the sense of being right

Stray thoughts of a stray dog, this afternoon...   Have been reading the translation of Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov, a sober, concise, and poignant biography.  Came upon this passage, quoting a letter (written to his wife in the spring of 1935) of Sergei Rudakov, a writer who spent some time with the Mandelstams during their exile in Voronezh.  Rudakov :

"I have never seen anything like this in my life... At a distance it is impossible to measure or relate.  I am standing before a working mechanism (perhaps even organism - it would be the same) of poetry.  I see the same thing as in myself, though in the hands of a genius, which will mean much more than it is possible to understand now.  There is no human anymore - there is Michelangelo...  For the sake of 4 lines, literally 400 are pronounced.  He does not see anything.  He does not remember that some of these lines belong to his earlier poems and repeats these lines again.  Then by eschewing the old lines he creates new poems." (Mandelstam, p. 144)

Anna Akhmatova's memoirs are then quoted, reflecting on the same period : "It is amazing that the sense of space, breadth, deep breathing appeared in Mandelstam's poetry in Voronezh, when he was not at all free."

There are several statements here worth pondering.  I just want to focus on what they triggered in my thoughts.  First is Rudakov's impression of the "biological organism" at work.  The sense I have here is of an artist who has ripened and sharpened his talent over a lifetime.  This is not a dilettante, but a kind of word-sculptor ("Michelangelo"), who is refining - in compositional "real time", so to speak - his own conception of Russian poetry as a totality, and his own individual idiom, purpose & sense of occasion - within the theatre of creation which is the making of the particular poem.

Secondly, these pages got me thinking about works of art & poetry as monuments, turning points, as benchmarks of cultural refinement.  As great expressive achievements : quintessential, incomparable.

This sort of window on poetry seems unfashionable these days.  We don't think of poems (or poets) as "rare" : in fact we go out of our way to encourage everyone to be a poet.  We don't understand this picture - a poet composing out loud, not writing anything down - reciting 400 lines in order to melt them down to four.  The whole idea is alien to us.

Poetry today is nothing if not transitive, direct, colloquial, and above all informal.  Every line is a throwaway line.  Every line is a "hook."  Even our current "experimental", formalist poets lay out their organizing principles very explicitly,  as if on a blueprint, or as a Powerpoint presentation.  We are meant to see & appreciate exactly how A leads to B.

Difficulty is conceptualized as "technical difficulty".  Poetry is evaluated by the sharpness or effectiveness of its rhetorical weapons.

This is not to deny that sharp, effective rhetoric has not always been a part of poetry.  But what's missing in art & poetry today (in large part, if not everywhere) is some kind of elusive spiritual dimension.  The strange epileptic seizures or fits of passionate composition which we behold in Mandelstam should be understood as the culmination of decades of committed labor at his craft; yet they must also be seen as Mandelstam's own conscious submission to the wave of inspiration.  He cannot fully control what he is making, because it is happening out of the improvisatory process itself; and yet it is guided by a kind of overall sense of wholeness or cultural mission - a critical sense - which shapes and informs his artistic "oracles".

Mandelstam refines 4 lines out of 400 lines because he senses he is not just writing "for himself" but is composing something which has objective meaning for the Russian people as a whole, and perhaps for humanity as a whole.  Poetry is not solely a private egotistical achievement, but is part of a vow, a "commission", to produce these integral, free-standing objects or monuments of harmonic song.  They belong to everyone, and he is somehow aware of this, and his awareness reinforces his effort to sing it exactly right.

This is perhaps one interpretation of the retort Mandelstam offered, when asked by an apparatchik interviewer for his "definition of poetry."  Mandelstam simply replied : "the poet's sense of being right."

Where do we find this sense of mission in American poetry?  Where do we find a poet relinquishing the calculations of rhetorical guile, and submitting to a more profound source of inspiration?  Where do we find a poet refining & refining lines out of an obscure sense of enunciation, of oracular speech?

I'm not arguing such poetry is not out there in America now.  I just think perhaps it's a little hard to find, under the unceasing bombardment (from what Mandelstam called "the horde of scribblers") of easygoing, unctuous, smarmy, clever, cozening, glib, prosaic, tossed-off, complacent, shallow, and trivial so-called works which offer themselves to the public in the name of poetry.

