* * * TRANSLATION * * *

John M. Bennett, "Six Poems"

John M. Bennett
Avant Writing Collection, http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/avantwriting/

Six Poems

* * *

D

blagger ,roont .s/law laeke )“arm”(
dloubleld nor mere nor .e e .ffor
t ang led ack ehn jliffy mort whe
yu r legk bloombd )ha ha( .rince
squirlming nah yr s hoe/umble
.log rat here .splread int )“out”( unh
glas glrand oubling/fodo/mlrak/icne/hu
h huh )tred

* * *

Crawe

form mistle ,grundt )“ah”( )“aet”(
loo ‘n histle .ahg uh :maet neh
,“air” ur flumbled nin .log hock ,est
nuh grim toont )“flolded”( ni ,uhn
blaenk ,grondt moadt “ahh fuzzle” d
a denk a chape g rifter )“thot”( b
uzz .flood mihn hamarm ,at at

* * *

long rinse

-][-
-long]blue[grunt-
-deng]blue[simp-
-urn]blue[smote-
-rint]blue[homp-
-graw]blue[hendle-
-lag]blue[neds-
-hog]blue[lumber-
-lab]blue[cough-
-ant]blue[rinse-
-][-

* * *

wot blunder
.
.
blunder.chaw
knot.roof
said.rump
holt.cram
soo.flot
dough.map
deb.craw
kno.wot
.
.

* * *

ete

e
to an
she slo map
flem clat sunk sint
chein slunk slabs dropt clank
flag burn mope slug
tep ida shu
eh na
t

* * *

slonks

slotn trunt slags meant blunt
tore head flan drit
she ham woe
st un
t
it ho
fle emb cas
hant hump hemp hold
creep singe slump slabs sinks

_____

John M. Bennett has published over 300 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. Among the most recent are rOlling COMBers (Potes & Poets Press), MAILER LEAVES HAM (Pantograph Press), LOOSE WATCH (Invisible Press), CHAC PROSTIBULARIO (with Ivan Arguelles; Pavement Saw Press), HISTORIETAS ALFABETICAS (Luna Bisonte Prods), PUBLIC CUBE (Luna Bisonte Prods), THE PEEL (Anabasis Press), GLUE (xPress(ed)), LAP GUN CUT (with F. A. Nettelbeck; Luna Bisonte Prods), INSTRUCTION BOOK (Luna Bisonte Prods), la M al (Blue Lion Books), CANTAR DEL HUFF (Luna Bisonte Prods), SOUND DIRT (with Jim Leftwich; Luna Bisonte Prods), and BACKWORDS (Blue Lion Books), NOS (Redfox Press), D RAIN B LOOM (with Scott Helmes; xPress(ed)), and CHANGDENTS (Offerta Speciale). He has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him “the seminal American poet of my generation.” His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His Ph.D. (UCLA, 1970) is in Latin American Literature.

Doug Holder, "With Charles Plymell"

Doug Holder
Ibbetson Street Press, http://homepage.mac.com/rconte/

INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES PLYMELL: A POET WHO REFUSES LABELS

Recently I sent out an email asking poets what does it mean to be a “failed poet.” Poet A.D.Winans hooked me up with poet Charles Plymell who (tongue-in cheek) offered to teach a seminar in this arcane subject and requested a hefty paycheck, and or a stash of drugs in payment.

Charles Plymell is a poet and writer who is often overlooked for his involvement with the BEAT literary scene in the 50’s and 60’s. Plymell, originally from Wichita, Kansas, moved from New York City in the early 60’s, to San Francisco and shared a house with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady on Gough St in 1963. Plymell, although in the background to such BEAT figures as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, was very influential. Under his “Cherry Valley” small press he published such Beat writers as William Burroughs, Robert Peters, and Herbert Huncke. Ginsberg credited Plymell as the first person to introduce him to the music of Bob Dylan.

Plymell had a huge influence on the underground comic scene, and printed the first issue of ZAP COMIX on his printing press in San Francisco. Plymell said he worked feverishly over this interview with his wife, the avant-garde publisher, and cofounder of “Cherry Valley Editions”, Pamela Beach, on a scorching June day.

* * *

YOU ARE COMMONLY KNOWN AS A BEAT POET. IS THIS A FAIR CHARACTERIZATION?

It beats not being known at all, I guess; therein lies the rub. Tag fame when you can, or cast your mind about the shadows. Burroughs said he never thought of himself as beat. He always knew the literate way to say things. I never did, so I’m always stuck in the semantic swamp. It is “fair”? I suppose it is, in a historic literary sense where labels serve as quick designations when they take on broader connotations toward social history. For instance, I was reluctant to contribute to Kevin Ring’s Beat Scene all these years because I could never think of Bukowski, Fante and many others he publishes as beat; but the broader brush, however thinly, feathers the label purposely, so that’s that. To argue for my reluctance would seem silly. But no, personally I hate to be eclipsed by a scene. As a fervent outsider, it is always a signal that my work has remained around the edges of a group. That is by my own design as well, though, I was always reluctant to jump into another’s scene (for more than a night).

YOU HAVE SAID THAT KANSAS CITY IN THE ‘50'S WAS YOUR FAVORITE SCENE, EVEN OVER THE HAIGHT IN THE 60's. WHY?

For many reasons my youth was spent seeing all the greats of jazz, race music, rhythm and blues across the tracks, and traditional songs by the greats at the honky tonks for a dollar cover. The youth of the Haight didn’t have that cultural education. We were also able to get all the Peyote we wanted and had youthful rituals on the riverbanks. No one was aware of anything happening except us, so there wasn’t any trouble. When I write about my long-time friend, Rapid Ronnie, alias Barbitol Bob reading me Pound in Zip’s Club that was way before we had heard of the Beats. We were ignorant of the latest cultural phenomena of Life and Time, but we didn’t need it. Our nights were spent on Benzedrine and Boo, making the rounds of clubs with the band members and club entertainers like Mickey Shaughnessy, the actor, making the rounds talking, laughing, goofing until breakfast or driving across the tracks to see and visit and smoke and drink with the likes of Fats Domino in his 49 Caddy from New Orleans in a little club with a few people all night long. We had something peculiar to the Midwest that we got high on for days at a time, bought at the drugstore that was much stronger than the amphetamines that Kerouac used while writing. I have never heard it mentioned at all in other canons of drugs and literature. Bob and I were in the Wichita jail together as high school dropouts and petty pill head gangsters, but we always read great literature and had the famous names in music always available to hang with at Mrs. Dunbar’s Barbeque. There are some things that are meant for place and time, never to come that way again. We even studied Zen and the New fucking Age!

I can remember the years and what I was doing by the cars I had. In 49 though I was up in the Dakotas operating a caterpillar (Neal Cassady) later claimed part of that story for a riff) near the reservation and borrowed a ‘48 Dodge from a friend of my father’s that had to get back to Texas. There was no such thing as a driver’s license at that time in that state so I drove it down to Oklahoma and joined my mother who was working on an auto daredevil thrill show ramping over a row of cars and driving through a board wall of fire...that sort of thing. I had a new ‘51 Chevy in San Antonio that I drove to Southern California to stay for a while. Then back to Kansas and down to Guadalajara and back and a trip to Baja for Bennies and Boo packing my 38 special and then followed the rodeo and rode Brahma Bulls and bareback broncs. Worked on the pipeline, then to Hollywood for a while and bought my ‘53 Roadmaster Buick there and went up to Oregon to work on a dynamite crew building a dam on the Columbia River. I bought a tugboat to live on and named it “Little Toot.” Then traveled Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming with my sister who worked the towns as a prostitute. Then to Kansas City, and Wichita for Peyote rituals and worked for the Santa Fe then back through Denver over the pass I had driven as a kid in my Mom’s ‘39 Buick, and back to San Francisco. Those are but a few highlights of the years when I had new or fairly new cars that corresponded to my travels in those years. I met Neal in ‘62 and that’s when he read me some of his highlights from the book. Understandably, I wasn’t that enthralled, so he only read two or three passages. I liked to drive with him and take him to work on my motorcycle.

So, by the time I went back to San Francisco again (right turn north off the Benzedrine Highway, Rt 66, my commute and Kerouac’s discovery, in 1962; I was living on the first block up Ashbury off Haight St. A couple other friends from Wichita and those they knew were there. Conner had a show at the Batman Gallery, and Rapid Ronnie was living with his family in a ‘52 Chevy, I worked as a printer and printed some stuff on the side. I made collages and had a show at the Batman and made a couple of 16mm films, which were all the rage. They were in Ann Arbor Film Festival, through my Wichita friends, we had Sandoz LSD and later, Owsley. “Acid” hadn’t been coined. We also had pure Mescaline from a laboratory in England. Brautigan and I sat in a café and watched the neighborhood change. It had been an old Russian neighborhood with great cafes serving pirogues and good food…unfortunately that all was to be trashed, I reflected that the new comers didn’t have much street smarts and most of them didn’t have formal education as did the beats who had made an earlier scene centered around City Lights and national attention over “fuck.” So I asked Brautigan what would become of them. He got right into their trappings. Neal reminded me of the people I hung with in the 50's from Denver to K.C. I got along with him well, and later when Ginsberg returned from India in ‘63, he and Neal shared the Gough St. flat with me. I think Ginsberg knew Neal’s wild side and saw me as a stabilizing force. So I’d take Neal to work at a Goodyear tire shop on Van Ness on my motorcycle and go on to my job at the print shop like the squares of the 50's the young people now talk about. Well, with the circus in town, that didn’t last long!

Someone just sent a notice that Bo Diddley died. He was from the old rhythm and blues and race music I listened to in the 50's. He was one of many originals who didn’t get his due, at least to the fullest. A snapshot apropos: We were living a block or two from the Avalon Ballroom in a pad where we printed Zap and had nude parties and someone came to visit who said to come over and meet the band he’s managing. A strange name: Pink Floyd. Another “strange name” was playing the Avalon during that era where the usual band had sell out crowds of hippies with psychedelic music blasting and strobe lights flashing. One night the lights were down and there was a dozen or so in the crowd. Bo Diddley took a place off stage towards the front of the ballroom and began by saying: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, and here I am now, playing for YOU as if to punctuate the lack of cultural, educational, and streetwise heritage of the youthful arrivals. Of course, while living at that same place, we had complimentary tickets left at City Lights to attend Janis Joplin and Big Brother at the Filmore a few blocks in the other direction. After going up to City Lights to pick up the tickets, the night grew larger with more places to stop, get high and eventually miss a historically important performance where the like of Joplin, Doors, Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles would soon re-introduce the great traditional music that had been forgotten.

Though San Francisco was going to be the town built on Rock’n’Roll in the 60's, it would eventually have to pay tribute to the Jazz and blues from Kansas City from the 50's to achieve its greatness. My nostalgia lay in both decades.

ACCORDING TO THE INTERVIEWS I READ, YOU HAVE BEEN HEAVILY INVOLVED WITH DRUGS. GUYS LIKE BUKOWSKI SWORE THAT BOOZE, ETC...WAS ESSENTIAL FOR THEIR CREATIVE PROCESS. IN RETROSPECT WAS ALL THE LSD, ETC...MORE OF A HINDRANCE OR HELP?

That’s the old question “on many levels” as we used to say so much during that period. Someone remarked that he thought we were eternally on an elevator! It’s difficult to answer. Brain chemistry is still endless in new territories. Certainly spontaneity and improvisation in the frontal lobe are stimulated by holding all that Cannabis smoke in. The associations seem favorable and helpful for jazz musicians, for example, and probably proved through anecdotal experience and empiricism. Cannabis in other arts that demand simultaneous critical and symbolic motifs of the eye instead of the ear, and the whole language/brain involvement seems more problematic. It is essential for creative people to travel that road of excess unless they are by chance the Innocent or Idiot. It would be impossible for me to weigh those imports into such an elusive study of so many variables such as a personality overlay on a biochemical mass. The most concrete case study would probably remain in Kubla Khan. It is odd that two of the most motivating forces for modern man surface to the top of the paradigm in drugs and money. In the “B” column, Sex and Rock’n’Roll. Or maybe Sex on top.

ALBERT HOFMANN DISAPPROVED OF THE RECREATIONAL USE OF LSD. HE FELT YOUNG PEOPLE SHOULD USE IT MORE RITUALISTICALLY. YOUR TAKE?

