About the Change in the Air
To my taste, it’s too seductive and simple to explain what’s happening to us with the usual set of external conditions, as is routinely done in literary life. The parties that are clearing out a place for themselves under the literary sun are doing so industriously but somehow not seriously. They have nothing to divide: there’s no venue that could be the contested object, no prize that everyone would treat with equal respect, no united audience that everyone would like to please. The situation is thus conducive to peace and calm. But there’s no calm, while a sense of the anomaly of the present condition remains—for me myself, too, among others.
For a start, regardless of all the conversations about how interest in poetry has returned or overturned, poems themselves (as distinct from the poet) have suddenly stopped interesting people. What one might call resonance has disappeared; new names, new texts fall and vanish without a sound. You can see hardly two or three meters in any direction, your nearest neighbors are barely within reach. In confusion you start being non-judgmental in a bad sense: what previously seemed unacceptable turns out to be possible, permissible, almost even likable. It appears that, after we settled in the recent zone of risk, the territory of strong actions and big experiments, we succeeded in turning it into something like a large state corporation, where coexistence is regulated not only by a set of general rules but also by hidden indifference toward the field of our own activities. Poetry has become a profession, serving has become service (going to the office every day)—and it can’t possibly survive that.
That sense of a meaningful shared space, which was the main gift of the late nineties and early aughts, has disappeared before our very eyes. It’s possible to exist in a zone of pitch-dark uncertainty, in a physical (and also metaphysical) blast of wind, and it’s there of all places that poetic speech could become the only instrument of cognition, the cane in a blind person’s hands. But that isn’t happening at all. We’re no longer alone with ourselves, not in a blind spot, as in the early 1990s, but in a well-lit major shopping center along the lines of IKEA. You can say (buy, sell) anything you like here, which means you can get along without any of it. The very situation doesn’t presuppose the existence of words that are indispensable. Whereas poetry, one would like to believe, can be nothing else.
Everything else has changed along with the air; first and foremost—the poems themselves and what we expect from them. Conventions that worked for decades and seemed unshakeable precisely due to their obviousness have now crumbled: the presumption of trust in the author (who won’t try to make a fool of you), the need for experience as a reader (the citation-cicadas in the text want to be recognized), faith in the necessity of shared work—of the text and the one reading it. Today every author is offered an easy chance to feel like a charlatan (in the best case—like a clumsy joker): “Well, I think you’re shit”2 is the main mode of talking about poetry.
What we’re encouraged to reject now is perhaps the most important thing: the idea of a genuine reader, the reader from Mandelstam’s article “On the Interlocutor,” who’s ready to take on the work of understanding and collaboration. The new logic suggests that we approach the reader like a waiter or chef, whose duty is to serve the client in a way that pleases him. Poems begin to be perceived not as a guide (to a brave world, new or old) but as a tool. For what? For immediate pleasure, which the reader has already earned—simply by agreeing to open a book of poetry. The main virtues of a poetic text turn out then to be new, alien things: being energetic, entertaining, touching, and comfortable for reception.
This is a new approach, though it ought to work; you can make a standard, mass-consumption product from poetry, as from any other material. It will be of high quality, it will cheer up hundreds of intelligent people and thousands of fools, it will pay its way physically and symbolically. It’s another matter that it takes away territory that poetry has occupied since the Modern Era: it will cease to be a place to work out new things, an arena of anthropological experimentation. Lacking a market suited poetry: cheap to produce, not very attractive to an outside observer, it regulated itself, saved and ruined itself on its own. In surrendering itself to the reader’s mercy, it will have to agree to a decorative existence at a nicely furnished resort: with no function, with no task—as background music for someone else’s emotional life.
This manner of existence (oriented toward no one’s taste, the statistical average) moves to the forefront the kind of poetry that this averaged taste identifies as “strong,” making an impression on people external to poetry. A declarative quality is valued. Sentimentality is in favor, along with everything intensive, quick-acting, straightforward. So is narrativity (sources of interest not directly linked with the matter of poetry are brought into play). Forced, exaggerated devices admixed with extremely lightweight content. Humor, humor, blazing satire, and once again innocent humor. To fit the new role (to be liked, to be loved) a poet has to behave like a circus performer, demonstrating wonders of agility, spinning weights and catching porcelain teacups: each line with a prizewinning metaphor but even better with two. Everything that isn’t obvious, that doesn’t dazzle at first sight, that is delicate, light, unsteady, multilayered, is simply not apprehended by the new taste; the new reader has a poorly tuned sound receiver.
I wish the guilty parties in all these unpleasant things were some kind of them—those people from the outside, so easy to make claims against: they write badly, they hear badly, they misunderstand, they miss the point. The problem is that this them is us, that the new taste was formed not by popular magazines and not by visitors to literary cafés but by us ourselves, by “me myself.”
I can’t call the thing that has worried and perplexed me myself for the last few years anything but a simplification, a shallowing of verse. This tendency seems to me so contagious that it’s almost impossible to stand up to it; I see its patterns in the work of the best (and, for me, best-loved) authors, I see it in my own practice; otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother to talk about it. In order to understand what I have in mind, it’s enough to take any few stanzas at random from Elena Shvarts or, say, from Alexei Parshchikov’s “I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava” and compare their density with the best texts of the late aughts. I invite the reader to do this independently; for me the lesson is obvious, and I just want to understand how and why it turned out this way.