The Voice Over

DISPLACED PERSON

Imagine that (for any reason you like) using first-person pronouns in poetry was suddenly forbidden—and it was one of the tasks of the person writing (and, consequently, of the person reading) to reject the focal points designated in the old days as “I” and “we.” What gets lost in this case? And is anything lost at all? Why indeed does a lyric poem need an “I” when things are set up so that if you blot out every “I” and “we” in a poem, we’ll be visible all the same. The substance of poetry takes care of itself, reproducing the author’s gait with every line, every turn. The selection of objects described, the articulation and gesticulation, various manners of evading reality or making an alliance with it—what constitutes the individual’s territory in poetry needs no signature to be recognized. Here “I” is something akin to Captain Obvious: the greater, more varied, and more layered the poet’s presence in a text (and for a text to be good, the author has to be looking out of every pore, sharing her self with every cell), the less need for a signature. It’s another thing that what we call a strong poetics—what makes poetic speech potent, that is, inimitable—is always the result of microdeformations, small disturbances of the linguistic fabric, invisible, unnoticeable plots of surmounting and submission. In this sense, lyric poetry can’t get along without an author, like a dog without a master, and it’s doomed to be colored this way or that, non-neutral and non-transparent (the way vino tinto—red, “tinted,” wine—differs from water, which is no one’s, no-kind-of, impenetrable).

Let’s leave aside the hypothetical reader who selects texts for himself guided by the logic of “Hey, this is about me”—as if, in order to read a poem about love or a fiddlehead fern, one must without fail get hold of one’s own photograph with them in the background, stick one’s own head out the window—“I was there, too!” But if you consider poems an enterprise for obtaining a certain extreme experience (or a special one, at least, not afforded easily or to everyone), with the task of nudging the reader, taking him out of himself (to somewhere outside oneself), the poet turns out to be an intermediary whose identity must be examined and verified. It’s important for us to know that the poet really has spent time in another place, one that is foreign to us and strange, and has brought material proof from there, a product from beyond the seas—heavenly sounds. It is desperately important who precisely is speaking to us—therefore, a conversation about poetry often begins or ends with a childish game of I believe/I don’t believe: “Why, he made it all up himself,” we say, when someone else’s experience strikes us as false or empty. It’s as if we refuse to take the poet at their word; we demand that the poet present their credentials: biography, correspondence, diaries, a body of explicatory texts (these slight shifts of reality should be a message addressed to me, not an accidental lexical ripple on the language’s surface).

Lyric poetry is hardly possible without trust in the one “who speaks.” In essence, a poet is a simple device, something like a flashlight pointed at certain objects, making them visible for the first time—but the place where we need a flashlight is dark and alien, and she’s our only guide. Hence, the importance of the voice itself, its unity and indivisibility—what may be described very crudely as intonation or manner. That’s why readers are so troubled by the difference between “early” and “late” Pasternak and Zabolotsky, and that’s what nourishes the very need to compare “before” and “after,” “was” and “became,” unavoidable when you speak of a life that endures.

It’s another matter that occupying oneself with poetry presumes a chain of greater and lesser deaths, each putting in doubt the possibility of continued existence. Poems move forward in gigantic leaps, rip themselves loose from familiar and fertile soil, rejecting (shaking off) the very soil they were only just clinging to. Poetry seems to preserve itself by way of disruptions, renouncing what only a moment ago comprised an inalienable part of it, and sometimes its very essence.

Perhaps now this disruption will impact the figure of the author and the idea of authorship.

As I sense it, speaking-in-verse in Russia has now hit some kind of wall, and I physically feel the scale of the effort needed to hack one’s way through it. What’s going on? Did the first decade of the 2000s bring to life a parade of abilities, an exhibition of achievements, which we now want to consider closed? The very abundance and variety of what’s been going on vaguely recalls, with distorted proportions and details, what has been happening in society—living pictures of Putin-era stability! But a conversation about changing the frame, rebooting, rethinking the foundations on which the poetic now exists, has been going on for a long time and in various forms, even sometimes inside one’s own mouth. As it happens, it’s a matter of refusal—this time, of everything that could be perceived as excess or “riches,” everything that has a relationship to vigor, success, and even simple quality: everything with a possibility of hierarchy, a shadow of selectivity. In the profound article “How to Read Contemporary Poetry,” Grigory Dashevsky, among other things, divides contemporary poems into those that speak to an inner circle, that call out for recognition (of citations, cultural codes, underground passages of secret affinity)—and then those that anyone can read in the blinding light of impersonality.¹ Conceiving of one’s speech as common—or directed at some collectivity, groping toward it in the dark—means ridding it of everything excessive, everything particular or personal. At its limit, this means an extreme poverty of resources and ideas, which must then be borne like a cross. Of course, everything that suggests itself further, the entire sequence of small and large measures for interception, at its limit means the fundamental, inevitable refusal—refusal of the “I,” which is superfluous as such. For a start, one can move it outside the parentheses, make it unusable, a silly anachronism: Akhmatova’s “I put on a narrow skirt / So as to seem yet more svelte,” and so on.