Yeah, I saw his recent obit and said that was the guy who used rye bread for his toast and tea. Yes, there was intelligent advice in the obit. The Golden Mean is always good advice. I was more heavily involved in the variety instead of the quantity. Even with Benzedrine in the 50's, I would take breaks for my body to recuperate instead of maxing it out, which seem to be a universal approach for many in a kind of competitive way rather than what common sense would dictate. There was a certain excitement riding with Neal on the Amphetamine Trail, but in reality the more he used it, the more symptoms of overuse came into play, and his preoccupation with defending his title of fastest word in the west would became more tiring. So there is always an apex where force recedes to entropic realities.

There was always an implicit demand in opening doors to the interior universe, I remember just before the Haight explosion a bunch of us were tripping in a pad down the street below McClure’s. We had locked the doors and would express a kind of anguish about going there again. There were terrors along the way. The mirrors would change your face into others. Of course it was Sandoz vials at that time, or maybe Owsley had come on the scene by then. Either was the pure stuff and only fools would not have a personal trepidation of a contraindication. McClure came to the door about the time we were dissolving into the trip and we didn’t let him in . He was sort of joking about tripping and it was very alarming to us because we had definitely left the road of known landscapes. I don’t know whether or not he had the experience by then, but I’m sure he would have taken it with his doctor friends or under very trusted circumstances. It was not to play with in the normal environments of society. I shudder to think how the young would take it in such cavalier ways. Of course I don’t know how much the doses were diluted or contaminated since the first days of it. Even a decade earlier in the 50's with Peyote, we would naturally gravitate to ritualistic behavior down on the river banks. The experience itself seemed to demand the ceremony of at least twisting in the wind of a higher force. I just saw a rather stupid program on TV of Peyote to something or other flashing from early investigators to Leary and the Haight.. My God! Well it shows that culture is the worst contaminate. And I began to think of all the cool, hip distinctions surrounding the reefer of my early years and then tried to picture Laura Bush and her sorority friends smoking Marijuana. Ha! The devaluation and deflation dissolves the mythical. The tincture of spirit no longer has purpose while ground into toxic trash crawling alongside the sanctioned public expressway of technology. God will give us only what our hands can make, what our brains can discover in science. Our spirit has not busted out of our upright poster. Drug chemistry just stirs the maw. Some like to throw off social safety nets, hate controls, and chant for freedom to take the cosmic plunge. Hart Crane said that the bottom of the sea is cruel.

A LOT OF US SMALL PRESS FOLKS HAVE GRIPES WITH THE “ACADEMY.” YOU HAD A SMALL PRESS, AND THERE IS NO GREAT LOVE BETWEEN YOU AND ACADEMIA.

I’m no longer involved with either. Publishing has changed a great deal since I was active in it. Somehow I was one who had to be written off the money list for a personal grant/fellowship. Any institutional activity always needs a fall guy. Ironically, it’s always the person who could have benefited the most. After a lifetime of involvement, I just read my poetry when friends put together an interesting venue, or a cultural wealthy country invites me to their forum. I’m probably one of the few poets who needs the honorarium for livelihood rather than resume/curricula/vita. If I can add to my almost 700 a month social security check, I will. In publishing, I no longer know poetry and mainly read physics and sleep the longs nights thinking about what I do not understand and sometimes read what my comix friends send. If I do want to preserve thoughts in word combinations that I’d like to see again, or have something to give guests, etc. . . . I print them privately. It’s much simpler that way and very inexpensive online printing with no storage costs, etc. I’ve had nothing to do with funding for publishing since the 70s. It took a long time for me to realize that any funding, private or public would have nothing to do with me. My wife told me that long ago. People still send me books inscribed to their first teacher and blah, blah listing several grants and awards they have received. I see the names that used to reappear connected with funding when little publications came in the mail; it’s pretty easy to see the corruption and who was whose friend. I toss them. Gradually, I receive fewer. I used the analogy of the farm bureau that wanted to help the small farmer by subsidies. They kept the administration to themselves until bureaucracies out numbered the small farmer. Where’s the small farmer now? Maybe Willie Nelson knows! All the rest are speculators who have manipulated the subsidies. The academe and mainstream politicos will always reward themselves first and create their legions to prop up their own organizations. In the name of milk or in the name of art, all the little towns have subsidized- homogenized products in the vinyl era.

IN AN INTERVIEW WITH JON RANDALL YOU SAID GINSBERG ENDORSES ANYTHING THAT IS POLITICALLY CORRECT AND PROFITABLY CORRECT.GINSBERG AT ONE TIME WAS IN ADVERTISING, RIGHT?

I always thought that was apparent. I remember taking him to a national endowment meeting where he turned it all around immediately got grants for him and Peter and all his Lower East Side friends, some of them who had asked me to write about them. About that time, my friend Rod McKuen was in town and asked if he could do anything to help Cherry Valley Editions and I asked Allen to read with him for a benefit, but Allen said it would have to be out in Kansas. He didn’t want to offend any of his constituency. This after I introduced him at his big reading at the Folger Shakespeare library. He told me when we first met that he had worked as a market researcher. If so, I thought he put all those traits to good use managing his career. He did excel in that sort of thing. I thought it was a good thing to have, but a lot of work. He was on the phone all the time. I don’t think Burroughs was hype but he enjoyed others hyping him. As he used to say, wouldn’t you? Bremser was no hype. Neal, well hype was his might.

WE HAVE A MUTUAL FRIEND HUGH FOX. FOX IS AN ICON OF THE SMALL PRESS SCENE. RECENTLY THE IBBETSON STREET PRESS PUBLISHED HIS CONTROVERSIAL MEMOIR: “WAY, WAY OFF THE ROAD.” HOW DID YOU GUYS HOOK UP BACK IN THE DAY?

I knew Hugh mainly in the publishing days of the 70's. We published his book and he was friends with Pam’s mother, Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pelieu. He was always going off to Kansas City or Rio with outlandish stories of great interest. All he needed was a market researcher! Well, we were out in New Mexico on a literature panel 30-40 years ago and I sat down in a theater sort of place where there were presentations and along side me came a lady dressed to the nines. It was Hugh! Later we went to a party at a Mexican’s house in the country. He was a writer whose name I forget, but I saw it everywhere those days. Obviously he had ties to the director of programs who got drunk and started feeling me up. Later at the hotel, the director had a room across from mine and he opened his door and pulled out his dick and wanted me to suck it. It was small, dark and crooked, very unappealing, so I declined. I never knew whether this was the grant application or not. It frustrated me because I had heard stories of people with government power trading their influence for sex and the like, but I didn’t know the protocol. (No wonder they called them fellowships) I guess it continues for many today, like the foot taper. It was so unromantic, but sex in the Beat scene was like that, too. Most of it was a service type industry, almost clinical. I needed more research in this area. In Kansas all that was taken for granted, but it wasn’t tied to power, so I felt like the ignorant hippies, no street smarts, no educations, no grants!

A FRIEND OF MINE JACK POWERS, WHO FOUNDED STONE SOUP POETS IN BOSTON, SAID KEROUAC’S “ON THE ROAD” FREED HIM FROM THE CONSTRAINTS OF HIS BOSTON IRISH CATHOLIC BACKGROUND. HOW DID IT AFFECT YOU? YOU WROTE A BOOK OF SIMILAR THEME: “Last of the Moccasins”. . .

Yeah, I remember Jack. He played me Willie Nelson’s “Blues Eyes Crying in the Rain” at the Stone Soup. I guess the Austin rebels were coming to fame at the time. Willie did a real version, of course. Jack looked kind of blank when I told him that my mother used to sing it to me. She had learned it from Roy Acuff on the radio. Kerouac’s book was a catharsis for many youngsters all over the world. I never read it. Neal used to read me passages from it, and I would see passages in literary anthologies. My catharsis probably cannot be related to an event. It was probably on the road. I’m not sure of the time line when he wrote his book, but I had definitely camped in the back of an old International (about the same year as the original Further bus) and had driven a ‘39 Buick over the Rockies. I was probably in the Dakotas at that time sleeping on the prairie. And by ‘52 was goin’ to Kansas City to hear Jay McShann and later Charley Parker. He was older and had a good ear for jazz and one of the only poets who could put poetry with it. Allen used to read me his Mexico City poems. But I was never into his prose. Except for his jazz, I wasn’t impressed with him and thought most of the Beats were pretty square early on. I thought Huncke was a true hipster and Neal was a phenomena and Burroughs superceded labels. My youth was far removed from the ward-head mentalities of east coast cities. The cultural geography was different. My geography was from the Mississippi to California. The expansive geographical freedom was a continuous catharsis for me, with maybe some peyote thrown in the medical definition! City Lights published my book and about the same time refused a book by both Kerouac and Burroughs, so I don’t know what the publishing situation was. My book was pretty well shelved with no royalties paid. Europa Verlag in Austria published it and I had to split the advance with City Lights. Later my rights were reassigned and it came out with Mother Road with the fabulous cover by the famed artist Robert Williams who said he wasn’t a cover artist but that he’d do one for me because of my history with the Comix, first publisher of Zap and first brought S. Clay Wilson into print when we lived in Lawrence, Kansas. Meanwhile I just gave my last copy of the one with the Robert Williams cover to a collector, a deaf guy who popped in, who I had met at a Robert Williams signing in NYC years ago. So that publication became very rare quickly, but someone (I wonder who) finally pulled the City Lights version from the cellars and the booksellers and collectors have the City Lights first edition for sale all over the place. I found it hard to deal with millionaire beatniks.

AS A SMALL PUBLISHER I AM INTERESTED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR SMALL PRESS YOU FOUNDED, “CHERRY VALLEY.”

It would be impossible to list the publications. Part of it began with Josh Norton here in Cherry Valley, where we received a couple of small publishing grants and famous poets and writers gave work and donations. Pam Beach Plymell knows more about that. She is also over her mother, the late Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pélieu’s voluminous work of beat book translations, their own publications and the visual art archive. Fame is what sells Independents. And one has to kind of be in a movement or tied to performance to sell original work these days. There is very little literature from larger presses. Most of it is reserved for the people who are known on television to have a hard copy of their thoughts. The book has become more archival and more of an artifact itself for lesser-known artists these days. We do not have an archive for Cherry Valley. We sold it for living needs. Wichita State has a complete one, I think and Byron Coley and Thurston Moore have put together a complete one at their Yod Space in Florence. They met the only remaining artist/poet; they didn’t have, who we published, Paul Grillo, at Claude and Mary’s show in NYC curated by John McWhinnie last fall.

WHICH POETS LIVING OR DEAD ARE IN YOUR PERSONAL CANON?

I don’t have any new influences because I read mainly physics and science and things I can’t understand. I think this country’s greatest poetic mind was Loren Eiseley. His brush was as broad as Shakespeare’s. I thought that he didn’t have a vehicle in formal prosody and genre as did Shakespeare to use poetry and that his prose in books, like The Star Thrower, was more poetic than most poetry. Like a fool, I tried to suggest this to him and he humbly answered that he spent a lot of effort trying to place his words to suit him, or something like that. When I went to meet him at his museum office at the University of Pennsylvania, I was frozen in place as he came from his office. A glimpse of his even diminutive presence made me scurry out of the museum like a rat unnoticed. I don’t know why. His mind on the Platte and mine on the Cimarron must have fused at the Cathedral Rocks on the north/south trail where the voice from “the shaken tent” was heard, a catharsis on the trail, indeed. Hart Crane, out in Akron, before the literary moneyed industry, when we knew what a real bottle of milk cost, wrote: “Played ragtime and dances before the door/and we overpaid them because we felt like it.” A few meat scraps from Pound, his wonderful translations with Noel Stock from the days of Cleopatra taken from the hieroglyphs of broken pottery have didactic phrases from everyday life much like what poets send me now. The Island poets, any historical glimpses by Herodotus. I don’t like the fascist Greek plays. Plays always bore me anyway, except for “The Iceman Cometh” and some movie plays of Tennessee Williams. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and poetry in his plays. Gore Vidal and Burroughs always remain current. J. H. Fabre, the French poet of science, Wilson’s Insect societies. Last winter I read at (I don’t read through difficult works) but pick them up and read at them to reflect or guide my dreams: Radin’s “Entangled Minds”, David Bohm’s “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” though he began to babble and rescued himself in Za Zen like Gary Snyder or someone; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Nadeau and Kafatos’ The Non-Local Universe; and Becker and Seldon’s Body Electric, which has to do with reasons that might be shattering or retarding the national intellect. It also explains some of my own “road to Catharsis” by re-enlightening me to the fact that my younger years were spent only with the earth’s electricity that is open ended rather than the closed circuit man-made electricity. The other books and readings were to help me substantiate a theory I’ve been thinking about for a long time; places gravity’s weaker force as a tiny measurement of the larger magnetic force.

