Foundation Pit

Alexander Terekhov: Myself as a Russian Designer

2009-05-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Tiger Beckett

2009-01-17T16:47:00.000-08:00

in the jungles of the tigers's heart

the same jungles are burning

while your mother draws calligrams

with a wooden spoon

the soup of her heart

fogs the eyes of her windows

she hears the songs in the subway

they are inaudible

II.

the tunnels of this imagined city sleep in the ground

a thousand years before their construction

in the dumb myths of the savages

who skin the most beautiful princess for their gods

she rises with agni’s smoke

into cerulean blue

the drums keeping time

the air is full of our cries

CHECK OUT THE NEW ANTHOLOGY

2009-01-06T19:42:00.000-08:00

CAPITALIST PIGS!

GO TO JACKET MAGAZINE

AND CHECK OUT THE NEW CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN POETRY ANTHOLOGY!

New Year

2008-12-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

With things almost ending/But not quite ending /Nothing seems to end /Through the white noise of last week’s dream /The relatives come /An eager spirit haunts us /Like a pornographic treatise from the 18th century / We feel old /And Babble incoherently / Snow falls /It is December 26th 2008 /A pink headless corpse with two bright blue eyeballs watches our every move /At the mall /A limousine makes a wide ox cart turn /With nowhere to park /The driver slowly circumambulates the lot /An hour later he is still there /In the car /On the way back from shopping /A female reporter tells the usual story of a recent natural disaster /Figures and numbers /7.8; 7.9; 1976; 1989; 9000, 250,000; 70,000 /The curious part of the story is that the Chinese Decided to make the place into a park /And tourism is predicted to go up by 25% /At around this time /A fat baby grabs a plastic toy off the tree /Dogs throw up grandmas’ fudge /Anxious step-moms step out for a cigarette /At one point you stand at the mirror /Thinking somewhere else /And then notice the equable look /Of a cheap plastic Buddha

Man in the Park

2008-11-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

The Voice of the Angels

Everything
you say
may be used
against you.

The Wedding

2008-10-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Eastward and the Orangutan

I.

Eastward and the orangutan sing a song
In a bar outside of the world.
They do not engage history.
The internet has been down for two days.

II.

They are at a wedding.
The bride looks stunning in her
Narrow notch lapel with boutonnière.

The orangutan takes a sip from a 32 oz. plastic mug
Full of vermouth.

Two women sit chatting with Eastward about his new film.
The women look stunning
In their narrow notch lapel with boutonnière.

Only Jojo notices the sadness in Eastward’s eyes.
He can hear those ghostly Morricone whistles
Which his great-grandmother would send across the Atlantic.

And where did they bury her?
And why am I making another order?
And who is Jojo?

Fish

2008-12-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

gregorovius thought that somewhere chestov had written about aquariums
with a removable glass partition which could be taken out any time
and that the fish, who was accustomed to his compartment, would
never try to go over to the other side. he would come to a point in the water,
turn around, and swim back, without discovering that the obstacle was gone,
that all he had to do was to keep on going forward...

Danse Russe

2008-11-25T11:22:00.000-08:00

when grandma is sleeping
and the cat in the kitchen
is sleeping
and the moon is a pale-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if i in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my bookshelves
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"i am eating, eating.
i was born to eat borsch,
i am best so!"
if i admire the sour cream, my spoon,
your cabbage, beets, potatoes
against the yellow drawn shades—

who shall say i am not
the happy genius of my household?

Yippee!

2008-11-04T20:05:00.001-08:00

The Pillory

2008-09-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

If we could only use the pillory to reprimand bad executive decisions, I would have more faith in laissez faire capitalism.

Как Писать Как Сорокин

2008-09-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

when i was at the university
in the professor's office
the grey haired professor said
that i should be careful about becoming an academic
looking down at me from his wizard's accent
he said that if i wanted to be a writer
i should probably pick some job that wouldn't drain my mind
he said that he once also wrote
and i imagine him in 1965
writing sorokin shorts
lying in a long coat, perhaps on a bed
perhaps in a large old bathtub
half full, a bottle of jameson's or some other cheap brown
next to his left hand, which hangs over the tub
twitching to some obscure baroque tune
once played in a stuffy hall by his ex-lover

South Ossetia

2008-08-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

The initial coverage of the war between Russia and Georgia was quite terrible, and once again made me question the integrity of the west's finest news organizations. The thing most troubling about this coverage was that it almost completely ignored the Battle of Tskhinvali and the injuries suffered by the Ossetian people.

I support neither Saakashvili or Putin. However, in this case Saakashvili is clearly the principle aggressor -there is nothing more craven than using civilian lives in order to instill pity in your allies. Of course, this doesn't mean that I don't love Georgia, or that I support Medvedev or Putin.

As always it is the politics that is rotten.

Recently I went on the radio to talk about the conflict, and I think it was a pretty good show. Check it out at RadioActive.

On the Anniversary of Prigov's Death

2008-07-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

Prigov and Rubenstein fighting in the Kitchen

It's been a long time since I've written anything here. Things have been busy and busty, surreptitious and pulchritude, osculation, and recently I've been told to use a little craven Tact...anyway... Here is to Prigov and Rubenstein, for adding a playful, gamesome, absurd, happy, face to the generally morose often complacent face of Russian poetry.

Kids These Days

2008-05-23T10:44:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time I stood in line at the grocery store to buy cat food, and heard this time honored phrase: "I just don't get it: what is it with kids these days anyway?" I thought about the answer: MTV, Reality TV, Tevo, (i.e. television, television, Dante, The Karate Kid, kids these days, etc...my mind wandered). Then I looked over to see a newspaper with the image of a Muslim woman holding a baby. The message being: "Look they have little babies just like the rest of us."

