the rubles flow from here to there

SAND UNDERFOOT

A mouse ran across a bridge

one winter, in Leningrad –

his name was little Vlad.

He had a key, which was his badge.

He wanted to be Czar one day.

It made things easier.

When life got crazier

he took control – things were okay.

The rubles flow from here to there

in pockets of his underwear –

he makes a face, to scare

the other wolves (the sheep won’t dare).

He liquidated people in the way.

It wasn’t always easy...

Scotland Yard (like Stasi)

fingerpoints (Polonium 1-A).

The light flutes in another realm –

coral reef of seraphim

& monks on mountain rim

(Kievan polyphonic Argo-helm).

A scattershot of goldfinch tunes

or chords of Marian

sis-diva Anderson

lift off cimetière dunes

Pushkin or Berryman would know.

Sparse salty grass.

Sand underfoot, hélas.

A Black Sea seething, as of long ago.

8.28.18

in the whisper gallery

BROKEN SHELLS

My mater’s feet, that spun the heavy

wheel of Red Wing clay

dancing with gravity

to shape a starfish gaiety

for these galactic lunch plates, pink

& blue & white... her Ravlin

hands (out of that Iowan

earth Quaker Negus trunk)

were muddy with the garden soil

of Minneapolis-

St. Paul... O this

most plain midwestern gopher hole!

The soul stages a circus act

of spacy time, perchance –

her gyroscopic balance

tops an unknown Planet X, in fact

& dream.  Mary’s crafty fingers

rhymed those blue-&-white

starbeams with one fleet

bathtub tug... her name lingers

in flame & memory (Sophie).

Like Firebird in the Russian

symphony, my swan-

boat swallowed up Eternity

consumed by cigarette-smoke blaze

in Petersburg poet’s

birdnest (Elena Shvarts) –

pipestoned into a purple haze.

                   *

I pace your clay circumference

in sleep.  My blind alley

or whisper gallery

is domed – an acorn’s happiness

or Okie’s California – inward

mother-of-pearl, bent

parallactic as a mint

wrapper... green mirror-bird

soaring from rusty copper frame

into the theatre of sky.

Your crossroad, ply on ply

flexed on sine-wave of Ever-Same

& in the dust of the Ecclesiast

of human brokenness

inherited faiblesse

& all the suffering, from East to West

one mighty spindly tree, one pine

of cloudy poetry

swirls, fiddlehead – sea?

Transmodulation of the sign,

en face!  To pivot on the least

of these... gray wing

of Jonah, mutely lifting

from the broken shells... the Beast

stung by remorse (Guillem d’Orange)

– stick figure of the Son of Man

familiar, somehow – someone

you must have met, somewhere... étrange!

1.18.17

Memory is full of Providence

FALL STEPS

                           i.m. Henry Shelton

Fall steps softly to the door

beside the river now.

Memory, somehow

is full of Providence today – your

little hideaway of brave

adorable & free

spirits, whom to thee

were given – opening, wave on wave

sea-gates of joy & liberty.

Like that dear one

on Petersburg pontoon

floated to town – Elena, she

of the midnight sun – as if an emerald

kamen-ring of Gumilev

(tattooed ghost-brave)

stood there, incarnate – held

my hand, like Word made Flesh – began

to dance & sing; as if

Columba on his acorn skiff

arrived in New York harbor – shine,

Franco-Irish lantern – beam

your torch around the globe!

Moss-copper robe

whose folds encompass freedom’s dream

whose web of mutuality

is wind-blown sail

on cosmic Ocean trail

chaste vision of equality

                 *

tall northern pine who will prevail

like massive cedar tree

in Puget Sound   like she

who danced the Shaker upland trail

to soul freedom, with John Slocum

or Henry Shelton in

Rhode Eye   Franciscan

mule of social justice   plumb

spine of Blackstone’s Catholic Oak

or Williams’ open hand

give me your poor... stand

in my healing shade... Manitou spoke

on Wisdom’s dancing-wheel of joy!

& my hoarse scar-tattoo

on Queequeg’s silver-blue

casket – my burbled Jaybird cry,

confessional – only an ochre scratch

on earliest cave-wall;

only a golden ball

of Ariadne-wool, wet sheepish match

balled-up by selfishness.  Who lit out

for that stony kingdom –

ancient Big Rock Mountain,

deeper firmament, beneath the shout

of pokey politics – that Cosmosphere

of lovingkindness, where

the soul finds Primavera air

& breathes... & sighs... & lives forever.