_____

Small press activist Doug Holder is the founder of Ibbetson Street Press, http://homepage.mac.com/rconte/, and has published over 50 books of poetry by local and national poets. THE MAN IN THE BOOTH IN THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL, a collection of Holder’s poetry, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2008.

Doug Holder, "Avec Charles Plymell"

Doug Holder
Ibbetson Street Press, http://homepage.mac.com/rconte/

Interview de Charles Plymell, un poète qui refuse les étiquettes

Translation by Jen-Marie Flemal

Dernièrement, j’ai fait circuler un mail demandant à des poètes ce que signifiait être « un poète raté ». Le poète A.D. Winans me mit en rapport avec le poète Charles Plymell qui – avec ironie – me proposa d’organiser un cours sur ce sujet énigmatique tout en me demandant, en guise de paiement, un chèque substantiel et/ou une réserve de came.

Charles Plymell est un poète et écrivain dont on néglige souvent l’implication dans la scène littéraire beat des années 50 et 60. Originaire de Kansas City, il quitta New York City au début des années 60 pour s’installer à Gough Street, San Francisco, où il partagea une maison avec Allen Ginsberg et Neal Cassady, dès 1963. Bien qu’il ait un peu en retrait par rapport à des personnages de la Beat tels Jack Kerouac et Allen Gisnsberg, Charles Plymell eut une grande influence. Sur sa petite presse des éditions « Charry Valley », il a publié des auteurs beat comme William Burroughs, Robert Peters et Herbert Huncke. Ginsberg a dit de Plymell qu’il était la première personne à l’avoir initié à la musique de Bob Dylan.

Plymell a eu une énorme influence dans le domaine de la BD beat, et il publia le premier numéro de ZAP COMIX sur sa presse, à San Francisco. Plymell a déclaré qu’il travaillait d’arrache-pied sur cette interview en compagnie de sa femme, l’éditrice d’avant-garde et cofondatrice de « Cherry Valley Editions », Pamela Beach, en cette torride journée de juin.

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Vous êtes généralement connu comme « poète beat ». Est-ce une définition correcte?

C’est chiant de ne pas être connu du tout, je présume, et c’est là le hic. Sautez sur la renommée quand vous le pouvez, ou adaptez votre esprit à plus de pénombre. Burroughs a dit un jour qu’il ne s’était jamais vu dans la peau d’un beat. Il voyait toujours la façon littéraire de dire les choses. Moi pas, si bien que je suis toujours embourbé dans les marécages sémantiques. Est-ce « correct »? Je suppose que ce l’est, dans un sens littéraire historique où les étiquettes servent de désignations rapides dès qu’elles adoptent des connotations plus larges débordant sur l’histoire sociale. Par exemple, j’ai été très réticent, durant toutes ces dernières années, à contribuer à la Beat Scene de Kevin Ring, parce que je n’ai jamais pu considérer Bukowski, Fante et bien d’autres comme beat, mais à la brosse plus large, même si la couche est plus fine, elle étale l’étiquette à dessein, et nous y sommes justement. Justifier mes réticences pourrait sembler stupide. Mais non, personnellement, je déteste être éclipsé par une mouvance. En tant qu’outsider passionné, c’est toujours un signe que mon œuvre est demeurée à la périphérie d’un groupe. Selon mes propres normes, c’est tout aussi bien, toutefois. Je n’ai jamais aimé de sauter dans le biotope de quelqu’un d’autre (pour plus d’une nuit, du moins).

Vous avez dit que le Kansas City des années 50 avait été votre milieu favori, même quand vous étiez à Haight, dans les années 60. Pourquoi?

Pour de nombreuses raisons, j’ai passé ma jeunesse à aller voir les géants du jazz, de la musique de couleur, du rhythm’n’blues hors des sentiers battus, et les chansons traditionnelles des grands noms dans les beuglants à un dollar l’entrée. Les jeunes de Haight n’ont pas cette éducation culturelle. Nous étions également à même d’avoir tout le peyotl que nous voulions et nous avions des rituels très enthousiastes sur les rives du cours d’eau. Personne n’était conscient de ce qu’il se passait quelque chose, sauf nous, si bien qu’il n’y avait pas d’ennui. Quand j’écris, à propos de mon ami de longue date, Ronnie le rapide, alias Barbitol Bob, qu’il me lisait du Pound au « Zip’s Club », c’était bien avant qu’on ait entendu parler de la Beat. Nous n’étions pas au fait des derniers phénomènes culturels de Life ou Time, mais nous n’en avions que faire. Nous passions nos nuits à la benzédrine et à la boo (marihuana), faisant le tour des clubs avec les musiciens des orchestres et les présentateurs des clubs, comme Mickey Shaughnessy, l’acteur, tout en discutant, en rigolant, en faisant les dingues jusqu’à l’heure du petit déjeuner ou en roulant hors des sentiers battus pour aller rendre visite – et fumer et boire avec eux – aux gars du style Fats Domino, et sa Caddy de 49, venu de La Nouvelle-Orléans. On allait dans un petit club où il y avait un peu de monde toute la nuit, sans discontinuer. Nous avions quelque chose de particuler, dans le Midwest, nous planions des journées entières d’affilée en achetant dans les drugstores des trucs bien plus forts que les amphétamines que Kerouac utilisait quand il écrivait. Je n’en ai jamais entendu parler du tout ailleurs, dans les autres classiques de drogues ni dans la littérature. Bob et moi avions été en taule ensemble à Wichita, en tant qu’ex-étudiants de l’école supérieure et petits truands du comprimé, mais nous lisions toujours de la grande littérature et nous avions toujours à notre disposition les grands noms de la musique au « Mrs. Dunbar’s Barbeque ». Il y a des choses qui doivent se passer en temps voulu et à l’endroit voulu, et qui ne sont pas censées se reproduire. Nous avions même étudié le zen et aussi ce new age de merde!

Je peux toujours me rappeler les années et ce que je faisais d’après les voitures que j’avais. En 49, pourtant, j’étais du côté des Dakota, à bosser sur un caterpillar (plus tard, Neal – Cassady – s’est approprié une partie de l’histoire pour un riff) près de la réserve et j’avais emprunté une Dodge 48 à un ami de mon père qui devait rentrer au Texas. Les permis de conduire, ça n’existait pas, à l’époque, dans cet État, de sorte que j’étais redescendu vers l’Oklahoma et que j’avais rejoint ma mère, qui travaillait dans un show de cascades en bagnole, planant par-dessus une rangée de voitures ou fonçant à travers une palissade en feu… enfin, ce genre de trucs. J’ai eu une nouvelle Chevrolet 51 à San Antonio que j’ai conduite jusqu’en Californie du Sud, où je suis resté un bout de temps. Puis retour au Kansas et descente sur Guadalajara et retour, puis un voyage à Baja pour me procurer de la benzédrine et de l’herbe et ma 38 Special, après quoi, j’ai suivi la saison des rodéos, chevauchant des taureaux Brahma et des broncos à cru. Travaillé dans les pipelines, aussi. Puis je suis allé un bout de temps à Hollywood, où j’ai acheté ma Buick Roadmaster 53 et je suis remonté dans l’Oregon pour travailler avec une équipe de dynamiteurs et construire un barrage sur le fleuve Columbia. J’ai acheté un remorqueur pour vivre dessus ; je l’avais baptisé le « Little Toot » (le petit coup de sirène). Puis je suis parti pour le Montana, l’Idaho et le Wyoming avec ma sœur, qui écumait les villes comme prostituée. Puis retour à Kansas City et à Wichita pour les cérémonies du peyotl et j’ai ensuite travaillé pour le Santa Fe, après quoi, je suis remonté, en traversant Denver et en refranchissant le col où j’étais passé tout môme, dans la Buick 39 de ma mère, et je suis retourné à San Francisco. Ce ne sont que quelques faits saillants des années où j’avais de nouvelles voitures, ou assez nouvelles, qui correspondaient à mes voyages de l’époque. J’ai rencontré Neal en 62 et ce fut alors qu’il me lut certains de ses péripéties marquantes du bouquin. De façon assez compréhensible, je n’étais pas tellement emballé, de sorte qu’il ne m’en a lu que deux ou trois passages. J’aimais rouler avec lui et l’amener au boulot sur ma moto.

Ainsi donc, à l’époque où je suis retourné une fois de plus à San Francisco (directement à droite, en décrochant de la Benzedrine Highway, route 66, mon trajet habituel et la découverte de Kerouac, en 1962). J’habitais dans le premier pâté de maisons juste au-dessus et après Ashbury, à Haight Street. Un couple d’autres amis de Wichita et les gens qu’ils fréquentaient étaient là. Conner avait une expo à la Batman Gallery et Ronnie le rapide vivait avec sa famille dans une Chevrolet 52. Je travaillais comme imprimeur et j’imprimais donc des trucs sur le côté. Je créais des collages et j’ai eu une expo à la Batman Gallery aussi et, en plus, je réalisai deux ou trois films en 16 mm qui firent fureur. Ils sont allés à l’Ann Arbor Film Festival, par le biais de mes amis de Wichita. Nous avions du LSD de Sandoz, puis de l’Owsley. On ne parlait pas encore d’« acide ». Nous avions également de la mescaline pure provenant d’un labo en Angleterre. Brautigan et moi, nous sommes allés nous asseoir dans un café et avons observé les changements qui s’étaient produits dans le quartier. Ç’avait été un vieux quartier russe avec de grands cafés qui servaient des pirogues farcies et de la bonne nourriture… Malheureusement, tout cela devait se barrer en couille et il me vint à l’esprit que les nouveaux venus n’étaient guère débrouillards et que la plupart d’entre eux n’avaient pas d’éducation formelle, comme les beat qui avaient constitué la précédente scène, centrée autour de City Lights et de l’attention naitonale qu’avait suscitée le mot « fuck » (baiser). Ainsi donc, je demandai à Brautigan ce qu’il advenait d’eux. Il donnait en plein dans leurs signes extérieurs. Neal me rappelait les gens avec qui j’avais glandé dans les années 50 depuis Denver jusqu’à K.C. Je m’entendais bien avec lui et, plus tard, quand Ginsberg revint d’Inde en 63, lui et Neal allaient partager l’appart de Gough Street avec moi. Je crois que Ginsberg connaissait le côté sauvage de Neal et qu’il me considérait comme une force stabilisatrice. Ainsi, j’emmenais Neal avec moi, à moto, pour qu’il se rende à son boulot, dans un magasin de pneus Goodyear situé sur Van Ness, puis j’allais à mon propre boulot, à l’imprimerie, comme les gens ringards des années 50 dont les jeunes parlent aujourd’hui. Eh bien, avec tout le cirque qu’il y avait en ville, ça n’allait pas durer longtemps!

Quelqu’un vient justement de m’envoyer une note disant que Bo Diddley est mort. Il venait de l’ancienne musique de rhythm’n’blues et de couleur que j’écoutais dans les années 50. Il était l’un des nombreux originaux qui n’ont pas reçu leur dû, du moins pleinement. Une anecdote, à ce propos : Nous vivions à un pâté de maisons ou deux de l’Avalon Ballroom, dans un appart où nous imprimions Zap, et nous organisions des soirées à poil et quelqu’un nous avait rendu visite pour nous dire de nous amener et d’aller voir le groupe qu’il faisait passer. Un drôle de nom : Pink Floyd. Un autre « nom étrange » jouait à l’Avalon à cette époque où le groupe du jour faisait salle comble, attirant des foules de hippies et jouant à fond une musique psychédélique dans des flashes de lumières stroboscopiques. Une nuit, on avait baissé les lumières et il y avait une douzaine de personnes à peu près. Bo Diddley prit place au bas de la scène, sur le devant du parquet de danse et commença par dire : « Merci, merci, merci! Et me voici, maintenant, et je vais jouer rien que pour VOUS! », comme s’il avait voulu insister sur l’absence d’héritage culturel, éducatif et branché des nouveaux arrivages de jeunes. Naturellement, comme nous vivions au même endroit, nous avions des billets de faveur déposés à City Lights pour aller voir Janis Joplin & Big Brother au Fillmore, quelques pâtés de maisons plus loin, dans la direction opposée. Après être passés à City Lights pour prendre les billets, la nuit s’élargit avec d’autres endroits encore où faire un arrêt, nous mettre à planer et, finalement, louper une performance historiquement importante là où les Joplin, Doors, Dylan, Rolling Stones et autres Beatles allaient bientôt réintroduire la grande musique traditionnelle qui avait été oubliée.