The Best Translation of Akhmatova's Epigram

Anthony Madrid is one of those rare birds who listens in to the fine mesh of subtle rhetoric, syntax, metrics & style - the nano-landscape - of poems.  His brief article on translation & Akhmatova's famous sarcastic epigram, just published at the Paris Review website,  is a good example.

I think perhaps he slightly exaggerates the difference in tone between the first and second halves of the quatrain.  Akhmatova's powerful persona could mediate & blend both the archaizing poetickal "high style" of the first half, with the earthy directness of the second : she did this often.  Her poems are littered with the Ancient Greats, not merely as references or allusions, but by direct address : she could "naturalize" the most magisterial, heightened, exalted strains.  Still, I think he is correct & perceptive to note the satire on traditional patronizing male attitudes toward female poets.

Here's my own version of the epigram into English.  I reckon I have preserved something of the original meter & rhyme-scheme.  I have a little more Russian than Anthony, I think - though not much more; & anyway that's no guarantee of a better translation.  I just happen to think mine is the best.

Could Beatrice like Dante compose?

Or Laura glorify Love's fiery rose?
I taught the women how speech flows...
but how to shut them up - God knows!

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...

Ars Interpres, online. Lots of curious fine things in there.

I should probably keep working on that little translation. What's hard to get, among other things, is the balance in both syntax (so different in Russian) & versification. But it may be too much for me. I sort of like it as is, though it has none of the original's delicate syncopation. Nor did I get the rhymes right.

& there's probably a vast field of tone & implication of which I am completely unaware. Fools rush in where Russians laugh to read.

SELF-PORTRAIT

 
In the uplifted forehead, a winged
suggestion.  But the coat looks awkward.
There's a hideout of pure impulse
in closed eyes, an arm's repose.

 
Here is one who floats and chants -
his word become ductile flame
in order to overcome inborn
clumsiness with innate rhythm.

- Osip Mandelstam (1931).
(provisional trans. by yrs truly)

(M. wrote some variations on this, in a series of little poems addressed to a goldfinch - kind of a personal emblem.)

New book from Spuyten Duyvil by Russia-borne poet Regina Derieva. I'm going to check into it.

Plus I need to start listening to my Russian tapes again. Elena Shvarts has been waiting ten years (in my mind) for me to learn the language.

Hey ! Finally, the cavalry shows up! A Russian to the rescue!

(Though I think Igor's a little too hard on the late Brodsky. There's interesting stuff going on. See one of his very later poems, published in the New Yorker. A paranoid Mandelstam ode, at the frizzed end of an LSD hair day.)

Brent Cunningham posted this in one of the comment boxes below:

"I wanted to express some doubt that you could support what seems to be a component of your counter-argument to Ron, namely the idea that the Futurists weren't a central influence on the Formalists. Shklovsky anyway never misses a chance to champion Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky especially, & does connect the formalist method of literary analysis to futurist compositional strategies--this is very clear in VS's Mayakovsky & His Circle (where he writes "I was a Futurist at that time," i.e. 1915) and elsewhere. I'd say the Formalists analyze Doestoevsky or Pushkin as application of their method, but the method itself finds much inspiration in Futurist principles: the valuing of science and the mechanical, the sense of the primacy of component parts, the contempt for Symbolist mystification and transcendence, and also just personal friendship with that older generation. Tho he is maybe not a formalist (tho in many ways a formalist-linguist perhaps?), Roman Jakobsen's My Futurist Years also makes clear the personal and intellectual effect Mayakovsky had on his immediate circle.

Certainly, there was more to it than Ron's crib--yes, naturally formalists intervention in lit crit took place in a different field, where there was a different history and different figures and different debates, etc., that's all true--but for a thumbnail it's not far: Futurism, and Mayakovsky looming as its main figure, was really the great tributary into Formalism, and provided much of the social and tactical inspiration.

Ron's sense of connection between Russian Formalism and the New Critics is, as you suggest, much more debatable. But at the same time it is quite striking, as one goes along reading Shklovsky or Tynanov, to run across so many ideas that are deeply resonant with positions held by Brooks or Warren etc. despite the difference in their politics. Ewa Thompson has a whole book on this from 1971 that is worth looking at."

This is a serious challenge, & it got me to go down to the library today & look into the history of Russian Formalism - for which I'm grateful to Brent. And, after looking at some of the scholarly work on this, I have to agree that the Futurist poets, primarily Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, were closely affiliated with the Russ. Formalists - at least, with some of them - during their early (pre-Soviet) years. The Moscow wing was closer to the Futurists - the circle in Petersburg, however - primarily Boris Eikhenbaum - seem to have been more interested in the Acmeists.