But there’s a sense that more serious measures might be necessary. A poetics may break with the individual in a variety of ways. The most straightforward and drastic move is the definitive victory by way of refusal.² Here the “I” is under threat not just as the front entrance, the door half-open in expectation of a reader—but as the organizing will that stands behind the sequence of words and texts. The poet must husk off everything that comprises the primal charm of poetry for him, all its bells and whistles, rhythm, rhyme, citations, everything, including the author’s own manner, which is typically called one’s own voice (inevitably putting both notions in question)—in hope that an indivisible, indestructible remnant will be revealed over the line—the substance of poetry in its pure form.

It would seem to work just that way—that is, it can work that way, too—and poetry can be looked at not only as a project (“a colonial one,” someone in the audience will say) to expand the territory of the poetic, where ever more new, uninhabited zones are occupied and cultivated, yesterday’s virgin soil is plowed (and pondered). And not only as a progressive utopia of cultivating new devices in pursuit of galloping modernity. But also as a kind of potlatch, an orgy of self-denial, the ultimate letting go of property (having left the beauty of the world and what is corrupt in it³)—flaying oneself of everything, refusing oneself everything, including existence. This rather hair-raising striptease, where external things (blouse, shoes, panties) are followed by the essential (body, bones, skin), can end as a victory, if it succeeds in proving that the essence blows where it wishes and has no need for bearers and wrappings.

It seems that at present the sense of lyric poetry, its new life’s work, consists in attempting to free itself of something it can’t yet get along without: the selfhood of the poet. And inasmuch as poetry is a self-consistent thing, if the author becomes a problem for it, it has to do something with her. The question is, What?

What thus comes into question is the lyric poet as an agent. How was this set up for the last two or three hundred years, in the traditional arrangement of lyric poetry’s workings? Like in old movies. The hero drives a car, gets on a horse, a motorcycle, a flying carpet, remaining immobile himself—while behind him the landscape goes by with terrible speed, creating the illusion of movement: he’s not the one rushing; rather, it’s his surroundings, the mountains, valleys, clouds. The lyric poet is the static and stable center of his universe—he’s the point where speech emerges, a ray directed at objects passing by. In a certain sense, it’s precisely that immobility that ensures the poetic text’s authenticity and the readers’ trust: it’s a kind of trademark; we have already once and for all dubbed certain images and situations “Blok” or “Aronzon.”

What interests me now lies somewhere in the vacant zone between the author-as-necessity (a guide, an intermediary, a Dersu Uzala,⁴ or Leatherstocking, a living person in the here where strangers don’t go) and the need for a text as a pure and communal cup (where it’s possible and necessary, pace Brodsky, to share a poem by Rilke with someone else). I see something along the lines of a promise there or at least a possibility—and here’s what it looks like.

Let’s suppose a problem has these conditions: we’re being asked not just to dump the ballast, get rid of the excess—but to reject everything we possess, consciously or unconsciously, and “possession of speech” is the natural pretension of a person who lives with the help of words. If the problem is formulated as a victory over subjectivity, rejecting oneself and one’s own, then, I repeat, the most obvious, straightforward solution comes down to purification, smoothing the text with sandpaper—completely renouncing expressive means, what comprises its outer integument. In point of fact, this is something like a cosmetic redecorating that doesn’t touch on the structure of a residence and a way of life; there’s no demand here for radical changes of layout or rewiring the entire building. But from the outside it looks like a powerful gesture—if only because it too exists in a whirlpool of coercion, except that this time it turned to face the author, who’ll have to work in the new system of prohibitions and never step on a crack.

But it can turn out that this is not the only solution—and that the equation should be solved for y instead of x.

What does it mean, this will-to-death-of-the-author revealed one way or another in texts of the recent period? “I” leaching out from poetry collections and anthologies, anonymous and pseudonymous projects, experiments at speaking in voices, experiments at adding in someone else’s word (on which people lie down prone, as if on newly discovered land), speech that hovers, like a dirigible, over the border between the individual and the impersonal—these are all details of the big picture. But almost the whole stretch of the canvas shows the author unclenching his hands and refusing to be rather than staying in charge—keeping control over the text and guiding it like troops, in various directions. What can this mean—and, most importantly, how does it work? Could it be that, as they promised at the dawn of automatic writing, our text is beginning to live on autopilot and, all by itself, is forming a substitute, a wax model, an author for an hour? It wasn’t me, it was another.⁵ The main thing, it seems to me, is that the person writing willingly admits a non-identity with him- or herself at each stage of the poem’s existence. On the level of the concept, then of the writing (not to mention the particular stage that will have to be called the cooling down of the text—the lapse of time between completion of a poetic work and its final assimilation-dissipation in linguistic reality), the relations between text and author presume a kind of gap: an unstable equivalence, incomplete comprehension.