Walking home, my backpack full of ground up animal byproduct I would feed the large black cat sleeping on my porch, I thought about kids and Muslims. I soon came to the thought that kids are like Muslims. They get a bad rap because of the loud obnoxious ones, or the ones who can't write a decent short story so they turn to the gun, but all in all the majority of them are quietly masturbating with their mother's lotion, or scribbling obsenities on the pages of Vogue. They are an oppressed people sure, but most aren't nearly as irksome or truculent as the bad ones make them out to be. Most can even spell, and actually want to be part of the larger world of responsibilities. They want to vote, travel, and have decent paying jobs with good health care benefits. So the next time you see a kid, don't cower in fear or think about what he really wants to do if he were only given the resources, but remember that you were like that once --you too were once not allowed to vote, walk the city during a school day, or purchase a bottle of wine for your loved ones.

The Master and Margarita

2006-10-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

I recommended The Master and Margarita to S. (individual in picture)... You should all read it. I just finished the new russian film adaptation of the novel. It is rather silly -the black vodka drinking tom cat Bigimot is a puppet that reminded me of the one used in ALF. Also, OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (1926-1942)is finally out from Northwestern University Press;including writings from Kharms, Vvedensky, Zabolotsky, Oleinikov, Lipavsky, Druskin; edited by Eugene Ostashevsky; co-translated from Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, with Ilya Bernstein, Tom Epstein, and GenyaTurovskaya. It's not cheap, but it is a long awaitedrevelation (revolution?).You can check it out asfollows....<http://nupress.northwestern.edu/title.cfm?ISBN=0-8101-2293-6>

An Interview With Danila Davydov

2006-11-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

During the summer of 2006 I spent some time in Moscow and conducted a set of interviews, which I recorded and later transcribed. This an interview with the poet, critic, and editor: Danila Davydov.

There are at Least 2000 Good Poets: An Interview with Danila Davydov
Interviewed by Peter Golub

PG: When did you first start writing?

DD: I began writing early, and I think I understood what it meant to be a writer. I’ve always loved literature, but this did not get in the way of other interests. I read books on chemistry, biology, physics, etc, but no matter what I did I was always reading and writing poetry.
My first work was written around the age of thirteen. These early poems were naive, yes, but I understood that there were many different positions one could take toward the canon; it was then that I became interested in not just articulating the tortures of my soul, but working with the text as an object –working with form, and how form shaped content. In this sense I was a pretty precocious child. So, I was lucky. I had some talent, but also, I was very fortunate in terms of my company, both in school and at home. The adults I associated with recognized my talents, but didn’t parade me around, as is often the case with gifted children. We know of many cases when gifted children are put on display, and later exhibit signs of psychological damage. For instance, during perestroika a young girl by the name of Nika Turbina became a popular poet when she was very young, but later ended up hanging herself, or jumping out a window… I don’t remember the details, but it was a great loss. Or take for instance Vika Vetrova who wrote acclaimed Tsvetaeva style poetry at a young age, and now has reverted to a kind of hapless graphorrhea. So, it should be said that although I proved myself talented at a young age I had a perfectly normal childhood.
My literary socialization occurred at the age of 17-18. After graduating from high school I applied to the philosophy program at Moscow State University, but to my great disappointment was not accepted. Reluctantly, I applied to the literature program, from which I graduated. One of the most productive things to come out of my admittance into the literature program was that it acquainted me with the scene. Prior to this I really knew almost no one in the literary world. So, despite my reluctance to enter the program, it quickly absorbed me into the literary world. There was one rather closed literary circle with nationalist orientations, though a nationalism completely apart with any official orientation. The group met at Lesha Koretsky’s apartment. Natasha Chernikh and Ira Shastakovkaya, two excellent poets, were part of this circle. This was one circle. It should be mentioned that it consciously put itself in opposition to the Vavilon circle, and specifically Dmitry Kuzmin. On what principles this circle was contra to Kuzmin is not important, what is important is that I learned about Kuzmin through this circle, and this led me to meet him soon after. Shortly after meeting him I joined Vavilon, Kuzmin and I have been great collaborators ever since.
At this moment I considered myself a literatus and writer, but not a philologist or a critic. I became a critic after realizing that if I didn’t say certain things no one else would. Also, as is often the case with writers, I was looking for a way to make some extra money, and non-fiction gave me that opportunity. So, I began carving out a critical position. My first critical article was published in 1996.

PG: Did you have any creative writing classes at the University?

DD: Yes. At the university I attended a seminar led by Ruslan Kirilov, from whom I learned virtually nothing. Although, I am grateful that this was a prose, not a poetry workshop, because after all prose is more grounded than poetry –it helped me get a more abstract understanding of writing. Also, at the center of literary scene was the legendary seminar of Fila Kovaldjhe, which, by that time I attended it, was conducted in part by Evgeny Burimovich. Then there were of course the various Vavilon projects; Kuzmin was constantly getting people together.

PG:What effect did these seminars have on you?

DD: I can’t say that anything had a particular affect on me. What resulted was a widening of context. Things were beginning to come into focus. I was beginning to place myself in the field –authors, movements, histories were all something I could now position. Also, I have always been a proponent of self-educations; the best teacher you will ever have in life is yourself. This isn’t just regarding art, but all forms of education as well. My formal university education was in many ways obstructive, and I learned most of what I know on my own. I remember being 14 and going to 19th October (the only non official Moscow bookstore at the time) and inanely picking books off the shelves in the poetry section. The names at that time meant almost nothing to me. I was going purely off what I did or didn’t like. With this approach I discovered Elena Shvarts, Sergei Gandlevsky, etc. Plus, it was a strange epoch; there was this mad wave of publishing after the end of Soviet censorship. Suddenly, so much being published by journals, tiny presses, magazines like Ogoniok, etc. There was a huge amount of pre second world war material being published; many obscure Silver Age poets were being exhumed. During my young formative years I was submerged in a deluge of poetry. There were new niches constantly being discovered… But, to answer your question the seminars didn’t affected me nearly as much as individual people.

