Marjorie Perloff

Stanford University
0004221898@mcimail.com

 

In the wake, first of perestroika, and now of the wholesale dissolution of the Soviet Union, the temptation has been great to align the “new Russian poetry” with its American postmodernist counterpart. And since the poets who have taken the most active role in translating this hitherto samizdat poetry are those associated with the Language movement, most notably Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, and Jean Day, as well as Hejinian’s collaborators (Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten) on the extraordinary travel book Leningrad (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), there is naturally a feeling on the part of the Russian poets themselves that there are serious links between the Russian and the American postmodernist avant-garde, whatever these much contested terms really mean. At a reading at New Langton Street last year, for example, when the question was put to Alexei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov, “What American poets have influenced your work?” the immediate reply, I believe from Parshchikov, was “the language poets.” The same point is made by Andrew Wachtel and Parshchikov in their Introduction to Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby’s new anthology The Third Wave. “For both groups,” they write, “the source of poetic production is found in language itself, and it is with this group that, for the first time, the former underground poets have entered into active poetic dialogue . . . in the last few years these contacts have increased as the Soviet poets are actively translating and being translated by their newfound American poetic soulmates.”¹

 

The new rapprochement between our two poetries has already made a difference, especially on this side of the globe. The influx of energy, enthusiasm, and daring, as well as a new range of source and thematic materials, surely stands behind such recent books as Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota, a long “novel in verse” on the model of Pushkin’s Evgeni Onegin and Clark Coolidge’s forthcoming Russian Nights. At the same time, the question remains, at least for me, whether the homologies between the two poetries are really as prominent as they are claimed to be. And a related question would be: given the enormous political, social, and cultural differences between our two countries over the past century, and given the long midcentury hiatus of the Stalinist years, which largely suppressed the “Modernism” to which recent developments are supposedly “post,” can we expect to find comparable poetic paradigms?

 

Take Dmitri Prigov’s discussion of Conceptualism in his manifesto “What more is there to say?” and Mikhail Epstein’s elaboration on it, both included in The Third Wave. The Conceptual Art movement in the U.S. dates from the late sixties; as Ursula Meyer explains it in the introduction to her handbook by that title: The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts . . . . An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. More specifically: the Conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth and Vito Acconci, of Hans Haacke and John Baldessari took up the challenge presented by Duchamp, “preferring the ideational over the visual” and rejecting the notion of a predominantly retinal art, where “meaning” is hidden by a set of visual signs. Art as idea, art as information or knowledge: in practice, this meant that the catalogue could become the exhibition, or indeed, that there would be no exhibition at all, only a series of writings and blueprints.

 

Now compare this aesthetic to Epstein’s account: What is conceptualism?. . . . Almost any artistic work . . . is conceptual insofar as there lies within it a certain conception, or the sum of conceptions, which the critic or interpreter draws out. In conceptualism this conception is demonstrably separable from the live artistic fabric and even becomes an independent creation, or “concept” in itself. . . . a “break between the idea and the thing, the sign and reality, is created.” And Epstein cites a passage from Dimitri Prigov: The outstanding hero– He goes forward without fear But your ordinary hero– He’s also almost without fear But first he waits to see: Maybe it’ll all blow over And if not– then on he goes And the people get it all. And he comments: Behind these lines by Dmitri Prigov we easily recognize the formula that lies at the basis of numerous pathetic works about the fearless, all-conquering hero and his slightly backward but devoted comrades in arms. The typical problem with such odic writings is how to reliably hide the formula behind the clothing of linguistic beauty so as to make it frighteningly similar to a live person. The poet-conceptualist, on the other contrary, drags the formula out into the open from the sum of its aesthetic imprintings and changes of form, placing it as an independent fact before the reader’s perception. . . . Conceptualism . . . unmask[s] beneath the covering of lyrical soulfulness or epic picturesqueness the skeleton of an idea-engendering construct. (TW 270) For Epstein–and his explanation accords with Prigov’s own as well as with Lev Rubinshtein’s statement of his “conceptualist” poetics in The Third Wave–conceptualism evidently refers to the willingness to reveal the ideological base which a more conventional poetry would try to mask beneath a set of decorative trappings. But ironically, this urge to “expose” the ideologeme and separate it from its material embodiment is almost the antithesis of the conceptualism of our sixties and seventies, which rejected the notion of hidden meaning outright, making the case that psychological depth was itself an anachronism. Whereas American conceptual art was an attack from the Left on the vapidity and “prettiness” of late Abstract Expressionism and color-field painting, the Soviet version is concerned to unmask the “aesthetic imprintings,” designed to make Socialist Realist poetry and painting more palatable. Conceptualism, in this sense, is more properly a form of parody or pastiche, a self-conscious mode of satire that takes nothing on faith and is determined to reveal precisely those inner motivations of poetic and artistic discourse that our own Conceptualists have denied existed.

