Elena Shvarts

Here is a link with some photographs and a short video from the funeral of Elena Shvarts.

i.m. Elena Shvarts

I was very sad to learn, late last night, that Elena Shvarts has died. I have a little icon of St. Michael in front of me, on my desk, which she gave to me on a visit to Providence once. We were in the habit of exchanging small things. I have a Peter the Great cigarette box... a little ceramic Russian bell... & I once gave her a treasured little blue-&-white painted toy bathtub boat, christened Sophie, which my mother had made for me as a child. For a long time I liked to think of it in her apt. window in Petersburg (before the terrible building fire, in which the little boat & many of her manuscripts went up in flames). I also gave her one of those Audobon "bird clocks", in which different birds sing the hours,because she had been so interested in the one we have in our kitchen here in Providence...

Elena also wrote some things in poems & stories about me, & I wrote some things about her... it all began years ago when I read her book, "Paradise" (put out by Bloodaxe Bks). Afterward I wrote a short & simple poem in response... & then to my utter wonderment discovered that a Providence friend of mine, Tom Epstein, was a close friend and literary collaborator with Elena. He was able to hand deliver my poem to her, in Petersburg.... & thus a friendship began. (I wrote a little about that long ago in a short essay in the magazine Witz).

Poetry, as I am learning these days from the philosopher Emanuel Levinas, is about Saying back to a sort of primal mutual co-responding, a language of loving commitment to another, or an Other... an unspoken love-gesture & suffering commitment, at the beginning of all things. & this is the substance of Personhood, & a sort of inner, secret joy of the universe... & for me this encounter with Elena Shvarts not only re-affirmed, & set a living seal upon, my longtime absorption with Russian poetry - but it represents a sort of partial acting-out or playing-out of what Levinas et al. are saying... I write this not in pride, but humility & gratitude.

So I wrote this simple imperfect poem today, a chapter in Lanthanum. & I am sad that I will not see Elena again. But maybe in some other life, some other form, someday...

9
in memory of Elena Shvarts

A wet March wind blows through this twilit day.
And two days ago, you were still on earth;
but not for long. A last soft breath... a yellow
moth through the blackened cypress frame of bay

window... gone. Once you were only a name
to me, far off there in Petersburg -
a name for shining black - & whispered
words, changed in translation. Your poem

touched me, then : its Russian humor,
humorous remorse, wry welcome to
life's dangling, ramshackle ways - the hobo's
leaking wounds, all the scrap iron of this early

spring weather... & so you leave me now,
dangling here : never able to read you
in the original, as I was rarely able to see you
in person, zdyes. Yet there's no wedding vow

so solemn and substantial as the flight
of those frail verse missiles we launched
across an Atlantic of salty estrangements -
since what began as mumbles in the night

found its embodiment in flesh. An echoing
embrace of free bird-sounds - feathered
& traced on curving flute-bone - tethered
in harmony... as if we were never going

to say goodbye. On chilly Prospect Street
one bold forsythia has launched light-petals
of sunny praise... harbinger of such mettle as
a woman figures, limping toward the vernal vault.

3.13.10

Curious thing... I just discovered (reading a bio in this month's Poetry magazine) that Elena Shvarts, whom I've been out of touch with for a while, has a new book out from Bloodaxe Books, in England. The title is Birdsong on the Seabed. & it makes me wonder : is she taking the title from this poem, which she addressed to me (it was originally published in Russian, in a book of hers in St. Petersburg - this is my own, probably-inaccurate translation) :

To the Poet Henry Gould in the City of Providence

At your time's perihelion
the bird-clock sings.
Strange hours on the wall - as
if Keats devised their workings.
When, over there, an owl
hoots, representing midnight,
here a raven drops a crust
beside my windowpane.
I myself am on the wane -
needle-thin, grown accurate,
wheezing over cheap tea in winter
sunlight, a pudgy nightingale.
He, in deep dark, without hope
- poet left alone with his icon,
still-ineffable loving brother -
offers his Promised Land…

Over the ocean, two birds feed
halfway - and where they salute,
fallen rooted to the sea-floor,
a pearl aches - ripening
under the hard bark of the waves.