PG: Like who for instance?

DD: Well, Dmitry Kuzmin, Yuri Orlitsky, Viacheslav Kuritsin…

PG: How did they influence you?

DD: Well, first there was a kind of positivist pathos toward knowledge; a pathos toward diversity, in the ecological sense –a pull toward heterogeneity in culture. They saw many different events taking place at the same time, and understood that the ability to speak different languages, aesthetic languages, was a must for any artist or critic, or any cultured person for that matter. For me, this wasn’t a discovery. But these individual’s formulated for me these ideas better than I could have myself.

PG: Do you think this approach is different from what we had before?

DD: In a sense this multilateral approach has never been very popular, and isn’t all that popular to this day. Periodically a multilateral positivist approach is voiced, and then stamped out… long live individual tastes, or long live a specific school or hierarchy; it’s really all the same. Hierarchies are necessary –there is a cultural literary field that is not a collection of stochastic phenomena. The field can be made sense of, but it is not composed of one linear trajectory. It is composed of different parallel hierarchies. These hierarchies exist. It is a very complicated landscape. Our task (i.e. the task of people who seek to understand) is not simply to drift along, but to understand these various hierarchies, and comprehend the mechanisms that hook them all together, and not climb one particular hierarchy, and from it spit on the rest, proclaiming: “here we have culture and there we have profanity.” This of course isn’t anything new. I didn’t think this up, nor did Kuzmin for that matter. Lately I’ve been studying the critical writings of Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov. Bryusov formulated this position a hundred years ago, and was criticized just as Kuzmin is criticized now. It’s all exactly the same –a closed circle.

PG: What role has post-modernism played in this debate, or is it even relevant to this debate?

DD: Post-modernism exists as a theoretical construct. At the beginning of the 1990’s it had a great affect on young Russian literature. It demonstrated a kind of widening of horizons. Of course, it must be said that Russian post-modernism is quite different from Western post-modernism. Examples of Russian post-modernism are represented by several authors, varying in their insight: Irina Skoropanova, Mikhail Epstein, Viacheslav Kuritsyn and Mark Lipovetsky. One thing they all have in common is the idea that anything written in the “post-modern” epoch is post-modern i.e. we are all post-moderns. Now although this thesis may be charming it has no value from the point of criticism. This is the equivalent of saying that everything written in the modernist era is the product of modernist culture. I don’t know… post-modernism was a useful concept, but now this word has been used so much that it signifies everything, and too often nothing. I think that if you want to speak clearly you have to distance yourself from this word, and show what you mean through concrete examples. This is not because post-modernism doesn’t exist, not because this idea is a lie, but because in practice this word encompasses too much; in a way it was too successful. When I was 17, 18, 19, years old I freely referred to myself as a post-modernist, now I am not ready to say such a thing. This is not simply because certain personal views of mine have changed over the years (I now believe in a metaphysical truth that post-modernism cancels) but because I feel that the post-modern position is a distraction, an attempt to say nothing in the place of something.

PG: Ok. Do you think there are any clearly defined schools in Russian poetry? Schools formed around certain individuals, prizes, awards, etc.