However, these issues are extremely complicated. "Thumbnails" - mine included - easily become reductive distortions. It would be a mistake to project a kind of genetic or domino-theory description of the emergence of Formalism out of Futurism. Many of the ideas which the Futurists & Formalists shared - about the emphasis on the signifier, the autonomy of art from biography or social sentiment etc. - were in the air : one only has to point to the parallel genesis of abstraction in the visual arts during the same period. Moreover, even some of the most "avant-garde" Futurist assertions about the nature of poetry actually echo trends from the fin-de-siecle & decadent-symbolist styles which preceded them. (There's a good monograph on this topic, which I will try to locate.)

In other words, it would be a mistake to look at Mayakovsky as the "father" of the critical movement known as formalism. The poets & the critics shared some common interests and judgements, for a time. Then the critics moved on to refine & apply their theories to literature at large; and both movements traveled toward eventual destruction by Stalinism & soviet realism in the 30s.

So I will have to withdraw, partially, #1 of my proposed list of necessary logical props for Ron's original statement. But #2-4 still stand. First, the New Criticism and Russian Formalism are better described as parallel 20th-century developments, than as a genetic development of the former from the latter. Second, the relation between the New Criticism and Ron's School of Quietude is murky at best : if he's going to argue that the (soi-disant) School of Quietude has "nc roots", then he might as well say that Language Poetry does, too. Thirdly, to label poets like Auden or Lowell as among Brodsky's "School o'Quietude friends" is to misrepresent their work. Auden's neoclassical, social poetry displays the antithesis of New Critical dicta; Lowell's work, after Life Studies, differentiates itself also - toward autobiography, documentary, social chronicle.

All this nit-picking is out of proportion to the sheer nonsense of Ron's "thumbnail" depiction of Brodsky's career, these ersatz ironies. But if it leads myself and others toward a more detailed investigation of Russian poetics & literary history, I have him & Brent to thank. & I find it continually curious to have these debates, with their very faint and distended echoes of the original battles between Symbolist & Acmeist, Acmeist & Futurist, Potebnia-disciples & Formalists. What's ironic to me is that the debate takes place in the context of one of Ron's thumbnail biographical profiles (in which he specializes on his blog) : ie., the topic is molded, not by the literary, philosophical, philological or compositional problems in themselves, but by an author biography. Now this gets back to Kent Johnson's liminal presence in these debates, the way he harks back to ancient quarrels & hurt feelings on a Langpo trip to Leningrad, decades ago... because, considering the emphasis of the Futurists on the "word itself" - Khlebnikov's & Mayakovsky's insistence on the obliteration of the "author biography", the idea that "the poem is the only hero", and the poem itself is just "words as SOUNDS" (zaum) - when you get into this territory, you are getting into Kent Johnson territory : which is to say - away with these "thumbnail" promotion-demotions of individual writers!

So, in an odd & fairly primitive & definitely anachronistic American way, KJ & RS & HG are replaying Futurist/Acmeist debates. The Futurist demotion - in fact their scornful obliteration - of the bourgeois "author principle" & "literary tradition", played (for a while) into the hands of the general Russian-revolutionary zeitgeist - until their time of usefulness to the regime had passed. But the usefulness of such a demotion is still visible in the postmodern poetics coming out of Langpo and some other New American strains - and this usefulness, for his own poetics, is what propels Ron's Futurist-Formalist genealogy. Kent offers a more radical critique, regarding the consequences of such a theoretical move (in poetry). & I still stand with the Acmeists, more or less - unwilling to dispense either with "tradition", or with some purely poetic notion of "personhood", which has yet to be fully articulated.

Joseph Brodsky has always stuck in the craw of American poetry scenesters. This guy comes in from Russia, becomes the darling of the anti-soviet establishment and literary lionizee, promotes metrical & rhymed "verse", Frost & Auden, writes mediocre poetry in English, and wins the Nobel Prize!

Sam Hamill wrote a long diatribe against Brodsky for APR about 20 yrs ago. Even though Hamill's probably "Quietude" to Ron, they both showed a similar political spin & knee-jerk resentment.

Jonathan on the Brodsky thread.

The comparison O'Hara/Auden/Mayakovsky is fun, but I think their differences outweigh their similarities.

