Il Groupo Responds...

[this post contains updates that appear in square brackets]

late last night I received an email/ dispatch from Benjamin Hollander on behalf of Il Groupo regarding the recent revelation that Heriberto Yepez was retiring his 20 year long writing project.   

Benjamin asked if I would post the text below to my blog, Benjamin also wanted me to mention that Carlos b. Carlos Suarès  letters will appear soon in The Chicago Review [ed. correction 10/10/14 Chicago Review will not be publishing the Suarès letters, see below for Benjamin Hollander's statement regarding that situation] featuring "Letters for Olson," also including a letter from former SF poet laureate, Jack Hirschman.

Il Gruppo Responds to Heriberto Yepez's Impossible Resignation

Harriet blog recently posted “The Writing Project that was Heriberto Yepez,” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/09/the-writing-project-that-was-heriberto-yepez/)

 a letter from Heriberto Yepez originally posted at Venepoetics:

“2014 marks 20 years since the beginning of the writing project I’ve created under the signature ‘Heriberto Yépez, I have decided to conclude this writing project. It can be said that Heriberto Yépez’s oeuvre has concluded.”

Harriet asks:

What does this mean for Il Gruppo (whose members have included Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Ammiel Alcalay, Benjamin Hollander, Ricardo Cázares, and Carlos b. Carlos Suarès)

The Chicago Review will publish in the next two issues a section called “Letters for Olson,” [ed. correction 10/10/14 Chicago Review will not be publishing the Suarès letters, see below for Benjamin Hollander's statement regarding that situation] which were composed by members of Il Gruppo LONG BEFORE  Yepez's self-imposed "resignation."  These texts include two “Letters to North American Readers,”  by Carlos b. Carlos Suarès, a warning about the hero he had to abandon, Heriberto Yepez', whom Carlos had to let go before Heriberto could possibly conclude and quit himself.  Here is a sneak preview:    

In the end, my dilemma came down to this: The Heriberto I loved had become a disappointing fraud, at least in terms of his knowledge of Olson, but the fact was I loved him precisely because he had always been a disappointing fraud.  He acted the literary roles expected of him, as Mexican critic, or so he said, “performing a kind of role-playing as an author within a specific culture (in this case, the Mexican Republic of Letters)”   He wanted, he said,  to build “communication between our two cultures through imaginary entities and lies.” His “fictive criticism…was part of a diálogo diablo (to use Groussac’s image) on the periphery of Latin America, a devilish dialogue or diabolical dialogue, a sort of wanna-be experimental cross-cultural setup which [could] accomplish much more than more serious academic approaches.” He was, to an extent, a little like me, when I worked as the gardener for that kind SoCal scholar, when I hoped my skills with hoes would gain me entry into a dialogue with her-- on the heroes and anti-heroes of literature. For example, I would have treasured, like the recovery of a trunk full of manuscripts, a dialogue with her about my other hero, my distant cousin, Carlos Bernardo Soares, who once said:

I am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to….. Everything around me is evaporating.  My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating.  I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else.  What I’m attending here is a show with another set.  And the show I’m attending is myself. 

Hearing my cousin, distant though he was, it hit me: my bond with Heriberto had always been as a person on the fringe of what I belonged to—since there was really nothing there with me and Heriberto, except in theory, as there was really nothing there with Heriberto and Carlos Olson, except in theory.  Curiously, perhaps this was the way Heriberto would have wanted things to end: to be represented by a fact-less biography that explained nothing. So be it. Let him rest, resign, not be, be himself. He had tried to be authoritative and I had tried to save his image, but something else had to happen to rescue him from his “post-Mexican” identity. Maybe he had to become post-Heribertoan.

In fact, one could even say that in my separating from Heriberto, my hero, he had actually succeeded, because I came along to free him from his scholarly follies in order “to destroy his authority as a critic” (these were Heriberto’s words, not mine), which he never liked, or to save him from creating yet another irony to hide his vulnerability in the real world… (I never did that, people heard me confess I almost loved him). But if only a little history was what it took for the memory of Heriberto to be, well, chimera, then, so be it, our bond would have to be broken. Yes, of course I was saddened that it had all come down to a vanishing act in order to break my bond,  that it all had to go up in smoke, so to speak. But what else could I do but let him go? As he  once wrote, and as every one of us knew, “all this role-playing was utterly nihilistic and boring.” And certainly my loyalty to Heriberto, no matter my disappointments, would not allow someone else to just come along willy-nilly and use his irony against him, which is why, plain and simple and not in theory, he had to go before anyone came back for vengeance, lest some stranger come along one day and say with pleasure

“Heriberto, hoy, usted will be hoisted by your own petard.”

Read the complete letters in the next two issues of The Chicago Review [ed. correction 10/10/14 Chicago Review will not be publishing the Suarès letters, see below for Benjamin Hollander's statement regarding that situation]

Benjamin Hollander on behalf of Il Gruppo

updated statement from Benjamin Hollander 10/10/14:

"As of a few days ago, and according to two of its editors, The Chicago Review was in full support of publishing a sequence called Letters for Olson in their next two issues (evidence of this support can be provided). But for some reason they have backed out. Letters for Olson were composed by members of Il Gruppo LONG BEFORE  Yepez's self-imposed "resignation."  These texts include two “Letters to North American Readers,”  by Carlos b. Carlos Suarès, a warning about the hero he had to abandon, Heriberto Yepez', whom Carlos had to let go before Heriberto could possibly conclude and quit himself.  [an excerpt from the Suarès letters is quoted in the post above] which now, because CR has opted out, will not appear, unless other venue takes up Suares' letters--a thorough critique of Yepez's book on Olson."