DD: It seems to me that when talking about schools…this is a complicated question… I can’t answer it without certain qualifications. In Anatoly Naiman’s recollections of Akhmatova an episode is described in which Akhmatova criticized the Symbolists, and at one point Naiman interrupts saying something like “but you have to agree Symbolism was a distinguished important movement…” Akhmatova paused and glared at him, and then said, “Do you think that I don’t recognize that the Symbolists were the last great movement in Russian literature?” This was a very apt statement. Symbolism wasn’t just a poetic movement, but a worldview that affected people in many different disciplines. After Symbolism ended other schools formed (e.g. Futurism and Acmeism), but these groups and those that followed them (e.g. Oberiu) weren’t formed around an all encompassing cultural worldview, but around particular artistic scenes. Then there was that horrible gap between the thirties and fifties, in which things of course went on, but we know little about them. And this leads us to the Conceptualists who were their own particular movement. It is a myth that everyone was welcome in the Conceptualist circles. There was more than just one group of Conceptualists, and each circle had its own rules. We have to understand that Conceptualism according to Dmitry Prigov is very different from Conceptualism according to Andrei Monastirsky or Pavel Pepperstein. It seems to me that today certain groups work together, publish together, read together, and even argue in one voice against some other group, but still are not aesthetically coherent. We can’t say that the artistic process is anamorphous –it is varied– and this variance doesn’t map onto these different groups and scenes. There are aesthetic constants that work above the group level, that connect people in disparate groups. And I believe, that one of the main problems in contemporary criticism is related to this mess, when people mistake a certain social group for an aesthetic group and vice-versa. For instance, consider the category of a “Vavilon poet”. The Vavilon project now has so many different poets under its banner with such different, contrary, aesthetic values that to call someone a Vavilon writer could mean anything. And this is what is so wrong, or not wrong, but unfortunate about contemporary criticism –an individual becomes a synecdoche. When Dmitry Kuzmin is criticized it suddenly means that everyone associated with Vavilon is under attack. Again, history is repeating itself. This is all reminiscent of a careless article written by Alexander Blok (entitled Godless and Uninspired) directed against Tsekh poets, who were not a literary group. The Tsekh poets included not only Acmeists but Christian poets, Futurists like Khlebnikov, nonpartisans like Vladislav Khodasevich, Post-Symbolists such as Mikhail Kuzmin etc, etc. This tendency to lump different poets together is an old problem still seen in contemporary criticism. Meanwhile there are real boundaries that exist as the result of age, geography… these may be harder to distinguish, but I think these divisions are also the most interesting.
Consider the Debut generation, in some sense it has some aesthetic coherence. This was a generation that evolved on the web. My generation, although it overlaps somewhat with the Debut generation, was already mature when the web really took off, but Julia Idlis and Marianne Giede were raised on the internet. The writers who spent there formative years online, had an atmosphere which both helped and deterred serious literary work. The online community helped them in the sense that it created a generous community of authors and readers, where the cock praised the cuckoo and the cuckoo praised the cock. However this community complicates things; it’s too cozy. As the result of this I see a sort of leveling of language where the same words get repeated again and again. I am not trying to assign value to anything. There are epochs defined by opposition and breaks, and there are epochs defined by an evening of standards. This is the simple state of affairs.
Now, if we look at the Vavilon generation, and count all the differences among its writers, (which I attribute to the sudden deluge of a great poetry in the late eighties and early nineties) then it is obviously a generation of diversity. There were so many potential orientations a poet could take in the early nineties. This led to a hybridization of Symbolism and academic European poetry, the Oberiu and Conceptualism. The work of the 1990’s was to orient yourself among the different canons, and to create your own style…In the 21st century I’ve noticed a kind of unification of language, an attempt to speak in a language that everyone understands. Is this good or bad? I don’t know. Personally, it makes me uncomfortable, but this is no doubt my own prejudice coming to through. In the beginning there was this plethora of voices. Now, the roads have been built, some voices were chosen over others, some were coupled with a particular style of experimentation. This created a distinct lyric that is predominant today: a kind of neo-acmeism. And I’m not just talking about Brodsky, but the language represented by Gandlevsky, Tsvetkov, Kenzheev, and the St. Petersburg authors such as Elena Schwartz, Viktor Krivulin, and young authors such as Elena Fanaelova; and also there are the poets who have oriented themselves toward the west such as Stanislav Lvovsky, Alexander Anashevich, Lenor Garalik, etc. Now, from these authors we get a common language. The Debut authors follow all this, and consequently use this speech. I am not saying that the Debut poets don’t have their own individual voices; these poets are simply working in a narrower linguistic diapason.
The paradox is that the retreat from formalistic experimentation is still interpreted as a linguistic experiment. Tatyana Moseeva, Julia Idlis, Marianna Geide, Mikhail Kotov, and Piotr Popov are still heavily criticized by the assholes in the main journals. Overall the Debut generation is seen as the new avant-garde, and it is often criticized for not doing enough, for being formally lazy. In the mid 1990’s Znamya ran an article called: Shadow Know Your Place. This was a controversial piece in which the author argued that the status of emerging poets was too high; the idea being that they were mere shadows of their predecessors. Of course, “who is whose shadow?” is an open question. Today we once again see senior critics accusing the younger generation of not knowing their place; and even though these critics are aging and will eventually pass on, it is they –not Ilya Kukulin or Danila Davydov– who are defining and building contemporary criticism.

PG: Do you think the younger generation is conscious of this or are they simply writing there poems, and these poems just happen not to fall in line with critical expectations?

DD: I don’t think that anyone is consciously creating a particular kind of lyric, aside from two or three authors (whose names I won’t mention) who are consciously working through a particular method. But all in all I think there is a historical cultural movement afoot that is greater than individuality.

PG: They’re just writing their poems?

DD: Yes, yes, yes, in the 1990’s there was a distinct feeling of opposition to the official cannon. Poets were defending their own, pointing and saying, “These, these are our poets, fuck Voznesensky and Okudzhava, but Nekrasov, Prigov, Krivulin, Shvartz, Dragomoshenko, etc. These are our poets; this is who we are.” There were many different combinations that people chose to call their own, but the point is that they defined their position in opposition to another.

PG: And now?

DD: Today, everything is mixed into one common cultural tradition. One can easily inherit the traditions of Dragamoshenko or Pushkin, but it will all have the same value. In the 1990’s it would have been a shock to see an established hip poet prefacing a poem with a quote from…I don’t know… say Tyutchev. Today this wouldn’t surprise anyone. This is an aspect of the contemporary scene that I like: all traditions are up for grabs.

PG: So, what are the values of the young poet?

DD: Well, like I’ve already said, the neo-acmeistic language represented by Brodsky, in part the Moscow and St. Petersburg schools, several new authors that I’ve already mentioned… I don’t know. I don’t know how to assign a set of values to the contemporary situation. The present state of things feels like a period of transition, although who knows when this transition will end. In ten years? In twenty? Who knows? Also, periodically we have groups, who quite sporadically, decide to orient themselves toward a western school unknown in Russia (e.g. the circle of Sergei Ogurtsov which orients itself toward American Academic poetry, like the Language school).

PG: Like Dragomoshenko?

DD: Dragomoshenko in the senior generation and Skidan in the middle generation, but in the new generation we suddenly have these other poets… This leads us to assume that there won’t ever be an absolute, unified, language of poetry.

PG: I noticed that the majority of Russian poets don’t have an academic background in poetry. What role does the academy play in contemporary poetry?

