Soviet poetry

he took her

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Sex – A Five-Minute Briefing
–Nina Iskrenko
He took her through a fire hydrant
And through her mouth an herbarium began to fall
An aquarium of innards shimmered and banked
He threw up with both legs
It snowed and snowed the whole weekend in Iran
He took her
from one end of the train to the other

He ate her organics while the gas fumes
choked his bronchial tubes exhausted from his chase
the way he ate away at her tissues swilled from her loins
and copper seethed in his throat
It snowed and snowed all month from the fog
He lit a smoke
took a break

Later he took her through a plate of glass
through a system of lenses and a condenser
like a bobber began to shake with a gorged tremor
when he took out his paddle his drill
It snowed and snowed
and snowed

Then he even crawled away and yelled SIC HER
began to observe how the others proceeded with her too
Then he remembered a close-up shot from the film Nostalgia
and he took her again through a hyphen this time
It snowed and snowed from the screwdriver to the fine
trim.
Drink to the brotherhood! Like a drunken slave
Wrapped for a night in wolf’s clothing.
He rummaged among the fixtures
It snowed and snowed
He took her in a coffin
And like a simple art investigator
he pressed her bone marrow to her stomach
overcoming the sensation of pathos and intestinal smog
he took her without roses
and almost without pride not posing at full height
through anabiosis and converter

And having hunched over her out of violence out of tenderness and abuse
he pulled out her soul having taken her the best he
could
across the Urals Then he closed the gate
trembled until morning in the cold and sweat
prick open the door
but no he never picked grandaddy’s lock
It snowed and snowed from Easter to May Day

A wet snow fell the barge-haulers groaned
And it was unbearably genitalia genius
his Adam’s apple
dropping to his shin
like a pelican with the Pirquet reaction
that doesn’t fit the law of a draftman’s tools
It snowed and snowed he pulled out of the nose dive

A wet snow fell the sky it grew dark
the wind picked up the pond hawked
smoke in the stove pipe untwirled
whistling the opera Don Phallus
It snowed and snowed he came out of the water
Dry like Shchors
And then he took her once more.

Original

секс-пятиминутка (конструктор для детей преклонного возраста)
-Нина Искренко
Он взял ее через пожарный кран
И через рот посыпался гербарий
Аквариум нутра мерцал и падал в крен
Его рвало обеими ногами
Мело-мело весь уик-энд в Иране

Он взял ее
на весь вагон
Он ел ее органику и нефть
забила бронхи узкие от гона
Он мякоть лопал и хлестал из лона
и в горле у него горела медь
Мело-мело весь месяц из тумана
Он закурил
решив передохнуть

Потом он взял ее через стекло
через систему линз и конденсатор
как поплавок зашелся дрожью сытой
свое гребло
когда он вынимал свое сверло
Мело-мело
Мело

Потом отполз и хрипло крикнул ФАС
И стал смотреть что делают другие
Потом он вспомнил кадр из “Ностальгии”
и снова взял ее уже через дефис
Мело-мело с отвертки на карниз
на брудершафт Как пьяного раба
завертывают на ночь в вольчью шкуру
Он долго ковырялся с арматурой
Мело-мело
Он взял ее в гробу

И как простой искусствоиспытатель
он прижимал к желудку костный мозг
превозмогая пафос и кишечный смог
он взял ее уже почти без роз
почти без гордости без позы в полный рост
через анабиоз

и выпрямитель

И скрючившись от мерзости от нежности и мата
он вынул душу взяв ее как мог
через Урал Потом закрыл ворота
и трясся до утра от холода и пота
не попадая в дедовский замок
Мело-мело От пасхи до салюта
Шел мокрый снег Стонали бурлаки
И был невыносимо генитален гениален

его
кадык
переходящий в
голень
как пеликан с реакцией Пирке
не уместившийся в футляры готовален
Мело-мело Он вышел из пике

Шел мокрый снег Колдобило Смеркалось
Поднялся ветер Харкнули пруды
В печной трубе раскручивался дым
насвистывая оперу Дон Фаллос
Мело-мело Он вышел из воды
сухим Как Щорс
И взял ее еще раз

Photo by Tom Strecker on Unsplash

My beast, my age

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The Age

–Osip Mandelstam

My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries’ worth of vertebrae?
Blood, the builder, gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they’ve brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child’s supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.

