The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!:
Field Notes on Russian-American Poets; Volume
2
*To read Volume 1
of this series, go here.
So,
why this emphasis on naming oneself? When do we do it, and how, and why—so many
years after the death of the author of Barthes, and the
self-negation of Beckett and Blanchot—does it come
back? And why with particular vigor, as it seems, among the Eastern European
poets?
Preparing
ex-Yugoslavian, Macedonian poet Lidija Dimkovska's manuscript for publication, I stop to wonder
every time I come across these lines in the poem, "Decent Girl":
At this
age it's best if somebody else
cuts your
umbilical cord,
and I am
not afraid of Virginia Woolf,
I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard
of her? [i]
At
first, it tripped me up, when she appears, superhero-like, in her own poem. I
thought maybe the move was too easy, too aimed to provoke. But then, when I
heard her read this poem at the Bowery Poetry Club in late November, it got my
attention again, very differently. I looked around, thinking, trying to see
what other people were thinking. How do people react to this naming, the
attention drawn to the poet's own name—so different from the naming of place or
names of friends, one's generation of poets, or influences of the past? How do
we react when the poet redundantly asserts the name that is her mask and her
signature? And asserts it in a fictional field, moreover, and with
double-tiered references to foreign (English) literature/culture?
Perhaps
Eastern European names simply sound good (Tomaz Salamun does it too!)—they tend to have a lot of meat to
chew on. But it can't just be that. I can't help but be reminded of Mayakovsky, and his self-named tragedy. Perhaps that Mayakovskian self-assertiveness is making a comeback,
albeit sometimes with an ironic twist.
Philip
Nikolayev signs off on his own poem:
Yrs,
eminently postmodern
and
deadly, Philip Nikolayev [ii]
Eugene Ostashevsky
inserts himself into battle as the Begriffon, and is
therefore victorious over his own character (and alter-ego?) DJ Spinoza. In
another poem he faces off with the Unraveller, and
says:
You're
acting like a character out of Theodore Dostoevsky!
Thus
proclaim I, Eugene Ostashevsky! [iii]
More
obliquely, in a recent spat of poems, Genya Turovskaya addresses "Jenny", and one hears of
course the poet's own name, only in its normalized American, assimilated, form. These are (love?)
letters to another self, a naive teenager perhaps, who believed she could be
American, simply by changing her name.
Seemingly
inconclusive, these notes... But they have led me back to the topic, and so my
editor may no longer despair at ever getting the promised continuation. And
now, back to it, it might be interesting to talk about Russian-American poets
who name (or identify) themselves in their work as Russian, émigré, or
bilingual; to speak of poetry in which the assertion of a poetic identity is an
express (though at times suppressed) pursuit.
ANDREY GRITSMAN
A
successful émigré doctor living in the environs of New York City, the poet Andrey Gritsman seems to name
himself through all his creative endeavors—whether in writing poems and essays,
in the curating of reading series at the Russian
Samovar or the Cornelia Street Cafe, or as editor of Interpoezia (an "Intercultural
Magazine for Poetry and Arts). A figure of bear-like stature with kindly
features, Gritsman wears his identity on his
sleeve—proudly, and yet as a prisoner of the very distinction. Gritsman's many books are to be understood, even read,
through these eyes only. One can simply list their titles to make the explicit
concerns of the work quite clear:
No Man's Land [Nichejnaya
zemlya] (Almanach Petropol, St. Petersburg, 1995)
Vid s mosta / View
from a Bridge (Slovo/Word Publishers, New
York, 1998)
The Double [Dvojnik]
(Hermitage Publishers,
Transfer [Peresadka]
(Arion,
In Transit (Scrisul Romanesc,
Long Fall (
All but the last title bear
connotations of border-spaces, travel, the intermediate space between cultures
and between languages. The last in the list, the only one published by an
exclusively English-language publisher and containing no Russian-language
texts, might fit in with the others if we think of the fall in association with
the
I
won't linger in this forum on Gritsman's Russian
poems intended for a Russian audience, as technically sound and emotionally
rich as many of them are. But it should be said that these poems often touch
upon issues of immigration. Some are written as letters to the author's Russian
past; many weave foreign words (English, Hebrew, Italian) into their Russian
fabric; and even when crossing borders is not the central theme, one finds a
plethora of metaphors involving or invoking borders and crossings, plane
flights and moving trucks, highways and bridges—real and linguistic. In other
words, the poetic space that these poems occupy is the space of migration, of
movement between cultures.
