Speaking of Acmeism... here's HG Poetics in Russian -

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).

Paper I would work on if I had time, energy & presence of mind...

something about Russian-Petersburg cultural history - 18th & 19th century currents of liberal democracy & republicanism - Pushkinian background in Nabokov, Mandelstam - and certain aspects of Acmeism & early 20th-cent. Petersburg poetry (as developed mostly by Mandelstam, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva) which assimilate these liberal trends, and try to blend them with older (medieval, Muskovite, Orthodox) traditions - thinking here of M's essay "Pushkin and Scriabin", where he sketches (very briefly) ideas about the "inner freedom" of Christian art in the West as being rooted in the historical fact of the Redemption - also the allegiance of the Acmeists to earthly, historical actuality & beauty (as opposed to the otherworldliness and spiritual detachment of Symbolism) - there is an analogy or kinship suggested there (in Acmeism) between spiritual, artistic and political freedom - & these impulses are evident (if often highly camouflaged) also in much of Nabokov -

- then about how my own development as a writer seems to find its historical ground & actuality, paradoxically, in these Petersburg writers, with whom I've been engaged off & on now for 40 years or so - ever since I got infected by my mother's enthusiasm for Nabokov (she tried to read everything he wrote) back in high school - the last short story I wrote in high school was a kind of proto-Nabokovian elegy for high school (which included a section in which the narrator & friends "re-enact" scenes from War & Peace in a snowy Minneapolis city park) - & probably beginning even earlier, with the affinities between Russian & northern Minnesotan & Ontario landscapes, where I spent so much time back then -

New issues of the journal Ars Interpres are coming online. An elegy for Brodsky (written 10 years ago - a sort of literary round-robin, modeled on Brodsky's elegy for Eliot, which was modeled on Auden's for Yeats) - is here, in issue #6. (With thanks again to Alan Shaw - and the editor, Alexander Deriev.)

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.

Looking over my old poems, the big quatrain explosion, trying to get oriented, inspired.

Writing for me is a very elusive, elliptical thing. I think it's because I am the proud possessor of a left-handed birdbrain.

Mandelstam has repeatedly over the decades been a source of inspiration.

Last night again considering him & the Russian poets generally, struck me once more how for some poets, in some traditions, there's a clearer demarcation between poetry & other forms of writing & discourse.

The factor of song, musicality. Mandelstam liked to call it "breath" : he was fascinated with "curvature" (in smiles, in eyebrows, and especially in cupolas, domes and filled sails).

"And suddenly, an arch appears in my mumbling" [rough translation].

The musicality of the line in verse as an expression of curvature, tension. Again the affinity with architecture ("frozen music"). Maybe Mike Snider's onto something (about meter), and perhaps poetry will eventually turn back toward the distinctive, distinguishing marks of verse. (Just as an aside - fascinating comment quoted by Jonathan Mayhew - Marjorie Perloff noting Phd. candidates in English who have never read Keats or Milton.)

Brodsky's remark that his Petersburg poet-friends considered prose writers "the infantry" and poets "the air force".

[linked with the notion that harmonics is what differentiates reading (prose) from performing (verse) : AND that this has something to do with "presence" and "the present" - embodiment. The technical characteristics of verse have "epistemological & ontological" implications. these are things I've mulled over before on this blog.]

Thinking out loud here. How today, for me, poetry appears as a sort of parallel universe - due to the otherness, the strangeness, of harmony itself.

So to get going again will require going back into that parallel bird-world ("Bluejay").

I have to be in the right mood.

Two Acmeists on the right (Mandelstam, Akhmatova). Nadezhda Mandelstam, 3rd from right. w/friends & family.

I love the style at the smoky loge.

Still, I find myself harboring reservations (do you take reservations?).

Something is wrong with the sour & stale critiques of the previous century. The oppositions underlined by Adorno, ornamented by Rasula - the notion that writing (poetry) stands opposed to exchange, the merely political notion of "canon" as elitism and exclusion - something missing here. & what's missing leads inexorably to JL's closing fantasies of an autotelic/invisible victim-poetics (the writer above the filling station).