9.23.16

4th of July, Providence harbor

A missive from Petropolis

DEAD RECKONING

In the clear winter light, the bright life

swings through memory

like steady Mississippi

viewed from a bridge.  My wife,

whispers a tottery unknown Schweik,

hugging his beloved

flak-jacket (bullet-

holes & all) – Maya Jhenna, that Mike

mumbles to Neva (ghost of a muzhik-

moosh)... my shining

inkling, engravening wing-

back turtledove... (nuncle be sick).

Awhile soul clap in jail, this bird

will penetrate the day –

a wormhole P-Jay,

serpentine (heart’s own sail-shroud).

Like Raven, still criss-crowing

over Noah’s bobble-head –

whose flinty beak’s dead

reckoning will note the gorgeous

hillside, blooming afar, over the sea –

so that prophetic castaway

(Hobo-Jonah) will play

black Orpheus to Coulombe-Bee;

a missive from Petropolis

(long-axled hasp)

plumbs Negrepontis –

limns Clio’s last golden gasp.

2.9.16

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : Russia (label : subject/Russia).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

byt, Futurism, Glazov-Corrigan, Potebnia, Russian Ark, Russian art, Tom Epstein, translations, Tsvetaeva...

Jonathan offered a fine reading of Frost sonnet yesterday (5/18) ("Never Again Would the Birds' Song Be the Same").

Just got an email from Elena Shvarts : singing bird-clock arrived safely in St. Petersburg.

Sent another bird-clock to Elena Shvarts in St. Petersburg. Apparently she had a fire in her building, lost a lot of books & personal things, including the bird-clock & little blue & white wooden bathtub ocean liner, Sophie, which my mother had made 50 years ago.

[p.s. addendum, 5.18.07 : years later, my mother's wooden boat was lost forever in a major fire in Elena Shvarts' apt. Ah, Russia!]

I've quoted quite a bit this cold January from "Letters to Elena", retracing that 5-yr-old snow-trail. Soon we may continue into the delta mysteries of ch. 3, "Palm Sunday". yup. & we haven't even talked about July yet. ("The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J." - Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift)

from "Letters", the conclusion:

 
                          *

  
         It is finished.  The dove will not return
 to the empty sanctuary.  My blue pines,
 my frozen childhood firs... a saw whines,
 a wolf howls, Elena, in that forsaken

  
         garden.  I whisper to myself alone,
 I say.  Just then – the darkness wanes.
 Gratitude swells... through windowpanes,
 the shadow of a hand grows light toward dawn.


 
                                   Providence
                           2.5.99

from Grassblade Light (ch. 2, "Letters to Elena"). written 5 yrs ago. the "star of free speech" : a leading Petersburg democrat & feminist, assassinated as she returned home from work.

         14


  
         It's cold here, Elena.  Almost like Minnesota.
 It must be cold where you are too, and dark.
 Where a star of free speech fell – look,
 she breathes... no more.  At her own door.

  
         Like More, or Marlowe, murdered for a candle.
 Free mind, flown out the window, gone.
 And now the sun is gliding down.  In
 honeycomb cubbyholes you bundle

  
         up, bound tight around the spindle
 of Aurora Borealis.  And wound
 upon wound, as mummy-cloths are wound...
 the spiral tunnels into Shakespeare's wonder-

  
         brain... an unknown worm or summer soldier
 wintering through night upon a polar sledge.
 Against this tested light what need to rage
 – is only a promise.  Only a promise.  Dear

  
         limping leg of the stony trail toward Lent,
 dear crutch, dear rhyme-enfrosted heart!
 At midnight we shall pilgrimage (start
 now, in PJ's) toward the dark tent

  
         of heaven.  Yoked with uncertain
 flutters planted there – each
 crossroad underwritten – search
 your own mosaic microcosm!  Then

  
         into the black stone of Jerusalem,
 where blind eyes and seeing fingers
 hear, feel the running waters – tumble,
 froth – break forth – gush forth for them.


       
                                       1.30.99

from "Letters to Elena" (Grassblade Light, ch. 2). sort of an orphic credo.