As regards the rest of Jonathan's comments : I am really tired of this kind of criticism by insinuation, based on very slim knowledge, and even less fellow-feeling, with the poet in question. What Ron might have thought about what Brodsky might have thought about Mayakovsky - what is the point of this? A little research in the Brodsky archives might turn up a totally different, and far more interesting and informed, perspective on Mayakovsky/Brodsky. But we'd rather settle for myth, rumor, insinuation, and the other ingredients for the potential cooking up of literary slander.

It's not enough that Brodsky was, in his own country, an almost dissident-by-default (Jewish, somewhat independent) under a dictatorship, and sent into exile; we have to make efforts to "place" him aesthetically and politically with these little filaments of meaningless genealogy (N.C. to SoQ etc.) and these animadversions of political incorrectness (Brodsky, let it be noted, arrived in the U.S., with his suitcase from China & his rudimentary English, in the fall of 1972 - a little late and a little disconnected from the moral responsibilities of the Vietnam War).

Here's a link to some basic biographical information.

I've gotten into a tussle over Joseph Brodsky with Ron Silliman. This happens now and then in my life. I wrote a long letter to American Poetry Review back in the 80s, answering a particularly jaundiced attack on Brodsky in that magazine.

Here's the paragraph of Ron's with which I took issue:

"One of the great ironies of this sort of dismissal is that a Joseph Brodsky, whose solution was a return to the formal precision of pre-Soviet poetics & to abstain from collaborating with the aesthetic bureaucrats of his time, easily fell into the hands of the same sort of apparatchiks once he was able to come west. An even greater irony – the new critical roots behind Brodsky’s later School o’ Quietude friends could be traced back¹ to the Russian Formalists & their principle source of inspiration, old “Cloud in Trousers” Mayakovsky himself. Now that the old Soviet Union is no more, of course, they are constructing a monument to Brodsky in St. Petersburg."

(The "dismissal" referred to is Ron's notion that Mayakovsky is not given his critical due because of his affiliation with official Soviet literature.)

Let's have another look at this fascinating paragraph. First, Ron says that Brodsky's "solution" to soviet repression was a "return to the formal precision of pre-Soviet poetics". As I understand this, Ron is applying a familiar template from American poetry - i.e., that there is some sort of parallel between literary experimentalism and political engagement - to the Russian situation. But this does not hold up. The poets responsible for experiments in early 20th-cent. poetry in Russia cover the political spectrum, from Tsvetaeva's White-Russian royalism, to Mandelstam's gradual separation from the regime, to the otherworldliness of Khlebnikov, to Mayakovsky's revolutionary commitment (I don't know enough about Kruchenyk's politics to speak about him). To argue that Brodsky returned to a pre-soviet formalism as a political move, simply does not jibe with the facts. The Brodskian model was neither literary conservatism nor political withdrawal. He did not "abstain" from collaborating : he was sent to a labor camp at the age of 24 for "social parasitism", and his case became a Russian cause celebre when the bizarre transcript of his trial was written down by Nadezhda Mandelstam and published in samizdat. He was eventually released after a storm of public protest, and forced into exile in the West.

Brodsky's poetry developed gradually, and draws on many, many sources. To describe its development as a "return" to pre-soviet aesthetics is a myth. As I wrote earlier in Ron's comment box, Brodsky's most immediate mentors were soviet-era poets (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva), one of whom (Tsvetaeva) was a tremendous innovator and literary experimentalist.

But let's move on to the next part of Ron's statement : [Brodsky] "easily fell into the hands of the same sort of apparatchiks once he was able to come west". Ron bases the supposed irony at play here on the notion that the established poets who helped him on his arrival in the West (most prominently, Auden) were somehow similar in social position and function to the officials in the Soviet government who deemed him "social parasite" and sent him to prison. Now it helps to have some knowledge of the particulars of Brodsky's trial & conviction in order to understand the full absurdity of Ron's comparison. There are a number of web sources available on that trial : here's one. But what he is implying is that literary figures & publishing organs of the West - those which helped Brodsky find a job, translated his work, helped make it known - were in fact equivalent in some way to the punitive organs of soviet repression : the ministers of propaganda, the censors, the jailers, etc. Without such an equivalence, there is no "irony".

This claim is a reading of literary history and politics which is so extreme, as to represent a kind of absurd, anachronistic soviet propaganda.

But let's move on to the next sentence: "An even greater irony – the new critical roots behind Brodsky’s later School o’ Quietude friends could be traced back¹ to the Russian Formalists & their principle source of inspiration, old “Cloud in Trousers” Mayakovsky himself."