DD: Unfortunately a negative one, though it has the potential to play a positive one. This again, is the old story of Russian culture. The idea of an academic literary education, not coincidentally, belongs to Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov. He organized the first literature program at the Russia Theater Arts Institute, or… I can’t remember what it was called, we can look it up later. Bryusov believed that a musician should get an education at a conservatory, or that a painter should get his education at an art school. It’s obvious that you can’t teach someone to be talented, but technique can be taught, and this is what Bryusov set out to do. Of course, earlier I mentioned my belief in the autodidact, but this is my own personal belief. But as a whole, Bryusov’s idea was a good one, and other important writers supported him (e.g. Nikolay Gumilev). They were both teachers and proponents of the techniques behind good poetry. It is arguable whether they produced any good poets through their teaching, but they certainly produced some great translators. Later in the thirties the Soviets opened the Gorky Literary Institute. The goal of this program was formally the same, but in essence completely different. The Gorky Institute had two objectives: first, educate the proletariat, and second, create a place where bourgeois writers could interact with the proletariat. The main point of this school was to teach people who was Shakespeare and who was Pushkin, because at that time, people were horribly ignorant. Thus, the main job of the Gorky Institute was to provide a basic standard education –a kind of production line approach. And this is basically still the model of the literature program to this day. This is the model upon which the Russian academic literary education was founded. This also goes for the discipline of philology. From my point of view a poet must be a philologist. But the contemporary state of academic philology in Russia is atrocious. This isn’t to say that the academy as a whole is atrocious; I’m just talking about philology. Russian philology still functions according to the old Soviet bureaucracy, both in the capitals and in the provinces, and this prevents it from playing a major role in the actual creation of poetry. The old Soviet models deter the academy from becoming the center of literary life. This is why Russian artists must find alternative resources, through non-academic publishers and salons. But as a whole it’s a pretty sad state of affairs. Also, I must add that I think that many young poets are quite capable of holding their own, and many of them are even more capable of producing quality criticism than those with an academic education in philology.

PG: In America, people still think of Yevtushenko and Voznesevsky reading poetry in soccer stadiums; Americans believe that in Russia, poets and poetry are far more popular than in the U.S. How much truth is there to this? Who cares about poetry in Russia? What is the poets status?

DD: First, we have to keep in mind that the success of poets like Yevtushenko and Voznesensky was the result of a political culture that doesn’t exist anymore. People piled into stadiums to listen to Yevtushenko and Voznesenky not because of any aesthetic beliefs about good poetry, but to simply hear: “Stalin’s an asshole!” or “Get Lenin off the ruble!” Also, we have to remember that Russia was a very repressed country –the films of Fellini, Anotnioni, Bergmann, etc. where accessible to a small minority of people. The aesthetic niche, which poetry fills, was much emptier back then. The same can be said for the Silver Age –Blok could pack a hall full of people. But the role poetry occupied back then has been spent; to what extent it has been spent is an interesting question, which could be the subject of a dissertation. The answer to this question will depend on what counts as poetry. Maybe poetry hasn’t spent all of its capital but simply transferred it? For instance, consider rock poetry, which began to fulfill the function of mass poetry back in the 1970’s. Viktor Tsoi and Boris Grebenshchikov work according to the same models as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky.
The legendary status of the poet in Russian isn’t completely a lie. No matter how much the poet is replaced by other forms of media, there will always be this sense that the poet works at the height of art. This can be seen when critics and journalists refer to a painter or a singer as a poet. This means that the title of poet still has important value in the eyes of culture… The role of poetry diminished greatly in the 1990’s, but I believe there is a rebirth occurring today. In part this rebirth is connected to the internet, and the small presses willing to publish young work. There are also the various projects like OGI, and the Debut Prize. All this puts the show back into poetry.

PG: What are your ideas concerning the trajectory of Russian poetry? How is Russian poetry going to develop? What is it going to look like?

DD: What awaits poetry? Lots of things, probably. Certainly a split between an academic practice, and the more amateur practice. Signs of this can already be seen online. From the point of view of world culture this happened first during the post-Alexandrian epoch in Greece, when suddenly both traditional academic poets existed side-by-side with a rich folk and theatre culture, which functioned independently of the academy. This split is in its first stage but I think that after a couple of generations these two poles may form into their own distinct phenomenon. Is this good or bad? Who know? It is an objective process, and one cannot assign qualitative value to such a process. Is it good or bad that this summer was so hot, and then suddenly so cold? It was uncomfortable, but we can’t say that it was good or bad –it simply was.

PG: Do you think there is a new narrative trend in contemporary young poetry?

DD: I don’t know. Poetry has always had prosaic attributes, and prose has always had lyric attributes. They diffuse into one another. This is nothing new.

PG: I noticed that most Russian poems don’t have titles. Why do you think that is?

DD: It is the result of a minimization in poetry. It is the process of trying to distance oneself from formalities. For instance, considered texts written in the 16th century with titles that stretched on for eighteen lines. By doing away with the title the poet is letting the text speak for itself without formalities. It’s like taking the frame off the painting to maximize the ratio between painting and everything else. The reader is given less and less markers, which allow him to guess the nature of the work. Think about how people define a poem? If it rhythms, it’s a poem. If it’s in stanzas, it’s a poem. If it’s in meter, it’s a poem. If it’s called sonnet or ode, it’s a poem. Now the poet is saying, “No reader, you’re going to have to work, and figure out for yourself what is, and isn’t, a poem.” This approach puts more responsibility on the reader. This is a trend which can be seen in all art. The history of art has been defined in part by a stripping away of the clichés that signify art.

PG: You were an editor for the poetry anthology Nine Measurements. In his introductory essay to the anthology Ilya Kukunin comments that your choices were the most radical and avant-garde. How did you go about choosing poets for this anthology?

DD: Nine Measurements was a pretty strange project, although it is very dear to me. It was a project that aimed to both, put forward the poetic beliefs of the selectors, and to present an objective representation of young Russian poetry. Of course, the selectors didn’t simply choose who they liked. We bartered. There was a lot of: “I’ll give you these two if you let me have her.” We all know how these things go. I’d have to answer Kukunin’s comment about my selections with a question: “What exactly is meant by avant-garde?” I tend to think the term avant-garde is dated. It’s a term tied to the first third of the 20th century. Anything called avant-garde after this time should really be called something else –post avant-garde, neo avant-garde, etc. Today, you have people using the term avant-garde when talking about themselves, while at the same time adhering to a tradition. A writer adhering to a tradition can’t be avant-garde by definition, even if this tradition is composed of avant-garde writers.
The term radical also needs qualification. An author is radical only within a specific context. One author might be radical in their form, and another might be discursively radical. In this sense the term radical isn’t very thoughtful either, but I suppose within the context of the anthology my choices do stand out. In this sense my choices might be called radical, but only in this sense –within the context of the anthology. For me the authors I chose are actually central to contemporary Russian poetry.