Bien que San Francisco dût devenir une ville bâtie sur le rock’n’roll dans les années 60, alle allait finalement devoir payer un tribut au jazz et au blues de Kansas City des années 50 pour parachever sa grandeur. Ma nostalgie couvrait les deux décennies.

D’après les interviews que j’ai lues, vous avez été très branché sur les drogues. Des gens comme Bukowski ont juré que la boisson, la bringue, etc. étaient essentielles dans son processus de création. Rétrospectivement, tout ce LSD et le reste, était-ce une entrave ou un adjuvant?

C’est la vieille question « à plusieurs niveaux », comme nous le disions si souvent, durant cette période. Quelqu’un avait fait remarquer qu’il pensait que nous étions en permanence sur un élévateur! Il est difficile de répondre. La chimie du cerveau va toujours à l’infini dans de nouveaux territoires. À coup sûr, la spontanéité et l’improvisation dans le lobe frontal sont stimulées quand on retient toute cette fumée de cannabis. Les associations semblent favorables et utiles pour les musiciens de jazz, par exemple, et ça a probablement été prouvé par des expériences anecdotiques et par l’empirisme. Le cannabis, dans d’autres arts qui requièrent en même temps des motifs critiques et symboliques de l’œil au lieu de l’oreille, et toute l’implication entre le langage et le cerveau, semble davantage problématique. Il est essentiel pour les gens créatifs d’emprunter cette voie de l’excès, à moins que, d’aventure, ils ne soient innocents ou idiots. Il me serait impossible de peser ces apports via une étude tellement vague, avec un si grand nombre de variables, de ce qu’est que le substrat de la personnalité sur une masse biochimique. L’étude du cas le plus concret en resterait probablement à Kublaï Khan. Il est étrange que deux des forces les plus motivantes pour l’homme moderne qui apparaissent au sommet du paradigme sont la drogue et l’argent. Dans la colonne B, le sexe et le rock’n’roll. Ou peut-être le sexe tout au-dessus.

Albert Hofmann désapprouvait l’usage récréatif du LSD. Il estimait que les jeunes devraient l’utilioser de façon plus rituelle. C’est votre avis?

Ouais, j’ai lu sa notice nécrologique récente et j’ai dit que c’était le gars qui utilisait du pain de seigle pour ses toasts et son thé. Oui, il y avait un conseil intelligent dans la notice nécrologique. Le juste milieu est toujours un bon conseil. J’étais plus profondément concerné par la variété que par la quantité. Même avec la benzédrine des années 50, mon corps aurait besoin d’interruptions pour récupérer au lieu de maximaliser le tout, ce qui semblait être une approche universelle pour beaucoup, dans le genre compétition plutôt que selon ce qu’aurait dicté le bon sens commun. Il y avait une certaine excitation à suivre en compagnie de Neal la piste des amphés mais, en réalité, plus il en consommait, plutôt les symptômes de consommation excessive entraient en jeu et son souci de défendre son titre de parleur le plus rapide de l’Ouest devenait plus lassant. Ainsi, il y a toujours un sommet à partir duquel la force rétrograde vers les réalités entropiques.

Il y a toujours eu une demande implicite d’ouverture des portes de l’univers intérieur. Je me souviens de ce que, juste avant l’explosion de Haight, nous étions une flopée à être en plein trip dans un appart au bas de la rue, plus bas que chez McClure. Nous avions fermé les portes à clef et nous exprimions une certaine crainte à propos de retourner là-bas à nouveau. Il y avait des motifs de crainte tout le long du chemin. Les miroires allaient changer votre visage en d’autres visages. Evidemment, c’étaient des fioles Sandoz à l’époque, à moins que Owsley ne fût déjà apparu, alors…Enfin, l’un et l’autre, c’était de la marchandise pure et seuls des fous n’auraient pas eu de trépidations personnelles ou de contre-indications. McClure s’est amené à la porte à peu près au même moment où nous nous dissolvions dans le trip et nous ne l’avons pas laissé entrer. Il avait l’air de plaisanter à propos des trips et c’était très inquiétant pour nous parce que nous avions quitté pour de bon la voie des paysages connus. Je ne sais pas si oui ou non il avait quelque expérience à ce sujet, à l’époque, mais je suis sûr qu’il en aurait pris en se faisant accompagner de ses amis médecins ou, du moins, dans des circonstances très fiables. Il ne fallait pas jouer avec cela dans les environnements normaux de la société. Je tremble rien qu’à imaginer comment les jeunes pourraient en prendre de façon aussi désinvolte. Bien sûr, je ne sais pas à quel degré les doses étaient diluées ou contaminées dès les tout premiers jours. Même une décennie plus tôt, dans les années 50, avec le peyotl, nous gravitions naturellement vers un comportement rituel là-bas dans le fond, vers les berges du cours d’eau. L’expérience en elle-même semblait requérir la cérémonie au moins d’une distorsion dans le souiffle d’une force plus élevée. Je viens de voir une stupide émission de TV sur le peyotl et d’autres expériences flashantes en provenance d’anciens chercheurs s’intéressant à Leary et à Haight. Mon Dieu ! Eh bien, ça montre que la culture est ce qu’il y a de plus contaminé. Et je me suis mis à penser à toutes les distinctions cool et branchées entourant les joints de mes jeunes années et, ensuite, j’ai essayé de m’imaginer Laura Bush et ses amis de l’amicale de l’université en train de fumer de la marihuana. Ha! La dévaluation et la déflation dissolvent ce qui est mythique. La teinture de l’esprit n’a plus de but une fois qu’elle est moulue dans les saloperies toxiques qui se traînent le long de la voix publique expresse de la technologie accessible à tous. Dieu ne nous donnera que ce que nos mains peuvent faire et ce que nos cerveaux pourront découvrir dans la science. Notre esprit n’a pas jailli de notre image debout. La chimie des drogues se contente de remuer la gueule. Certains aiment se libérer des filets de sécurité sociale, ils haïssent les contrôles et ils chantent la liberté d’effectuer le grand plongeon cosmique. Hart Crane a dit que le fond de la mer était cruel.

Un grand nombre d’entre nous, les petits imprimeurs, ont des doléances à l’égard de l’« Académie ». Vous aviez une petite presse et ce n’est pas le grand amour non plus entre vous et l’Académie…

Je ne suis plus impliqué là-dedans d’une façon ou d’une autre. La publication a changé beaucoup depuis que j’ai été actif dans le domaine. De toute façon, j’étais quelqu’un qui devait être radié de la liste des donations pour appartenance à des associations d’anciens universitaires. Toute activité institutionnelle a toujours besoin d’un souffre-douleur ou d’un bouc émissaire. De façon assez ironique, il s’agit toujours de la personne qui aurait pu en tirer le meilleur profit. Après une vie d’engagement, je ne lis ma poésie que lorsque des amis organisent un rassemblement intéressant ou lorsqu’un pays à la culture florissante m’invite à un forum. Je suis probablement l’un des rares poètes à avoir besoin d’honoraires pour vivre plutôt que d’un rappel de son curriculum vitae. Si je puis ajouter un peu de rab à mon chèque de sécurité sociale d’à peine 700 dollars par mois, je le fais. Sur le plan des publications, je ne vois plus de poésie et je lis surtout de la physique et je passe de longues nuits à réfléchir à ce que je ne comprends pas et, parfois, je lis ce que mes copains des « comix » me font parvenir. Si je veux conserver des pensées sous forme de combinaisons verbales que j’aimerais revoir, ou si je veux avoir quelque chose à proposer à mes invités, etc., je l’imprime en privé. Cette façon de faire et l’impression on-line, c’est beaucoup plus simple et ça coûte vraiment peu, il n’y a pas de frais de stockage, etc. Je n’ai plus rien à voir avec la subsidiation des publications depuis les années 70. Cela m’a pris un bout de temps avant de comprendre que tout financement, qu’il soit privé ou public, n’aurait rien à voir avec moi. Ma femme me l’a déjà dit il y a bien longtemps. Les gens m’envoient toujours des bouquins dédiés à leur premier maître et flanqués de tout ce blabla reprenant les subventions et distinctions qu’ils ont reçues. Je vois les noms qui réapparaissaient sur le plan du financement lorsque les petites publications sont entrées sur le net : il est assez facile de voir la corruption et de voir qui était l’ami de qui. Je les liquide. Progressivement, j’en reçois moins. J’ai utilisé l’analogie avec le bureau de l’agriculture qui voulait aider les petits fermiers au moyen de subsides. Ils ont gardé l’administration pour eux-mêmes jusqu’au moment où les bureaucraties l’ont emporté sur les petits fermiers. Où il est, ce petit fermier, aujourd’hui ? Peut-être Willie Nelson le sait-il, lui! Tout le reste, ce sont des spéculateurs qui ont manipulé les subsides. Le monde universitaire et les politicards traditionnels se récompenseront toujours eux-mêmes d’abord et ils créeront leurs légions pour favoriser leurs propres organisations. Au nom du lait ou au nom de l’art, toutes les petites villes ont leurs produits subsidiés et homogénéisés, à l’ère du vinyle.

Dans une interview accordée à Jon Randall, vous disiez que Ginsberg souscrivait à tout ce qui était politiquement correct et profitablement correct. À une certaine époque, ç’avait été dans la publicité, non?

J’ai toujours pensé que c’était apparent. Je me rappelle l’avoir emmené à une réunion de dotation nationale où il fit en sorte qu’aussitôt, il parvint à décrocher des subsides pour lui et Peter et tous ses copains du Lower East Side, dont certains m’avaient demandé d’écrire sur eux. À peu près à la même époque, mon ami Rod McKuen était en ville et je lui avais demandé s’il ne pouvait rien faire pour aider Cherry Valley Editions et j’avais demandé à Allen de lire avec pour une soirée bénéfices, mais Allen dit que cela devrait se faire ailleurs et au Kansas, Il ne voulait offenser personne de sa circonscription. Cela, après que je l’avais introduit à sa grande lecture à la bibliothèque Shakespeare de Folger. Il me dit, la première fois que nous nous rencontrâmes, qu’il avait travaillé comme chercheur de marché. Si c’était le cas, je pensais qu’il utilisait toutes ces ficelles à bon escient pour goupiller sa carrière. Il était excellent dans ce genre de chose. Je pensais que c’était une bonne chose à avoir, mais ça demandait un tas de boulot. Il était au téléphone, cette fois. Je ne pense pas que Burroughs faisait de la pub, mais il aimait que d’autres fassent la sienne. Comme il disait : et vous pas? Bremser, lui, c’était pas le genre. Neal, lui, c’était justement sa force.

Nous avons un ami commun, Hugh Fox, une icône de la scène des petits éditeurs. Récemment, Ibbetson Street Press a publié ses mémoires controversés : Way, Way Off the Road. Comment vous, les gars, vous êtes-vous connectés, à l’époque?

J’ai connu Hugh surtout à l’époque de l’édition, dans les années 70. Nous avons publié son bouquin et il était copain avec la mère de Pam, Mary Beach, et son mari Claude Pélieu. Il s’en allait toujours à KC ou à Rio avec des histoires incongrues d’un très grand intérêt. Tout ce dont il avait besoin, c’était de quelqu’un qui lui cherchât un marché! Eh bien, nous étions au Nouveau-Mexique pour une conférence sur la littérature, voici trente ou quarante ans et je m’assis dans un endroit où il y avait des présentations et une bonne femme sur son trente et un vient de mon côté. C’était Hugh! Plus tard, nous sommes allés à une party, à la maison d’un Mexicain, à l’intérieur du pays. C’était un écrivain dont j’ai oublié le nom, mais le le voyais partout, à l’époque. Manifestement, il avait des lins avec le directeur des programmes qui finit par être soûl et qui se mit à me peloter. Plus tard, à l’hôtel, la directeur eut la chambre en face de la mienne et il ouvrit sa porte, sortit sa bite. Il voulait que je la lui suce. Elle était petite, sombre et recourbée, de sorte que je refusai. Je ne sus jamais si c’était la grande demande ou pas. Cela me frustra parce que j’avais entendu des histoires de gens qui avaient du pouvoir au niveau du gouvernement et qui vendaient leur influence moyennant des rapports sexuels et des histoires du même tonneau, maios je ne connaissais pas le protocole. Pas étonnant qu’ils se fussent donné le nom de fraternités ou confréries. Je présume que ça continue de la sorte aujourd’hui pour beaucoup de gens, comme le foot taper. C’était si peu romantique, mais le sexe sur la scène beat, c’était comme ça aussi. La majeure partie de l’affaire, c’était une industrie du genre service, quasiment clinique. J’avais besoin de faire plus de recherche, dans ce secteur. Au Kansas, tout était considéré comme allant de soi, mais ce n’était pas lié au pouvoir, de sorte que je me sentais comme les hippies ignorants, pas de copains malins, pas de liens avec l’éducation, pas de subventions!

