trans. Olia Prokopenko
Chains of North Atlantic icebergs below, under the plane.
To describe freedom in one hundred lines?
A mouse between the rails of the New York City Subway: littleness and warmth do not depend on the city size. A trinket, red beads on a wire, picked up at the same place--who wore it?
Openness--sometimes it could be too open. A permanently lit-through day. Instruction to a mechanism. But the transparency of others teaches you to see your own murkiness?
Emily Dickinson: a careful look on the edge of the well of the good. Whitman, an electric body: plug in and charge your batteries. Pynchon’s cool chaos and Bowles’ desperate dry sand.
Waterfalls in the woods near Bard College, behind a students’ scarecrow. Toss, toss glass shards. But it was you who have chosen them.
Dynamic balance: the plane will fall if it stops. Dynamic uncertainty. Mobility that drives poetry. Fear of finding oneself dependent on somebody--and that somebody will depend on you--thus, one should learn to be separate and linked simultaneously. When there are lots of perfectly functioning communications, then one can turn them off and stay alone. The place of change, of change and disruption. People that are strangers everywhere.
Wise as a snake, Leonard Schwartz with his boa-constrictor in his arms--and next to the “snake” there are also a “baby” and a “cat”, unintended symbols (graffiti in Los-Angeles: “It’s your fault that Symbolism expired”; what kind of city is that if they write graffiti about Symbolism?). Edward Foster: proofreading after seven, students after nine, at the conference at twelve, New Englandish, ironic, crisp, gathering Russian poets after four cafes and two second-hand shops. Michelle Murphy: jet, black amber that is a jet plane. Gerald Janecek[1]--beyondsense[2] and music, a wistful smile at a bad performance at the Samara Drama Theatre.
And when this was exploded, the feeling was that they bombed your own city; and after that, hours of e-mail: the addressees were OK, survived. After this, say whatever you like about the shallowness of advertising.
As if they themselves are not sick and tired of Hollywood and McDonald’s--but one can live through them--of course, if one cares to. One can change one’s life (we also do lots of weird things, but somehow á la Brown[3]). A possibility and desire to choose one’s identity. Complexity and subtlety are and will be there--about those who want them, of course: that’s why they are poets--but not about those who copy from newspapers.
It is a hundred times easier and more interesting to speak in bad English with a Chinese poet from New York City than in one’s own, “great and powerful”[4], with a Russian salesman. (Yes, there are assholes among them; well, where aren’t there?) Perhaps everybody except poets here still thinks that everything can be arranged rationally? Adjusting to each other--based on trust or similarity?
Multilingualism, that teaches to listen carefully. Instability of space and time that teaches to define them. Individuality that managed to affirm itself. An individual that becomes nobody knows what. It is I, but who is I is unclear. Here the question “why?” was stretched to the extreme, that is why it has finally become totally senseless. A motion driven by immediate desire is senseless--but is there more sense in any other actions of ours?
A house with forty-four walls and nothing but doors[5]--or forty four doors and nothing but walls.
Russia also has a city, premeditated on the empty place[6], a mirage that will disperse any minute--and has already existed, safe and sound, for three hundred years.