What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry: A Recent View from St. Petersburg

Translator’s Preface

“All this is familiar; still it needs to be repeated. In its very essence the decorative grid of the Chinese interior is inexhaustible. Repetitions do not exist as long as there is time. Thus non-coincidence, deviation, residue, all requiring a different approach” (“Syn/Opsis/Tax” 5). These words of the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (iguana@comset.spb.ru) that open what may very well be considered his poetic manifesto¹ would also make an excellent epigraph to the text that follows here. It has been five years since his work was introduced to PMC readers in the 1993 Symposium on Russian Postmodernism (PMC 3:2).² The brief essay in the present issue is in many ways a repetition of what was then said by and about him. Yet the non-coincidence is apparent. Five years ago Russian postmodern poetry was too much of a conceptual curiosity to be dealt with entirely on its own terms. In 1992, after a bilingual reading by Arkadii in Charles Bernstein’s poetics seminar at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was then a visiting fellow and I a graduate student, I remember being asked how his work sounded to a Russian ear—whether its ostensible affinity with American Language poetry did not make for a certain foreignness, constructedness, a certain out-of-the-test-tube quality.³ At the time, I was unsure. His poetry was certainly most unlike anything I had ever heard or read in my native tongue. As Barrett Watten put it in his contribution to the PMC symposium, Dragomoshchenko’s poetry “rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of [Russian] tradition’s... authority” by resolutely breaking with the “overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standard for Russian verse” (Watten 2). The question of influence, of tradition and innovation, of “lineages and cultural formations” (Perloff 13) thus suggested itself before any other. It was an obvious one. It remains to be explored further.

Today, however, new lines of questioning can also be pursued, or at least invoked. Now that “the momentum that has brought the [“Third Wave” of Russian literature] brilliantly crashing on our shore” (Perloff 13) has somewhat subsided, other approaches seem possible. One of them is to imagine what it would be like to view post-Soviet poetry as something other than a representational practice specific to a given context, and thus, as something not always already determined by, or reducible to, a habitual set of national attributes current at a given moment. This possibility is not easily recognized simply because it appears to have few immediate uses.

Consider the history of Dragomoshchenko’s essay “On the Superfluous.” The piece was commissioned by a small British journal as a commentary on the contemporary state of poetry in Russia. Yet the text Arkadii wrote and asked me to translate was flatly rejected as it contained no actual information about the specifics of the poetry scene. The editor was in fact puzzled and, I think, slightly insulted. He was clearly expecting a straightforward report on the latest poetic trends but instead received a dense paratactic rumination that mentioned Russia only in passing and was mostly concerned with poetry as “something superfluous” to what we generally talk about when we talk about poetry. In other words, Dragomoshchenko’s reflections offered a view of poetry and its scene that was not centered on any particular historical, political, cultural, or literary developments, links or connections other than those poetry itself projects “in its constant self-questioning.” The view of poetry presented in his essay was, to be sure, poetic. For that very reason it was deemed redundant, gratuitous, self-indulgent—superfluous, as it were.

Which, of course, illustrates Arkadii’s point only too well, even though one cannot but sympathize with the British editor’s frustration. Dragomoshchenko’s own frustration, however, is also understandable given the context out of which he is writing—the context on whose framing we always rely so heavily in our discussions of Russian poetry. What...