PG: Your own work includes both prose and poetry. How is your approach to prose different from your approach to poetry?

DD: Well, aside from the formal separation, there really isn’t any principled difference. This is why I write such short prose. I like the western tradition of including short prose in poetry anthologies. I think the two complement one another quite well. The concept of putting short prose and poetry together is also beginning to gain acceptance in Russia.

PG: What about the use of the aphorism in your work? Does your work have anything invested in truth telling?

DD: For me, truth and morality are important. Again, if we turn to Bryusov (who thought truth was very important in poetry) we see the idea that each subject has its own kind of truth. Maybe there are eight or nine kinds. Who knows? The post-modern project wasn’t meant to dilute truth, but to show its many aspects. The great physicist Niels Bohr once said, “A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth.” In this sense a question about truth and morality has to be about some specific thing.
I want these truths to have some value over time. The aphorism of Daniel Kharms is really important for me: Poems should be written so that when thrown at a window, the window breaks. Although, unlike Kharms I am not an abstruse poet; everything I write has a specific meaning behind it: I am not an absurdist. The most important thing for me is the organic coherence of a text. It is an organism. What’s the meaning of a rabbit’s, an oak’s, or a person’s existence? We cannot talk about the meaning of a human as a type, we can only talk about the meaning of an individual life. The meaning of a human as a type is biological. The meaning of a text as a type is to be whole and alive. In this sense we can see how complete, meaningful, truthful texts can be in opposition to one another. The wolf may live in opposition to the rabbit (one eats, while the other runs away) but both are complete and true. This for me is what is important about a text, that it be whole and complete. Yes… As for an investment in the truth…Yes, I feel responsible to tell the truth, but I respect the person I was in the past, and that person is quite different from the person sitting in front of you. My beliefs change quite often. I am not talking about my philosophical, aesthetic principles (although these change as well, but more smoothly). What I am talking about here is my detailed approaches to the world. These change rapidly, and quite schizophrenically. I recognize this, and to some extent welcome schizophrenia, while respecting the truth held by the many selves before me.

PG: Who are some of your favorite contemporary Russian poets? Who are you reading write now?

DD: I hate this question! Lesha Denisov has an old poem in which the followinh line appears: “according to some there are only 500.” He got that line from me during a conversation about how many good poets are in Russia. I said that there were no less than 500 good poets in Russia today. Although, this is a very conservative number, the number is probably closer to something like 2000. I really couldn’t answer the question you asked without naming at least 200 poets. I also change my mind. The list I give you now might be inadequate in a week. As to the later part of your question: Who am I reading? I am a professional critic; my job is to read everything. What do I like best? I don’t know. It is impossible to answer this question.

The Critics

2008-05-22T00:28:00.000-07:00

most critics know almost nothing about art because they constantly use the criteria of the past
when art is obviously an experimental thing that happens only in the present
so that the critic is always necessarily at best one step behind

the argument would be that there are laws
and archetypes
that are the critics heuristic bag

well that is true
and in this way innovation can be measured
but still when something truly new and important comes along

the critics are almost always at a loss
but of course
just because the critics are at a loss doesn't mean something interesting is happening

2008

2008-03-18T21:50:00.001-07:00

I am returning to this abandoned project. Look for poems in Jacket and Word Without Borders sometime next month. There should also be an entire issue of Jacket, dedicated to contemporary Russian poetry, in the fall.
Here is a piece I translated the other day:
A Room