Sure, there are truths in all this... but I say something's missing, something's left out...

First of all, the exchange binary. Works of art, poems, are BOTH inalienable labor and forms of exchange. They are exchanges of aesthetic-intellectual values. Of beauty, if you will - which cannot be divorced from ethics (ie. there is something you could call "moral beauty" : the just equilibrium of a humane civilization, the life-force, manifested in liberation from various forms of oppression).

The sullen hopelessness of much 20th-cent. critique is, of course, based on a sense of outraged moral value; the irony, parody, and refusals of the artists often draw from, rhyme with, or contribute to, the general intellectual critique. The trouble is, without hope, critique because an end in itself, becomes autotelic : and it then reads art in the mirror of its own refusals. Thus Adorno simply juxtaposes art and (commodity) exchange. But if art is also exchange, then the modernist claim of pure autonomy is not strictly true : intellectual/aesthetic exchange runs parallel in some way to general economic exchange.

Rasula's strictures against Western "canon" build on the same set of alienation-formulas. But to reduce canonization to a sociological mechanism actually deforms the role of artists themselves. My readings in Russian lit history bring this home very clearly. The artists themselves nurture and create the canons, not some theoretical pyramid of hierarchical society. Read Wachtel's book, noted here earlier, and watch how 200 years of Russian poetic tradition draws consciously on its own "canonical" roots. Listen to Brodsky:

"When I left school, when my friends quit work or college and started in on poetics, the people we read - and we read a lot - we chose by instinct, by intuition. We had no feeling that we were continuing any sort of tradition, or that we had any mentors or spiritual fathers, or anything like that. We were, if not the black sheep of the family, then orphans. And it is a marvelous thing when an orphan begins to sing in his father's voice."

Later.

Wachtel's study of Russian verse, mentioned yesterday, makes it clear that even the Futurists, despite their brash gleeful revo-destroyo attitude, worked & re-worked their own craft basis, by means of response to powerful & popular works of the past (see his comments on Kruchenyk's re-do of Pushkin's ballad "The Black Shawl", in his language-game verse crime novel, The Brigand Vanka Kain and Sonka the Manicurist).

I'm feeling shrifted & shifted this morning. Thinking back to Hotel Point comments also noted yesterday (last paragraph of his Friday post).

No one can destroy poetry. But are we ruining it & spoiling it (or just missing it) by too much glib talk? The emphasis is on creating unique & exceptional alternative verbal spaces. Should it be, rather, on practice that tries to reach for the essential, the central, the paradigmatic (through careful engagement with tradition-as-craft)? Such does not necessarily have to be "serious" in a ponderous way (as poets like Kruchenyk show). But the power, the acoustic magnitude, of the communicative instruments of poetry - just as in music - depends on refinement, exactitude, and careful listening.

the old school gang from Grand Fenwick. Akhmatova & Mandelstam on the right.

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.

(... & inevitably, when I look back at my own development in poetry over 30 years, I witness the acting-out of these principles: from early attraction to & imitation of the NY School poets, to absorption (to the point of psychological breakdown) with Shakespeare's sonnets, to complete immersion in the language of the Bible, to a return to poetry-making through the unpredictable influence of Mandelstam (leading, after a long time, to the "literary encounter" with Elena Shvarts), to the long-drawn-out exploration of modernist poetry & the long poem, to the recurrent return to Mandelstam as to a first principle of inspiration. Glazov-Corrigan [p. 146]:

"We can now begin to see why Mandelshtam speaks about Dante's writing as a 'bird's mating call', a fife. 'The fife is nearly always sent forth to scout ahead.' Dante's poetry does not transmit a message: it awakens, stretches out, and develops a response. It is a generative principle of literature.... the poem awakens into writing a generation of writers to come. It precontains, as it were, its subsequent history: 'The miracle-ship left the shipyard with barnacles adhering to its hull.'")

Literary phenomena & succession of time-periods. "Who shall have the succession?" (Cantos)

Trying to explain a worldview which emits Stubborn Grew & its sequels, so you might get into it more.

