Additional Articles

Poets often complain that poetry is of no use to anyone, that nobody publishes it. And certainly, it brings in no money. The complaints vary greatly—direct complaints, veiled complaints, open dissatisfaction, subtle hints. In general, every possible kind. Broadly speaking, poets’ complaints may be divided into the following categories:

• general complaint: “Nobody publishes poetry. Nobody needs poetry nowadays.”
• personal complaint: “Nobody publishes my poetry. Nobody needs my poetry.”
• biased complaint: “They simply do not understand my poetry. They are fools. Nobody understands me. I shall write for the drawer, for myself alone.”
• passionate complaint: “I am a genius. The Great Important Man at the Writers’ Union told me so, as did my husband/mother/brother/colleague and somebody else besides. Therefore I am absolute, and everyone who dislikes my poetry is trash themselves.”
• dishonest complaint: “I write only for myself. I could easily never show my poetry to anyone at all!”

These complaints are actually quite easy to answer. Because all of them are sucked out of thin air. And the people who complain this way are not poets, but scribblers. Why does nobody publish poetry? Here the “personal complaint” answers itself rather truthfully. It is not poetry that goes unpublished. It is your poetry that goes unpublished. Untalented, bad poetry. I often attend literary seminars and gatherings, poetry evenings, all sorts of such events. Ninety percent of what I hear there is complete garbage. Moreover, bad poets are usually far more confident in their abilities than good ones.

Of course, it has always been this way. Whom do we remember among the greats? Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, for example. In fact, from Pushkin’s era we remember perhaps forty or fifty poets at most. Those are the good poets. Yet at that time Russia contained no fewer than three thousand versifying masturbators. We neither remember nor know their names. What percentage, then, were truly good poets? One and a half percent—a mere handful! Exactly the same is true today. So there is no need for despair. Good poets do exist; they simply drown in the flood of mediocrities. The only thing capable of distinguishing them and setting the record straight is time. And time will decide who will still be remembered two hundred years from now and who will not.

Of course, there are poets to whom so much has been granted from above that they need nothing further. Those are geniuses. I know a few—enough to count on the fingers of one hand.

When some talentless fellow reads aloud his “great creations,” and instead of praise you tell him, “Rather weak, sir. Everything limps here, and there is not a drop of meaning—this part ought to be corrected…,” he becomes terribly offended. “You simply don’t understand!” he cries. Forgive me, but I understand perfectly well. When someone points out poetic mistakes in my own work, I either justify them or correct them. Our hero, however, sees no mistakes whatsoever. He is convinced that тебе–уже constitutes a magnificent rhyme merely because both words end in “e,” and no power on earth will persuade him otherwise. Such a poet will never improve.

The most dishonest statement a poet can make is something along the lines of: “I write only for myself. Other people’s opinions do not matter to me. I could simply keep everything in a drawer.” That is utter nonsense. If you truly write only for the drawer—then do not read your poems to anyone! Never tell anyone you write at all! The moment a person reads a poem even to a single friend, that poem already exists for someone else. That person’s opinion already matters, even if it is only the opinion of that one friend. Emily Dickinson, for example, published no more than ten poems during her lifetime. Yet she wrote extensively; after her death nearly two thousand poems were discovered. Now she is a classic of American poetry. She did not lie. But if someone reads you a poem and then claims that it was written “only for themselves,” that is nonsense. It was written for you.

Poets also dislike revising their poems. Ah yes, I understand—it hurts to tear something away from your heart, something personal and dear. But it must be done. One must tear it away mercilessly. A masterpiece will not emerge on the first attempt. Have you ever seen Pushkin’s drafts? Every line is crossed out ten times, and entire pages have been rewritten two or three times over. And we are no Pushkins. If a poet writes something, they are obliged to reread it after some time has passed and revise it. God willing, it may turn into a jewel. Meaning comes from the heart, but form comes from the mind. Therefore form must be polished.

And then there is the current fashion for free verse. Every talentless versifier is convinced that at least they can write a good free verse poem. But a good free verse poem is a hundred times more difficult to write than a rhymed and metrical one! With meter and rhyme, we can conceal any weakness of meaning, any nonsense whatsoever. But in free verse there must not be a single unnecessary word. Among poets, bad free-verse writers make up almost sixty percent of the whole crowd. Mostly women, incidentally. And you ask one of them, “Do you work with rhyme?” And she replies: “Why should I? I do not consider rhyme necessary! It restricts me! It limits the flight of my imagination!” Forgive me, but a person who cannot work with rhyme has no business writing free verse! Rhyme and meter are the foundation, the stumbling blocks. Do you think Malevich painted only black and red squares? Therefore learn how to write poetry first, and only then choose your form—whether free verse, musaddas, or visual poetry.