         12


  
         A child playing in muddy Paradise.
 Lost in the mudpies there between her legs.
 Where a word is a profile, and a dog's
 cocked ear is the letter J, sideways –

  
         or upside-down.  Your birthday
 every day, under the clean azure U:
 no harm shall befall you,
 says the fortune cookie

  
         oracle.  In the shadow of a little tree
 it all comes back to me – you too.
 This balm, this grief, these nettles,
 this rue – light lives and heavy

  
         dyings – as though we were all coracles
 of hide and willow branches, all sails,
 all canvas – from earliest first
 bells, launched – infant disciples

  
         summoned to swim toward the shy
 vortex of the shadiest voice.
 To carry the freight of despairs
 toward... how can I say it?

  
         One almond eye.  Noah's canoe –
 lashed forever to your own eyelashes
 in the morning mirror.  Hush.
 A curving ellipse will show

  
         how the crown of child's play becomes you.
 Wear it (your diadem) in truth –
 while buried root and blossom both
 from the muddy earth are borne anew.


       
                                  1.30.99

In the same way that Mandelstam/Aristotle's "law of identity" (A = A) marks the tautology of a universe in which Word=Love=Cosmos, the "Orpheus/Eurydice" romance adumbrates or narrates a reality brought back to life by song (Orpheus' lyre caused stones & lambs & lions etc. to sing together) : just as poetry invites its listener into a "Now" of loving creative play. So for the infinitely hungry "Henry" of Forth of July, Mandelstamian Russia is reborn, re-incarnated in the Petersburg (city of the "Midnight Sun") poet Elena Shvarts (etymologically, "shining black") - the heiress of Russia's "black sun" (cf. Mandelstam), Pushkin. The hunt for "Pushkin the black cat" leads through Bluejay back to Petersburg (by a roundabout route).

from the 2nd chapter of Grassblade Light, "Letters to Elena":

         10


  
         Pushkin's catgut stretches taut
 across the wood.  From here to there
 it's a walking game (your
 move, Beatrice).  Astigmatism taught

  
         you better than they knew : Jerusalem
 both here and there.  Many thousand gone,
         one just begun, my Lord.  Is just begun.
 Body and soul, tourist-pilgrim,

  
         heart-mind, lover-beloved,
 promise-desire, shroud-ark...
 Elena, nightmares of the shark
 will never shake your silhouetted

  
         chariot's erratic circuits over Venice
 (like a spiral J at sunset).  East
 to west.  Human-beast,
 animal-flower, water-stone.  Finis.

  
         And a wave-curve emerges
 continuously out of these
 reflections as
 the blurred eye sees

  
         and the blind eyes feel
 and in the adjacent niche
 the icon's eyes reach
 forward toward you... seal

  
         that endless enigma of longing
 sin remorse and imperfection.
 All is resurrection now – and
 a slow walk toward spring.


      
                                    1.25.99

[note: human-beast, animal-flower, etc., and the "circuits over Venice", refer to 3 famous Shvarts poems, "Elegy on the Cardinal Points", "Animal-Flower", and "The Virgin Rides on Venice, and I on Her Back", available in English in the Bloodaxe selection of her work, Paradise.)

Here's the text in translation:

All three of my peaks glance upward;
a gentle triocular cupola is crowned;
and in sharp-edged empyreal beams
someone rotates around.

They are like three wells. . . and water
will suddenly swim to the brink of mutiny;
whenever a pail is lowered in, it must be
very carefully, very tenderly.



(I liked the way "empyreal" puns on "imperial", since this is, in a sense - if I'm right about the Streltsy theory - a meditation on the Moscow/Petersburg relationship : Petersburg the imperial western outpost, Moscow the mother-city, the home of the old religion : all of this enCAPsulated in the microcosm of the poet's trinitarian scalp. It fits well with the employment of the word "mutiny" in the 2nd stanza; also with Shvarts' famous tendency to mingle the spiritual/personal/erotic : the last stanza is somewhat "Greek" (Orthodox) in its Sapphic-erotic & concise undertones.)

"circumference" (ED via Shkspr's Head)

audblog audio post

My amateur translation, published in Nedge #4 (translation issue). When I was working on this I was reading a biography of Peter the Great. The image of "someone rotates around" brought to mind the mutiny of the Streltsy, Muscovite elite soldiers who rebelled against Peter in favor of his sister, and who were executed by hanging outside her (home confinement) bay windows. I learned later that the "three peaks" referred to the three swirls, or widow's peaks (rather unusual) in ES's own hair - which she relates to contemplative Trinitarian "eyes" in the top of her head, a cupola (Byzantine architecture, curve of eyes & eyebrows very prominent in Mandelstam's oeuvre). cf. earlier blog notes on circumference, microcosm, "Shakespeare's Head".

audblog audio post

Untitled octet by Elena Shvarts (her name means "shining black" in Grk-Ger-Rus-Indo : insignia of her native city, the yellow-black eagle flag, the white nights), read very amateurishly by c'est moi. 1994, from her book "Birdsongs from the Golden Sea"(?) published by Pushkin House in 1995.