good-man. grew. and people
do the right thing for the wrong reasons. don’t follow someone
just because they have a good track record. the divine approach is so that every word is not the author’s i.e. the work excavated is placed inside the museum with no tag. thus it is not a recording of the past, but a reference inside the present. giving up the ghost. giving up whatever thrill the past had held. giving up being what it is. it is not our failure which strikes us as remarkable but our impunity. I say these things alone in a small crowded room full of books and other debris. I say these words into a small crowded room at 7 pm on a March morning. it is cold outside. my neighbor seems to have lost his mind. an odd thing to say. today I feel as if I am talking with other people’s words, that everything is an unknowing quotation from a book I probably wouldn’t read unless I was on a plane or a toilet. my neighbor seems to have lost his mind. he is riding circles around his house on a motorcycle, tearing up the brown muddy lawn, his lips moving something incomprehensible. now he circles around a leafless cherry tree in the backyard. I saw this through the chainlink fence, which replaced the old red wood fence that I loved as a kid. or did I hate it, because even then it was brittle, and threatened to break under my weight. I can see this through the chainlink fence, which replaced the red, wooden, fence that fell last year under the weight of a three day snow storm. that day in the snow, everything subsumed by it. Simon and I went to the park and found a mound of snow on a bench. the brilliant quiet air was so magic and still that for one of the only times in our time together we both walked attune and in silence. there was no one in the park, and our tracks meandered between trees as if we were Adam and Eve –good enough to see the transformation of the garden from life to peace. in this sublime mood we passed a bench with a large mound of snow, vaguely possessing the contours of a man on his side. we stopped, and I stuck the shape with a stick. it was indeed a man, and underneath the bench was an old yellow suitcase. we opened it. we opened it and it was full of clean linens. that was all. that day everything was magic and separate under the snow. we found a mound of snow on a bench in the park and when I hit it with a stick it was a man. the papers said he must have been there before the beginning of the storm—froze the night before—froze the night before the storm. they said that it was highly unusual for a man to have been left like that for nearly four days in such a public area. how little we see of death these days. even in the form of snowmen. I am thinking of the galleys now, or even the lack of proper medical facilities, when men and women died dying in the rooms of the house where everyone else did their living. it is almost impossible to think of children dying, because it is only morons who believe a boy of four years doesn’t understand death, or that while watching his dying sister he sees a little girl and not a woman. the papers said he was there for nearly four days. how little we see of death, and when we do see death we mistake it for sleep or something else entirely. I was thinking of the galleys just now, and what public execution must have taught small children, besides the obvious things not worth mentioning. or for instance consider the Indian practice of bride burning. what is all this? finding some connection and justification in some ancient text for the atrocity our souls still desire despite the façade of political progress usually referred to as “democracy.” take the books you like and burn them. it is best if the books you burn were written by someone you love –for instance a past lover, whose story involves words like “absconder” “timidity” “encumbrance” “bemused” “love” “magic” “mysticism” “child” “fear” “a loss of decency and growing heartache no one could have predicted.” these are your words soldier –that sun ain’t going anywhere. you abandon her for a chance at peace or a younger lover who waited for you night and day month after month year after year who loved you. take her letters, the clothes she wore, the pills she left in the cupboards, and burn them in the privacy of your own home, in the kitchen sink or the toilet. as the small fire grows take your own letters, the books you read, any money laying around the house, the photos in your late father’s desk, the cigarettes you only have the courage to smoke when drunk, the grey rhino hanging from a tree above the flood waters, the Bolshevik spy in the same tree with a camera in his shoe when the negro blind women walked the shores of Martinique thinking about her late husband who had always been faithful to her or so she thought, the words floating in the white space pinned to the wall with remarkable computerized precision, a trail of wagons headed for Treblinka, a trail of wagons headed for California, a dumb Jew walking from Moscow to Paris in 1937 during the height of Stalin’s terror, which he believed, and in a way was right to believe, believing to the day he died that it was essential for the survival of everything, officer after officer shooting themselves, or flying planes into buildings, while their families waited it out at home or in some mass grave on a Japanese island now claimed by the Russians who fought in Afghanistan and lost. who standing over the small fire feeding it pencils, receipts, holiday cards///eventually if you keep this up
eventually
who is that man
the lips he has
when was the last time
you remember
think
faster pig
hurry hog
who is he
you want it more
you want more
say it
who is he
who is the man responsible
look harder think better
the books burning in every room now
the sound of the motorcycle circling in the back as April crawls out again
from under winter that no longer can contain not knowing whether the circumstances or the recourse is to blame

By A.S. Pushkin

A Response

2008-01-18T19:28:00.000-08:00

I believe the contemporary poet must have some of the character qualities depicted above. A friend of mine sent me an email about my November 19th post. Here was my reply: I think you are completely right. I was just throwing some ideas out there. But I certainly believe good poetry is ostensive in that it points to things and then leaves. Instead of telling a linear story it says:

Here is this
and this
and this

ok bye

Let the reader piece it all together -that is the fun in reading poetry. Also, I truly believe any poet writing today must believe she is sincerely better, at expressing the current condition, than any predecessor, if not, then what is the point of reading contemporary poetry. Of course, as you say: why should the contemporary poet think she is better if she is only adding "changing" the canon? Here is a question: Is Einstein a "better" physicist than Isaac Newton? I think a lot of people would say the question is nonsensical, because the two geniuses shouldn't be compared. I agree, but I also think that when a contemporary artist (be she scientist, poet, pastry chef, etc.) must truly think that what she is doing is the best, better than anything before her.

Publications

2007-12-26T17:57:00.000-08:00

Looking back on the year I feel like I've barely achieved anything: most of the authors I wanted to translate are still on the to do list, I have no idea which PhD programs fit my interests and needs, and I haven't applied to any translation grants. However, the publication side of things is not entirely hopeless. My own book came out in Moscow, I've had something like 15 translations accepted for various magazines, and my attendance at ALTA made me feel that my efforts may be obscure, but are not entirely isolated. For those of you who read Russian I encourage you to check out some of my poems on LitKarta or TextOnly. For those of you who have $5 to spare go buy My Imagined Funeral (my book) online. (Although, the site that carries it is in Russian. HA! Good luck.) Merry Merry.

Davydov Reading

2007-12-15T19:16:00.001-08:00

I just did a little editing on the Davydov interview I posted so long ago. Reading through it reminded me that Davydov, like many Russian poets, is a protean character --impossible to contain in any specific category. He is both a traditional formalist and ceaseless experimenter. For those of you who are interested here is a video of him reading. He is a bit melodramatic in this one.

Russian Parliamentary Elections

2007-12-02T14:56:00.000-08:00

Yevdokia Ivanova prepares to vote while her son Pyotr cuts wood in the village of Markovo,

Kasparov, who was jailed for five days after a protest last weekend, spoiled his ballot by writing on it "Other Russia," the name of his opposition umbrella group.

Let us consider the names of Russia's different political parties:

Liberal Democrats (basically fascists)
Communists (the same ones we know and love)
United Russia (the scary party that has made Russian network television unwatchable)
Other Russia (headed by Russian chess champion Gary Karparov)
Apple (no affiliation with Steve Jobs)
Just Russia (what else is there to say)

There are many others, but I think this bunch will do.
Looking at just the names of these parties one wonders how anyone voted in the first place. The parties are either the opposite of their name (e.g. the Liberal Democrats), or seem to have a complete lack of creativity. I would think a party, positing itself as anti-establishment could come up with a name better than "Other Russia". Of course three of the names above do just this. Of these I think Apple is the closest to achieving the real potential of a great party name, but the Russians could do better. I was thinking these parties could go back to the old Russian tradition of employing poets as propagandizers; I am sure there are poets out there who could put together some great agitprop.