Un ami à moi, Jack Powers, qui a fondé Stone Soup Poets à Boston, dit que « On the Road » de Kerouac l’a libéré des contraintes de son contexte catholique irlandais de Boston. Comment cela vous a-t-il affecté ? Vous avez écrit un bouquin sur un thème similaire : « Last of the Moccasins »…

Ouais, je me souviens de Jack. Il m’avait fait écouter « Blues Eyes Crying in the Rain », de Willie Nelson, au Stone Soup. Je présume que les rebelles d’Austin commençaient à se faire connaître, à l’époque. La version de Willie en était vraiument une, naturellement. Jack m’a regardé avec un regard sans expression quand je lui ai dit que ma mère me la chantait déjà dans le temps. Elle l’avait appris de Roy Acuff à la radio. Le bouquin de Kerouac a été une catharsis pour des tas de jeunots de par le monde entier. Je ne l’ai jamais lu. Neal m’en lisait des passages et j’en ai découvert d’autres dans des anthologies de littérature. Ma catharsis ne peut sans doute pas être mise en rapport avec un événement. Elle était rpobablement sur la route. Je ne suis pas sûr de la ligne du temps quand il écrivit son bouquin, mais j’avais décidément campé à l’arrière d’un vieux camion International (à peu près la même année que l’autocar Further original) et j’avais conduit une Buick 39 de l’autre côté des Rocheuses. J’étais probablement dans les Dakota, à ce moment, dormant dans la prairie. Et, en 52, je retournais à KC pour écouter Jay McShann et, plus tard, Charley Parker. Il était plus vieux et avait une bonne oreille pour le jazz et il était l’un des rares poètes capables de mettre de la poésie dessus. Allen me lisait ses poèmes de Mexico City Blues. Je ne suis jamais entré dans sa prose. À l’exception de son jazz, je ne fus pas impressionné par lui et je pensais que la plupart des gens de la Beat étaient assez ringards, dans les débuts. Je croyais que Huncke était un véritable hipster, Neal un phénomène et que Burroughs supplantait toutes les étiquettes. Ma jeunesse fut très éloignée des mentalités de ward-heads des villes de la côte est. La géographie culturelle était différente. Ma géographie allait du Mississippi à la Californie. La liberté géographique expansive était une catharsis continuelle, pour moi, avec peut-être un peu de peyotl ajouté à la définition médicale! City Lights publia mon bouquin et, à peu près en même temps, refusa un livre de Kerouac et un autre de Burroughs, ds sorte que je ne sais pas quelle était la situation de l’édition. Mon bouquin se trouvait sur bien des rayons et sans paiement de droits d’auteur. Europa Verlag en Autriche l’a publié et j’ai dû partager l’avance avec City Lights. Plus tard, mes droits furent retransférés et le livre ressortit chez Mother Road, avec la fabuleuse couverture de l’artiste renommé Robert Williams, qui déclara qu’il n’était pas un artiste pour couverture mais qu’il en avait fait une pour moi en raison de mon histoire avec les Comix, du fait que j’avais été le premier éditeur de Zap et que j’étais également le premier à avoir imprimé S. Clay Wilson quand nous vivions à Lawrence, Kansas. En attendant, j’ai refilé mon dernier exemplaire du bouquin avec la couverture de Robert Williams à un collectionneur, un type sourd qui passait par hasard et que j’avais rencontré lors d’une séance de signature de Robert Williams à NYC, voici des années. De sorte que cette publication est rapidement devenue très rare mais quelqu’un (je me demande bien qui) a finalement sorti la version City Lights des caves et les libraires et les collectionneurs ont la première édition de City Lights en vente un peu partout, désormais. J’ai trouvé ça dur, de devoir partager avec des beatniks millionnaires!

En tant que petit éditeur, je suis intéressé d’en savoir plus sur la petite maison d’édition que vous avez fondée, « Cherry Valley »…

Il serait impossible de faire la liste des publications. Une partie a commencé avec Josh Norton, ici, à Cherry Valley, où nous avons reçu une ou deux petites subventions pour publier, et des poètes et écrivains célèbres ont apporté du travail et des donations. Pam Beach Plymell en sait davantage à ce sujet. Elle l’est également à propos de sa mère, feue Mary Beach, et du volumineux travail de traduction de bouuqins beat de son mari, Claude Pélieu, de leurs propres publications et de leurs archives d’arts visuels. La renommée, c’est ce qui vend les indépendants. Et il vaut mieux faire partie de quelque chose comme un mouvement ou lié aux résultats pour vendre des œuvres originales, de nos jours. Il y a très peu de littérature, chez les éditeurs plus importants. La majeure partie de ce qu’ils font est réservée à des gens qui sont connus à la télévision afin qu’on ait une copie tangible de ce qu’ils pensent. Le livre est devenu plus un phénomène d’archivation et davantage un objet en soi pour les artistes moins connus de notre époque. Nous n’avons pas d’archives pour Cherry Valley. Nous les avons vendues pour assurer nos besoins vitaux. L’université d’État de Wichita en a de complètes, je pense, et Byron Coley et Thurston Moore, à eux deux, en ont de complètes aussi à leur Yod Space de Florence. Ils ont rencontré le dernier poète artiste restant, qu’ils n’avaient pas et que nous avons publié, Paul Grillo, lors de l’expo de Claude et Mary à NYC organisée par John McWhinnie l’automne dernier.

Quels sont les poètes vivants ou morts qui correspondent à vos normes personnelles?

Je ne subis pas de nouvelles influences parce que je lis surtout de la physique et de la science et des choses que je ne puis comprendre. Je pense que le plus grand esprit poétique de ce pays a été Loren Eiseley. Sa palette était aussi étendue que celle de Shakespeare. Je pensais qu’il n’avait pas un véhicule en prosodie formelle et en genre comme celui de Shakespeare pour utiliser la poésie et que sa prose, dans ses livres, comme « The Star Thrower », était plus poétique que la plupart des œuvres poétiques en général. Fou que j’étais, j’ai essayé de lui suggérer la chose et il m’a répondu humblement qu’il faisait beaucoup d’efforts pour essayer de placer ses mots de façon à ce que l’agencement lui plaise ou quelque chose du genre. Quand je suis allé le voir à son bureau au musée de l’Université de Pennsylvanie, je fus comme pétrifié sur place quand il sortit de son bureau. Un regard sur sa présence tout aussi minuscule m’incita à filer en douce, comme un rat, du musée. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Son esprit sur la Platte et le mien sur le Cimarron doivent avoir fusionné à Cathedral Rocks, sur la piste nord-sud où l’on entendit la voix de la cérémonie de la « tente agitée », une catharsis sur la piste, en effet. Hart Crane, sorti d’Akron, avant l’industrie littéraire à fric, à l’époque où nous savions ce que coûtait une vraie bouteille de lait, écrivait : « Ils ont joué des ragtimes et des danses à notre porte / et nous les avons surpayé parce que nous en avions envie. » Quelques bouts de viande de Pound, ses admirables traductions – avec Noel Stock – de l’époque de Cléopâtre, prises sur les hiéroglyphes des poteries brisées, ont des allures didactiques ; elles proviennent de la vie de tous les jours, c’est très dans le genre de ce que les poètes m’envoient aujourd’hui. Les « poètes des Iles » et toutes les allusions historiques d’Hérodote. Je n’aime pas les pièces fascistes des Grecs. Les pièces m’ennuient toujours, quoi qu’il en soit, sauf « The Iceman Cometh » (Le marchand de glaces est passé) et certaines des « pièces filmées » de Tennessee Williams. Les Sonnets de Shakespeare et la poésie dans ses pièces. Gore Vidal et Burroughs demeurent toujours actuels. J. H. Fabre, le poète français de la science, les sociétés d’insectes de Wilson. Le dernier écrivain que j’ai lu (je ne lis totalement les œuvres difficiles, mais je picore dedans et je lis des extraits pour réfléchir ou pour guider mes rêves) : « Entangled Minds » de Dean Radin, « Wholeness and the Implicate Order » de David Bohm, bien qu’il se soit mis à blablater et à se réfugier dans le Za Zen, à l’instar de Gary Snyder ou l’un ou l’autre ; Richard Dawkins, « The Selfish Dream », Nadeau et « The Non-Local Universe » de Kafatos, « Body Lectric » de Becker & Seldon, qui a trait aux raisons qui pourraient disperser ou retarder l’intellect national. Cela explique aussi certains trucs de ma propre « voie vers la catharsis » en me rééclairant sur le fait que mes jeunes années se sont passées uniquement avec l’électricité de la terre, qui a une extrémité ouverte, plutôt qu’avec l’électricité produite par l’homme, qui est en circuit fermé. Les autres livres et lectures ont servi à m’aider à concrétiser une théorie que j’imagine depuis longtemps ; des endroits à force de gravité plus faible en tant qu’infime mesure de la force magnétique plus puissante.
_____

Small press activist Doug Holder is the founder of Ibbetson Street Press, http://homepage.mac.com/rconte/, and has published over 50 books of poetry by local and national poets. THE MAN IN THE BOOTH IN THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL, a collection of Holder’s poetry, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2008.

Erin Geegan Sharp, "Clouds, Wind, Air, Light"

Erin Geegan Sharp

Clouds, Wind, Air, Light

Clouds

weave

thin

membrane

separating outcasts [1]

-----------------------------------------

1. from container [a]

-----------------------------------------

a. expanding in quilts ruptured by light inside [i]

-----------------------------------------

i. forged into mutation [ii]

-----------------------------------------

ii. adapting, recalibrating vulnerability


* * *

Clouds

sense [1]

time [2]

in

heat [3]

-----------------------------------------

1. adapting as membrane, storing

2. precarious [a]

3. never finished, rising against the nebulous [b]

-----------------------------------------

a. residing in an invisible windhouse

b. to form and hatch seasons [i]

-----------------------------------------

i. pliant.


* * *

Clouds

press [1]

into a

physical place

-----------------------------------------

1. into a boundless horizon [a]

-----------------------------------------

a. as bundles slipping. Liquid oeuvres hopping incessantly as sparrows. Folded immobile feathers. Folded sky, folding into infinity, via material of feather. Garment of feather from a contour of sparrow. Sculpture of veils in multiple; fold at the edge – under cover – sloughing wet. A migration of many weaved, an intensive fold, exposed within a space. A space folded onto itself. An intensity of feather frayed, exposed intricate oiled grooves, an excess of flow, uncontained, leaking, linked to air, a dimension reconfigured as space folds


* * *

Wind

is loosening [1]

the authority

formed of

invisible architecture [2]

-----------------------------------------

1. in a fluid movement, in form of clouds that arrive as a sort of womb secret [a]

2. being of degree, not located on one side or the other [b]

-----------------------------------------

a. the wind itself retreats as [i]

b. but inside echoes of words heard from not above or below but is within itself, wavering, slipping in and out of memory

-----------------------------------------

i. words heard from


* * *

Wind [1] as

open order [2]

floating [3] in

postive and negative

space?

-----------------------------------------

1. a mass [a]

2. becomes formless

3. in an invisible architecture. [b]

-----------------------------------------

a. of letters lost in space

b. she asks how does it shape an entire body politic? [i]

-----------------------------------------

i. she asks how open to the future are packs as they align, orient, move and trans-form


* * *

Wind [1]

form dematerializes as [2]

pure surface [3]

-----------------------------------------

1. composed of ions, oxygenated, influenced by

2. multiple combinations of open space in

3. dislodged, loosened, connected by light to lift in a state of looming [a]

-----------------------------------------

a. She asks – what shadow, what light is cast? Does it have borders? How does it hold the space between where it is and where it was, where it will be? When it arrives is it still there? When did it leave? [i]

-----------------------------------------

i. Is it as it is now or is it a state in which it can be? [ii]

-----------------------------------------

ii. Is it recreated from the past – intersecting time and space as location, shape-shifting a place to a place held?