For some reason poets imagine that poetry neither requires study nor demands practice. Nikolai Shulgovsky, a great man, wrote in 1914 that architects are taught for ten years how to build houses, while weavers study five years to weave carpets. And what—poetry is simpler? It requires no learning? Of course it does. Incidentally, an excellent way to master virtuoso technique is combinatorics. A person capable of writing a coherent word-by-word abecedarius, an acrostic, or a ropalic verse fears nothing thereafter.

Strangely enough, untalented poets often recite their verses rather well. For I frequently hear some complete idiot excuse the worthlessness of his poetry by saying: “You cannot read these poems from the page—I have to declaim them.” That is nonsense. Poetry is, first and foremost, a literary genre. Not a musical one. It must initially reach the reader’s mind directly from the printed page. Performance matters, certainly, but it remains secondary.

Good poets rarely read their own poetry well. It has always been so—Brodsky, Rozhdestvensky, Yevtushenko all recited poorly. Brodsky, in fact, was dreadful at it. Poetry should not be read inwardly to oneself. It must be poured out into the hall; words must be struck like metal; one must perform like an actor, loudly and clearly—for even a whisper from the theatrical stage can be heard in the back rows, can it not? In truth, I know only three or four genuinely strong poets capable of reading their work for an audience rather than into nowhere.

Among the classics, one should read everything. One should read Bella Akhmadulina, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Blok, Joseph Brodsky, Valery Bryusov, Ivan Bunin, Nikolai Gumilyov, Gavrila Derzhavin, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Sergei Yesenin, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Georgy Ivanov, Aleksey Koltsov, Ivan Krylov, Mikhail Lermontov, Apollon Maykov, Osip Mandelstam, Samuil Marshak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Nekrasov, Alexander Pushkin, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Nikolai Rubtsov, Kondraty Ryleyev, Mikhail Svetlov, Igor Severyanin, Fyodor Sologub, Alexander Tvardovsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, Marina Tsvetaeva, Korney Chukovsky, and Georgy Shengeli. One should certainly also read combinatorial poetry—the works of Valery Bryusov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Dmitry Avaliani, Gleb Sedelnikov, Boris Grinberg, and Ivan Rukavishnikov.

Read contemporary poets as well—Vladimir Vishnevsky, Igor Guberman, and even Grigory Oster. Listen as well to Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich, Willy Melnikov, Konstantin Arbenin, Dmitry Rastaev, Alexander Bal, Oleg Medvedev, Olga Chikina, and Mikhail Shcherbakov.

A famous wall-quatrain attributed to Igor Guberman has recently begun to sound with alarmingly prophetic accuracy.

God grant that it may prove otherwise.

Sometimes I hear or read remarks about myself such as: “Oh, this sounds like Butusov (Medvedev, Shcherbakov, Kudryasheva, Polozkova, Brodsky, Chikina, Bardin—underline whichever applies).” And I myself occasionally notice, in the musical or poetic works of other poets or bards, motifs that remind me of works I already know. I too make observations or comments of that sort.

But in reality, there is nothing wrong with a poem or a song resembling something else. Far worse is when it resembles nothing at all.

There exists a particularly foolish point of view: that in order to be original one should neither read nor listen to anyone—then one will not even be tempted toward plagiarism, and will become utterly unique. This presents a certain dilemma: would you rather be originally terrible, or slightly derivative yet still worthy of attention? To my mind, the second option is preferable. The point is that if you manage to write in the style of Brodsky (without quite reaching his level, naturally—that goes without saying), or in the style of Medvedev, or Shcherbakov, then at the very least, if you strive toward such models, the initially derivative works will eventually grow into something distinctly your own, something original and personal. The allusions to this or that famous author will gradually fade away. The borrowed technique will transform, yet its quality will not diminish. We all learn from something. A child first copies incomprehensible little symbols, and only later learns to write letters independently. Any painter begins by drawing from life or copying another painting, and only afterward can permit himself to seek subjects within his own imagination. So it is with poets as well: in order to learn how to write one’s own work, one must first learn how to imitate. The important thing is not to become trapped in imitation forever.

I am not ashamed to name those whom I imitated while learning to write poetry and songs. They are not necessarily my favorite poets or songwriters. They are simply people who influenced me. Oleg Medvedev, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Yegor Letov, Ilya Kormiltsev, Vyacheslav Butusov, Mikhail Shcherbakov, Konstantin Arbenin, Dmitry Bykov, Margarita Pushkina, Alya Kudryasheva, Vera Polozkova, Alexander Shcherbina, Nikolai Gumilev, Olga Chikina, Willy Melnikov, Anastasia Vinokurova, Sergei Kalugin, and perhaps a few others I cannot painfully recall at the moment.