 

The other two movements described by Epstein– Metarealism and Presentism–pose somewhat different problems for the Anglo-American reader. “Metarealism” (here Epstein includes such poets as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Nadezhda Kondakova, Viktor Krivulin, Olga Sedakova, and Ivan Zhdanov) is defined as “the pull toward the construction of supertemporal models of reality,” the emphasis being on metamorphosis, the process whereby “one thing becomes the other.” Metarealism, says Epstein “has little in common with surrealism, since it turns not toward the subconscious but to a supraconsciousness” (TW 177). To which Surrealists would respond that in practice, one can’t quite separate the two. Indeed, such precursors of surrealism as Rimbaud and Lautreamont made use of precisely the kind of imagery Epstein describes; the passionately erotic, discontinuous, and hallucinatory poetry of Dragomoshchenko, for that matter, immediately brings Rimbaud to mind although there are no doubt important Russian models as well.

 

The third major movement–presentism or the “poetry of presence”–is characterized by its “taste for contemporaneity and the technological plasticity of objects,” but without the “social-aesthetic aggressiveness and evangelical utopianism” of futurism (TW 280). “Presentism,” writes Epstein, “affirms the presence of an object, its visibility and tangibility, as the necessary and sufficient conditions of its meaningfulness.” And his gives the example of Parshchikov’s “Catfish,” as a phenomenological lyric that tries to capture “the sum total of perceptions: [the catfish] in water and on land, waking and sleeping” (TW 281).

 

I find this account somewhat puzzling because postmodernism is generally characterized as precisely the calling into question of presence, of center, of organic wholeness, and so on. From the late sixties, when Derrida published Ecriture et difference, “presence” has been one of those terms whose role is to be negated in favor of its antithesis, “absence.” How, then, do we deal with a poetry like Parshchikov’s? His own “Conversation between an Editor and a Poet,” reprinted in The Third Wave, doesn’t help us very much. Parshchikov says he “want[s] to be plugged into the search for a new descriptive language,” but then adds that “there is no ‘old’ language, only the discovery of new ways, only the growth of language.” And further: “Biochemistry is leading us into a world where the border between the living and the dead is washed away. . . . and so I wrote about the concrete work on earth” (TW 24).

 

