Her weak, her cheap labor force
Is all gathered in her arms and won’t tolerate conversation.
Her father and everyone’s will descend upon us like an avalanche,
The moment she doesn’t turn out to be a virgin.
Her father and everyone’s, the elder guide,
Head doctor of an empty mountain hospital,
Where someone’s ribs, like the mother’s womb, are stretched
And fear pulls apart eyelashes that were squeezed flat.
Her father and everyone’s, he’s coming after his dotter,
Along the dark route he stretches by day and by night,
Like a stripe of fug on a train car’s walls.
When his armies make their way into the city,
And stick like a bone in the throat by Red Square,
And go along ambulance roads, easing their hunger,
Taking the fox-fur coats off the homespun poor,
We’ll wait for them beneath the mound,
Where Yulia the manager swore at her today.
3. Fidelio
The session begins, everything rustles,
They lead witnesses out and lead new ones in,
The sentence is delivered in haste,
The accused turns into the convicted.
The sentence is brought into action,
Usually with the doctor and the prison director.
They don’t allow relatives in here.
They don’t allow journalists in here either.
They let the convicted in here, one by one,
Arrange their shoulders, ankles and wrists,
Let them smoke one final cigarette,
Give them a shot, give them alternating current,
The convicted man turns into a bear.
The relatives don’t usually come to pick them up,
Although I do know of one exceptional case:
They keep it at the dacha, under guard, to live out its years.
The unclaimed ones are distributed to zoos,
To circus troupes, to private animal collections:
They aren’t aggressive, they can be trained well,
They walk on their hind legs, sometimes they say “Mama.”
(The woman disguised in the pelt of a guard
is politely ushered into a “Black Mariah.”)
4. Iphigenia in Aulis
The action continues by the water,
A fatal war, trenches, swords, cuirasses,
The yids occupy the war’s left bank,
The faggots stand in formation on the right.
This battle takes place on foot, it will never end,
Will grind through and chew up five hundred generations,
Will have its way, like a nuclear winter,
Because cavalry attacks them from the heavens,
While darkness comes on from under the ground,
Piercing the heel and poking the knees apart.
Each one of us stands on that bank or this.
Each one of us didn’t lay down arms at once.
Each one of us, long as we’re still alive,
Looks toward where the flag-bearers are consulting,
The riders whistle and shout back and forth,
Where willy-nilly you turn into a poet.
Let me join the yids or the faggots,
I’ve been dreaming of this since third grade:
To become a stag or a ram for you,
A fatted heifer or a pudgy aunt,
A maiden, revealed in the bushes!
With a sword in my chest I sing and do not die
In the war waged on the foothills of paradise.
IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY
Conventional wisdom has it that Russian poetry is now undergoing a remarkable, extraordinary flowering; recently someone compared it to the Silver Age, even to the Golden Age of Russian poetry. I myself have said something similarly rosy, perhaps expressing myself a bit more carefully, but rejoicing no less than the others. And there was plenty to rejoice about: the mid-1990s really did chart something like a new course.
Everything changed then, just as if you had discovered a new room no one had noticed in an old communal apartment, and it could be settled in and filled up to suit one’s own preferences. It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck—that possibility of the simultaneous existence of not three, not five, but fifteen or twenty major authorial practices (especially after the cramped beginning of the 1990s, when it was as if all poetry’s voice broke or the air ran out; here I’m not mentioning the few important exceptions, who seem to me more to confirm the catastrophic nature of that time’s context). Soon the hallmark of the new decade was a constant conversation about numbers (do we have six good poets or six hundred, fifteen or twenty-five?); but long before that we got used to feeling confident in the presence of a choice, an assortment of goods—we have both calico and brocade, and this, and that, for any taste, color, and character. The feeling of warmth and reliability that such a picture gives is natural and innocent, but it more often arises in connection with other matters—say, when you go to a local supermarket, that paradise of availability: there, the absence of some familiar cereal on the shelf would make the customer sense a gaping hole, a black gash in the fabric of the macrocosm. Strictly speaking, poetry’s task is precisely that—to be that kind of gash, a black hole that leads God knows where or with what purpose, strengthening discomfort, and if offering consolation, then of a very special kind. But it would be odd not to rejoice, right? And so Russian poetry not only turned out to be good and varied: it also let itself be aware of that. And right away, to its own surprise, it turned into something like a popular exhibit of achievements—a festive and colorful panorama of its own abundance.
Where then does the growing uneasiness come from, the sense that the picture of a general feast has been badly distorted, if not fictitious? The “market mechanisms” of poetry’s existence, as they’re generally described, explain and justify the existence of literary clans and unions, the warring parties, the literary struggle with all its losses. But market mechanisms don’t explain the particular inflammation that has distinguished any conversation about poetry for the last few years, flattening the mass media and blogs into a single style. It’s really not easy to explain it—with an enormous quantity of publishers, journals, venues to speak up, poetic series, there’s lots of space for everyone,1 and the variety shouldn’t dispose anyone to bitterness: what kind of animosity could the butchers’ row feel for the greengrocers, or the “Space” pavilion for “Horse Breeding”? Yet there’s a shared feeling of some kind of unnamed, unnoticed distortion, offense, disagreement with what’s going on—and this turns out to be more or less the point of consensus that critics were for so long declaring impossible. This feeling—“things aren’t right, guys”—is uniting aesthetic platforms that wouldn’t imagine knowing of one another in the most terrible dream, and it makes allies of authors who have nothing else in common.
It’s been accumulating slowly, day by day: first this or that link runs through the blogs, and everyone follows the sound—they’ve trashed someone again: time to read, discuss, take a position, and defend it. After a year or so goes by, “they’ve trashed” won’t suffice to get anyone’s attention—everyone’s trashing everyone; the very tone of irritation has become a tool for advancement in the literary market. (Someone’s grouching—that means “he’s not afraid of anyone,” “he has the right,” “he speaks from a position of strength”—strength being the key word here.) But then any praise becomes a pressure point: the words “X is a good poet” provoke a lightning reaction: to give him the acid test, to conclude that the poet is bad, to let the world know it as soon as possible (to pull out the splinter). Strange substitutions occur here: a good or, why not, a major poet in the context of that sort of conversation is understood (and refuted) as the best, the main, the chosen one, as if the interested reader constantly measures the author’s place in an underlying yet unmentioned table of ranks, where any “I like” lifts a poet up a few invisible steps. There’s another thing, too: it seems that praise (a mention, no matter whose; publication, no matter where), like a streetlight in the dark, picks out one person’s face, and that alone shoves everyone else back into the outer darkness, beyond the bounds of the visible world. What lies behind that feeling, besides the general loss of culture, which makes one see money or a personal connection everywhere? Plenty of things. An abolition of conventions that finally allows us to see what is complicated as a failure of simplicity (and to talk about it with a soldier’s bluntness). A certainty, abashed at itself, of the existence of a single military hierarchy, a big general staff, which alone can make a recruit into a poet. A deep distrust of the very possibility of parallel systems, of planes and poetics that don’t intersect, and that aren’t evaluated on a single scale. And a sense that everyone shares of some kind of massive unfairness.