Your work is much
richer than reflections on it. This is the kind of wealth that
affirms: the poet is only
briefly
aware of his being
let loose into the world. This, it would seem, is the illusion
against which the claims of poetry are shattered – but not only
in that brief
instant when a new person is created in you. You gather matter
into a tight center, giving it a name appropriate in and for that
moment.
The weakness and ambitions of the contemporary Russian lyric are
in large measure a result of its submission to extraneous theoretical
temptations: to step back, and then from another distance to step
back again, the text forming a compact line of rapid evasions.
This is the shamanic way: being not with the object but casting
a spell
over it from a distance. It thus becomes easy to get caught up
in the letter and conventions of dead laws, which demand illusory
judgement
and even history; and you turn up in a strange environment, unconnected
to you – the usual case. The author fears but one thing: to approach
the indubitable e reality of passing states of being, for there
is nothing more unbearable than to have to limit the obviousness
of
the empty flux that daily forces us to get out of bed, have breakfast,
speak, look, return home, go to bed. Man dies each day. The atmosphere
that accompanies him to the end of this road is permeated by the
currents and echoes of ephemeral experiences. However, they cannot
be taken in at one fell swoop: they are more evasive and varied
than any exposition of merely literary adventures. The most difficult
thing of all is to grasp them within a poem, where one must remain
within the limits of two or three lightning-quick decisions, describing
only that which cannot be secured in action. A mood without plot
– it passed near us and was forgotten, only to return again sometime
later; but now we are exiled and defenseless, and it is difficult
for us to refuse because therein lies a choice. The point is to
allow
powerful meanings to pour forth while at the same time filling
the outer object and the unconscious act with a breath of freedom,
never
for a moment letting actual reality out of sight. A slightly open
spontaneity can be controlled, but only to the extent necessary
so that its elementality is not encroached upon. Such meticulousness,
doomed from the start to failure in creative effort, suddenly seems
to be a form of madness, which it is not. It sometimes happens
that
an effect can be had quite cheaply: it is enough merely to name
objects, anomalous by nature, taking note only of the most obvious,
vectoral
traits.) Thus on occasion a work is created almost instantaneously,
as if dictated by the motion of the hands themselves – a sudden
prophetic impulse; but what is being prophesied? Simultaneously
death and eternity.
This in part explains the muffled aggressivity of some of our best
poems. But they don't accept you. Individuals are torn apart, and
the fear of arriving late falls on the heads of the innocent (you
envy Robinson Jeffers, who built a house on the ocean and lived
in it until a ripe old age, writing gloomy and long poems in free
verse).
Of course, you are a member of poetic sect; as a rule, every little
group is initially defensive, arming itself with utmost rigidity
and the discipline of form. Nevertheless, these days many write
unclearly, making constant use of a slippery set of stylistic devices,
as if
they were ashamed of the subject of their verse, or else have not
mastered this lack of clarity itself, confusing the texture and
essence of completely opposite and vaguely sensual definitions.
In truth,
what they are doing is akin to using words to adorn and cover an
already prepared foreground, thereby feeding the demon of deafening
repetitions. They are turning language into a stone fool, an ecstatic
metronome that transforms fate into philosophical Substance, thereby
avoiding all practical embodiments: thus hacked into everyday numbers,
into an illegible sketch, it is doubtful that the mystery can be
heard. These kind of lines are reminiscent of rays of sunlight
groping
around an empty street, full of passers-by. Others, far away, determine
plot, prosody, plan. As for us, we are left to see only long days
and several duplicate faces in the slowed flow of Asian time.
Thus,
as Montale wrote, "style comes to us from good manners," and
the value of the poet is not in speech, quickly soldered into a
lyrical yoke, but in the ability to squeeze out something like
material proof
of an uninhabitable wholeness, or rather to cover a painting (that's
how you're caught red-handed), provided by the powers-that-be in
order to resurrect the found image. A kind of internal precision
of verbal experience shuns aesthetic fact, which is transformed
into exaltation. Tranquillity must be ensured and constantly nursed.
The
pay-off is a correspondence to one's own claims. What flickers
across my memory is not the linguistic phenomenon of a fading era
but a
wave-like signal sent, tribulation of a new world, to individual
experience in the here-and-now, in defiance of the false witness
of never-ending norms. Nevertheless, it is probate necessary to
rely on this mythical pressure, which is ground down and contained
by
the tranquillity of writing and by a set of your favorite states
of being, which cam charge at any time with a change of purely
literary provocations: room, climate, the human figure, earth,
a hot wind,
light and night. An objective material ripens before our eyes,
and its greater palpability is apparently a result of the ability
to
situate the material within a slightly aberrant context that denies
neither the duration of the inspiration nor the truthfulness of
authorial behavior. The ideal text is perhaps analogous to a river
whose source
and month cannot be encompassed by a glance – what is perceived
instead are scraps of the passing disorder, which the banks both
conceal
and goad. Striving vainly toward it, we remain unchangingly – and
unfortunately – within the limits of our initial hopes aid conjectures.
We are left with a slice of day's light on a table, and in it all
the passion of the glittering world shudders. Air, burdened with
longitude. An empty landscape. A final refuge. The sun.
Translated by Thomas Epstein |
