamber of Commerce and the Stories Project, a group of businesspersons, educators, and scholars, have proposed building a $90 million museum focused on language and literacy to be located on the Iowa River Landing near I-80.

“We're hoping to build on the literary heritage of Iowa," explained Christopher Merrill, the Director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and the University’s liaison to the Stories Project, "and that heritage begins with poetry.”

The central building of proposed museum complex would be the “Story Center,” a combination gallery and presentation space that would include a “holovision show that demonstrates the magic of reading.”

The museum would also include a Hall of American Literary Achievement, a school and research center, and “Book Town,” a project put together with the help of Prairie Lights that would be “the world first adventure bookstore."

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that the ambitious project also hopes to create an annual literary award to rival the Pulitzer.