*

I will have to get ahold of that book, & find out! p.s. the "bird-clock" she refers to is an Audubon Society singing clock (with different bird-calls for the hours), which I sent over to her, & which she seemed to enjoy. (I had to keep sending her battery replacements. & a new clock, after her apartment fire.)

*

p.s. next day : I WAS WRONG. Wishful thinking. Got ahold of the book. Title comes from an earlier poem by ES.

Reconsidering past writings... don't want to be too negative! Unless I have to be.

The long poems... in their context (with other like-minded long journey-poems or life-poems) - maybe, anyway, have their good points...

Reading more in & about Ezra Pound lately. Feel some connections between themes in later Cantos & what I'm trying to do or think about these days...

"can you enter the great acorn of light?"

Long time ago I wrote a longish poem called Spring Quartet, which actually included a kind of "ideogram"... it was a sketch of a small wooden toy bathtub boat, which my mother had made for me, christened "Sophie" - all white and light blue. In the center of the boat was an acorn. It was represented as sailing into Providence (the city)... eventually I gave the boat to Elena Shvarts (the Petersburgians have a serious historical thing about boats). It was destroyed several years later in a massive apartment fire in her building... I wish I'd taken a photo of that little toy.

I'm definitely in the Whitman endless-poem bunch. Interesting to me that Anny Ballardini is acquainted with Pound's daughter (Mary de Rachewiltz), over in Italy - and gave her a copy of our bilingual In RI.

Just one more thought on this for today. This contrast noted earlier between Crane's finish and the others' various ongoing (quasi-narrative, Wordsworthian) agons : how key this is to 20th-cent. aesthetics! (All the debates about "process", the autonomy (or lack thereof) of the art-object, etc.)

And I am reminded again of a remark made to me at a Russ-Amer poetry conference many years ago by Elena Shvarts (we were talking about how the Russians memorized their poems for recital) : "Russian poets compose the poem in their heads, then write it all down. Americans start writing, and it takes them a long time to finish, if they do."

And this notion of finish can perhaps be linked with the notions of the self-sustaining, free-standing image in Crane & Mandelstam et al. Which leads back, ultimately, perhaps, to the Byzantine tradition of the magnetic, charismatic icon.

Sailin' to Byzantium.

 III  (Sham Death of a Minor Shakespearean)


  
 "I die for the glory of the light and
 the majesty of Apollo!" – he cried
 – drifting slowly, fastidiously,
 to the floorboard bedside.

  
 Head flat against the hard oak
 neither he nor audience could tell
 if it was by his own hand
 or by another's, that he fell.

  
 Only that the heavy thunder, the light ringing
 washing through his skull was not applause,
 but penetrating phantom fingers
 of the black – sable – nurse of darkness.
      
                                  5.27.96

This is from Blackstone's Day-Book, the last book of Forth of July (published in The Rose, and also in Island Road). It's about what I've been talking about today; it's also about the poet Edwin Honig (Honig, Tom Epstein & I had dinner one night with Elena Shvarts in Providence. I think it was around my birthday. I'll post a section of the poem I read for them, which I had written for ES the night before).

 5


  
 You remember the stooped man from Brooklyn,
 Elena – limping (wounded) through cedars.
 The man with elephantine features,
 a crown of white hair, scarred... a nobleman,

  
 the only knight we knew.  Out of the black-ink
 melting pot of Septimania (marches of Spain
 tattooed with strange lettering – a written,
 walking tome or tomb).  We drink

  
 the black milk of these scored hoofprints,
 a bread of pain – we scourge the scriptures'
 breathless Word – of heaving sighs
 only (and faded into sand long since).