Gritsman
prefaces Vid s mosta / View
From The Bridge (his 1998 bilingual collection) with an essay about his
experience writing in Russian and English, of writing anew (instead of
translating) his own poetry. The essay contains his thoughts on translation and
an outline of his own method, which he calls "emotional and rhythmical[iv]."
The English version of the preface is riddled with typically Russian
awkwardness: incorrect articles, stray pronouns, and the like. Considering that
Gritsman tackles the subject of translation and the
mastering of articles specifically, this circumstance is a little
bewildering—and to purists it may even be off-putting. But we must not forget
that the immigrant changes the home he finds himself in.[v]
Indeed,
the structure of the book itself is truly unusual and hybrid: some of Gritsman's Russian poems appear in the original Russian
together with translations by other poets (Alex Cigale,
a younger Russian-American poet, and J. Kates, the
publisher of Zephyr Press and translator of several anthologies of Russian
poetry). Some poems appear written by the author in both Russian and English,
such that it's not always clear which language is the "original." The
book also contains Gritsman’s own translations of a
few Russian Modernist standards (by Mandelstam and Blok)
and is topped off with two essays by other poets that praise Gritsman as a poet straddling two cultures and two
languages.
Gritsman’s
Russian poems are written in the manner of the Russian Silver Age and are
mostly rhymed and metered. When he re-writes the same poems into English, he
tends toward a staccato vers libre with
abrupt line breaks, in a manner he considers contemporary to the American
context[vi].
In
his poem "End of the Century," Gritsman
attempts a looser verse form. The English version substitutes
"jack-o-lanterns" for the strangers who look at you like "gods
in a museum." His English version
cuts short the long sentences of the Russian stanzas, leaving out a little here
and there, making the poetry plain-spoken, lacking the resonating alliteration
of his Russian. The holiday invoked by the Russian version of the poem reeks of
Soviet times, but the English one transforms it into Christmas:
Russian: Poyut proletarii pesni poslednego boya
[The prols sing songs of the last battle.]
English: The proletarians sing "Jingle
Bells" [vii]
Not only is the
alliteration dropped (which goes against Gritsman's
emphasis on translating sound, a tenet of his own translation theory as laid
out in the book's preface[viii]),
but also the whole setting is suddenly lost. These proletarians are no longer
Soviets, and therefore (according to the American "life landscape[ix],"
as he sees it) do not sing popular songs about World War II. Gritsman's defense might be that the poem is updated or
revised to fit his American consciousness. But proletarians singing Jingle
Bells is not a particularly real American image, either.
This
kind of re-writing is interesting, certainly, if one takes the two versions of
the poem together, as though the poem existed in the union of the two—but then
the reader must also be bilingual to make the necessary comparisons; he must
also be interested in the inconsistencies. Then, the reader may see in this
project a greater meaning, and perhaps a metaphor for immigration.
Though
tantalizing as an intellectual bilingual project, this approach is unconvincing
simply because the correlation between the two poems/versions, as present as it
may be "emotionally" for the author, has the undesirable effect of
stereotyping the target culture (American) while creating an even greater
distance to the apprehension of the original one (Russian). The bridge he
attempts to construct in this book—in order to view his dual world from it—is
built on foundations that grow ever further apart.
Gritsman's
views on translation are important ones, and his assessment of the problems in
mainstream American translation practice is astute and much needed. He writes:
The main
product of the American translation industry is predominantly intellectual and
related to vocabulary. It is neither sound-based nor related to the emotion of
the original. It is usually not sufficiently faithful to the historical and
cultural circumstances. Such translations are rendered from the point of view
of the encyclopedic dictionary...[x]
Certainly this is true of
much of the cold-war era translations of Russian Literature (which anyone can
attest to simply by reading readily available English translations of Mayakovsky, for example). However, I feel that Gritsman's comments here are part of a current zeitgeist
that favors looser approaches to translation that yield more precise results in
terms of tone and sound. Gritsman's attempted
"parallel poems" are, as he admits, not exactly translations. They
are, however, part of an important (though sometimes unsuccessful) experiment
in "creative life between cultures."
In
the same essay, Gritsman asks if Nabokov
was an American writer, and it is Nabokov's example
that gives him grounds for upholding "the ability to view the landscape
from the side[xi]". This notion of "side," which the
author emphasizes with italics, comes directly from the Russian expression
"so storony,"
implying distance, as well as slant. (This manner of Gritsman's
to hammer Rusisan expressions into his English is
part and parcel of his unique voice.) He continues with the example of Brodsky,
"to my mind [...] a major original English language poet, but not an American poet[xii]."