Here we get into some inner workings of Ron's literary genealogy. It goes something like this : Brodsky's new Western friends were part of the School of Quietude camp; the SoQ has its roots in the New Criticism; NC has its roots in Russian Formalism; RF's principle source of "inspiration" was Mayakovsky. QED : the "father" of SoQ is really Mayakovsky! Brodsky's new "apparatchik" pals were really descended from the poet they reject (for his soviet affiliations)! Oh my, how ironic!

This is an example of a sort of idee fixe, which obsessively threads its pseudo-logical needle, without seeing the pattern of facts which contradict it.
What if:
1) Mayakovsky did not "inspire" the literary scholars who called themselves Russian Formalists - but that, rather, he was one among many of their literary objects of study?
2) The New Criticism was not some kind of genetic outgrowth of Russian Formalism, but rather a set of American critical theories & practices, which drew on RF among many other sources?
3) Ron's "School of Quietude" is not descended genetically from NC, but is rather a polemical grab-bag label applied to many kinds of contemporary poetry - including, for example, vast amounts of verse modelled on Lowell and the Confessionals - a poetics developed in direct opposition to the precepts of New Criticism?
4) Brodsky's main friends and mentors - Auden, Lowell, Walcott - practiced various modes and styles deeply at variance with the supposedly a-political, aesthetically self-contained modes promoted by the New Criticism? And, for that matter, deeply at odds with the practices Ron impugns as SoQ?

The fact is, all these "what ifs" are well-founded. There is a lot of evidence to support the historical truth of each one of them. Thus, Ron's interpretation of Brodsky's & Mayakovsky's literary-historical meaning for us seems to be based more on theory than on fact, on fantasy than on history. Thus the rationale for these "ironies" evaporates. We are left with a tendentious, mean-spirited complaint about a new statue for Brodsky, a quintessential Petersburg poet, being erected in his home town - from which he was exiled for life. After his forced removal to the West, he never saw his homeland (or his parents) again.

Pleasantly snowed-in here for a few days.

I guess people reading my entries about Byzantium, Mandelstam, etc. would have to overcome a sense of obscurity, incoherence, hobbyhorse-ism.

Someday maybe I'll write a My Mandelstam, like Tsvetaeva's My Pushkin or Howe's My Emily Dickinson, & try to render some coherence to it all.

In poetry, I do two main things, I guess. Under certain favorable circumstances, I write poems. Otherwise, I think in "poetics", which is a jumble including my own taste in reading & my response to other writers & traditions (not just an aesthetic response but a personal response, which includes aesthetics, politics, "world-view", a sense of kinship, etc.).

This is how it is for most poets, I figure.

I've probably absorbed as much of the general assumptions of my time & generation as everybody else. Thinking about it off the top of my head this morning, I think I tend to orient myself as part of an era or a century - and an era which is either ending or transmogrifying into something else. This era began around World War I ("the real, not the calendar, 20th century" - Akhmatova), and was characterized by a new kind of self-consciousness, perhaps a sort of apocalyptic thinking, which simultaneously recognizes its alienation from the previous age, and tries to comprehend or interpret or summarize it in a new synthesis, for a new era (ie., Modernism).

In the atmosphere created by the modernist poets & those who followed (up to our own time) I guess I make certain choices & elect certain affinities or models, like everybody else.

to be continued, maybe. . .

A p.s. to previous note on "Green Constellation":

the "ecstatic Russian bells" should be seen in context of the many Russian topoi informing the entire Forth of July, which began (in the 1st chapter of Stubborn - "Shakespeare's Head" [a building in Providence]) with brief sketches echoing-mimicking Mandelstam's Voronezh poems. The "path P of the Pushkin-the-cat thread. . . the coccoon/butterfly metamorphoses, central in Nabokov & important in Brodsky. . . the "Letters to Elena". . . not to mention the whole number/dating system, so pervasive. . . (the numbers 28 & 29, dates 5/28 & 5/29. . .

the central book, Grassblade Light, is the most numerically orchestrated. . . each chapter of 28 poems (each containing 7 quatrains or 28 lines : 4/7, or 4th of July), with a central 29th. . . July (1st part) is made of of chapters containing 5 sections of 28 stanzas each. . .