Let us look more closely at the poetry itself. Here is “BEGSTVO–II,” (the original is represented here by my transliteration), together with Michael Palmer’s translation in The Third Wave, and the word-for-word translation of Parshchikov’s poem by Andrey Patrikeyev: (Peel. Peel i priboy. Myedlenuh, kak smyati pakyet tselofanovi shevelitsuh rasshiryayass zamootnyayetsuh pamyat. Samalyot iz peska snizhayetsuh, takovim nye yavlayayass Vnachalyeh voini mirov kroochye beryot poleen Vpoot’ sobirayass, ya chistil ot nassekomikh radyator, kogda novi ogon’ spalil puluvinu zemyel’, no nass nye nakreel, isskomikh Pepyel byenzozapravki. Peel i priboy. Kroogom nikovo, kromye zaglavshevoso pribora Vsadnik li zdyess myertsal, ili snybeo pyeskom possipali leeneeyu priboya Vrabye blestyat kablooki i zoobi. Tanyets Tyanyetso, slovno bredyen vkogtyakh cherepakhi. Zrya Ya eeshchoo tebya, soboy nye yavlyayass; nass, vozmozhno, rassassivayet zyemla) FLIGHT Michael Palmer Dust. Sea-form and dust. Slowly, the way a crushed cellophane packet stirs and expands, memory blurs. An airplane out of sand descends–not even a plane. At the start of the war of the worlds harsh wormwood takes command. Preparing to set out, I was scraping bugs from the radiator when a new fire torched half the land, seeking but missing us. Gas station’s ashes. Sea foam and dust. Nothing around but this control panel in eternal malfunction Was a rider shimmering there, or was sand scattered from the sky along the shoreline … Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar. The dance fans out like a seine net in a turtle’s claws. In vain I search for you, not knowing who I am Maybe the earth dissolves us. (TW 26) “Begstvo II”: Word-for-Word Translation Andrey Patrikeyev (Dust. Dust and the surf. Slowly like the moving crumpled plastic bag the memory expands, getting torrid. A plane made of sand is losing height, without being a plane. The smell of wormwood is more acute at the beginning of the war of the worlds. Getting ready to set off, I was cleaning the radiator from insects when a new fire burned half of the lands, without reaching us whom it sought. The ashes of the petrol station. Dust and surf. All around there is nobody but the instrument (measuring?) that is telling lies without reserve. Was it a rider that glimmered here or was it sand that was strewn over the line of the surf … Heels and teeth glitter in the bar. The dance is like a drag net stretching in the claws of a tortoise. In vain I’m seeking you without being myself; maybe we are being dissolved by the earth.)

 

Palmer’s fine translation, generally quite close to the original (compare it the word-for-word translation by Andrei Patrikeyev), presents us with nature images in collision with those of industrialization gone awry. In this nameless and faceless landscape of “sea-foam and dust” (peel i priboy), memory expands like “a crushed cellophane packet,” and the “gas station’s ashes” cover the sand, which scatters like a mysterious airplane or, in the second stanza, like a “rider shimmering there,” with “Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar.” Sea-foam, dust, wormwood, bugs, turtle’s claws: these items from the natural world provide a mysterious backdrop, first for the “radiator,” from which a “new fire” seems to erupt, “torch[ing] half the land, seeking but missing us,” and then in line 9, for the unnamed “instrument” or “measuring” agent–Palmer ominously calls it a “control panel in eternal malfunction.” The poem inevitably raises the specter of Chernobyl, although the meaning is not limited to that particular disaster, the imagery conjuring up any number of nightmare visions having to do with fire, earthquake, and apocalypse. Whatever the referent, the poet presents himself as one who can make contact neither with the unnamed “you” nor with himself: the only reality seems to be one of wholesale “dissolution” (rassassivayet zyemla).

 

Given its hallucinatory imagery, its lack of specification of “I” and “you,” its strange conjunctions of unlike objects–rider with flashing teeth and radiator covered with bugs–it seems quite appropriate to call a poem like “Flight” “meta-realistic” as well as “presentistic.” Yet the motive and mode of Parshchikov’s poem is, in many ways, quite different from, say, the poetry of his translator Michael Palmer. Here, for example, is the opening of Palmer’s “Notes for Echo Lake 1”: He says this red as dust, eyes a literal self among selves and picks the coffee up Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move. It was the woman beside him who remarked that he never looked anyone in the eye. (This by water’s edge.) This by water’s edge. And all of the song ‘divided into silences’, or ‘quartered in three silences’. Dear Charles, I began again and again to work, always with no confidence as Melville might explain. Might complain.²

 