And we can see how Gritsman's own writing is a kind
of unpretentious invention, even in his essay writing, of an erudite, but still
immigrant or Russian-American English.
Part
of the charm and power of his language is that Gritsman
seems unrepentant for what we might harshly judge as mistakes. Certain
"mistakes" are rather, as it seems, cultural differences or somewhat
awkward attempts to rectify mistranslations of the past. By referring (on the
same page as above) to Pushkin's famous
This
publication, along with many others I've seen from the Russian diaspora in
Sometimes
I long for a poetry that is naturally foreign, that is "wrong" and yet
completely right. I want to hear what that would sound like. Like a perfectly Benjaminian translation. Perhaps knowing something gets in
the way. Gritsman's English is not consistent enough
to be naturally non-native. But he is looking at it askance, "from the
side," and this can provide certain original effects, similar to those we
find in Nabokov and Brodsky. (Though in Nabokov's case, his foreignness seems more a consequence of
class than of culture, and therefore his foreign-tinged English is a mask for
an aristocrat's whimsy. Nabokov gets his way, whereas
Brodsky—and Gritsman[xiii]—can
only offer us a choice: to see these mistakes as innovations formed from
misunderstandings, or as conscious impositions on the language.)
Gritsman's
more recent collection, Long Fall, is
subtitled "Poems, Texts, and Essays." It pairs essays (on
translation, bicultural poetics, depression, 9/11, Eliot and Brodsky) with
original poems, some of which also touch upon the same, ever-productive
concerns. It is worth quoting the blurb on the back of the book by Romanian
poet and fellow Spuyten Duyvil
author, Carmen Firan:
Andrey Gritsman lives
borders as on the edges of a crystal ball, reflecting light, color, and power
all around. Gifted poet and sharp essayist, passionate thinker and master of
games, sleepless mind and energy dedicated to art, time-bomb of ideas at the
crossroad of himself, strong creation out of
In describing Gritsman as a poet, Firan is
inclined toward binary pairs: he is this
and he is that, an essayist and a
poet. In other words, he is never one thing. Moreover, he "lives
borders" (or perhaps, on borders), and stands on a "crossroad"
at which the self meets
He
concludes one of the essays in Long Fall
with some insights into recent developments in the Russian-American cultural
and artistic sensibility, thereby also identifying himself, and his own
allegiances:
I believe
that currently there is a developing newly formed Russian émigré culture that
is different from the former mainland Russian culture. The sensibilities and
the language are somewhat different and the writers borrow their images and
situations from two separate worlds. It probably takes fifteen to twenty years
for a social group to form a new cultural entity [...] The main difference
between Russian émigrés of the first and second wave and the immigration of the
seventies-eighties-nineties is that the Russians of the current wave of
emigration live entirely and committedly here. Their lives go on as
Russian-Americans, without any particular longing to return to
For the current group emigration is not a temporary, forced situation.
[...] A certain cultural group achieves its critical mass in terms of
population and creative activity and in about twenty five years becomes not a
marginal exile phenomenon but a cultural group unique in its complex
sensibilities, with language derived from the land of origin, albeit reflecting
a newly acquired "alien" sensibility. [xiv] [emphasis is Gritsman's
own]
It
seems that Gritsman has come into his own with this
essay, and this collection. In a poem entitled Frequent Flyer and dedicated to his father, Gritsman
writes:
After you
are gone,
I've been
flying alone back and forth
above the
waters and the continents.
Both of
us: me here and you there
know too
well that this is a waste of time
and space.
I may fly
looking, for you
for the
rest of my life
or death,
and still never see you. [xv]
This poem maps out a new
kind of relationship to
Further in the Long Fall, Gritsman inserts three whole
stanzas from Mandelstam (about reading Homer) into a gritty descriptive poem
about a lonely breakfast at a Greek diner along a local highway. Through Gritsman's pairing, Mandelstam's dreams—disturbed by Homer
and imaginary, thunderous
the salty
froth, curve of the beginning
and a
splash of the end,
the dream
of dusty street.