  
 The icon floats through a crane bone
 flute, and is only image or memento,
 crumb of madeleine... a slow tempo
 memorized long before music began –

  
 in the foam of stars, seeded through night
 like Abraham's offspring, or light manna
 slipped from pigeons' wings – lemony
 taste and flower-scent – white

  
 snow in the depths of blue taiga.
 Was with us for a while, a recapitulation
 of a capitan, a Makhir from Narbonne,
 or Barcelona – Kyot or Flegetanis – troubadour,

  
 star-gazer, man of letters.  Was profiled
 in the ink-black night, still shining bright
 beneath a long-gone W – his delicate
 Sabean bride... (Cassiopeia – distant, mild).

       
                         4.29.2000

Listened to some of the (NPR) radio commentary on Arthur Miller, r.i.p., after work. One of his friends had bought his house in Connecticut, where he wrote "Death of a Salesman". His friend described how he had built a special shack out in the back yard, because he felt this important work coming... he wrote the 1st act in 48 hrs straight, pacing around, mumbling to himself... it suddenly reminded me of what Siberian shamans do... (build a little hut away from it all)...

before that they played a 1995 interview with Miller, where he talked about the show he'd gone to with his mother, age 8, which taught him the power of theater...

which reminded me of Elena Shvarts' memoir, about her own theatrical baptism (Brothers Karamazov, in Kiev) (see archive a few wks ago)

see archive, "life is theater" etc.

See also archive about Anny Ballardini's trans. of In RI (the poem). About RI history & separation of church & state, etc. The people dramatized in The Crucible are my direct ancestors. The mother of the Putnam girls (who started the Salem witch craze) was Priscilla Gould, sister (daughter?) of Zaccheus, of Topsfield, my gr-etc-grandfather. Priscilla also happens to be a direct ancestor of Joseph Smith, of Mormon fame. "The pure products of America / go crazy".

Which brings me back to Providence, and Roger Williams...

and my own sub-sub-literary line of descent: Poe-Crane-Lovecraft-Gould. I'm going to write a detective story...

Elena Shvarts' memoir, Vidimaia Starona Zhizni, is made up of little 1-2 page sections. According to my Slavicist pal Tom Epstein, there's a section toward the middle about me. I'm a little nervous about reading it (I identify with those graphomaniac failed playwrights whose scripts her mother used to find hilarious) so I'm starting the book at the beginning, in Russian, which with me is pretty slow going.

The book was published in Petersburg a few years ago. It's a nice little red paperback. It took me a while to find a copy, through a Russ bkstore in Boston (Petropol).

Tom says Elena has also written a short story in which there's a character who resembles me named "Henry Silver". Then there's the poem about the seagulls meeting over the Atlantic, which I posted here in translation many moons ago.

So it's been a bit of a Russ-American literary game, when you think of all the versified epistles (epiphanies) I've sent her way.

St. Petersburg was modelled on Amsterdam (after a trip there by the young Czar Peter, incognito). E. Shvarts writes quite a bit about Venice & other diked locations. (thinking of the strange juxtaposition of the floodish poem just posted, & the tsunami.)

winter daydreams. VBA. this is from section of Grassblade Light titled "Letters to Elena".

24


 
Elena, in the pool of Solominka,
flickering upon that ceiling
where a ludicrous king
drifts in his cockleshell – hélas...

 
the water flows across the crown
of wooden beams and out
the window – a geyser, spouting
Noah’s antediluvian naiads (unknown

 
to man).  There to rejoin the river
(Neva land), and cycle back
past dike and sea-wrack
to the sea again... forever.

 
Some nomadic spiral of the ether,
compassing diurnal clockworks –
some field’s associated particles or
bedsprings of the universe (her

 
conch, loveseat or shofar, where
virtual affinities materialize –
supposedly).  But we will lionize
this plenum here below – sere

 
sheaf of arrowheads all-knotted –
strung together – admirable
petroglyph!  Your humble
servant, swept, translated

 
into history’s dustbin (a vacuum
cleaner?) and groaning in the cedar
dentist’s chair, calls out – Look there!
Look there! – as a canvas of the pneuma