But the text and the author are fighting on the same side—they aren’t master and hired man (nor horse and mounted ranger) but rather a gun crew where each soldier has their own function (and a common goal). To make sure the artillery doesn’t shoot at its own side, one has to confirm the sense and place of each one—and presume that the rationale for their standing together is con-frontation with the external thing, foe or friend, that stands before both of them.

If the center of the poetic world, its navel-omphalos, turns out to be not the selfhood of the poet (eternally stuck with the arrows of ecstasies, like Saint Sebastian, or sending rays of valency in every direction), but something from-outside, exterior—an immovable question that stands before a singular poetic practice, calling for an answer and a solution—then it turns out that we can see the relations “author-language,” “author-text,” and even “author-author” in a different way. This question, as a rule, has nothing to do with a common cause, with a generation’s or language’s tasks, but it stands so close and so clearly before the person it addresses (before me, for example) that not answering is impossible—and we give our answers until it becomes clear that our own experience is not sufficient here. The opponent (the one who ought to change, subjected to reworking and rebirth) turns out to be, then, not the fabric of language and not the matter of the poetic but rather one’s own boundaries. “And I feel that ‘I’ is too small for me.”⁶ The depletion and finality of “I” (against the scope of the tasks facing the person and the text) appear to me as the greatest trap for lyric poetry, as it has approached yet another finish line—where, in order to survive, the poet must become a choir.

The very thought of being one’s own master (“I” as a candle manufactory) seems somewhat faded and a bit silly, but you can’t get away from it. Among the various rights of ownership connected with the practice of poetry (in which the right of precedence, where themes or devices are concerned, continues to mean something, as before), only “I” can’t possibly be patented, or copied, and it remains the sole inalienable possession, the sole token of established destiny. But the present situation seems to provide a possibility for revamping the usual correlations.

In a 2001 article about the poetry of the 1990s, Ilya Kukulin introduced the critical concept of fictive erotic bodies of authorship. I’ll permit myself to quote at length.

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.

If we remind ourselves of the condition where the lyric poet was the immovable object in a film shot (and at the same time the reason for it, and the only optical instrument that allowed one to see what was around), the new situation promises a new filming technique. “I” turns out to be not an actor now, but a camera; suddenly several cameras appear—a lot of them—and they aren’t pointed at you. Then the author’s volition comes down to arranging the work of the team that is providing live coverage of the experiment; here the task is nearly technical: switching cameras, alternating viewpoints. But if we suppose that all the cameras are working, all the voices are speaking (singing, coughing, whistling, stuttering; one of them, obviously, belongs to the author himself, but we can’t say with any certainty which)—and if this sheaf or whiskbroom of diverging intonations exists as a text, as a unity, we can consider the experiment a success. In that case a poet’s oeuvre appears as a kind of gigantic installation with a displaced center—and what happiness to know that you aren’t the center but the radius.

In Elena Shvarts’s Kinfia there is a poem where outlived “I”s, little girls and grown-ups, appear as an unspooling chain, an electric garland of identity retained—and renounced (“They’d smother one another, / They’d bite one another”):

But the soul would run off as a spark

From one—into another—to the live one,

To me, flying up in a moment,

Leaving behind all the crowds

Of melting, dressed, undressed,

Enraged, and merry, and sorrowful—

Just like a city after the eruption

Of an indifferently wild volcano.

What can be offered and understood as a metaphor all too often turns out to be a simple statement of fact. From “I” to “I,” as if from thought to thought, there are many thousands of miles, and along the road as mileposts stand the used-up, lifeless shells of living meaning, which doesn’t know anything except how to knock the bottom loose and get out.

My poems, I suppose, are indeed written by various authors; and from various points of view and with various voices, they attempt to bear witness to or to overturn one hypothesis that someone put in my mind as a lifelong sting. Like a prisoner in shackles, the poet is bound with the shared chain to precisely this hypothesis, rather than voice-manner-gait—and in order to estrange oneself from it, see it from a distance and from above, one needs these series of fissions and substitutions, of exits from the self and from the world, familiar-unfamiliar voices that speak with you from the sidelines, with the indifferent engagement of a stranger. Thus, a fictive poetics forms around the hole in reality. Its task is to overturn the paving stones of personal pain that have rooted into the earth and to make the water of life flow beneath them. If that works out.

2012

Translated by Sibelan Forrester