I see it
on the bottom
of the
coffee cup in greasy homey warmth
of the
diner by Route 547 local. [xvi]
Another
poem in Long Fall filters a Russian
dacha into the landscape of the
auburn
hills, time, paradigm of escape,
mighty
river, flowing upstream
in the
evolution of light,
beige
trash bin on the pier,
two tight
bikers in spandex,
confiding
to each other
in their ovulational surge. [xviii]
And suddenly the view
yields to "the memory of the old shack behind the country home, my father,
his upper torso bare, sitting under the birch tree..."
Yet,
finally, there is more about
Gritsman's
obsessive reflexivity about the bilingual (or inter-lingual) and intercultural,
in no way necessitates a desire to remain a foreigner. He is bent on writing
and defending the "poetry of English as a second language[xix]."
Furthermore, Gritsman is keen to learn from American
poetry, and from his (multi-cultural) American landscape. This willingness
seemingly enables him to write poems in the American grain; poems simply about
experience, a
Yes,
the bridges and the tunnels that connect the two sides of the
ILYA KAMINSKY
There
are many rave reviews out there for Ilya Kaminsky's first book, Dancing
in Odessa, winner of a recent Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, so I would like to
focus my notes here on the specific problems Kaminsky's
work reveals from my angle.
Kaminsky's
book is presented to us, by the publisher and by the critics, as primarily a
Russian book. It is less Russian-American than simply the book of a Russian
poet writing in English. In part, the problems I'm referring to, arise from
this—as Ray McDaniel has noted in his astute and severe review of the book (for
Constant Critic[xx])— the book's
reception, and particularly the language of its reception. So I will first
quote an especially positive review by one Patricia Fargnoli
(for VPR[xxi]):
And here
are poems of metaphors so original, so sensuous and accurate that they seem to
leap off the page: "memory" is "an old flautist, / [who] plays
in the rain . . ."; "time" is the "twin" who
takes him "by the hand through the streets of [its] city"; the
"past" is "figures coming to the water's edge, carrying
lamps"; love itself is "a one-legged bird" bought "for
forty cents as a child."
The metaphors that Fargnoli finds original, sensuous, and accurate, I find
sentimental, if not hackneyed, or at least precious. To a Russian-American
reader, as I have already admitted to be in the previous installments of these
notes, the flautist in the rain is reminiscent of a technicolor
Soviet musical; the image of figures carrying lamps is at best, Tarkovskian. Arguably, it's simply an aesthetic difference
I have with Ms. Fargnoli, but I would not choose
these passages to support a claim of accuracy for Kaminsky's
poetic powers, nor to claim originality for these poems. They may be
"original" to their American audience because they come from a
foreign flock of stock characters. Would we excite ourselves over these same
metaphors (time as twin, love as injured bird, etc.) were they written by Joe
Poet next door? Do we grant a "Russian" poet a different kind of
license?
What's
creepy about this review—and I've chosen perhaps not the best-written example because
it reveals an underlying current in all of the reception of Kaminsky—is
the way in which it places the author's biography front and center.
Kaminsky, deaf since he was four, was born in
I'd like to point the
reader's attention to the phrase "soul language" used in the review
quoted above. It's a phrase I'm not familiar with, but I can guess at its
meaning. Why not the somewhat old-fashioned "mother tongue" or
simply, "native language"? This soul-talk
is pure mystification; it exposes the exoticization
of this poet—made Other not only by virtue of his foreign extraction, but also
by his deafness.
I
agree with a point made in an otherwise non-committal review (for Jacket[xxii] )
of Dancing in Odessa: Kaminsky does not
seek, in the poems, to exploit his biography. Yet, I have strong reservations
in this regard about the publishers and promoters of the book. (The jacket copy
of the
If
I were Ilya Kaminsky, I
would likewise take offense at the notion that he does not "hear" the
rhythms of the language he writes in—English. Rhythm is a meaningful element in
Kaminsky's poems, and the constant references to
music and dancing in this book would lead us to believe that this is a poetry
supremely concerned with sound. (For Kaminsky, the
poets that have influenced him are "Traveling Musicians.") I would
argue that, in fact, it is a multi-layered rhythm because it is simultaneously
Russian and English, and this has to do, also, with who is reading it.
Speaking
again as a bilingual reader, the cadence of these poems recalls the voicings of Joseph Brodsky, first of all. Moreover, if one
actually has heard Kaminsky read the poems, one can't
help but think of recordings of Pasternak reading in Russian, and the whole
Russian declamatory tradition, especially in Brodsky's interpretation, which
gives a religious ring to any poem (he climbs higher in pitch with each
incantatory line, then drops low for strategic cadences, creating an
"Amen" effect). It's no surprise that many of Kaminsky's
poems in this collection are explicitly modeled on prayer, beginning with
"Author's Prayer." Even the
jacket copy "blesses Ilya Kaminsky"
and the publisher's "perfect luck in finding him."
