The Voice Over

These bodies represent a certain kind of intermediary, linking authorial consciousness with the world; at the same time they are characters that play out their own dramas, encapsulating the world’s general characteristics. The author’s consciousness, or more precisely the author’s longing that pervades the whole being of the person writing (in the words of Mandelstam’s “Conversation About Dante”), flies behind these ghostly bodies—it’s as if they bring about the creative work ahead of the author’s mind. These bodies are alienated from the author’s consciousness and can be examined somewhat from a distance, like strangers […]. At the same time they are inseparably linked, linked by blood, with the author’s consciousness. […] Their procreation was, obviously, characteristic of the poetry of preceding epochs, but in the 1990s interacting with them and dramatizing this interaction became an important, vivid and frequently deliberate creative method.⁷

If we move on according to the logic suggested, and if we remove from the equation, as only one of many options, the corporeal character of these constructions and intermediaries that are alienated from the author and indissolubly connected with her, we can speak about something larger—and extremely important. The end of the 1990s gave poetry a new modus operandi, and it would be a shame not to take advantage of it, of the additional agencies of writing, equal but not identical to the person writing, which could be called fictive figures of authorship. These figures are something like Sorokin clones (Pushkin-7, Parshchikov-19)⁸: models of authorial practices, of points of view, which could and ought to exist—but which only function in the limited space-time of one cycle or one book of poems, attempting to exhaust their whole potential there. It sounds quite mechanistic—but that’s what freedom looks like, the one promised to the text by I-not-I, the intermediary agency, which has at its disposal sovereign territory and which exists according to laws that are not entirely identical to those the author recognizes over himself.

(What sets these phantom voices, practices-for-an-hour, apart from the centuries-old experience of literary mystification with its masks and mustachios? Perhaps the fact that they don’t even try to pretend that they’re not one-offs. The lightweight working constructions don’t conceal their utilitarian and situational nature, the fact that they’re set up, like a tent or a tripod, for a short time, to complete a singular task. One could say that their existence is something like a demonstration of capabilities that greatly exceed the skills and pretensions of their physical author; they’re a kind of fragment pointing to the existence of a whole.)

But what remains of the author in this situation? I agree with those who see an ethical difference between “I write the way I want” and “I write the way I can” (and who for understandable reasons choose the second), so I suspect that “I can’t do otherwise” refers not so much and not only to the text itself, its acoustic and semantic topcoat, but also to what about and what for it exists. No matter the kinds of problems the poet is solving on the surface of her own writing, where there is room for the illusion of successes and mistakes, from where the sequence of texts looks like a product of her will (a collection of conscious decisions) rather than destiny (a sequence determined by laws very like the laws of grammar), in the main she is all the same doomed to herself. As if surrounding a shell crater, all her energies are drawn to the borders of an enormous problem, which she attempts to deal with (to which everything she does, strictly speaking, is an answer)—they’re gathered together, like cloth wrapped around a fist. Facing this problem, one’s own voice has no more rights, and no fewer, then the voices of the neighbors, the subs, the witnesses, who are alive or seem to be alive. The poet endlessly fumbles and pulls at the contours of this problem; moves from place to place chasing after a solution; speaks about it at length and quietly, loudly and succinctly—and no kind of individual “I saw the way out” will be sufficient as an answer. In a certain sense, poets of this type are what eats them: a pain whose scope exceeds their cognitive potentials—to such an extent that remaining only-yourself won’t help you.