Anastasios, asking me to respond to a news article about shifting Bush Administration positions on the nature & extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Before the war, I defended it, here on the blog & on poetry lists; I let my forensic instincts have their way. One motive for doing that was my sense that poets were opposing the war in a knee-jerk manner, a reflexive anti-government attitude which had little to do with the actuality before us. This reactive attitude degrades the role of poetry too. Of course there are lots of roles for poetry. There are always the new new brutalists & the advocates of toy poetry, finding ever-new ways to celebrate poetry-as-subculture & cottage industry.

I'm not against this, don't get me wrong. It's just that walking around Providence last night in the spooky moist spring haze, with all the cherry trees & magnolias & azaleas flowering, thinking about my crumblous, desiccated "career" in poetry, I felt the ever-recurrent determination that a poet must try to speak to public questions, face the pressure of the time & articulate it in the poetry & the essays. The models that came to mind were Auden & Brodsky. I know so well how alien this & these models sound to the nuvo-bohos of the bloggy set.

So, you will say, isn't that what we are doing? No, it is not. I guess I would go back to early days of this blog where I was writing about "metaform". I think poets have to find ways to synthesize & correlate & enunciate a coherent & capacious RESPONSE to the issues facing the world. I like the way Joe Duemer seems to be aware of this, though we disagree on the politics a lot. But a POETRY-response is not yelling on the internet or protesting in the streets or even pamphleteering, even though these things also have their inherent poetry!!!

What comes to mind for me again anyway is also this notion of the "literary absolute". Have been thinking lately that maybe it's analogous to Georg Cantor's & Godel's notion of infinity & the "continuum problem" & the "incompleteness axiom" (if I've got that right). There are these different levels of mathematical reality, and some levels are incommensurate - sort of unapproachable - using the tools inside particular "ordinary" systems of math. So I think of the literary absolute as this poetic capability - a synthetic articulation - which is incommensurate with both the ordinary levels of talent & desire to write, and with the coordinates of the literary industry & all its subcultures. Another aspect of "Pushkinism"?? Is this a flanking chess move?? But do we perhaps NEED some such concept (literary absolute) if we want to maintain a "normative" literary-civilizational culture? Do we want to maintain such a thing? Do Americans even understand or accept the notion of "normative", sustainable culture or civilization? Sustainable would have to include self-critical, dedicated to an ethical absolute (not the same as the literary absolute, but maybe analogous).

An aside : took home from the library Elena Shvarts' 2-vol collected poems, published in Petersburg. Old-fashioned 19th-cent. heft of the volumes. Looking at her lines with their hieratic Cyrillic, their bold but firm syntax, dashes & periods. Oddly, the poem I opened the book to was titled "Poetica : More Geometrico" ("more" - sea? death? method?). Mathematical literary absolute a kind of authoritative articulation of Person-in-Civilization, an image at the root of liberal education. . . AND beneath this the notion of absolute devotion/vocation to THIS line, THIS phrase, THIS text & no other : the finality of writing : inescapable, uncanny aspect of the literary absolute (see Emily Dickinson). Mandelstam [paraphrasing] : "reading the poem we enter into & share the poet's death". Poetry is serious, serious fun. Frost : "a game with mortal stakes".

Anastasios must be thinking I'm evading his question. WAS THIS WAR JUSTIFIED? I don't know. . . it seems too early to base such a judgement on the current results of WMD search. I feel like my mother, who told me she wanted to keep her mouth shut (hard for her) at the neighborhood coffee get-togethers, because she felt so oddly unconflicted & optimistic about the war in Iraq, & this was very out of step with Minneapolis opinion (not I suppose with Dallas opinion though).