To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It’s the age that rocks the swells
With humanity’s despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.

Still the shoots will swell
And the green buds sprout
But your spinal cord is crushed,
My fantastic, wretched age!
And in lunatic beatitude
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that once was agile,
At the tracks left by your feet.

The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The lukewarm cartilage of oceans
Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high
From the humid azure stones,
Streams a flood of helpless apathy
On your fatal wound.

The challenge, the pain, the cruelty, the lie of translation…

Her ex-husband is dead

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Very often I cite the work of Bella Akhmadulina but rarely that of her ex-husband, the much better-known Yevgeny Yevtushenko. A giant of 20th century Soviet/Russian poetry, Yevtushenko died in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma, this past weekend. His passing made me think back to university in the mid-to-late 90s. One professor had spent time with Yevtushenko, telling of what a magnificent and shameless flirt he had been. No surprises there. I marvel at times thinking of poets filling concert halls and stadiums, holding rapt the attention of a massive audience. Can you imagine a modern audience in America trying to get tickets to such an event?

Later
-Yevtushenko
Oh what a sobering,
what a talking-to from conscience afterwards:
the short moment of frankness at the party
and the enemy crept up.
But to have learnt nothing is terrible,
and peering earnest eyes are terrible
detecting secret thoughts is terrible
in simple words and immature disturbance.
This diligent suspicion has no merit.
The blinded judges are no public servants.
It would be far more terrible to mistake
a friend than to mistake an enemy.

Or this lovely one (which I’ve just read aloud and recorded).

And let us not forget the masterpiece for which he may be best remembered, Babii Yar.

The art of letting go …

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 …or ‘it wasn’t a dry fuck’

“It sucks to be reliable.”
“Maybe we should teach you the art of letting go.”

Yesterday apparently was the birthday of poet David Ignatow – a poet whose few works I’ve rather haphazardly come across impressed me and were worthy of going back and reading again at different points in life. I first heard of him in high school – during the hated poetry unit we were force fed. Our teacher assigned us each a poem to explicate and investigate and then present to our class. She had apparently taken some care to match our personalities up with poets she felt somehow had something to offer us. I was given Adrienne Rich. Don’t get me started. The teacher had hoped we would each respond to these assigned poets and pursue a more in-depth research project on the one we were already acquainting ourselves with. By this time I was deeply entrenched in my 20th century Russian women (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Akhmadulina) and could not be bothered with Rich.

Meanwhile my dear friend Mike, whom the teacher had previously referred to as a “miscreant” (for some unknown reason?), was given a poem (I believe) by David Ignatow. Mike decided he would pursue Ignatow as a research project but ran into the problem we all ran into back then: a dearth of information thanks to … well, the limitations of libraries and access to information. Libraries were well-connected networks, of sorts; you could look up and order information, but it was not instant or immediate. There were still barriers to all the information you might have wanted – primarily temporal barriers, particularly the more obscure your topic. If you could find what you wanted eventually – time was often the ultimate limitation. School assignment deadlines – waiting for some book or resource to arrive at the local library – really not practical. But once upon a time, it was the only way. And probably was the reason that many viable but difficult research topics ended up abandoned by well-meaning and curious students. I suspect this is why, in the pre-internet era of too-little-information at the fingertips, Mike abandoned David Ignatow.

Now I run across Ignatow fairly frequently in my readings and find gems, such as this Paris Review interview from 1979. I loved to read about Ignatow’s attempts to succeed at business, only to find that he felt more like a (willing) prisoner to his writing and had to write. Or that it was an inevitable pleasure: “I didn’t will myself to become a writer. It was just a natural outgrowth of the pleasure readers got from my work. I wanted to give pleasure and give myself pleasure. It wasn’t a dry fuck, in other words.” HAHA. And also was inspired by reading the following passage, feeling as though this ‘background of immortality’ is a guide:

“INTERVIEWER

A Mexican writer, José Gaos, was quoted in Octavio Paz’s beautiful book The Bow and the Lyre as saying: “As soon as a man enters life he is already old enough to die.”

IGNATOW

That’s good. When you assume that knowledge, you begin to live a very vital life, because everything you do is in the background of immortality. The background is the immortality of death. That’s when you can say you are a man in the full sense of the word. You’ve become an existentialist. That’s what it’s all about.”

Photo (c) 2013 Jana Reifegerste