But this system of coordinates simply gives no chance to the subtle. It is precisely the subtle that we lack—tormentingly, desperately.
How It Happened
It’s possible that we’ve taken the position of the other (the other self, the reader’s self, the stranger’s self) too much to heart. We got the urge to read our own poems with the eyes of the person next to us on the train; we wanted to like them, whereas they’d have to frighten or strike us, and we would have to be unacquainted with them.
It’s possible that the face of the other came too close and too fast. With the spread of social networks, the opacity and separateness of the author, the poem, and the reader is no longer the natural state of things but rather a question of personal choice (while intentional opacity becomes something like an exotic ascetic exercise). A lot changes when it’s not a book of poetry but a freshly written individual poem that becomes the unit of a text’s public presence—a poem that moreover is written partly in public, before the eyes of strangers. Now you can think of poetry as token money of communication, one of the currencies in circulation. The possibility of a quick reaction to a text makes it even more like a commodity, courteously delivered to you at home (commentaries on the poem are given by readers, like change for a bill, bringing in the additional backlighting of success or failure). Poems have become a message, poorly (crookedly) adapted to the addressee; they show up next to a note on a blog or a photograph on a Facebook timeline. Then again, it’s easy to say that there’s nothing to regret: in the end, a picture too is no longer a window in a blank wall, as it used to be in the olden days.
It’s possible that we’ve lost something very important along with opacity—the author’s right to being alone, to not writing, to long transitions between one text and the next one. And, not least, to not knowing everything they’re saying about you. “I don’t read reviews,” “I don’t do vanity searches,” “I’m not interested in readers’ reactions”—a tactic that now seems archaic (if not hypocritical)—is almost the only way to take a stand against the logic of supply and demand. It will win anyway: it’s already hard not to know one’s own reader by sight; the speed of communication keeps increasing, the temporal gap between the text and publication is minimal, while between the text and someone else’s evaluation there’s no gap at all. I’m sure, though I can’t verify it, that all these things influence the poetic work itself: the tempo of writing changes and the amount that’s written, the addressee spreads out or else gathers into a point. We live in public, demonstrating our jumps and somersaults to the audience on a broad background of statewide vigor and plenitude. It’s not at all surprising that we perceive any kind of judgment of taste as an attempt to establish a hierarchy on a model of top-down governance.
It’s striking that everyone agrees that things aren’t right—but no one has any idea how to make it right. Everyone’s positive program comes down to reciting several names from a list; that’s precisely why everyone feels so awkward about praising someone else’s poems—understanding that the peace and accord last only while we conceal this indecent thing—private opinion, personal taste. The builders of the tower of Babel no longer even try to talk to one another; there’s neither a common language, nor borders, nor rules, nor even faith in the possibility of understanding. In place of that is a sense of sinister stability, a feeling that we’re taking part in the work of someone else’s mechanism, one that we ourselves did not set into motion. This feeling, I think, is shared by all the participants in the literary process, and by everyone around it.
And What Is to Be Done Here
First and foremost—to be cognizant of the absurdity and relativity of manmade hierarchies. No one is canceling anyone, no one’s intriguing against anyone, no one’s needed by anyone. The chill of having no place (against the background of hysterical overheating in which theater and performance art now exist) is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external meaning. In this situation, opacity seems like the only choice: a murky, closed, unpopular, unentertaining, unsuccessful existence in the catacombs, one that remains aloof. One that, among other things, ignores its own “I want” and “I can” that enwrap every action in the logic of the market, that are ready to write themselves into any context and to turn any loss into a well-calculated win.
What does poetry reject when it turns away from aspirations to success—away from the contemporary reader? From a social function? From the need to meet (invariably overly low) expectations? From the possibility of becoming a remedy? Losses are inevitable here. Willy-nilly you’ll start looking toward the allied industries—into the territory of contemporary art, which has spent a century on separating the “creators of the beautiful” once and for all from the producers of what is comfortless, inapplicable in everyday life, socially unacceptable, and continues to go through the desert toward an unknown goal.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know what to do now. But this situation (of unproductive not-knowing, constant shame, dismal anxiety, blind running through the corridors of the brain) seems to me the only way of finding the emergency exit.
October 2010
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
DISPLACED PERSON
Imagine that (for any reason you like) using first-person pronouns in poetry was suddenly forbidden—and it was one of the tasks of the person writing (and, consequently, of the person reading) to reject the focal points designated in the old days as “I” and “we.” What gets lost in this case? And is anything lost at all? Why indeed does a lyric poem need an “I” when things are set up so that if you blot out every “I” and “we” in a poem, we’ll be visible all the same. The substance of poetry takes care of itself, reproducing the author’s gait with every line, every turn. The selection of objects described, the articulation and gesticulation, various manners of evading reality or making an alliance with it—what constitutes the individual’s territory in poetry needs no signature to be recognized. Here “I” is something akin to Captain Obvious: the greater, more varied, and more layered the poet’s presence in a text (and for a text to be good, the author has to be looking out of every pore, sharing her self with every cell), the less need for a signature. It’s another thing that what we call a strong poetics—what makes poetic speech potent, that is, inimitable—is always the result of microdeformations, small disturbances of the linguistic fabric, invisible, unnoticeable plots of surmounting and submission. In this sense, lyric poetry can’t get along without an author, like a dog without a master, and it’s doomed to be colored this way or that, non-neutral and non-transparent (the way vino tinto—red, “tinted,” wine—differs from water, which is no one’s, no-kind-of, impenetrable).