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

Here's an article by Thomas Epstein about Alexander Vvedensky, one of the OBERIU poets. Turns out he was interested in Nicholas Cusanus.

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

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. . .]

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.

Among his many other projects, Tom Epstein co-edited, with Susan Brown and myself, the anthology in honor of Edwin Honig, titled A Glass of Green Tea - With Honig.