The
book abounds with praises, blessings, and prayers, pronounced with a heightened
timbre that is meant to pierce. These poems are texts for speaking, for
singing, rather than for contemplation. The prose texts that accompany the
poems in an attempt to ground them in some more discursive reading fail, at
times, to do so; when they are too similar to the poems in linguistic
character, they become (somewhat surrealist) parables, sticking to the poems
like side-glosses on psalms.
In
the title poem of the collection, he writes, "...My grandfathers fought //
the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full / of Brodsky's
poems..."[xxiii]
Through imitating Brodsky (for two years, as he confesses in the final
sequence, "Praise"), he has learned to surround lofty sentiments with
furniture, to surround love with "bedstands and
tables and chairs," and to mention "genitals" in a blessing[xxiv];
to speak of fingers and mouths when speaking of language, of bodies when
speaking of books; and to insert abstractions into sentimental landscapes
("I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order."[xxv]).
And these are all worthy tools in their way. It's their overuse that makes the
poetic impulse seem like a re-enactment. For some, particularly those who
imagine poetry can bring the dead back to life, this re-enactment will resound,
and for others it will seem too booming (like a "Rumanian
orchestra"). Similarly, the many quotations of Mandelstam—obscured,
opaque, or explicit—will have a positive effect on some, and seem coy to
others.
A
fascinating confusion arises when you hear Kaminsky
read his poems, and you realize that the stresses fall in the "wrong"
places. The spoken English of Kaminsky is neither
American nor British. It is a language of accent. Accent gives it flavor. And
this accent underscores the unsettling discrepancy between how the poem is read
on the page and how it is read aloud (or sounded) by the author. For instance,
let us look at this short passage:
I've
loved, yes. Washed my hands. Spoke
of loyalty
to the earth. Now death,
a loverboy, counts my fingers.[xxvi]
When Kaminsky
reads this passage aloud, I hear nine instead of seven syllables in the first
line. The past tense ending, "-ed," on "loved" and
"washed" is pronounced, even emphatically. The meter sounds iambic in
the author's interpretation. The final "s" of "fingers" is
sibilant, not a flat "z". I should also mention that the whole is
read in a dramatic declamatory style adopted from the Russian manner of
delivery. What, then, we are forced to ask, is the "correct" or
intended music of this passage, and of all these poems? When reading such lines
from Kaminsky to ourselves should we keep in mind the
foreign tones, stresses, and meter that is imposed onto this otherwise
unmarked, even laconic poetry.
Let
us look at the poem I've mentioned, "Author's Prayer," that Ray
McDaniel also cites in his review, noting the "explicitly bold"
gestures that set forth the goals of the book from its very first page.
If I speak
for the dead, I must leave
this
animal of my body,
I must
write the same poem over and over,
for an
empty page is the white flag of their surrender.
If I speak
for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself,
I must live as a blind man
who runs
through rooms without
touching
the furniture.
Yes, I
live. I can cross streets asking “What year is it?”
I can
dance in my sleep and laugh
in front
of the mirror.
Even sleep
is a prayer, Lord,
I will
praise your madness, and
in a
language not mine, speak
of music
that wakes us, music
in which
we move. For whatever I say
is a kind
of petition, and the darkest
days must
I praise.
Indeed, speaking for the
dead is a bold task for any poet. Yet the tone of this poem also creates a safe
haven for that first step: the poet allies himself with an older voice, a voice
belonging to another generation (an alliance that is emphasized by the
traditional declamation). He adopts a classical tone, of diplomacy, of oratory,
that makes him seem "wise" for his years. This introductory
incantation frees the poet of responsibility (because he proposes to channel
older voices) and at the same time it provides an ethical armor by using the
commonly valued trope of poetry as a repository for history, especially the
history of oppression.
Right
off the bat, Kaminsky emphasizes the orality of these poems, and simultaneously claims to
channel these voices into a language that is foreign to him (and to them):
"...in a language not mine, speak..." This line reveals not only the
ambition of this work, but also the strange duality of it, the shaky identity
of this poetic voice. In fact, it would have been interesting to have printed
the poems with the "correct," that is the author's own, accented
stresses ("must" in the last line should be emphasized for good
measure), and add to that a Chaucerian spelling scheme ("furniture"
should be pronounced "foornietur") and
instructions to the reader to slightly roll their r's as they read, or give them a
trailing British air. Perhaps, presented in this way, the poems would be
endowed with archaistic qualities, a heavier rhythm, creating an obstacle or
difficulty that would counterbalance the book's leitmotif of the airborne,
dancing artists and lovers.
