The Voice Over

We’ll wait for them beneath the mound,

Where Yulia the manager swore at her today.

3. Fidelio

The session begins, everything rustles,

They lead witnesses out and lead new ones in,

The sentence is delivered in haste,

The accused turns into the convicted.

The sentence is brought into action,

Usually with the doctor and the prison director.

They don’t allow relatives in here.

They don’t allow journalists in here either.

They let the convicted in here, one by one,

Arrange their shoulders, ankles and wrists,

Let them smoke one final cigarette,

Give them a shot, give them alternating current,

The convicted man turns into a bear.

The relatives don’t usually come to pick them up,

Although I do know of one exceptional case:

They keep it at the dacha, under guard, to live out its years.

The unclaimed ones are distributed to zoos,

To circus troupes, to private animal collections:

They aren’t aggressive, they can be trained well,

They walk on their hind legs, sometimes they say “Mama.”

(The woman disguised in the pelt of a guard

is politely ushered into a “Black Mariah.”)

4. Iphigenia in Aulis

The action continues by the water,

A fatal war, trenches, swords, cuirasses,

The yids occupy the war’s left bank,

The faggots stand in formation on the right.

This battle takes place on foot, it will never end,

Will grind through and chew up five hundred generations,

Will have its way, like a nuclear winter,

Because cavalry attacks them from the heavens,

While darkness comes on from under the ground,

Piercing the heel and poking the knees apart.

Each one of us stands on that bank or this.

Each one of us didn’t lay down arms at once.

Each one of us, long as we’re still alive,

Looks toward where the flag-bearers are consulting,

The riders whistle and shout back and forth,

Where willy-nilly you turn into a poet.

Let me join the yids or the faggots,

I’ve been dreaming of this since third grade:

To become a stag or a ram for you,

A fatted heifer or a pudgy aunt,

A maiden, revealed in the bushes!

With a sword in my chest I sing and do not die

In the war waged on the foothills of paradise.

IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY

Conventional wisdom has it that Russian poetry is now undergoing a remarkable, extraordinary flowering; recently someone compared it to the Silver Age, even to the Golden Age of Russian poetry. I myself have said something similarly rosy, perhaps expressing myself a bit more carefully, but rejoicing no less than the others. And there was plenty to rejoice about: the mid-1990s really did chart something like a new course.

Everything changed then, just as if you had discovered a new room no one had noticed in an old communal apartment, and it could be settled in and filled up to suit one’s own preferences. It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck—that possibility of the simultaneous existence of not three, not five, but fifteen or twenty major authorial practices (especially after the cramped beginning of the 1990s, when it was as if all poetry’s voice broke or the air ran out; here I’m not mentioning the few important exceptions, who seem to me more to confirm the catastrophic nature of that time’s context). Soon the hallmark of the new decade was a constant conversation about numbers (do we have six good poets or six hundred, fifteen or twenty-five?); but long before that we got used to feeling confident in the presence of a choice, an assortment of goods—we have both calico and brocade, and this, and that, for any taste, color, and character. The feeling of warmth and reliability that such a picture gives is natural and innocent, but it more often arises in connection with other matters—say, when you go to a local supermarket, that paradise of availability: there, the absence of some familiar cereal on the shelf would make the customer sense a gaping hole, a black gash in the fabric of the macrocosm. Strictly speaking, poetry’s task is precisely that—to be that kind of gash, a black hole that leads God knows where or with what purpose, strengthening discomfort, and if offering consolation, then of a very special kind. But it would be odd not to rejoice, right? And so Russian poetry not only turned out to be good and varied: it also let itself be aware of that. And right away, to its own surprise, it turned into something like a popular exhibit of achievements—a festive and colorful panorama of its own abundance.