* * *

Air

charged [1]

brick [2]

back onto

black tar

-----------------------------------------

1. exhaust [a]

2. a load bearing masonry to sink walls of carved sound

-----------------------------------------

a. spews back on to


* * *

Light [1]

inside

body [2]

------------------------

1. never coinciding with its center

2. it swerves in and out of its own swarm [a]

----------------------------

a. as interface

_____

Erin Geegan Sharp has translated Hélène Cixious’ play, Portrait of Dora. Mind Architecture, a play by Sharp, was performed at Naropa University. A radio opera, Eclipse, published by Nerve Lantern, is currently in development as part of a radio opera series. New writing is forthcoming in Bombay Gin and Mental Contagion. Sharp has a MFA from Naropa University and BA from Purdue University.

James Stotts, "Notes on Osip Mandelstam"

James Stotts

Notes on Osip Mandelstam: Goldfinch Variations

Мой щегол, я голову закину —
Поглядим на мир вдвоем:
Зимний день, колючий, как мякина,
Так ли жестк в зрачке твоем?

Хвостик лодкой, перья — черно-желты,
Ниже клюва в краску влит —
Сознаешь ли, до чего, щегол ты,
До чего ты щегловит?

Что за воздух у него в надлобье:
Черн и красен, желт и бел! —
В обе стороны он в оба смотрит — в обе!
Не посмотрит, улетел.

Декабрь 1936, Воронеж

* * *

i threw back my head, saw my goldfinch alight—
we shall watch the world turning side by side
the winter wind has chafed me raw
but was it your sky that i saw?

notched rudder for a tail, feathers black and yellow
ruby paint bleeds down below your beak
are you aware, but that i’m going weak
while you strut and finch about?

yellow, white, black and red—
cagey eyes inspecting either far side of the day
as the storm air rushes o’er your head—
looking either way, but not at...what?—and you’d flown away!

* * *

The point of this paper, its mode, is to discover the process of reading a few short, difficult poems by Osip Mandelstam; they are a series of interrelated lyrics written in his Voronezh notebooks that develop the symbol of the goldfinch. Probably, as a reader, the best way to start would be to read the verse itself. Poetry’s power properly operates the same way as a riddle, in that it answers itself after resisting and seeming to have no answer. The optimal approach to reading is not research (even though many professors of literature have taught themselves to a fault), to start by looking for the footnotes that have not been supplied or to grope for references. It is a complete lie that a research paper can improve a poem, and yet research papers for the most part carry out that vicious purpose: to attempt to make good art bad or bad, good. Or else, many papers start with a premise, a supposed poetics or a theory, and then hope that they can find the poems to prove their paper; that is, the literature serves the research. That approach is antipode to the sincere and unaffected engagement that makes poetry worth reading in the first place.

As a thought experiment: suppose we lost all the critical literature and academic analyses, and all that remained was the artistic literature itself. Though of real consequence, it would not be so great of a loss. But suppose the opposite, that all the poems, the stories, the songs, the novels, etc. were gone, and just the criticism and analyses were left. We would be bankrupt. When I proposed this idea to Maxim Shrayer, my ex-professor (like an ex-girlfriend) and first reader, he said that it was “not absurdist, but just plain absurd,” and yet it still goes a long way towards explaining how I feel about the role of the research paper. And so my task is partly to reevaluate my task and turn to what is most essential and worthwhile about research.

A good poem can sustain the simplest interpretation as its foundation, and does not yield to all the scholarship that is brought to bear against it; actually, it invites the most immediate and matured readings to exist together. What a decent research paper is, then, is the history of a reading, giving pause to the careful prosodic considerations, providing responses to the questions the poem creates, mapping the sources of understanding. What a research paper does, for a reader, is to construct a literature in which the poem (or novel, or whatever) can be situated, so that there is a guide for erudition. That is, there is a sense of preservation that is demanded, to repair the fragile retia of associations invoked by the poem, to illuminate lost connections. It is suggested reading, canon making, synapse routing. Especially in a territory where there are so many experts and so few general readers, like Russian poetry, the point cannot be to prove how obscure the verse is, or try to prove how good a reader and expert I am myself that I can navigate its obscurities. The first thing I want to accomplish is to have my readers (no matter how small their number is) read the poems that are the subject of this paper, and then to tell them how I read, as a testament to the in lento reading I am advocating.

(As a note, it should not be supposed that I am discounting a second vital function of literary research: the intensive processes of gathering and compiling extant materials. The fullest possible recovery of a great artist’s output, working against history and generations of memory, is definitely rewarding and worthwhile. Ironically, this is not just a task for the literary scholar, but the historian and librarian as well, and many other kinds of scientists, and can be carried out with or without a personal stake or interest in the art. Fortunately, a good number of writers leave a well-managed legacy themselves, and anyway, the glut of research being done in the countless universities is usually not of any essential variety, and while it may certainly be edifying it is not necessarily worth writing about or publishing.)

In Voronezh exile, Osip Mandelstam confounded what later critics would make of his predicament—he saw the terrifying reality of language, arbitrary and concrete, transforming itself into his executioner. Afterwards, many would ironically comment that his punishment from Stalin was light (including his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, who called it a ‘miracle’[1]), surprisingly so, given the fates of other proclaimed enemies of the state in a time of en masse executions and terror. He was ordered to reside outside the major cities. It was internal exile, as opposed to execution or hard labor, but to witness in verse the awful torture of his soul, the suffocation of his sanity, is to give lie to the lightness of his situation. The extraordinary historical circumstances that were the crucible for Mandelstam’s verse are worth looking at, not least because of their resonance with the verse itself.

Mandelstam’s prosody also deserves attention. His definitions of Acmeism and his plastic understanding of language are borne out in a great deal of his poems. His stance as a poet is hidden in furtive places—published and unpublished manifestos, hinted at in the verse of other poets, etc.—but none of it is definitive. That is, research does not provide conclusion, has no ultimate purpose except to feed a curious appetite. Weak poetry lends itself to reflection ad nauseam, and great poetry, to reflection ad infinitum. Reflection, in the emphatic sense, asks the reader to reread, to slow down, carry the poem with himself. Research is only a beacon light: the mirror, and not the thing itself.

Also, there is another lens on the verse’s interpretation, played out like its own coded analysis, and that is the undertaking of translation. If analysis is a kind of dissection of the poem, breaking it into component parts, examining it in detail—then translation is the messier task of trying to recreate the magic of one language’s special case in another language, bringing the thing back to life then performing vivisection on the undead. When I started, there was no way for me to translate Mandelstam’s goldfinch poems from the second of his Voronezh notebooks. There was no way to start. I think, without having been the victim of bureaucracy, the chronic second-hand victim of rape, I would have had no impulse to try. Absorbing Mandelstam’s late vision was a dual-process: the translation of a personal trauma and a staring contest with the slanted eye of history (that’s the window into time that a Mandelstam poem is). The process was carried on like its own trauma. And, of course, translation is a traumatic mode—a mode of violating the form of the original, and exploiting the erotic power that lends itself to being sensed in another language. To look at a poem in its original state and compare it to a translation is to literally see the original lose its virginity. (Some days I could only talk about the poem when I was drunk, or else it brought me to drink.) I asked everyone who would answer what it was about, Russians and Americans. I marked the meter, and memorized the lines. It was what poetry always demands—reading in lento.

Lastly, the inevitability of exegetic failure should be restated before I begin. If a paper’s standard were the soundness of the interpretation, then it would be a waste of time. Or perhaps, to be kind, there would be very little point. As I said before, when reading becomes an act of searching for footnotes, looking outside the text for what it cannot itself provide, then the text in question has passed the point of saturation. I would ill serve the reader if all I wanted to do was provide those footnotes. A poem fits into literature like a star, and the mapping of constellations is ultimately an imaginative fallacy, but is nonetheless worthwhile because the imaginative fallacy is one of the key aspects of the sky’s beauty and our fascination with it. This is due, not to any fault of mode or any shortcoming of the reader/researcher, but the problematic nature of knowledge itself.

Мой Щегол

But what, if anything, is the poem about? The red-yellow feathers of the Soviet-Jew. Stalin as savior, Mandelstam as Stalin. The hunger and famine of collectivization. Cheka (the organ that would become the KGB) mania. The beauty of winter, and cage birds’ canny grace. About being a child, and being like a child. About the violent plasticity of language. The fate (fatalism) of culture. Is there a story contained in the lines? The goldfinch in the winter sky, taking orders, sitting in the sweet bread, behind bars. Why is his tail like a boat? How? What’s in Salamanca? The university, clement weather, escape, democracy. (Note: recently (early 2008, months after I had considered this paper finished), when I first shared the paper with Mitchell Morrison, my old high-school teacher and longtime mentor, he gave me a hint to decoding Salamanca: Cervantes, himself a prisoner whose time in detention (five years as a slave in Algiers after being captured by pirates) had a significantly harrowing effect on his own Don Quijote (think of Nabokov’s harsh criticism of the cruelty in Quijote which is often overlooked for the wit and pathos), was a Salamanca man; it was where his grandfather studied at the university and where it is speculated he studied as well. The kinship between Cervantes and Mandelstam—opened by the Salamanca key—is couched in the final stanza of his ultimate “goldfinch” poem.)

Mandelstam was ill and unable to recuperate when he wrote his manic Voronezh poems (1934-7). He had first been sent to Cherdyn by Soviet authorities (after long interrogations which many speculate included torture), where, after suffering insomnolent delusions, his eyelashes fell out, and angina onset. Depression consequentially led him to attempt suicide. Permission to reside in Voronezh was granted, and that was where he recaptured his muse and began filling his notebooks with the desperate lyrics that would later secure his sure place in the canon of Russian poetry. He was released to Moscow in 1937 after serving a reduced three-year sentence, only to be arrested again the next year and sent to a prison camp in far-east Russia somewhere near Vladivostok. He died in-transit, and the Soviet regime gave his official date of death as December of 1938, and the official cause of death as heart failure (supremely redundant!) Now that history has been written, and we can look back upon the unimaginable but too-believable fate of Mandelstam, there can be no consideration of his punishment being light.

After the arrest he developed acute delusions, his health was failing and his heart and lungs were weak. He was uprooted, and would never get another chance to put down roots—legally and spiritually homeless. He had lost almost all sources of income, and all means were closed to him as a convict. He became the beggar-bird carrying the world’s last song that Akhmatova prophesied in her “Теперь никто не станет слушать песен,”[2] being turned away at the doors of strangers in a world bereft of miracles.

The official reason for his arrest was a vitriolic poem against Stalin where he describes the dictator’s brutality, his cockroach mustache, etc., but as Brodsky mentions in his essay “The Child of Civilization,” “there’s a much more devastating line in the poem called ‘Ariosto’ written earlier the same year…there were plenty of others, too…He got his warning and he could have learned from that as many others did. Yet he didn’t because his instinct for self-preservation had long since yielded to his aesthetics.”[3] That is, his poetry—and not any one of his poems—made him a marked man and put him in conflict with the state.

Опыт из лепета, и лепет из опыта

Acmeism is for those who, seized by the spirit of building, do not meekly renounce their gravity, but joyfully accept it in order to arouse and make use of the forces architecturally dormant in it. The architect says, I build…and the man for whom the sound of a chisel splitting stone is not a metaphysical proof was not born to build.[4]

In this formulation, offered by Mandelstam in his prosodic manifesto “Утро акмеизма,” the poet is likened to an architect, his words to stones, the grammar of his language to gravity. Acmeism was the ideological-aesthetic banner of Mandelstam officially shared by Akhmatova, Gumilev, Gorodetsky, Narbut, and Zenkevic, formed from the Greek word akme. Mandelstam’s essay was the third of a kind, after Gumilev’s and Gorodetsky’s,[5] but each one seems to stand as a personal poet’s credo rather than as the coordinated definition of a poetic school. If it was written in 1912 or 1913 (as seems likely), while he was living in St. Petersburg among the other Acmeists, the reverence for architecture is especially poignant, as it was central to Mandelstam’s vision, and St. Petersburg’s architecture is an inspiration in itself. When Mandelstam writes that “the capacity for astonishment is the poet’s greatest virtue,”[6] it speaks to astonishment at both nature and art, and in art the word is as real to Mandelstam as stone, just as language is as real in nature as biology.

A more compact definition of Acmeism offered was simply: “nostalgia for world culture.”[7] This seems to combine with the above credo a sense of loss and alienation.

