The Voice Over

In a certain sense, what happened to Russian poetry was the same thing that happened to the whole country at that time. A complex and ramified system of institutions had arisen that regulated the consumption of texts. After that, an alternative system arose (the literary internet), which immediately engaged in self-regulation, becoming something like the unofficial reverse side of the existing (“professional”) system. All at once, it became terribly important to know and understand who was speaking in verse and about verse—that is, any statement, regardless of its own pragmatics, wound up getting drawn into a process of constructing hierarchies (this has been going on most openly of all on Live Journal, with its perpetual objection “And so who are you?”). Under these circumstances, a critical conversation about texts became impossible or optional, was crowded out from the usual venues into the blogosphere, so that the status of discourse about poetry became deliberately informal, while the discourse itself wound up oversimplified, fragmentary, coarsely emotional. All of that somehow blindly, unwittingly reproduces what was going on in those years in Russia, and the very accidental quality of this imitation makes the situation inherently absurd. On the other hand, precisely the ability to simplify the complex is now dictated by the milieu. It’s in the air and hangs on your collar; without it, the faculty of unreasoning pleasure might atrophy.

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.