From Scales (11)
by Carla Harryman
to Russian/Ukrainian Poets
—checking email every five minutes for an answer. I got it I got the answer and it didn’t make me look so good.
Pounding on your own goodness sounds a bit tarnishing.
Say stinging.
Have a latke.
The smell of onion in the vapor of potato reminds me of the Russian poets in our kitchen drinking vodka at a somewhat earlier hour than this.
They did not sleep.
They do not sleep much now either.
Up all night in your fantasy. Some of them dead.
No not in mine. In mine they sleep willowy sorts of idealisms smothering vast plains sequestered in small farms and mushroom gathering.
They are almost all gone now, but there are more.
Some. Alexei. Others too are lauded on the lips of the still living.
Alexei turned vitriol blue.
Hmmm . . . I thought it was a reference to hydrated copper.
Ukrainian rubble recalls each dead poet in Russia as Ukrainian.
They have to be careful now. That rubble disseminates in the elements spreading across the globe.
As ever but more so.
Tabling the turn and turning.
So. Let them leave as they did.
They leave again and again.
So and so is arriving.
A ways off.
They are arriving.
We break hearts with them when they arrive with stoic pretense.
And then we get out the vodka.
They have not yet slept.
We keep the vodka in the freezer in case someone is looking for it.
I confess I didn’t understand entirely, these males. But Alexei—
Now understanding, forget.
—I was a poet in the company of Alexei.
The point is disbursed in rubble—
Yes forget understanding.
—and never made again in the same way.
That’s right. It’s missing varnish.
—March 20, 2022
Notes and links
Begun in December 2021, Scales is the third poem-dialogue sequence of Good Morning Trilogy. Written through the pandemic period, the improvised conversations happen between two unnamed entities within their dwelling, usually during the morning. These dialogues can variously be thought of as representations of one person’s interior thoughts or as literal exchanges. They are written in liminal states before I am fully awake, usually just after breakfast. In 1992, I did a performance at The Lab in San Francisco that featured Alexei Parshchikov’s poem Blue Vitriol and my poem Dim Blue. Today I woke up thinking about Russian poets. —Carla Harryman
From Alexei Parshchikov’s biography : “Born on May 24, 1954 on the Pacific coast, in Olga Bay (Primorsky Territory). Finished school in Donetsk, Ukraine. After studying for two years at the Kiev Agricultural Academy, Parshchikov moved to Moscow. In 1975 he entered the Gorky Literary Institute (seminar by I. Mikhailov), from which he graduated in 1981. [. . .]
The first publication of Alexei Parshchikov is the poem “New Year’s Lines” in the journal “Literary Studies” (No. 1, 1984). He is regarded as a key figure in the poetic moveement metametaphorism (as defined by Konstantin Kedrov) or metarealism (the term of Mikhail Epstein ). His first collection of poems Dneprovsky August was published in 1986 by the publishing house Molodaya Gvardiya in a book representing four young poets. [. . .]
Parshchikov is laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize in 1986 (“awarded for a non-trivial and convincing work on expanding the possibilities of poetic language, for the poem ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava,’ which returns the reader’s imagination and thought to the field of genuine reading”). In 1986 the poem “I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava” was published by the private publishing house of Arkady Semenov, “Peace Fund.” [Read more here]
Comment from reader Ron Day (posted to Facebook): “Lovely. It gets to the point of things, which as the poem notes is disbursed in rubble. Which is the disturbing point of it all. What makes existence so fragile. And why this war, as all realities of war, are so beyond, as the poem says, understanding. And so what is understanding? And what is war, from the viewpoint of understanding? Maybe all points should be, or really are, reduced to rubble, particularly the points of war. The point disbursed in rubble, which the form of the poem nicely enacts. It’s a good commentary on the division between experience and memory, poetic form and some sense of knowledge, or at least, and most problematically, information, forms, as well, to me. And the way this war is being pointed and repointed is very disturbing to me, as well. Where tanks are destroyed (whichever ‘side’), for example, as if they were autonomous, without young people in them. There’s the reporting of the war effects, and the reporting of points, including on the missile points, and as, ‘the war’ . . . so distressing, ‘all of it,’ not least because ‘it’ is sometimes, often, reported as points, including the deaths—i.e., the destroyed lives. And then the feeling that it is all for some political reenactments, some demonstrations of political or military strategic points, that it is taken as examples for some future threats and counter-threats, and internal politics, as well, in both Russia and the U.S. and maybe Ukraine and elsewhere. Rhetorical points and missile points, missals and military missiles. So ‘Ukraine’ is an example, as well as a reality. And so these are the ‘points’ . . . and the lives, human and non-human animals . . . well . . . in the rubble . . . just rubble. (And the rubles too.) Thanks to Carla for so well creating this, and to you for posting it.”
