The Voice Over

Let’s leave aside the hypothetical reader who selects texts for himself guided by the logic of “Hey, this is about me”—as if, in order to read a poem about love or a fiddlehead fern, one must without fail get hold of one’s own photograph with them in the background, stick one’s own head out the window—“I was there, too!” But if you consider poems an enterprise for obtaining a certain extreme experience (or a special one, at least, not afforded easily or to everyone), with the task of nudging the reader, taking him out of himself (to somewhere outside oneself), the poet turns out to be an intermediary whose identity must be examined and verified. It’s important for us to know that the poet really has spent time in another place, one that is foreign to us and strange, and has brought material proof from there, a product from beyond the seas—heavenly sounds. It is desperately important who precisely is speaking to us—therefore, a conversation about poetry often begins or ends with a childish game of I believe/I don’t believe: “Why, he made it all up himself,” we say, when someone else’s experience strikes us as false or empty. It’s as if we refuse to take the poet at their word; we demand that the poet present their credentials: biography, correspondence, diaries, a body of explicatory texts (these slight shifts of reality should be a message addressed to me, not an accidental lexical ripple on the language’s surface).

Lyric poetry is hardly possible without trust in the one “who speaks.” In essence, a poet is a simple device, something like a flashlight pointed at certain objects, making them visible for the first time—but the place where we need a flashlight is dark and alien, and she’s our only guide. Hence, the importance of the voice itself, its unity and indivisibility—what may be described very crudely as intonation or manner. That’s why readers are so troubled by the difference between “early” and “late” Pasternak and Zabolotsky, and that’s what nourishes the very need to compare “before” and “after,” “was” and “became,” unavoidable when you speak of a life that endures.

It’s another matter that occupying oneself with poetry presumes a chain of greater and lesser deaths, each putting in doubt the possibility of continued existence. Poems move forward in gigantic leaps, rip themselves loose from familiar and fertile soil, rejecting (shaking off) the very soil they were only just clinging to. Poetry seems to preserve itself by way of disruptions, renouncing what only a moment ago comprised an inalienable part of it, and sometimes its very essence.

Perhaps now this disruption will impact the figure of the author and the idea of authorship.

As I sense it, speaking-in-verse in Russia has now hit some kind of wall, and I physically feel the scale of the effort needed to hack one’s way through it. What’s going on? Did the first decade of the 2000s bring to life a parade of abilities, an exhibition of achievements, which we now want to consider closed? The very abundance and variety of what’s been going on vaguely recalls, with distorted proportions and details, what has been happening in society—living pictures of Putin-era stability! But a conversation about changing the frame, rebooting, rethinking the foundations on which the poetic now exists, has been going on for a long time and in various forms, even sometimes inside one’s own mouth. As it happens, it’s a matter of refusal—this time, of everything that could be perceived as excess or “riches,” everything that has a relationship to vigor, success, and even simple quality: everything with a possibility of hierarchy, a shadow of selectivity. In the profound article “How to Read Contemporary Poetry,” Grigory Dashevsky, among other things, divides contemporary poems into those that speak to an inner circle, that call out for recognition (of citations, cultural codes, underground passages of secret affinity)—and then those that anyone can read in the blinding light of impersonality.¹ Conceiving of one’s speech as common—or directed at some collectivity, groping toward it in the dark—means ridding it of everything excessive, everything particular or personal. At its limit, this means an extreme poverty of resources and ideas, which must then be borne like a cross. Of course, everything that suggests itself further, the entire sequence of small and large measures for interception, at its limit means the fundamental, inevitable refusal—refusal of the “I,” which is superfluous as such. For a start, one can move it outside the parentheses, make it unusable, a silly anachronism: Akhmatova’s “I put on a narrow skirt / So as to seem yet more svelte,” and so on.