Across my desk :

new 2-vol selected poems by Elena Shvarts, published in Petersburg by Pushkin Publ. Wish I could read it more easily ! But it will be good practice.

found 2 more Shvarts translations (the first one seems like a commentary on my note this morning). (Russian-readers, forgive my errors please!)


from Zapadno-Vostochni Veter, p. 26-27


ALCHEMIST'S DAWN

With spiritual abstinence I guide my age,
with radiant intellect. But often I get drunk.
A bird suddenly rushes and falls,
a cold blue eye hangs over nothing.
I go through nigredo - my soul awakens:
again the bird sprouts wings on the wall,
her candescent flight flaring in the gloom.
She is within - where her light is hidden.
She fills my soul (a rounded retort)
with fiery matter - but she won't
give birth. Both angel and devil, she
herself was born to experience miracles.

1995






Blinded, these northern nights
look down into a courtyard well,
drag slowly from the depths
a pail. . . and chi vedra,
they carry it off to the heights:
Petersburg dust at the bottom,
three-day-old fish, books, mice,
an ancient janitor's axe.
They gaze at candles in people's
windows, hundreds of them:
luminous quiet multitudes
in the city left empty.


1996


[This image of the pail from the well recurs in other poems; makes me think of the Voronezh lyric of Mandelstam which begins "I was washing up in the courtyard"]

Angels considered as projected images of the soul.
A little flighty firebird, elusive.
Your quiddity.
That we live in a Byzantine, wooden-icon reality?


Here's an untitled poem by Elena Shvarts, translated (probably mistakenly) by me :


Why, here in this dust,
don't I say "you" and "I"?
A bit of flint given life
gleams dimly out of death.
When light blazed near
I might have dared the sun,
crying - Burn me, dear!
You - my body! Here I am!
But I'm no windmill
and he's grinding me already -
my landlord, shrouded
beneath this decaying shell.

1996

[I remember her telling me in Hoboken once how interested she was in Baudelaire.]

I read many of the poetry blogs every day, some of which are listed to the left.

The trip in fall 2000 to Tuscany with Sarah, Beth & Caroline (from Norwich CT), & Arnold (from Amersfoort). I was walking around in Florence, in the district with all the plaques commemorating Dante's early life - was across the street from the little church (at that time enveloped in construction) where for the 1st time he beheld Beatrice. Suddenly a young woman in a white bridal dress came around the corner, walking toward a young man, followed by a small crowd - they embraced in front of the church doors - a wedding in progress.

Vita Nuova. I have posted many an old poem on hgpoetics: here is a recent poem (written today, actually). Part of a woik in pwogwess titled Time Flowers: an effort to tie together unfinished strands in the long poem Forth of July. Some background might help here. Last Saturday morning I went to the Met to see the big exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci sketches. I left about 12:15; learned that evening that Elena Shvarts (see previous blog entries) had come to see the same show around noon (see her poem "Leonardo" in her Paradise (publ. by Bloodaxe Press). Anyway, the phrase "there (in Tuscany)" is an echo of Mandelstam's Voronezh poem, the last stanza of which (trans. by James Greene):

I'm ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.

(I still prefer the David McDuff versions, but these are pretty good. M's Voronezh ('raven-knife") a mirror image of Ojibwa midwest)

Now you have to refer back to blog of a couple days ago where I talked about the humanizing of reality through the microcosm (the Whitman-world, the Proust-world) and you have to understand that the impulse of the following section of Time Flowers (from a chapter called "At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head") was that I was pondering this idea of the Person humanizing with human warmth & idiosyncrasy the wholeness of reality - epitomized by Leonardo's immaculate, obsessive, open-minded SKETCHING, observation, handiwork.

I was also remembering Elena's comments at dinner about her "mapping" poem (The Cardinal Points) & the shock of the Challenger crash, & quoting Maria Brodsky's quoting of Inferno xxvi, and Montale's repeated motif of the LP record of time & reality (see Arrowsmith notes to translation of Storm & Other Things on this) & the notion of angelic time as a continuous eternal re-enactment or re-viving in a different dimension, & Anastasios' comment about the isometric relation between Nacogdoches & Tigris/Euphrates. . .

from TIME FLOWERS

II - At the Sign of Shakespeare's Head

11

to E.S.

Left-handed Leonardo improvises,
a palimpsest of ink-scratches and quotes,
unfinished sketches. From those notes
(from lean-bent angel-Byzant faces)

virgin hills triangulate in flesh
inimitable features, there (in Tuscany).
From incommensurate to harmony
(estranged will and strangled wish,

ugly mug and evanescence)
eye and hand combine - unite;
so we imagine a distant star might
blossom like a planet's orbit (Venus) -

so we might hear a planet whisper,
or a dear star (empalmed in your ear).

