- Looking at the AroundSerial Poem, with an Introduction by the Author
The serial poem “Looking at the Around” is a cycle of twenty-five stanzas that I wrote during the winter and spring of 2010, in Budapest, while holding a research fellowship at the Central European University. Extended residence in a Central European capital, with its particular postsocialist geography, made it possible to reflect from a distance on the cultural-historical situation of Russian poetry and, in particular, on its rapid politicization. Thanks to that geographical remove, I felt able to estrange the language of Russian poetry—to revise its characteristic ideological positions, stylistic registers, and aesthetic clichés. The familiar became other, the close became distant, the known became unrecognizable, and the local became in whole or in part global. It should be said as well that this poem is an emotional, critically charged document of the days of anticipation before the mass protest movements of 2011 and 2012, from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to the student camps on Syntagma Square in Athens and the mass demonstrations on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. The punctuated, drumlike beat of the poem expresses, I believe in retrospect, a presentiment of the coming protests. The representational texture and formal logic of the poem are wholly appropriate to “fieldwork.” [End Page 147]
Contemporary poetry has often been reproached for its low potential for social engagement. “Looking at the Around” means to embody the present dissensus of voices, social masks, and behavioral modes: from the hipster dreaming of a Twitter revolution to the middle manager anxious about his bonus, from a highly paid journalist to a migrant worker lost in the urban landscape. It is this conflict and competition among voices of our day that gives this material the character of field research. The punning nature of my title (the translated title mimics the grammatical innovations of the original, which call into question whether “the around” is the object of the verbal phrase “looking at” or a peculiar additional prepositional construction) suggests that the poem’s rhythmic-syntactic movement might be something like that of a cinematic image surfing across multiple, superficially distinct elements of social reality. The final stanza proposes that the poem’s representation of the here and now is comparable to the cinematographic single long take (as seen, for example, in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark or, somewhat later, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman).
“Looking at the Around” was written in 2010. Although the wave of political protest has not completely dissipated, it has been degraded as a result of the symbolic defeat of the Occupy movement. The project of direct democracy seems nearly played out. The poetic work of 2016 must be far more severe, embittered, and cruel than the work of 2010. Documentation of contemporary subjectivities, in their political, economic, and social dimensions, will no longer do. Now we must assess and describe new objectivities, the character of our material world in the face of an unforeseen future.
— D. G. [End Page 148]
LOOKING AT THE AROUND
1looking at the around the air circulation ventleading into oval chamber, where councilof directors sits in session, secret lodge, shareholdersof major corporation, deputies conspiringagainst coalition government, polish coming off
2looking at the around finally in woman’s lifeinteresting object takes shape, conjuringeffectively eliminates evil eye, charms, cursesguaranteed return of lovers, same-sex marriageno need for white magic, magma gurgles
3looking at the around the farmer triumphs in dellcollectivization, Holodomor, no avoidingthe requisition, rawhide of nature writing, dry seasonsmall potatoes, snub-nosed Masha darned the sockslapdash, can’t get pencil sharp
4looking at the around two bleached blondesshoot the breeze, one chica preachespush the man to marry, had it up tohere this thorny crown of the unattached, all strategiestalked over to death, at what price to get some harmony
5looking at the around the endless chain of repressionsgiving way to thaw, denunciation of extreme measures,then standstill, stagnation, colonial warat the borders, liberasty, what the fuck...