The Voice Over

This manner of existence (oriented toward no one’s taste, the statistical average) moves to the forefront the kind of poetry that this averaged taste identifies as “strong,” making an impression on people external to poetry. A declarative quality is valued. Sentimentality is in favor, along with everything intensive, quick-acting, straightforward. So is narrativity (sources of interest not directly linked with the matter of poetry are brought into play). Forced, exaggerated devices admixed with extremely lightweight content. Humor, humor, blazing satire, and once again innocent humor. To fit the new role (to be liked, to be loved) a poet has to behave like a circus performer, demonstrating wonders of agility, spinning weights and catching porcelain teacups: each line with a prizewinning metaphor but even better with two. Everything that isn’t obvious, that doesn’t dazzle at first sight, that is delicate, light, unsteady, multilayered, is simply not apprehended by the new taste; the new reader has a poorly tuned sound receiver.

I wish the guilty parties in all these unpleasant things were some kind of them—those people from the outside, so easy to make claims against: they write badly, they hear badly, they misunderstand, they miss the point. The problem is that this them is us, that the new taste was formed not by popular magazines and not by visitors to literary cafés but by us ourselves, by “me myself.”

I can’t call the thing that has worried and perplexed me myself for the last few years anything but a simplification, a shallowing of verse. This tendency seems to me so contagious that it’s almost impossible to stand up to it; I see its patterns in the work of the best (and, for me, best-loved) authors, I see it in my own practice; otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother to talk about it. In order to understand what I have in mind, it’s enough to take any few stanzas at random from Elena Shvarts or, say, from Alexei Parshchikov’s “I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava” and compare their density with the best texts of the late aughts. I invite the reader to do this independently; for me the lesson is obvious, and I just want to understand how and why it turned out this way.

On the Aughts

The first decade of the new century in Russia formed not only a new standard of everyday behavior, a generally accessible consumer ideal, but also broad possibilities for its application. These years gave us, after all, the desired consensus; it just hasn’t been set up on the territory of taste. It has to do with more basic things: the wish for affluence, the cycle of “I want,” “I can,” and “I get.” This looks the same in the cultural field as in any other shop: we expect attention to our wishes, we require quality, we consider ourselves experts. That explains why for the first time in several decades they’ve started talking about the reader—and we were quickly called on to entertain them without delay; but that’s not all. What’s important is that our own internal reader wants to have a good time, too, feeling that it has a perfect right to do so.

It was enough to start considering oneself a qualified user, proud of one’s own ability to choose goods after one’s own heart, in order to see the formation (with regard to esoteric things such as poetry that resist and evade) of what Susan Sontag calls a new sensibility. Having applied the logic of the supermarket to poetry, we obtain devices familiar from the work of a discount supermarket chain—aggressive promotion of a product, various kinds of the ever-changing most current, overproduction of goods that are more in demand, deep indifference to what is not in demand. Altogether this forms the very poetic mainstream that no one wants to admit belonging to, but that can be fairly easily described in military or sports terms—strength, success, the center, surprise, power, target/hitting accuracy.

The best match for such an understanding are the poems that were abundant precisely in the early 1990s—and which have made a victorious comeback in the last few years: orderly, cheerfully, and neatly made, with devices and tricks that flex like biceps along the line: text-broadcasters of an indefinite lyric ferment. Strictly speaking, these are verses of the late Soviet school (with its particular, dark-unfiltered, drive toward beauty—the best words in the best order), which give a good illustration of the special taste of the aughts.