Looking at the goldfinch poems there is a great deal of evidence that the Acmeist principles are still in play. Words are very much like stones, given to being reshaped with a hammer and chisel—words like красовит, черновит, щегловит, сердцевит have all been built from the linguistic roots by Mandelstam. They are possibly, on first appearance, either verbs (in third-person singular conjugation) or short-form adjectives. And they play that double function in the sentences, even if in some sentences they ultimately work more like one part of speech or another. Mandelstam is interested in exploiting language at the most basic levels. In the case of красовит and щегловит, Mandelstam erases the distinction between multiple meanings that arise in language development, creating a hybrid form that refuses to reveal the distinction between the many facets of крас- (red, paint, or beauty) and щегол- (goldfinch or dandy). Because of these constructive retroforms [my own term] the reader is led to reevaluate the root whenever it is used (as in красный and краска or щегол and щёголь). Mandelstam’s words also have the ability to create new meanings and paradigms of description; распрыгаться is the verb that defines the goldfinch’s hopping movements like buckshot. The bird is literally “starting to jump about,” but in the sentence “Он распрыгался черничной дробью” new attention is drawn to the prefix рас- (as in “scattering,” like buckshot pellets) and could be redefined as jumping-itself-apart or something similarly impossible, and yet it profoundly characterizes the goldfinch’s action and its underlying implications. Mandelstam is always conscious of root meanings and grammatical shapes, as he is intent on exploiting the full architecture of Russian to build his poems.

His ability to continue to write in this intensive mode is a testament to his calling as one of those artists who keeps the capacity for astonishment. His mission, even as he approaches the end, is appreciation: in the poems he says “Подивлюсь на мир еще немного,”[8] maintaining the childlike curiosity, exemplified elsewhere in the child’s smile of naiveté. The underlying tension is between the wizened sophistication of the poet and the artless production of a songbird. It seems to me that, here, more than ever before in his poetry, Mandelstam was embracing the latter. In his “Написки о поэзии,” Mandelstam keys in on the birdsong-like qualities of Fet and Pasternak: “Pasternak’s poetry is a direct mating call…it gasps on banalities with the classic delight of a trilling nightingale” drawing on the example of Fet’s “whistling, clicking, rustling, sparkling, splashing, fullness of sound, plenitude of life.”[9] The goldfinch poems are reverberant with the sense of kid- and birdsong, from the nursery-rhyme meters to the pure musicality we are drawn into the poetics of zaum—Mandelstam is attempting to take us “beyond meaning” into a primitive echo chamber. It is the kind of patter that, in his “Восьмистишия” he describes as “опыт из лепета лепит/и лепет из опыта пьет.”[10] Molding matter out of mutter is the metamorphic productive mode of Acmeism. And here, in his very late, very dense verse, Mandelstam’s acme (here, in the intensification of focus and syntax) has the stereoscopic effect of causing a sort of utteral terror. Joseph Brodsky, tracking the trajectory of Mandelstam’s career, comes to the same conclusion:

Russia went the way she did [this is referring to the Stalinist censorship and purges that ensnared Mandelstam in the 30s], and for Mandelstam, whose poetic development was rapid by itself, that direction could bring only one thing—a terrifying acceleration. This acceleration affected…the character of his verse. Its sublime, meditative, caesuraed flow changed into a swift, abrupt pattering movement…of high velocity and exposed nerves, sometimes cryptic, with numerous leaps over the self-evident with somewhat abbreviated syntax. And yet in this way it became more like a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song, with its sharp, unpredictable turns and pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo.[11]

Изолировать, но сохранить

Mixing the theme of personal metamorphosis with nature is overtly Ovidian. And this begs us to consider the characteristics of the goldfinch as they apply to the human it was transformed from. The small bird, with its coat of many colors, that sings per-chic-o-ree in flight. Small cage bird. To form the new context for these poems, I try to remember Nadezhda Mandelstam’s words about his circumstance, her own metamorphic utterances.

It was in 1934 the terms of Osip Mandelstam’s punishment were laid out by the authorities in a joint interview at the Lubianka in Moscow—Osip and Nadezhda with a police interrogator—where Nadezhda recalls “И тут я узнала формулу: «изолировать, но сохранить».”[12] This led to the internal exile in Cherdyn, and parallels Mandelstam’s own interpretation of Ovid’s predicament: that he was similarly exiled out of Rome because he loved to write. And the Mandelstams’ handlers noted the flavor of the sentence as well. In turning their prisoner over to police in Cherdyn, the police who delivered Mandelstam made it explicit that they were delivering “особую птицу, которую велено обязательно сохранить.”[13] Isolate, but preserve is also the cage bird’s ukase. Such a bird can only exist on either extreme end of the spectrum: flight or imprisonment. For both Mandelstams this set off all the obvious associations, and after his death Nadezhda Mandelstam thought of her husband and many other friends as the last specimens of an extinct species of bird:

Мне попалась раз книжечка о вымерших птицах, и я вдруг поняла, что все мои друзья и знакомые не что иное, как вымирающие пернатые. Я показала О. М. парочку попугаев, и он сразу догадался, что это мы с ним.[14]

This deracination of bird and poet is a particularly significant theme. For Mandelstam, poetry’s essence lay in its organic roots, not in its foreign appurtenance. His main complaint against the Symbolists of his day was their dependency on European traditions and themes to the neglect of Russian inheritance, which was in effect a sort of linguistic alienation.[15] How could you exploit the full properties of the Russian language if you kept turning outwards? For him, Greece always came by way of the Black Sea, and no Grecian heritage was so peculiarly Russian as Ovid, who had been exiled to the Black Sea. Not only that, but Pushkin, the fountainhead of Russian poetry, posits Ovid right in the center of the Russian folk history.[16] Mandelstam’s second book of poetry was even named Tristia, the same title as Ovid’s lyrics and letters in exile. It is this Russian Ovid of exile that Mandelstam constantly evokes throughout his goldfinch poems, and the polemic between sorrow and awe that every line is fraught with. Historic circumstance had brought his life into direct contact with the metaphors and influences he had earlier studied and exploited.

The physical toll on his existence was also extreme, leading to hallucinations and a suicide attempt in Cherdyn before being granted a transfer to Voronezh. This shift, into a heightened and unstable psychic state, is the Osip Mandelstam a reader should have in mind as the poet of the goldfinch poems. He was fractured, highly sensitive to stimuli. He was haunted by his arrest, as evidenced in the scene from the poems where he reimagines his arrest through the eyes of the goldfinch—the intense shock to his heart as he spies his captor and then the terror inside the cage. Anna Akhmatova, who came to visit him in the deep freeze of a Voronezh winter, depicted in verse how he was captivated in turn by fear and the muse in her poem “Воронеж” which she dedicated to him: “В комнате опального поэта/Дежурят страх и Муза в свой черед.”[17] Mandelstam is simultaneously dogged by the harsh elements and at one with them. The breakneck shifts in tone only begin to uncover the schizophrenic energy of Mandelstam’s metaphors and metamorphoses. To Akhmatova it was obvious that she was witnessing the fractured psyche of her dear friend; it was obvious to Mandelstam, too, utterly sober and canny to the end, but a little damaged.

Бродячая Собака

Mandelstam’s immortal epithet was gestural: his head thrown back in the throes of inspiration. It exemplified his pride and even arrogance as a young poet with extraordinary powers. It was the signature of his readings in the Stray Dog Cellar, the impression left on Marina Tsvetaeva that she attributed to him in her poem to him in 1916: Ты запрокидываешь голову – /Затем, что ты гордец и враль.”[18] But when Mandelstam himself revisits his signature—Я голову закину—it is a sympathetic gesture. He is comparing himself to the goldfinch, the bird world’s showboat and dandy, with a note of doubt and sadness, as if he has lost his spirit. The act of looking up is one of resignation, looking out through prison bars. A poet has a right, and a duty, to reevaluate and reinterpret his gestures. Here, his plumage and song are liabilities. Beauty and rarity define the prisoner Mandelstam as they do the cage-bird goldfinch. The hungry smile of the child and the cocksure chin of the poet are transformed into fate. His smile is like a road (“улыбка неподкупна, как дорога”) that he cannot alter. They are natural, like the red breast and chirrup per-chic-o-ree.

Despite my aversion to research, coming across a good deal of criticism was inevitable as a curious reader and graduate student looking through the Mandelstam literature, and naturally I have started to think like them, and should mention some of the contributions to my thought concerning these poems. Critics like Donald Rayfield, Maxim D. Shrayer, even Joseph Brodsky, begin to see these fatal attributes in terms of Jewishness and the corollary dual-identity, which seems natural enough, especially considering Mandelstam’s reliance on color association, his role as a victim in Stalin’s terror, his cultural ostracism. For example: “Mandelstam’s Jewishness was, at times, in his poetry a fatal heritage…The Jew was for Mandelstam his shadowy alter ego,”[19] “Multiple incongruities characterize Mandelstam’s self-awareness as a Jew and as a Jewish writer,”[20] “In order to understand his poetry better, the English-speaking reader perhaps ought to realize that Mandelstam was a Jew living in…Imperial Russia, whose political structure was inherently Byzantine, and whose alphabet was devised by two Greek monks.”[21] A lot of this seems refuted by legacy: it is hard to think of Mandelstam primarily as a Jewish (rather than Russian) poet because his own poetry does not seem to fit this paradigm, nor did he write in any “Jewish” languages like Yiddish or Hebrew as a number of Russian-Jewish poets were compelled to do (in fact, he was fiercely loyal to his native Russian tongue), and Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoirs asserts that anti-intellectual biases were more troublesome than anti-Semitic ones (“Анти-интеллигентские настроения страшнее и шире, чем примитивное юдофобство”[22]). In fact, as a student at Boston College taking a survey of Jewish-Russian literature taught by Maxim Shrayer, Mandelstam was never even introduced (nor was Joseph Brodsky). The proper emphasis lies elsewhere, and in the goldfinch poems Mandelstam suggests that his virtue and fault is an inherent philosophical disobedience, which makes him like a bird. Even though he was one-hundred percent ethnically Jewish, Mandelstam’s is the type of the existential, rather than the specifically ethnic or religious, Jew. But Mandelstam in these poems confuses Stalin and the Jew, captor and captive, in an act of great telepathic concern that marks him as a universal moralist. He seems just as earnestly interested in the multiple-personalities of the trinity as in his dual-identity as a Jew, and those considerations have very little to do with the goldfinch poems, anyway. Shrayer’s ultimate appraisal seems to settle the question: “What makes the Jewish-born Mandelstam unique and worthy of admiration and further study is not his relationship to either Christianity or Judaism, which was symptomatic of his time and milieu, but his peerless poetic genius.”[23] Still, this myopic concern seemed to creep into all the critical literature.

As a wandering exile, something like a stray dog, Mandelstam maintained his posture as a poet from his youth, as a beggar and lover of world culture, fiercely antagonistic (feisty), and an antipode to self-hating archetypes.

К себе переводчиков жду

I suggested in my introduction that translation was something akin to vivisecting a ghost. An analysis of translation, then, would be like the shadow cast by a ghost—pale indeed. But, if there is a particular virtue in translation, it is best phrased by Joseph Brodsky:

Civilization is the sum total of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator, and its main vehicle—speaking both metaphorically and literally—is translation. The wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of the tundra is a translation…The rigors involved in producing an echo, formidable though they may seem, are in themselves an homage to that nostalgia for world culture which drove and fashioned the original.[24]

Brodsky’s own Russian writing, venturing out into the American latitudes, was an attempt at carrying an echo of predecessors: Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pushkin. There is a danger in Brodsky’s deference to tradition, though, especially faced with the great ignorance of the world and the deteriorate fabric of culture which generations inherit so incompletely. This is an eternal condition, not an historic one, so by definition it does not preclude the production of great poetry (assuming that great poetry exists, which I am confident Brodsky would tacitly accept). Brodsky laments Mandelstam’s negligible place in letters, “The English-speaking world has yet to hear this nervous, high-pitched, pure voice shot through with love, terror, memory, culture, faith,”[25] despite the great number of bad translations of Mandelstam.

The problem with translation is that both decent and opportunist professors, both earnest poets and career hackwriters conventionally approach the translation of a body of work as some conquerable task, as if the poetic achievement of Mandelstam could be taken on and achieved again by proxy. Even good writers usually seem to be at their worst as translators. Mandelstam’s own appraisal of translation seems fairer: translations should be tools for approaching the original poem in its original language. The other half of the equation is the use of translations as an alternative mode of poetic production: simply a plagiaristic method for writing poetry. That would allow for the abusive tendencies of all translation, in a way that exposes and counters the apologetics of bad translators. It would also demand the same kind of struggle toward linguistic mastery in English that Mandelstam concerned himself with in Russian. A poem not only draws on its language, but creates new possibilities for it as well, and so a translation must also have that creative, dynamic feature to be worthwhile.

(Because translation implicitly provides its own analysis, the particulars of my decisions have been left to the close reading of the bi-lingual reader.)

