Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Lyn Hejinian, and the Persistence of Romanticism

Which follows a dialogue made up.Who believe they are warm if called Romantics.

Lyn Hejinian, "The Guard"

Contemporary experimental poets, who often seek to cast off Romantic notions of identity, story, place, and mood, can never cut their ties to Romanticism entirely.¹ Nor would it be salutary for them to do so. For poets seeking to resist the norms of their culture, Romanticism offers a lasting paradigm for literary rebellion, and its preference for questions over answers, for paradox over black-and-white clarity, remains compelling. Many poets who reject poetic conventions and traditional forms have shed the feel of Romantic verse in their work, but when we look past the tone and shape of the poetry, we find the themes and values of Romanticism reimagined. I hold the view that Romanticism is uncontainable, persistent, and filled with obstinate questions that are far more interesting than any provisional answers. Acultural phenomenon that never goes away, it does not return because it has never been fully repressed. This view of Romanticism's legacy, shared by a number of scholars writing after Paul de Man (among them L. J. Swingle, Carol Jacobs, Richard Eldridge), goes beyond the idea of Romanticism as a historical period to see it as a way of perceiving the world.² In Carol Jacobs's words, it produced "an uncontrollable moving beyond all those parameters seemingly fixed within the texts, because of the insistence in each text that it stage its own critical performance. Repeatedly rehearsed are the forces of control—representation, authority (artistic, political, theological, legal), and criticism—unbound precisely in the moment, or rather process, of their triumph, an unbinding that perpetually undoes the various gestures of teleological closure" (ix).³ I share Jacobs's view that Romanticism persists in poetry's commitment to keep open what might tend to closure, to resist authority beyond and within the text, and to unravel the threads—exposing their colors and texture rather than celebrating their patterns—that make up the fabric of poetic work.

This undoing or unbinding marks the poetry of Lyn Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Hejinian, born in 1941, emerged as a major representative of the American Language poets, a direction from which she has evolved productively and impressively; Dragomoshchenko, born in 1946, is an idiosyncratic, richly metaphorical and philosophical Petersburg poet of equal stature, and he, too, has continued to play an important and never predictable role in contemporary poetry. Dragomoshchenko embodies the maximalism we associate with Romanticism, and Hejinian the resilient testing of all maxims.⁴ Both have considerable affinities with postmodernism and avant-garde cultural work, giving a texture to their Romanticism that has brought more readers to Hejinian, but fewer to Dragomoshchenko.⁵ Perhaps surprisingly, the greater resistance to Dragomoshchenko has partly to do with form: free verse is still regarded with suspicion by many who write or champion metered and/or rhymed verse in Russia, and Dragomoshchenko has refused to placate the influential critics and poets for whom this issue retains massive symbolic importance. With all the more reason for him to seek connections to poets outside Russia, he and Hejinian have made themselves into a strong pairing. They are mutual translators who have also addressed poems to one another; 2003 marked the twentieth anniversary of their collaboration.⁶ Hejinian has written of her fascination with Russian culture, beginning with formalist theory and futurist poetry when she was younger and extending to personal connections to contemporary cultural figures. The connection has been enduring, as evidenced in A Border Comedy (2001). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she spent months in Leningrad when the Soviet world was collapsing around her and wrote Oxota (1991) about that experience. She wryly subtitles it "a short Russian novel," and we could read Oxota as her quest, her hunt, for the meanings of Russian culture (the Russian word oxota means "quest," "hunt," and, in some contexts, "desire"). I take Xenia (Ksenii, 1990) to be Dragomoshchenko's corresponding text about time spent in the United States, although it is not in any sense a novel but a...