Having Maximus & "A" & Gunslinger before me, and Mandelstam & The Bridge & Ulysses & Finnegans Wake & Cantos & Paterson before me too, slightly further back, and Melville & Dickinson & Whitman a little further back, & Dante & Milton & Homer & Virgil & Ovid & Shakespeare & Bible further further back... not seeing them as "challenges" but simply as absorbing-authentic literary models of reality & totality.

seeing how each new work of necessity "blocks the view" of previous books & simultaneously stands in their shadows. Harold Bloom turns this into a psycho-melodrama-tragicomedy, but in my experience it's more a question of shades of taste... thus I feel what's missing from the style of Olson, say, when I sense the presence, still there, of something earlier & better (stronger, richer, deeper), & yet also see how Olson felt history differently than did some of his overweening or over-confident predecessors...

Anyway, the picture of people and the city & history that I try to present in Stubborn Grew, or the wild directions the poem takes after that, should be recognized as written in the light still emanating from these other books. So for example in the latter half of Stubborn you can recognize when the aegis of the Cantos shifts over to the aegis of Finnegans Wake, and why that might be happening, based on the recognitions undergone by the narrator-protagonist. & these "aegiae"[?] are forms of acknowledgement & also opposing arguments (theirs & my own) about "reality" as I feel it emanating from these writers - Crane & Mandelstam & Vallejo & Pushkin & Shvarts et al. coming forward as kinds of framing "style-testimonies" - some of these writers' influences more pervasive than others'. My own poem's capaciousness having certain architectonic nodes where its own arguments are marked & underlined, in its own strange way.

I still think I found a sort of unusual door through the long poem. It's been hard for me to write poetry at all since then, for the last 2-3 years, but I have hopes for Dove Street as a possibly authentic outgrowth, if I can keep focused (while other projects are underway).

Sitting in miniature cluttered backyard on mellow March 1st coming in like lamb. Yellow-gray pussy willow branch. A downy woodpecker, making a very confident "tock" for such a shrimp.

I look up and say the words vremeni and time (russian & english) a few times, slowly, under my breath. The branches are quiet & the light is soft & opalescent. It's nice not to be at work at this hour. I feel simultaneously like Proust & the madeleine. This is hard to explain. I mean I feel my mortal flesh pronouncing the words for "time", slowly, low & quiet, while that same time passes, slowly, low & quiet.

A sad feeling, something like Ecclesiastes.

I think, "this is something like a poetry reading".

This beautiful last published poem in the Voronezh Notebooks of Mandelstam seems to capture (better than I ever could) the feeling I tried to describe in previous post. I recommend these translations by the McKanes (publ. by Bloodaxe), despite the awkwardness. The notes included are very thorough, carefully done. In this poem OM sort of turns the Orpheus-quality inside out. (Natasha Shtempel (handicapped, with a pronounced limp) was a music teacher living in Voronezh, very kind to the Mandelstams. She wrote a memoir of their friendship.

I love this poem.

 
22. To Natasha Shtempel

 
1.

 
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept :
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.

 
2.

 
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal.  Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

                            
                                   5.4.1937

As I've often repeated, almost all of Forth of July is an address to, a conversation with, the spirit of Russian poetry, as manifested particularly in Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, & Elena Shvarts. Why is this? Or where does it come from?

I trace it back to the mid- to late-1970s, when I first encountered the dual presence of Osip Mandelstam's poetry (in the early David McDuff translation), and the memoirs of his wife Nadezhda. At the time I was slowly groping my way back into writing, after having renounced it in the early 70s (the aftermath of a psychological-spiritual crisis, which I have described somewhat in an essay in the memoir for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea).

The work of this pair of writers - the poet & his survivor & memoirist - had what I would call a very powerful "normative" effect on my thinking. Mandelstam's inspired, gorgeous & mysterious poetry is situated, put in context, by his wife's astonishing, razor-sharp, humane, cultured, & resolute literary response to the terrifying era of Lenin, Stalin & their followers, from the 20s to the 60s.

