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.

I agree with Jonathan about blind spots, anyway. But all I can say is, "give the guy a break." Do you really think literature & poetry fit into neat academic summations & the pat judgements suitable for MFA PROGRAMS? Brodsky's accomplishments & horizons are large, messy, complicated. His relationship with English & the battles over what is contemporary style were complicated. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a love-hate relation with English which he couldn't even acknowledge, which involved his dependence on that language from the day he stepped off the plane in London & under Auden's paternal umbrella. & that mixed feeling may have come out in these kinds of doggerel-songs. They may also be regarded as some kind of slap at what was considered contemporary American "high style" (Merwin, let's say). I don't know. Brodsky was a subtle and oblique poet - many of his poems in Russian depend on allegory & allusion & comic irony. His writing is steeped in estrangement, & feelings of frustration, spleen, loneliness, guilt.

The whole approach starting from "Brodsky doesn't deserve his fame - I'm going to show you why based on these poems..." - this ungenerous attitude guarantees there will be no encounter with Brodsky's strengths as a poet, essayist, human being. But this argument could go on forever, because there's no shared grounds for evaluation.

Here's an early poem, translated by George Kline, from the Penguin selected volume:

ON WASHERWOMAN BRIDGE

 
On Washerwoman Bridge, where you and I
stood like two hands of a midnight clock
embracing, soon to part, not for a day
but for all days - this morning on our bridge
a narcissistic fisherman,
forgetting his cork float, stares goggle-eyed
at his unsteady river image.

The ripples age him and then make him young;
a web of wrinkles flows across his brow
and melts into the features of his youth.
He holds our place.  Why not? - It is his right.
In recent years whatever stands alone
stands as a symbol of another time.
His is a claim for space.
                           So let him gaze
into our waters, calmly, at himself,
and even come to know himself.  The river
is his by right today.  It's like a house
in which new tenants have set up a mirror
but have not yet moved in.

1968

The poem exhibits an almost perfect balance between the thought of what poetry can and cannot be; between thought and (elegiac) feeling; between private emotion & a sense of a particular time (late Soviet Russia). The last image is perfectly subdued, an undertone. (Pushkin : "my sadness is luminous".) I can see why Auden was impressed with young Brodsky.

If Paris hadn't stolen Edgar Allan Poe, St. Petersburg would have had to invent him. See Mandelshtam's poem in which Poe appears (you'll have to do some research about the "tickling scarf"). Poe spent his dying days chasing after a phantom beloved named Helen Whitman, a Providence poet. I walk by her home on Benefit St. on my lunch break nearly every day.

Are there no grad students in English lit willing to sacrifice their careers for this? No - they haven't read Keats yet.