Federico García Lorca

I’ve been reading his collected poems off and on for the past couple months. It’s been hit or miss for me. I’ve really loved some of it but it’s super vibes-based and abstract, which for me has meant there’s never really a moment where a poem clicks or really hits you because they seem more aimed at producing a nebulous feeling in the moment. It’s not anything you can really pin down; some of them seem not really to be about anything at all. And since none of them click they’re hard to retain.

I just read Infinite Jest for the first time and have been re-reading some of Larkin, have been thinking about him in relation to them. Like DFW and Larkin obvi have totally different sensibilities about life but they have the same kind of cold, clear, English no-nonsense, anti-style with no sensuality in it (Larkin has more than Wallace tho). Lorca is the polar opposite; it’s all sensation and image. Wallace is pretty explicitly skeptical about this sort of style in Infinite Jest, and I think he’s right that it risks running into an all-style-no-substance problem, which is what I think you’re getting at. But the best Lorca poems I’ve read are like music, they’re emotionally direct, full of passion, hypnotic and in the space of 10 lines throw images at you more moving than DFW came up with in 1100 pages. But yeah they’re hard to remember.