5/28 : burial of Wm. Blackstone, 1st RI settler, the "man who went to live with Indians". . . 5/29 RI Statehood Day, HG/JFK b-day, date of fall of Constantinople, traditional seat of Orthodox Christendom (1453), date (in 1913) of debut performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". Final chapter of Grassblade is titled "Rite of Spring" (in which "Henry" finally addresses "Juliet" plainly, directly).

(Please pardon semi-repetitions here, for those who've read archive from around January.)

Here's a bit from the coda volume, Blackstone's Day-Book : one among many which emphasizes the Rus-Mandelstam threads of the poem (one etymology for "Rus", Russia, is "rowers" - refering to the Vikings who governed the 1st Rus capital, Kiev). The poem refers to Mandelstam's short stark Voronezh poem which begins "Washing up in the winter courtyard" ("mandel" means "almond"):

     1


  
         We are coming to the end of Henry
 Navigator's long voyage, Elena –
 circling around an elephant ear (Abul
 Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) – see

  
         how everything grows simpler,
 more harsh, more true.  Still
 the well is always there (and will
 be) – like the man standing here

  
         beside it in the dark courtyard
 (strange blooming out-of-season
 almond branch).  A stone,
 a star, a well.  A cup of water

  
         from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
 wine).  A circling dragon-boat
 or scrap of origami writ
 folded to float so lightly. . . there.

  
         You fold Andromeda into a W,
 a mountain range back into M.
 You cup them in your palm
 to make a diamond, or double-

  
         diamond – cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
 Delicate Blue Morpho wings
 woven with microscopic strings
 of quipu thread (gentian-

  
         gentle, violet, and red).  A knit
 crossroad, then – red, white –
 streams into Cassiopeia's
 mother-night (at last).

     5.22.2000

And what is this diff we're getting at? Isn't it deep down a difference in feeling, between the expats & the Americans, between Stevens & Eliot? a funny feeling, as in a reverse mirror the diff between Russian exile community (Nabokov etc.) & those who stayed home (Akhmatova, Mandelstam); and if there is a connection with poetry here, doesn't it have to do, ironically, with the universal Latin vs. national vernacular?

At issue here, anyway, is the lingua franca et jocundissima.

Which takes on new colorings as the years go by.

Don't get me wrong, though : I'm not on the side of the literary nationalists or the literary literalists. Eliot was right, Melville was right, Everyman was right : the cabala cabal of writing runs silent, runs deeper, runs universal.

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

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.

Nada asks why she wrote "hummingbird fever".

My guess is she was thinking of the book Nightingale Fever, a study of Mandelstam (who originated the phrase), Akhmatova & Pasternak (? or Tsvetaeva), by British poet & translator D.M. Thomas.

Or it could be coincidence.

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.

Jordan feeling feisty this morning.

I have the best of both worlds: make real arguments, experience eerie silence.

I see different critical talents, here & there in blogworld. Ability to characterize with precision & understanding, sometimes. Articulate. Not so partisan, clubbish; not so ready to spray cliches & beery nostrums from the political Bladder. Readers with real ears.

This split between mainstream & oppositional bugs me. Too many abstract counters, categories, pigeonholes. Seems to short-circuit synthetic energies necessary for solid critical perception; thus it stymies reception to some extent. Why not just fageddabaddit, & read the things on their own terms, & respond to them on your own terms, personally, as if you picked them up in a 2nd-hand bkstore in Tashkent.

So I create this imaginary St. Petersburg, where Gumilev & Akhmatova & Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva & Pasternak discover how to make past poetries their own (individual craft); speak about their traditions (education); engage in polemics while recognizing talent in the other's camp (culture). Russian ark.

& I can empathize with Mandelstam's notion that we write for an imaginary interlocutor from the future. (In fact I must say I sometimes I feel like a figment of his imagination in that sense.) Have I reduced a great Russian poet to the status of a reverse image of my own "professional" nonentity, by removing him from his proper context (his contemporary Russian audience)? So that he serves as sort of an icon/imaginary friend on the mantle for Everyman-Nobodypoet? That's part of it, I suppose. My context is this small city in Rhode Island, where I live & screw up & leave behind a sort of hodge-podge of inscriptions stored in the John Hay Library archives. When I'm underground over there in the 132 acres of North Main Cemetery, my poems will assume a different tincture, as the paper dries & the ink fades.

I want to write more topical report poems, up-to-the-minute Audenesque, & have them published in the New Yorker & in the paper of record in St. Petersburg, Florida.

& of course I could always read more poetry myself. . .