If
viewed this way, Kaminsky would be unwittingly
involved in a kind of performance of Otherness. If done with a critical angle,
i.e. if the poems themselves criticized this othering
of non-English English, then we would have a work of political complexity, and
one that dared the reader to confront their stereotypes and the hegemonic
quality of their own imperial tongue. But these are not the concerns of this
poetry, nor of this author, and that is perfectly all right. The confusion of
oral and written language cannot be resolved. Kaminsky's
poems are meant to be uplifting and meaningful, to fondle and stimulate our emotions:
this poetry is meant to be "poetic," not experimental or conceptual.
And it undoubtedly attains its goal for many a reader. Yet, that reader must
also find charming the poet who asks, or feigns to ask, "What year is
it?"
There
is so much of
Why
can't we let Russian poetry change, grow, in our Western mind, and accept that
much has happened since Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and
even Brodsky who carried the high-modernist torch into the late 20th Century?
To do so, would we have to throw them off the ship of modernity? I don't
believe so. But there is also room for—even a need for—criticism of this
cinematic, essentialist portrayal of Russian-ness. We are saturated as it is
with exotic imaginings of the Russian "soul" (take the Guggenheim's
"
The
truth is that Kaminsky's poems in this first book
open themselves up to a kind of mythologizing interpretation. The poems are so
directly tied into a mythical Russian context (in which KGB operatives can be
equated with the Furies) that it is impossible for the knowledgeable reader not
to read the book as a repetition or reliving of stereotypically Russian poetic
gestures. The themes are exile and oppression, and the steadfast resolve of the
Artist to seek out myth and meaning in the face of his social predicament; to
escape[xxvii].
Ray McDaniel's identification of a cultural "shorthand" in Kaminsky's first book is altogether apt. Writing the same
poem over and over, as Kaminsky says he must in the
"Author's Prayer," is a sure way to brand identity—a curse and a
blessing for a poet.
I
hope the author does not take offense when I say that this is the work of a
young poet; ambitious, no doubt, and not fully baked. It is truly the early
work of Ilya Kaminsky,
written some years before its publication, and bearing the mark of flamboyant
wunderkind flourish. The craft is truly admirable, but studied, a pass-me-down.
There is plenty of talent to be found here, even in the way the poet reinvents,
cites, and imitates his heroes. No doubt we can await more from Kaminsky's work to come, perhaps a stride that will carry
him out from under the heavy burden of the Russian tradition. The harder thing,
perhaps, will be to shed the simplistic labels of benefactors, publishers and
fans in the press.
Finally,
one more prayer: I'd like those airbrushed, fake-Chagall dancers on the cover
and title-pages of this book to be forever banished from the thesaurus entry
for "Russian." God save us all!
KATIA KAPOVICH
Katia Kapovich is a Russian poet originally from
The
well-known émigré poet, and friend of Brodsky, Lev Loseff
wrote in a preface to her 2001 Slovo/Word collection,
Stihi i poemy, that for Kapovich
"a life that can’t be described poetically is not worth living." Loseff quoted this couplet to reinforce his point:
- ne otryvaja pera,
opishu etot den’ i zabudu
[without
lifting the quill,
I’ll
describe this day and forget it]
The use of
"quill" instead of "pen" is an archaism intended to evoke a
"poetic" setting. The line break is metrically and grammatically
imposed—relaying a steadiness without surprises. The meter is plain, orthodox;
the emotion—face forward.
This short couplet is characteristic of Kapovich's work on the whole: Hers is not a poetry you have to dig around in to find the meaning: Kapovich puts it all in plain sight. Her need is to "describe her day." The fact that she can forget it afterward assumes that poetry transcends the everyday, that writing poems about everyday existence elevates existence, just as Loseff suggests in his introduction. This is a poetry that asserts its distance from the real world, and that is not uncommon in the context of the "unofficial," bohemian artists of the Soviet period. In Russia, outsider poets who had to endure or oppose the forced political and socially engaged poetry of the "official" Soviet establishment commonly chose to amputate politics from poetry, as Brodsky thought poets ought[xxix]