Research Post-partum

After I assumed I had finished my paper for all intents and purposes, I was required, as a technicality (as far as I am concerned) to keep myself abreast of the contemporary criticism of Mandelstam, and to focus a good deal of my reading on the output of professors and researchers that concern themselves with Mandelstam. I saw this, essentially, as a distraction. I should not become so much an expert on Mandelstam, but on literature about Mandelstam being written today. I took the task to heart. I had already sampled a decent amount of criticism accidentally or by way of introductions and distractions, but now I went back to the library and into the Mandelstam literature. But, this was all at the expense of Mandelstam himself, which was my true subject.

There was a problem with a great deal of the professional published critical literature I came across: it was dismissive, or redundant, or both, or worse. The problem with a difficult poet like Mandelstam is that academics feel obligated to formulate their own individual critical poetics (poetic theory) in order to approach him—as if the difficulty could be solved according to a formula. Only, Mandelstam is stubbornly anti-formulaic. Among the many full-book treatments of Mandelstam and his poetry and prose, there was nothing I was able to read through, nothing that when I was able to comprehend it I then felt I could use, nothing that I wished to turn my readers to for their edification, nothing I expect to go back to. I’ve called this kind of recursive reading research post-partum, and it comes with the depression. The argument to be found in the glut written by almost all the authors—professors, and graduate and doctoral students—is simply this: to prove that the author is himself an expert (of what kind, it is usually not even clear). Researchers evaluate and synthesize bad research ad nauseam. We are all asked to write, even when we have no contribution to make.

But as a matter of integrity, and for purposes of full disclosure, here is a good record of my sources. A great deal of my research has been informal, and therefore cannot be documented properly in any bibliography, but it is the backbone of my conceptual formation, and deserves recognition. It has been infinitely more rewarding and important than any technical (how could a book about poetic theory allow itself to be so coldly technical, intellectual!) analysis that I could find published in journals or among the rich holdings of Boston’s public and private libraries. I should reiterate my conviction that reading poetry is paradoxically a deeply personal and social act, and antidote to all the scholarly treatments that I firmly believe are to blame for the troubling distrust and neglect of high-poetics in our fully literate culture. In reading the poems, I initially engaged in intensive, intimate conversations with Nikita Chinenkov and Lyubov Ydolova, often over wine or vodka. Nikita is a graduate linguistics student at the University of New Mexico, intensely interested in the zaum poetics of Daniil Kharms and Osip Mandelstam, and his wife Lyubov is a graphic artist and poet active in Russia and the United States. They are both close personal friends, and together we discussed themes and particulars, parsing sentences and metaphorics. Nikita deserves credit for convincing me that the “road” which Mandelstam calls incorruptible is fate, is the poet’s fate (though it is more things than that). Also, the innocent wonder of the poet, as he observes the children and the snow is crucial to the poetic temperament at large. We both share a great deal of respect for the craft. Lyubov and I long wondered together what was so significant about Salamanca—did he invoke it as the home of the Spanish Inquisition? or as a beautiful forest locale? or the site of a thriving academic community with deep ties to Mediterranean culture? (At the time, there was no definitive consensus.) Also, these poems were exegetically examined by my mentor and professor, Byron Lindsey, at the University of New Mexico, and by his wife, Tatyana Lindsey. They first suggested to me the terrible implications of the goldfinch’s quirks, how he looks back and forth out of both eyes, in a fully heightened state of fear-sensitivity. The tone of the most innocent lines is fraught with the tension of the convict, or of the potential captive. Also, we discussed the jealous relationship between Mandelstam and the goldfinch, a creature capable of flight and escape. It was then I began exploring the doppelganger relationship between the martyr-poet and Stalin himself that is so central to Mandelstam’s vision. When I travelled to St. Petersburg in 2006, I got the opportunity to share my translations with the prominent Russian critic-translator-poet, Alexandr Skidan. Together we discussed the significance of low-brow meter and nursery-rhyme syntax. He also turned me onto the special significance of the word “мякина.” This “chaff” seemed to him to allude to the chaff that was the only remaining nourishment for the starving children that Mandelstam witnessed on his Soviet tour of collectivized farms in the western USSR. This seemed to both of us to complicate the image of the smiling boy chewing his chaff as a horrible image of Soviet social experiments.

All of this, I think, was much more enlightening and valuable than anything I encountered in my proper research after-the-fact to edify myself as to Mandelstam’s poetics and ethics. The approach I embraced is an engagement with the text, an organic (rustic) discussion with friends and experts. The approaches of various experts in American universities left me absolutely cold, and I was also enervated and dispirited trying to gauge the climate of current Slavic research-at-large in the leading periodicals. Where poetry is subservient to dissertative poetic theory by so many students and experts, poetry inevitably loses; great poems are abducted from the society as a whole and held hostage by the narrow academic community. I hold this system partly to blame for a great deal of the disconnect that is obvious in popular culture, where lay people have been rebuffed and are severed from enjoyment and engagement with the grand Russian poetic tradition.

* * *

goldfinch variations (after mandelstam)

i threw back my head, saw my goldfinch alight—
we shall watch the world turning side by side
the winter wind has chafed me raw
but was it your sky that i saw?

notched rudder for a tail, feathers black and yellow
ruby paint bleeds down below your beak
are you aware, but that i’m going weak
while you strut and finch about?

yellow, white, black and red—
cagey eyes inspecting either far side of the day
as the storm air rushes o’er your head—
looking either way, but not at...what?—and you’d flown away!

* * *

my childish mouth chews its chaff
grins, chewing
like a peacock, then i throw my head back
and see a goldfinch wing

boat for a tail, black-yellow feathers
breast sewn up blood red
black and yellow, you finch about so
o, how you strut and finch about!

i’ll wonder at the world a little longer
at the children and the snow
but my smile is sincere
incorruptible, like the road
and not obedient—not bound to any man

* * *

my childish mouth chews its chaff
and grins, chewing
like a peacock, i threw my head back
and a goldfinch i did see—

he jinkjumped about like berry-buckshot spilled
eyes darting around like beads
i answered to my likeness:
live, goldfinch—this is my sentence!

* * *

the goldfinch in the sweet bread
suddenly begins to tremble, wring-ring his heart
when there comes a dark raincoat dusted with poison
his cap beautiful black as commiepretty red

the perch and stand slander
the birdcage bars in hundreds lie
everything everywhere’s gone inside out
and there is a forest Salamanca
for clever disobedient birds!

* * *

Мой щегол, я голову закину —
Поглядим на мир вдвоем:
Зимний день, колючий, как мякина,
Так ли жестк в зрачке твоем?

Хвостик лодкой, перья — черно-желты,
Ниже клюва в краску влит —
Сознаешь ли, до чего, щегол ты,
До чего ты щегловит?

Что за воздух у него в надлобье:
Черн и красен, желт и бел! —
В обе стороны он в оба смотрит — в обе!
Не посмотрит, улетел.

Декабрь 1936, Воронеж

* * *

[Вариант]

Детский рот жует свою мякину,
Улыбается, жуя,
Словно щеголь голову закину
И щегла увижу я.

Хвостик лодкой, перья черно-желты,
И нагрудник красным шит.
Черно-желтый, до чего, щегол ты,
До чего ты щегловит!

1936, Воронеж

* * *

[Вариант]

Детский рот жует свою мякину.
Улыбается, жуя,
Словно щеголь, голову закину,
И щегла увижу я —

Он распрыгался черничной дробью,
Мечет бусинками глаз —
Я откликнусь моему подобью:
Жить щеглу — вот мой указ!

1936

* * *

Подивлюсь на мир еще немного,
На детей и на снега.
Но улыбка неподкупна,* как дорога,
Непослушна, не слуга.

* (вар.) неподдельна

10—13 декабря 1936 Воронеж

* * *

Когда щегол в воздушной сдобе
Вдруг затрясется, сердцевит,
Ученый плащик перчит злоба,
А чепчик черным красовит.

Клевещет жердочка и планка,
Клевещет клетка сотней спиц —
И все на свете наизнанку,
И есть лесная Саламанка
Для непослушных умных птиц!

Декабрь 1936, Воронеж

* * *

elegy for joseph brodsky

birds dragging themselves from battle
like twilight or spoilt blood
blue flies barely woken after winter
singing, signifying nothing

we tore off your wings and songs, like children
sold off the memory of countless flights
as you erased the sky—
now you limp and mutter
life in the dissipated light

or—i loved you for a little while
like brushing across nettleweed
then, after weeks of beer and cigarettes without a dream
forgot your face, replaced it with a girl’s

blind as the bloodshot eye inside its shell
would you have seen me in a crowd, i seen you?
unless we walked into a room, alone—
but you’re no longer of the body
only of the blue

about a year ago i remembered how
the half was like the whole of you
how adumbrations in the dissipated light
fade and then reform, taking on their own life

watching fish pass like ghosts under the hudson
urania like a palimpsest, my illegible english
over your once unintelligible babel
is it your eyes or just the skies stay green?
i remember how i read you—завоеватель
завыватель
забыватель

* * *

Bibliography:

Akhmatova, Anna. Stikhotvoreniya i poemi. Profizdat, Moscow: 2001.

Brodsky, Joseph. Less Than One: Selected Essays. Farrar Straus Giroux: New York, 1986.

Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Vospominaniya. Izdatel’stvo Imeni Chekhova: New York, 1970.

Mandelstam, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam. Chapter 42. Translated by Donald Rayfield. London: The Menard Press, 1973.

Mandelstam, Osip. Selected Essays. Translated by Sidney Monas. University of Texas Press: Austin, 1977.

Mandelstam, Osip. Stikhotvoreniya. Profizdat: Moscow, 2000.

Shrayer, Maxim. An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, Vol. 1. M.E. Sharpe: Armonk, New York, 2007.

Tsvetaeva, Marina. Stikhotvoreniya i poemi. Profizdat: Moscow, 2001.

Notes:

[1] Where there are no footnotes for biographical material, it can be assumed that I am cribbing my information from the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Воспоминания), which is the most dedicated and detailed treatment that any poet can expect, and what I trust to be the closest to the truth of Mandelstam’s life as possible.

[2] “No more’s the solitary soul who’ll listen to the songs.” Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniya i poemi, p 111.

[3] Brodsky, Less than One, pp 136-7.

[4] Osip Mandelstam, Selected Essays, p 129. (Here, instead of citing the actual Russian, I have deferred to Sydney Monas’ translation, “The Morning of Acmeism”).

[5] Sydney Monas, Selected Essays, p 229.

[6] Mandelstam, Selected Essays, p 131.

[7] Brodsky, p 130.

[8] “I’ll wonder at the world a little longer.”

[9] Mandelstam, Selected Essays, p 83.

[10] In the poem “Octaves” Mandelstam claims that the license of lines is “molding matter (experience) out of mutter/and drinking mutter out of matter.” Stikhotvoreniya, p 180.

[11] Brodsky, p 134.

[12] “And that was where I learned the formula: isolate, but preserve.” Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniya, p 35.

[13] “A special bird, which we were ordered to preserve without fail.” Nadezhda Mandelstam, p 62.

[14] “Once I’d come across a little book about extinct birds, and I suddenly understood that all my friends and relations were not so different than a dying species. I showed Osip a couple of already extinct parakeets, and he figured out right away was that it was a picture of us two.” Nadezhda Mandelstam p 382.

[15] See Osip Mandelstam’s essay “Notes on Poetry,” in Selected Essays.

[16] In Pushkin’s long poem, Цыганы, (Gypsies) the ancient gypsy folklore includes the arrival of Ovid as an old man to the tribe in what is present day Moldova, where he ended his wandering in exile. Pushkin also wrote “Овиду” (“To Ovid”) about the irredeemable pessimism of Ovid’s Tristia.

[17] “In the disgraced poet’s room, fear and the Muse take turns keeping watch.” Anna Akhmatova, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy, p 156.

[18] “You throw your head back, because you’re a braggart and a blowhard.” Marina Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniya i poemi, p 66.

[19] Donald Rayfield, Chapter 42, p 10.

[20] Maxim Shrayer, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, p 239.

[21] Brodsky, p 130.

[22] Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniya, p 362.

[23] Shrayer, p 240.

[24] Brodsky, pp 139-40.

[25] Brodsky, p 143.

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James Stotts is a writer and photographer living in Boston. He is currently translating for a selected poems of Marina Tsvetaeva forthcoming from Whale and Star Press, and inauspiciously translating a shotgun anthology of the Russian masters (from Afanasy Fet to Sergei Esenin and Osip Mandelstam to Joseph Brodsky).