 
– Gurdjieff?  Gesundtheit! – suddenly
unveiled itself – a sophic salience
sailed – into stony permanence!
and penetrating the meadowy

 
hypercubes where time does not run
its keel pealed like the bell of an onion’s
dominion, everywhere – someone’s
St. Michelson-Morley balsamic beam icon –

 
light wood, afloat – Chris Craft –
I saw the arc of its shadow overhead
and Frank will check too – he said
– renamed and thinly disguised – after

 
the ether returned as ore through the void
and (tweaked with energy) grew wildly
excited in a tableau of zeros – spiralling,
transmitted, pervading, perfuming the giddy

 
Hendrik B.G. Casimir plates so close together
that Umar Mohideen, Anushree Roy were
able, Madam, at last - I’m adamant – you’re
even – or... Odd Nerdrum we – eventually – are!

 
Odd Nerdrum – out of nothing – we!
Tableau – or tapestry!
And Steve K.
Lamoureux in Seattle – he

 
can prove it with his spinning plates!
And he will do that – as the triporia
separates all vibrations from the area,
and the keg or vessel percolates

 
across the semispheres and we cry
Noev Kovcheg Zaveta... or
Ave Venez Konch-Gato... and
as the lioness and the other beasts fly

 
faster than the human eye can see –
quicker than a quark – and we
fly with them – you and me (one
ultraviolet canoe makes three)–

 
and under the dark gilt of the giddy vault
you will not hear the sobbing of the seraphim
only the oratorio     Jerusalem, Jerusalem
as   the miniature ark lifts off   to float

 
suspended   in air
out of deep granaries
lifted   to play   sing
as children   everywhere

 
once nested in this knot of fire
never to be removed   nor remove
as from the pinnacle   a dove
comes spiralling   down,  here

 
hear   share   sheer   shores
wash   whoosh   whirrs
YHWHrrrrrshshsh...
she   flies...

 
out of my hands
the shadow of your flight
into the blue   becoming   night
and   beckoning toward...



           
                2.4.99

 
25
 
       ...Accolade thou dost bestow
       Of anonymity time cannot raise:
       Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

 
Paradise.  Orthogonal.  Yours, mine.
Orthodox, unorthodox – handmade
of the Lord, 90 degrees in the shade, and
all... a fingerpaint orthographer’s design.

 
Alpha and Omega, some anomaly or
salience – hidden well, buried in the rocks
of rough Armenia (where upside-down sticks
inside-out as well) until light pours

 
through carven crevice there... your
ear sees something whirling down:
anonymous, silly, like a clown
in love, a cartoon speech balloon - your

 
ecce homo, coming home.  Pre-branch,
pre-wind pre-word pre-sound pre-budding
preface of an angel’s deer-eyed brooding
dive... before a great pre-smiling avalanche

 
engulfs the playground once again, again again:
a dome of laughter in the air joins you
as tears dissolve into the ocean.  Go,
little bird... fly.

 
    *     *     *
    *     *     *
    *     *     *
    *     *     *

 
Paradise is a bird sanctuary now.
The path shines through the cedars.
He said – the Kingdom of God is yours.
The Rabbi – smiling, with the garden hoe.
                                      
                                  2.5.99

As I am reading in her memoir, E. Shvarts grew up around actors & the stage. Her mother was a script-reader & etc. for a major Petersburg theater.

"Ghenrik Gouldski" & "Yelena Karonska" star in : The L(love? language?)-Shaped Room !!!

that grey photo of grey syistra-golub Shvarts reminded me of Leslie Caron. I fell for her when I was about 10, watching "The L-Shaped Room" with my babysitter.

Is US poetry an L-shaped room?????? Open that window...

the young Elena Shvarts.

Am reading Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts' memoir, Vidimaia Starona Zhizni. In Russian! Horosho-whoopee!

Interesne link to some of her poems here.

Haven't perused Josh's most-recent report on the Z conference yet. But thinking of the focus on Zukofsky long-poem & gender questions.

*

The critic, the interpreter, seeks out a logical architecture (this leads from that). Necessary even for full aesthetic appreciation of a work.