*

All we needed, already seeded in Eden:
consider, foolish counselors - what then?

The tarada Columbia flares overhead,
seven burning souls (who left their mark
shaped like a tiger or a ewe) embark
to ineffable nether time (veiled, mangered) -

slight white scratch in the long LP
over the delta of the Nacogdoches,
microgroove in a nest of destinies,
children of immersions, buoyancy

not born for brutality, but virtue,
not fear, but trust and fortitude -
a bright star-seed (both goal and goad)
near farm in angel-time (come true).

2.3.03


further notes: "a planet's orbit": see bird's eye view of orbit of Venus in Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles, by James Ferguson (1799). the track of Venus' orbit looks like a flower blossom. "Tarada" is a kind of long canoe formerly used by the so-called "Swamp Arabs" at the delta of Tigris & Euphrates. "Foolish counselors": cf. the judgement on Ulysses (Inferno xxvi). Unable to do the accent grave over estranged & empalmed. Last line of 1st section should be read as "or a DEAR STAR" (affects rhythm). cf. again for the meaning of this poem Elena Shvarts' comment about her poem & the "only direction left" (up): in relation to the notion of angelic time as an actual time-warp in which angels reconstitute, recapitulate, resurrect, & relive human time, in some kind of continuum we don't yet understand. Fare forward, voyagers. "poetry is news".

On Saturday, thanks to Tom Epstein, I was able to get a ticket for the 2nd night of Russian poetry at Alice Tully, in the Rose reading room (a beautiful auditorium at night - 2 walls of windows, low lighting on stage, high ceilings - you felt like you were in a planetarium or outside).

Had dinner at Poona on 72nd St beforehand with Tom & Elena Shvarts. Telling them about the lecture on Russian "underground" poetry of 70s-90s given earlier in the day by Mikhaill Iampolski. Very clear well-organized presentation; he talked about the Petersburg poets, the Moscow poets; the "keepers of the (high culture poetry) flame" and the egalitarian, anti-tradition, anti-"art" postmodernist conceptualists, the "idiot school" of poetry. Very interesting, & he confessed his bias toward the latter end of the spectrum.

Told Elena what he had said about her reading Fri. night (which I missed) & her poem "Cardinal Points", where she maps out the cosmos on/through her body. She said (all in Russian, Tom patiently translating) that she had a new understanding of that poem while she read it Friday. Said something about how in this life we are destined to be torn to pieces in the "4 directions" leaving only one direction of access, straight up...
which was strange, since none of us at the point had heard about the Challenger crash - we went from dinner to the reading, & Joseph Brodsky's widow (Maria Brodsky) opened the program with a brief eulogy - quoted some apropos lines from Dante (Inferno XXVI l. 112):

Brothers, I said, o you who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.

During the reading they played recordings of Pasternak, mandelstam & Tsvetaeva (? or a reader) reciting. Never heard Mandelstam's voice before. Like a brave piping little bird - sort of a comic-brave intonation - Chaplinesque, it seemed! But similar to Pasternak in that the grid of meter & rhyme like a cage for this really wild musical recitation - inherent in the language but so different from the flat intonation of American poets - more like old recordings I've heard of Pound & yeats, but more varied pitch.

The quality of the poems - I mean the three old recordings - you understand M's notion that poetry is a visceral healing force - what Whitman must have sounded like sometimes. Hard to explain : it's the voice of poetry HUMANIZING reality - through shared/transcended suffering & happiness - turning it into song & art. The notion that a person personalizes reality - a Proust-world, a Whitman-world, an Akhmatova-world - & this personal cosmos comes through in the voice - but as it becomes Everyperson, universal - not one or the other but both.

This universalizing of the poetry image or statement must have a name - Aristotle I guess thought it was what differentiated poetry from history - the universal in the particular. But it's not an abstract thing - it's the universal through the personal human voice achieving a particular poetic statment like a victory against inimical forces. & people understand it immediately, share it as an experience known. It is an EVENT, not chit-chat; it is selfless experience, or an emptying, not "motivated". Dante's notion that poetry is renunciation.

The distance necessary to evoke/imagine/invent/be inspired this kind of special speech. Silence & inwardness.

Talking & thinking are not the same. Poetry & club talk are 2 different things. It was good to go to Russia for an evening.