Mikhail Aizenberg - I really like this poet. I think what he says about poetry is so thoughtful & deep, & mostly rings true. It gives one pause, & that's as it should be. & I like his poems too.

I like this essay. Andrey Gritsman's comments on tradition, imitation & necessary originality remind me of some things in essays of terrific Moscow poet Mikhail Aizenberg.

Poetry is embodied speech, language brought close to ordinary conversation and then spun wildly around it. Embodied, embodied, not simply collected, collated, sorted through mandarin effete distortion-filters... thus these readings/performances last night offer a kind of test - a sort of partial & preliminary measure (& not the only one, by far) - of the poetry's substance, reality... (the real test residing in the hidden performance, maybe never actually heard out loud, of the poem's composition).

Mikhail Aizenberg an architect by profession, and you see in his critical writings this constant tension between poetry and rhetoric, between poetry and mechanical, learned, imitation-discourse (the "Leningrad School" his emblem for the false turn toward the latter) - poetry having some kind of inner form, the creative/intellectual/emotional/sensible gesture - a shape, an architecture, in-forming the language.

(Thus the interest in Vvedensky & the OBERIU poets' demolition of everyday speech & literary language etc. Maybe that all goes back to the Byzantine theological crisis-complex, the tense ambivalence between iconophilia & iconoclasm, between the symbol (word) and what it represents.)

"The body is the temple of the Spirit."

For Aizenberg, it seems, ordinary speech & ordinary experience offer the paradoxical, counter-intuitive substance or acid test for the authenticity of the inner unspoken architecture of the gesture... this shared communal language-space being the place where all the human motives for composition are integrated & achieve actuality.

(the section of Fontegaia posted yesterday is in part a response to a particular poem in Mikhail Aizenberg's book, Say Thank You.)

Some very interesting essays by Mikhail Aizenberg, on (relatively) recent history of poetry in Russia, translated in a special issue of Russian Studies in Literature (vol. 32, spring 1996). Moscow has a special perspective on the Petersburg poets. Aizenberg has some very acute things to say about a poetry of "direct response" - really new poetry - as opposed to a poetry of Poetry (contemporaries so overshadowed and awed by the "four horsemen" - Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Mandelstam - & Brodsky). He writes how the latter actually becomes a kind of "narrative" of the Tradition itself, which differs in kind from the immediate roots of lyric poetry (no matter how impoverished, banal, ordinary). Emphasizes that the zone where everything really important happens is in the interaction between everyday experience, ordinary speech, & the lyric impulse.

I'm paraphrasing mightily. Aizenberg (unlike myself) does not go in for windy discoursing, either - he talks very specifically about the poets around him & immediately before (most of them unknown to American readers).

JL on the Harriet Blog Lot, where I have been squawking. Get ready for the sea-change, sez St. George HG.

Reading Mikhail Aizenberg's Say Thank You. Like it a lot. Intriguing Mandelstamian under-overtones.