The Voice Over

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 technical: 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

is permitted a non-i-ppearance

wants libert-i

——

Tramcar, tramcar, squat and wide!

Pushkin pops his clogs inside!

Dingle-dangle Pushkin-Schmushkin

Dying cloudberries in the bushkin

Demigod  theomorph

Dig the burning peaty turf

Innokenty Annensky

Stuck between heresky and theresky

Is feeling miserably empty

At the station in Tsarskoselsky

All the hungry passengers

Waiting in the railway shack

Say Look! A Bone is stuck in your Throat!

But the bone is red-lipped gabriak.