Selected Poems

Conversation with a Taxman About Poetry

128 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky Conversation with a Taxman About Poetry Citizen taxman! Please forgive the imposition. Why thank you, don’t trouble yourself . . . I’ll stand. I’m here to discuss a rather delicate issue: the poet’s proper place in the workforce. In line with all those who own granaries and land, I too am subject to taxation and penalty. Five hundred per half-year is what you demand, plus twenty-five more for failure to declare. My labor is akin to any other. Take a look— you’ll see just what I’ve lost; all my expenses incurred in production, and just how much my raw materials cost. You’re familiar, of course, with the concept of rhyme. Let’s say some line ends with the word “dad”— why then, repeating the syllables in a following line, we put in some sort of rat-a-tat-tad. In your terms, rhyme is a bill of exchange. Pay in full at line’s end!— that’s the intention. So you sift through suffixes and inflections— small change in your dwindling cash box of conjugations and declensions. You start trying to stuff some word into your line, but it won’t fit— it breaks if you force it. Citizen taxman, I’ll tell you no lie— the soviet years ✦ 129 130 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky words cost your poet a fortune. In our terms, rhyme is a keg— a powder keg. Its fuse is the line. The line burns down, the line goes bang! and as a stanza the whole city is sent flying. Where can you find them, and at what price— knock-’em-dead rhymes that won’t ever fail you? Maybe some half-dozen original rhymes still exist somewhere in Venezuela. And I yearn to rush off— somewhere cold, somewhere hot. I set out, tangled up in advances and loans. Citizen, take my travel expenses into account! Poetry— all of it!— is a journey into the unknown. Poetry is like mining for radium. Every gram mined takes a year of labor. For the sake of a single word you expend thousands of tons of crude verbal ore. But how incineratingly those single words burn compared to the decay of their unrefined peers! Those single words have the power to move millions of hearts over thousands of years. Of course, there are various sorts of poet. So many have the magic touch! Like a conjuror, they’ll pull a line out of their throat or even out of someone else’s, in a pinch. What can I say about the lyrical castrati?! They’ll steal a stranger’s line with a smile on their face. It’s just your typical embezzlement and robbery— the soviet years ✦ 131 132 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky quite a bit of that plaguing our country these days. All of today’s odes and verses, belted out loud in rounds of applause, will enter history as the overhead expenses for what we’ve done— just two or three of us. You’ll go through forty pounds of salt, I’ve heard, and smoke a hundred cigarettes, before you extract one precious word from the artesian human depths. Well, that right there should lower my rates. Knock the wheel of a zero off my tax! One ruble ninety kopecks for a hundred cigarettes, one sixty for table salt! Your form has question after question: “Any trips abroad? Yes or no?” But what if I’ve taken a dozen Pegasuses out for a ride over the past fifteen years?! Sir, please try to understand my situation; In this corner you ask about assets and servants. But what if I am a leader of the nation, and at the same time in the nation’s service? The working class speaks through our words, and we, the proletariat, are the engine moving the pen. Over the years the machine of the soul gets worn out. They say: “To the archive with him, no more writing, he’s done!” To love and to dare, there’s less and less inclination, and time gets a running start and smashes my head. the soviet years ✦ 133 134 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky We come to the most horrible of depreciations— the depreciation of the heart and the soul. And when that sun, like...