To a young person experiencing extremes of spiritual dislocation & homelessness in 70s America, along with alienation from his own writing talent, these writers came as enlightenment, saving grace. I was able to reconnect to American poetry through them. & the result was, I could no longer respond to the American tradition I was exploring (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Crane, Williams, Olson, et al.) without hearing these poets through a Mandelstamian lens. The era of 20th-century poetry was a different assemblage of Eliotic "tradition" due to this Russian influence.

The impact of Mandelstam's revolutionary-yet-classic lyricism, his riddling imagery, led me back into my own poetry. This, combined with the impact of the epic thrust of the long-poems of Crane, Pound, Williams & Olson, fired my ambition to re-interpret, to re-shape Pound's "poem including history" according to my own, different, lights. These were the 2 fundamental motivations driving my effort - at least on the conscious level. But poetry works at a deeper-than-conscious level; and my experience of diving into the long long poem involved letting it bring forth its own shape & reveal its own expanded (both high & murky) motivations. Yes, "the plot thickens. . ."

I first read Elena Shvarts in "Paradise", a translation of selected poems published by Bloodaxe. I was intrigued to discover a Petersburg poet, coming 2 generations after Mandelstam & Akhmatova, whom one could imagine standing in kinship with them. I wrote a short poem in response, and not long after discovered that my friend Tom Epstein, a Slavist and translator, knew Shvarts personally. Tom offered to hand-deliver the poem to Shvarts on his next visit to Russia.

About 9 months later I had the opportunity to meet Elena in person, at a Russian-American poetry conference in Hoboken (an encounter described in an article in Witz). Not long after, she visited Providence, and that encounter led to 2 more short poems, which I combined with my first one in a "triptych" - a form favored by the proto-Acmeist Petersburg poet Innokenty Annensky, and his admirer Anna Akhmatova. The center poem, a take-off on Mandelstam, now seems rather campy & parodic; but I still like the 1st and 3rd sections. Here is the poem:

Triptych for Elena Shvarts


I

Some words floated toward me.
Trailed over oceans,
an ice-locked sea.
Your words, that once

ran beneath your tongue
from canvas near your heart.
(Whiff of cigarettes. Rat dung.
Wrong from the start.)

Aloft, to waver in smoke
at hobo altitude -
an image (hard to make!)
of God. In a bad mood.

Image nonetheless,
with blemishes.
And if he can lose himself
up where it vanishes,

among red leaves,
over nerve-streams,
bent, like a sheaf
in a Joseph dream. . .

I puff the mirage
back in your direction,
translated - world-image;
coracle; orb of affection.

10.4.95

II
after O.M.

I see the lame-foot masquers gathering
on a winter's night in the ancient capital.
Heirs and heiresses of royalty.
Blood of kings - and Sheba's parasol.

I hear it - midnight - toneless rumbling.
Ears razored by the rustling of ice.
So let the heart dilate. When eyes go blind
there comes a scattering of Paradise.

Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?
Behind the mast at an inhuman pitch
sirens weave the locks of Berenice, while
cautious Fates unbind - slowly! - the bloody stitch.

We shall be gathered with them, murmuring.
Snow will burn; offbeat hearts
rehearse sun's night. . . while stuttering
Time - Osiris, Pharaoh. . . beat a slow. . . retreat.

5.29.96

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

The groundwork was laid for my interest in Mandelstam when I was in high school, in the 60s. Russian literature was Nabokov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky. The swampy, forested, birch-laden landscape of northern Minnesota, where I spent a lot of time then, was mirrored in this literary Russia. Nabokov was a favorite of my mother, & most of his books were on the shelves at home. Reading "Speak, Memory", Nabokov's childhood memoir, was an exercise in vicarious nostalgia (no one understands heartsickness for childhood like an adolescent). My high school prose writing included awkward Nabokovian echoes.