Like “Flight” Palmer’s “Echo Lake” has references to dust, to water’s edge, and to the process of memory, but it is much more dislocated–or more strictly speaking, unlocated than Parshchikov’s “Flight.” In the latter, the scene, however dream-like, is a constant throughout, even as the positioning of the the poet’s “I,” however unspecified and generic, is clearly established. This specification is in keeping with the poem’s formal structure: four stanzas, each rhyming abab with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes. In Palmer’s poem, on the other hand–and this would be equally true for, say, John Ashbery or Lyn Hejinian or Barrett Watten–subjectivity splinters and scenes shift from moment to moment. “The grey wall . . . toward which you move,” for example, gives way to “It was the woman,” and a declarative sentence like “He never looked anyone in the eye,” is followed by the pronomial phrase, “This by water’s edge,” where “This” has no specific referent. Address too shifts, as we see in the “Dear Charles” passage. Formally, the poem is prose–a fragmentary, gnomic prose that alludes to “events” and “objects” we cannot define, even though “Notes for Echo Lake” is, broadly speaking, a lyric “about” the emptying out of the sign, the search for clues that might connect past to present, that might make sense of memory and desire.

 

To generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous, and my aim is by no means to set up some sort of neat presence/ absence dichotomy between our two poetries. But what may be helpful in drawing literary/cultural maps of the postmodern situation is to “thicken the plot,” as John Cage would put it, by finding the lacunae in the current narrative. One such link, whether overt or not, is French Modernist poetry, not so much the poetry of Dada or the full-blown Surrealism of Andre Breton or Robert Desnos, as the poesie brute (“raw poetry”) of Pierre Reverdy, Rene Char and other Modernist poets who came of age after World War I. Indeed, the poetry of Parshchikov, of Dragomoschenko, and other poets of the “Third Wave” seems much more analogous to the intense, elliptical, and mysterious lyric of a Reverdy than to the disillusioned, cool, media-reactive postmodernism of late twentieth-century America. Here, for example, is Reverdy’s “Chemin Tournant,” which I reproduce in Kenneth Rexroth’s translation: It is frightening grey dusty weather A south wind on strong wings Dull echoes of water in the capsizing evening And in the soaking night spouting turning Rough voices complaining A taste of ashes on the tongue The sound of an organ in tbe byways The pitching ship of the heart All the disasters of work When the fires of the desert go out one by one When the eyes drip like blades of grass When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves Morning hardly risen Somebody seeks A lost address on a lost road The stars brighten the flowers tumble down Across the broken branches The dark brook wipes its soft scarce parted lips When the steps of the walker on the counting dial order the movement and crowd the horizon All cries pass and all times meet And me I walk to heaven my eyes in the rays Noise about nothing and names in my head Living faces Everything that has happened in the world And this holiday Where I have lost my time³ John Ashbery, in an essay of the sixties, praised Reverdy’s poetry for its transparency, its presentation of factories and canals as “living phenomena,” its “restoration to things of their true name, without the eternal dead weight of symbolism and allegory.”⁴ The mysterious presence things assume in Reverdy’s poetry (“When the steps of the walker on the counting dial / order the movement and crowd the horizon”) is not unlike the mysterious presence, in the middle of Parshchikov’s “sea-foam and dust,” of a measuring “instrument” or “control panel” that has gone awry.

 

The issue is not, finally, whether Parshchikov knew Reverdy when he wrote his poem or whether the links between them are only coincidental. Rather, I want to suggest–and I made a similar point in the case of Arkadii Dragomoschenko in a recent issue of Sulfur⁵— that as literary and cultural historians, we should try to flesh in the picture, tracing lineages and cultural formations more accurately than we have done to date. Take the simple fact that Ashbery and Palmer, themselves important to Parshchikov, were great disseminators of the French “poetry of presence.” Such missing pieces in the coming into being of the postmodern puzzle will help us to define the momentum that has brought the Third Wave brilliantly crashing on our shore.

 

Notes

 

1. The Third Wave, The New Russian Poetry, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 9. Subsequently cited as TW.

 

2. Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 3.

 

3. Pierre Reverdy, “Turning Road,” Selected Poems, trans. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1969), 21.

 

4. John Ashbery, “Reverdy en Amerique,” Mercure de France: Pierre Reverdy Issue, 344 (January/April 1962): 111-12. I reproduce the whole passage and translate the key sentences in The Poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 35-37.

 

5. Sulfur 29 (Fall 1991): 216-21.