Politics in contemporary Russia is a dreary business, so in the spirit of thinking happy thoughts in the midst of a terrible situation I suggest you think of a country that isn't completely politically fucked today.

Here is a question:
Where would you live if you could live anywhere in the world?

Diatribe

2007-11-19T23:05:00.001-08:00

Looking at this photo I am reminded of a conversation about poetry. In the conversation I talked about poetry being ostensive (in the Wittgensteinian sense of an ostensive definition) --I said that poetry points to something. The "I" of the poem points to memories, concepts, "mind stuff" inside the reader.

Pictures do the same thing. The criteria used to distinguish good photographs are the same criteria used to distinguish good poems. Now, a good photograph isn't just one that is clean; it is good because it points to the right event in the viewer's personal and cultural memory. I am no photographer, and from the technical perspective this photo might be seen as a failure, but ostensively it points in the right direction. Obviously I am biased, but I think that even if I were to come upon this image randomly I would pause for a moment. The composition reminds me of Gustav Klimt, and the profile reminds me of Anna Akhmatova. These two sparks are enough to make me stop and think: "Who is she?" "Why is she smiling?" "Where is all this taking place?" My attempt to answer these questions is the poem created by the image. It is like that moment when Walter Pater encounters the Mona Lisa in Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

I find it odd that people still talk about Adorno's saying about poetry after the Holocaust, but rarely raise the possibility of poetry after Dickinson or Eliot. For me it seems just as much a challenge, and every poem for me has to be audacious enough to say: "me": "I am just as, or even more, worthy".

The poem must point to the right place inside the reader. In this sense a poem is a sort of field marshal. It does not try and coax its readers, but orders them to attention, and proceeds to give precise instructions to get the job done. Which is? Which is that near impossible task of showing an individual a "better" way of thinking. How does the poet convince someone to think "better"? Here you were reader, thinking your thoughts and now I, the poem, propose you listen to me, because I think better for you. This is absurd, and this is precisely why poems are almost never read anymore, and also why the few readers still left are incredibly passionate. If a poem does actually manage to make us think "better" it is a profound experience in our time. Readers (American readers especially) are recalcitrant --they have their own "opinions". A poem is a field marshal; it is not a piece of fiction which coaxes the reader into a kind of docile pleasure. Good fiction beguiles the reader like an experienced odalisque. It is no surprise that fiction should do so much better in a world where the "consumer is always right".

A poem doesn't have time, it only has one chance to point in the "right" direction. The problem with most poems today is that they don't point anywhere, but unlike fiction they don't beguile either. Poems have seceded the job of marshaling, but are still too proud to take a job in the brothel. No wonder no one reads poetry anymore. It's not that there are more forms of media. It's that all the good poets don't think they are good anymore. People still read books, and in fact the poem is more fitting for a century built upon sound bites and youtube clips. It's just that the poets have stopped being poets. There is no authority in poems! What is the point of writing more poetry if it isn't better than what's already been written! Why should a reader follow the words of an inferior commander? One can definitely settle for a less than perfect whore, but one cannot be so compromising when it comes to choosing the right generals. If there are no more generals among our poets then poetry really is hurting in a bad way.

Now I am not saying that any poet is really better than say Denise Levertov. I am saying that a poet shouldn't bother writing if she doesn't believe she is better than every poet before her; she must feel best suited to lead the minds of her contemporaries. The good poet must feel as if she were a superb leader of minds --she must move the mind of the reader to ask the important questions.

Translation Projects

2007-11-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

It has been over a month. I've returned from the ALTA conference with the impression that there is a lot of work to been done.

At ALTA I spoke with Olga Slavnikova, Jim Kates, Marian Schwartz, Aliki and Willis Barnstone, Susan Harris, Dwayne Hayes, Garrick Davis, Bill Johnston, Susan Bernofsky, ok there are too many people to name. Adam Sorkin is possibly my favorite person of all. Idra Novey's work was the only thing I read during the conference, and if made me write. Doug Unger and Guiseppe Natale had a great panel in terms of putting forth a very practical MFA purpose for translation. So...

Let me say that if all goes well there will be much more about all this business in the future. For now I am thinking about putting together a translation project connected to the Russian Debut prize. Each year the Debut Foundation awards a $5000 prize in prose and a poetry. The prize also funds the publication of the Debut anthology which includes the shortlisted writers for that year. The prize has become a magnet for some of the most talented young authors writing in Russian today. My plan is to take the best of the Debut prize in poetry and fiction, and to help put forward two anthologies in the U.S. I believe such a project would be a great window into contemporary Russian literature. I've read the anthologies sponsored by Debut and it would be easy to select good authors for a translated anthology, the hard part would be deciding who to leave out.

As I finish up the semester I will also be looking at grants, and figuring out how to best put this project into motion. So many questions... How should I apply for a grant? Should I try and apply myself, or with a set of collaborators? Who would be most interested in such a project? etc. etc.

Also, I understand I haven't been posting as much as I should be, and that I really haven't followed through with my plan to write on a weekly basis about the contemporary literary scene in Russia. Hopefully I will find more time in the future. Something I might do is start writing for other blogs interested in what I have to offer. One place I might start blogging is Absinthe.

Here are my references for now.

Check out:
Zephyr Press
Subtropics
Zoland
Words Without Borders

ps. i made a complete fool of myself during ALTA's closing ceremony. the song i think best expresses my mood is this.

ALTA

2007-10-09T00:18:00.000-07:00

This year's ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) conference celebrates the organization's 30th birthday. I will be at least on one panel, and will read some of my Russian poetry translations. Translators of the world unite!