Once, much later, I wrote a 3-part poem exploring my absorption in Nabokov. Several years after that, I heard Joseph Brodsky give a stupendous reading at Brown (he recited his fairly long poems in both Russian and English, all from memory). The sloped auditorium was jammed. Brodsky took questions afterwards, & he raised a laugh when I asked if he had a favorite poem by Mandelstam. He said, "Yes, I do. Next question." After the reading, however, we talked. I apologized for "putting him on the spot" about Mandelstam. He was very charming and affable. He encouraged me to read more Auden. He even accepted a few of my poems, saying it would give him something to read back at his hotel.

When Brodsky died a few years later, I took the poem I had started about my obsession with Nabokov, and simply replaced the first section with a tribute to Brodsky. The last section (about the boy with the moth) worked very well - since Brodsky himself had written a poem based on this episode - which first appears in a short story by Nabokov. The Brodsky poem is also an echo of his tribute to Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's tribute to Yeats. I enjoyed adding another spoke to this elegiac cycle (English-Irish-American-Russian-American. . .). The poem was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal, the RI paper of record - where, incidentally, and curiously enough, Yeats himself had published a series of literary essays back in the 1890s.

Here is the poem:

JOSEPH BRODSKY

But each grave is the limit of the earth.

1

You died on a cold night in January.
It was Superbowl Sunday. A supine empire,
preoccupied with bread and circuses,
Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
bound heroes. Next day, fire
swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
Not with a bang - with a light rustle
of red silk, your heart passed the final
exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.

Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
of alien tribes). Snow falls on night grass
in the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
so it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.

Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
of columns and cenotaphs - no. Just a home
by a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
where tongues descend - ascending voices mingle
in companionable flame. This friendly fire
eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
into evening wine. . . one hawk's cry
screams - and melds into the Muse's profile.

2

Life's flimsy laundry, easily
unraveled. Transparent butterfly net,
wing of a moth, how slyly they
trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.

You fight the droning in your head
with all the cunning you can muster;
turning its power against itself, you lead
a life Laertes would approve (bluster,

business laboring for acclaim)
only to drown the voice above the trees.
Relentless, impervious to shame,
it finds you out, brings you to your knees.

And like the heavy signet ring,
a chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) -
the droning issues forth its stark command.

You listened, followed. A shuttling pencil
in a nighthawk's beak - a spear in your side;
and a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
shattered your lamp. Died.

Summer ends, the droning subsides.
The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
is dead. Cicada shells, butterfly hides. . .
some leftover spider's ecstasy.

3

In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
born - to die a few hours old -

into a false firewood springtime. Its delicate wings
are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
they drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
in unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

This tender sign. . . a tenderness snuffed out.
This heavy icon, then. . . true mimic of an action?
Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?

Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
at the edge of the cliff - their noise intuitive, innate. . .

The butterfly is gone. Its form was here, immaculate;
the hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
mimic its undetermined motion - late, late -

since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
in a signal heaven - a camouflage beyond dissection.


2.2.96


Now when I re-read it, the solemn tone and the heavy allusions to other poems almost wreck it, maybe do wreck it; but the last section lifts it up & together again, or almost.

My encounter with St. Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts (described in the Witz article) led to things like this: I started learning Russian (slowly, haltingly), and translated some Mandelstam, along with some poems by Shvarts (published in Nedge #4). She, in turn, responded to my efforts: this poem (written in Russian, translated imperfectly by me) appeared in one of her recent collections published in St. Petersburg:


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.


It seemed like a beautiful gesture from this grand poet (she is a recipient of the Pushkin Prize, the major St. Petersburg literary award). There have been more literary exchanges (as well as other things. I sent Elena an Audubon bird-clock similar to the one she saw on my kitchen wall; also a little wooden bathtub boat my mother made for me as a child, christened "Sophie" on its bow - boats being important icons in the city of Peter the Great). A chapter of my book The Grassblade Light (a sequel to Stubborn Grew) is titled "Letters to Elena" - another attempt to actualize the "Russian influence".

The interest in the Mandelstams led eventually to other encounters with Russian poetry, but that's another story. A little of it can be found in the article "Journey to Hoboken", published in Witz 4.3 several years ago. . .