(What sets these phantom voices, practices-for-an-hour, apart from the centuries-old experience of literary mystification with its masks and mustachios? Perhaps the fact that they don’t even try to pretend that they’re not one-offs. The lightweight working constructions don’t conceal their utilitarian and situational nature, the fact that they’re set up, like a tent or a tripod, for a short time, to complete a singular task. One could say that their existence is something like a demonstration of capabilities that greatly exceed the skills and pretensions of their physical author; they’re a kind of fragment pointing to the existence of a whole.)
But what remains of the author in this situation? I agree with those who see an ethical difference between “I write the way I want” and “I write the way I can” (and who for understandable reasons choose the second), so I suspect that “I can’t do otherwise” refers not so much and not only to the text itself, its acoustic and semantic topcoat, but also to what about and what for it exists. No matter the kinds of problems the poet is solving on the surface of her own writing, where there is room for the illusion of successes and mistakes, from where the sequence of texts looks like a product of her will (a collection of conscious decisions) rather than destiny (a sequence determined by laws very like the laws of grammar), in the main she is all the same doomed to herself. As if surrounding a shell crater, all her energies are drawn to the borders of an enormous problem, which she attempts to deal with (to which everything she does, strictly speaking, is an answer)—they’re gathered together, like cloth wrapped around a fist. Facing this problem, one’s own voice has no more rights, and no fewer, then the voices of the neighbors, the subs, the witnesses, who are alive or seem to be alive. The poet endlessly fumbles and pulls at the contours of this problem; moves from place to place chasing after a solution; speaks about it at length and quietly, loudly and succinctly—and no kind of individual “I saw the way out” will be sufficient as an answer. In a certain sense, poets of this type are what eats them: a pain whose scope exceeds their cognitive potentials—to such an extent that remaining only-yourself won’t help you.
If we remind ourselves of the condition where the lyric poet was the immovable object in a film shot (and at the same time the reason for it, and the only optical instrument that allowed one to see what was around), the new situation promises a new filming technique. “I” turns out to be not an actor now, but a camera; suddenly several cameras appear—a lot of them—and they aren’t pointed at you. Then the author’s volition comes down to arranging the work of the team that is providing live coverage of the experiment; here the task is nearly technicaclass="underline" switching cameras, alternating viewpoints. But if we suppose that all the cameras are working, all the voices are speaking (singing, coughing, whistling, stuttering; one of them, obviously, belongs to the author himself, but we can’t say with any certainty which)—and if this sheaf or whiskbroom of diverging intonations exists as a text, as a unity, we can consider the experiment a success. In that case a poet’s oeuvre appears as a kind of gigantic installation with a displaced center—and what happiness to know that you aren’t the center but the radius.
In Elena Shvarts’s Kinfia there is a poem where outlived “I”s, little girls and grown-ups, appear as an unspooling chain, an electric garland of identity retained—and renounced (“They’d smother one another, / They’d bite one another”):
But the soul would run off as a spark
From one—into another—to the live one,
To me, flying up in a moment,
Leaving behind all the crowds
Of melting, dressed, undressed,
Enraged, and merry, and sorrowful—
Just like a city after the eruption
Of an indifferently wild volcano.
What can be offered and understood as a metaphor all too often turns out to be a simple statement of fact. From “I” to “I,” as if from thought to thought, there are many thousands of miles, and along the road as mileposts stand the used-up, lifeless shells of living meaning, which doesn’t know anything except how to knock the bottom loose and get out.
My poems, I suppose, are indeed written by various authors; and from various points of view and with various voices, they attempt to bear witness to or to overturn one hypothesis that someone put in my mind as a lifelong sting. Like a prisoner in shackles, the poet is bound with the shared chain to precisely this hypothesis, rather than voice-manner-gait—and in order to estrange oneself from it, see it from a distance and from above, one needs these series of fissions and substitutions, of exits from the self and from the world, familiar-unfamiliar voices that speak with you from the sidelines, with the indifferent engagement of a stranger. Thus, a fictive poetics forms around the hole in reality. Its task is to overturn the paving stones of personal pain that have rooted into the earth and to make the water of life flow beneath them. If that works out.
2012
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
III
Spolia
Poems
Spolia (2014)
War of the Beasts and the Animals (2015)
Essays (2014–2016)
Today Before Yesterday (excerpt)
After the Dead Water
Intending to Live
At the Door of a Notnew Age
SPOLIA
TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE
for my father
totted up
what was said
amounted to
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
and so she always uses rhyme in her poems
ersatz and out of date poetic forms
her material
offers no resistance
its kiss is loveless, it lies motionless
she’s the sort you’d lift onto a chair
read us the poem about wandering lonely
she’s the sort who once made a good soviet translator
careful unadventurous
where is her I place it in the dish
why on earth does she speak in voices
(voices “she has adopted,” in quote marks:
obvs anyone-without-an-I cannot adopt anything
for anyone-without-an-I will wander, begging alms
pretending to be a corner, a jar of mayonnaise, a cat
although no one believes him quite)
I’m a bagel I’m a bagel says the speaker-without-an-I.
some people are stuffed with soft cheese but oh no not me
some people are engorged with character and culture
potato scones, hot stones,
I’ve got the biggest hole empty yawning
I’m the earth I send my cosmonauts floating
the mouths of my eaters, the teeth of my tenants,
converging from the east and the south,
they take a last chew swallow
when a quick nought has licked up the last crumb
fire’s sharp tongue will scour the granaries—
I won’t even remain as air, shifting
refracting sound
fading with the light on the river’s ripple
sucking the milk and vodka from still-moist lips
anyone-without-an-I