*

Each poet's personal "tradition" hinges on those affinities with other poets, whose work inspired immediate love & admiration & desire to imitate. But perhaps underlying this process, lies something infused more tightly with both psychology & the character of poetry in general : ie., maybe what we love in the predecessor or the model, is the flicker or intimation of Paradise-Utopia, the lost equilibrium or childhood or Heaven or ecstatic state or spiritual beatitude or Peace at heart or Jubilee. . . & this is the charismatic or the perfect goal or quiddity hidden in poetry or faintly echoed or represented by poetry.

*

The epic is a literary game, representing the ultimate "return home". . . thus Joyce's Ulysses points emphatically to Homer; and underneath "Bloomsday" is a kind of apocalypse - a World-Day in which time stops & turns toward Joyce's particular image of happiness, blessedness.

*

It needs no repeating, that my "tradition" seems like Mandelstam closely joined by Hart Crane & Joyce. . . thus, for Joycean example, Forth of July hinges on many signal dates, and a particular date (4/7). . . aiming toward Jubilee. . .

*

& the logical architecture - if you want to read this 1000-pp poem as a nice short poem? 4 books in 2 Parts:
1. Stubborn Grew
2. The Rose;

or, dying & rebirth;
& built on what? Family dynamics. . . gender relations. . . ie. tragicomic love song (Orpheus).

The figure of Elena Shvarts as incarnation of the Russian Mandelstam-model;
the figure of Juliet as poetry ghost-bride of a lost-&-found (native) America;

- these are like variations on a theme, the theme of the abandoned Orpheus-poet harping on his losses & mistakes & dreaming of a vast reunion.

& this logical architecture in turn, to repeat, intimates or stems from or allegorizes the general action or character of poetry per se, poetry as a phenomenon (the flicker of a Paradisal state).

2. Letters to Elena. (Top right: Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts. Lower right: yours truly, with polar bear. Left: London, Greek neighborhood. Orthodox church in background. Street sign reads: "St. Petersburgh Mews")

Saw my friend Tom after work. He is just back from another trip to St. Petersburg, where he saw Elena Shvarts, who is living on an air mattress in her burnt-out apartment. She lost a lot of personal things & art work, but most of her manuscripts are safe. She is a bird-like (I mean really bird-like - under 5 ft, under 100 lbs) woman in her mid-50s. Her mother died a few months before the apt. fire.

Tom told some good Petersburg stories. Just before he left for there, he was in line at a car repair shop, and ahead of him in line was the other Tom Epstein in Providence, whom he had never met, who was also having a similar problem with his car. This is a Petersburgian happening.

Tom lent me a copy of Elena's prose book, Vidimaia Storona Zhizni (I will translate later). According to Tom, there's a story about me in it, disguised as a character named "Silver" (since she thinks of me as H. Gold). Looking forward to trying to read this...

[p.s. who knows, possibly she was referring to. . . - or maybe. . .]

I have a little souvenir icon (glued on particle board, the kind of thing you might find in a museum gift shop), which Elena Shvarts sent me once. She said it's St. Michael (& that "he will protect me"), but the image is clearly derived from the great byzantine Angel Gabriel icon, which the Met is using on its catalogue cover (shown at the link below).

(Now I see it is Michael, though. He's holding a sword, rather than a red wand (as in the Gabriel icon), and "Archangel Michael" is written in cyrillic over the top. But the figure is definitely derived from the earlier icon.)

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties : a good title for 20th-cent. poetics. I've met Lev Rubinstein a few times, & heard him perform at the Hoboken conferences (Russ-Amer poetry). He's quite slight, like a baby bird, about 5 ' tall. Elena Shvarts' twin, actually. (They don't eat enough over there, sadly, & they smoke too much.) Remember the two of them walking together up the NJ sidewalk in close conversation, like a couple of pigeons.

As Shvarts & Rubinstein, so Acmeism & Futurism. Not one without the other. (Stravinsky & Shostakovich?)

When I practiced piano on the old upright in the ancient blue-green living room, my back was directly facing the screen door (mentioned in previous poem). Heidi Johnson (blonde daughter of chicken farmer Dale) would usually be practicing too, across the street: sometimes we sent each other musical signals.