Therefore: plagiarize to your heart’s content! It is not merely permissible—it is necessary. Only do not become too absorbed in it, for one may accidentally forget that the original purpose of involuntary plagiarism is self-improvement.

Profanity is a painful subject for many poets and critics. May it be used in poetry? If so, in what situations? And if not, then why? I have decided to reflect upon this topic, thus continuing my series of analytical essays devoted to poetry in general and to some of its more questionable aspects in particular.

If I were to generalize crudely, my point of view is very simple: profanity is, essentially, just as much a part of the Russian language as any other word. Accordingly, it should be used only where appropriate. For example, we use the word “display” (or any other word) where the meaning of the sentence requires it (“The display is smeared with some kind of grime”), and not wherever we happen to feel like it (“I walked down display street eating a display bun”). Profanity functions in exactly the same way. If I wish to emphasize the absolute, ultimate hopelessness of a situation, I say: “That’s it, this is a complete fucking disaster.” Because that phrase is far more forceful than milder alternatives such as “the end,” “ruin,” or euphemistic substitutes. If, however, a person uses obscenity merely as a replacement for ordinary words, that is both improper and uncultured. Therefore we shall refrain from quoting such examples further.

Now let us turn directly to poetry. Profanity in poetry, just as in everyday speech, should be employed only where appropriate. The question is where precisely that place lies. Where the boundary stands. Examples of obscenity used out of place are so easy to find that I shall not even bother citing them. Better to discuss something useful, however questionable. In certain cases profanity is not merely appropriate but even necessary. Let us examine such situations through specific examples.

Example 1. Wordplay. Evgeny Lukin, “Lyrical Poignant.”

In this poem, the brilliant play on words completely erases the negative effect of the obscenity бля involved. It appears purely as a toy, a masterful selection of rhymes, simultaneously sad and amusing. Lukin’s poem stands on the threshold of combinatorial poetry while remaining entirely remarkable from the standpoint of classical technique. The use of profanity as a playful instrument is, however, limited no matter how one looks at it. As another example, I might cite a palindrome by Boris Grinberg that made me laugh enormously: Вымой ухи, хуй омыв. A palindrome is, firstly, a rather difficult genre that permits the use of almost any means in pursuit of technical perfection; and secondly, this particular palindrome genuinely is funny.

Example 2. A cry from the soul. The second case in which profanity may be appropriate is precisely the one mentioned at the beginning of this essay. That is, when obscenity serves as an expressive device from which there is no escaping—one that intensifies and sharpens the effect of the poem. An example from Vera Polozkova, “About Love”:

In this poem, the well-known expression полный пиздец is employed brilliantly and with tremendous emotional force—it genuinely grips the reader by the heart. No other word could really replace it here. That is simply how it must be: on Fridays, all at once, and completely.

Another example, again from Polozkova, is this:

Here there is also a slight element of the first justification for profanity’s appropriateness—its witty deployment. Moreover, the particular coined obscenity невъебенность used here conveys something vast and enormous, far greater than an ordinary word like мощь ever could. Indeed, one could cite several more examples from Vera Polozkova in which the sincerity and aptness of obscene expressions outweigh all the negativity normally associated with them.

Example 3. Technical usage. Sometimes a poem simply lacks a syllable. An inexperienced young poet in such a situation inserts some filler particle or another meaningless little word. A poet of a higher order, however, may permit himself a colloquial or semi-obscene expression—provided, of course, that it fits the poem in terms of both meaning and style. Unfortunately, I could not find a perfect example involving outright profanity used this way. Yet a fine example involving vulgarism rather than obscenity may easily be found in Oleg Medvedev’s song “Red Boots.”

Here the vulgar colloquialism блин emphasizes the folkloric element in the song while simultaneously filling a metrical gap in the line. Incidentally, Medvedev uses actual profanity only two or three times, I think, and one of those instances appears as a quotation:

Here the obscenity бля both plugs a hole in the line and emphasizes the quoted speech—the words uttered by the character after bursting into a smoke-filled winter hut from the freezing outdoors.

Example 4. When it is simply funny. Very rarely one encounters an obscene poem that is funny precisely because of the obscenity. Simply funny, nothing more. Sometimes witty, sometimes not. But still delightful. As an example of this, let me mention a poem by Igor Vishnyakov over which I laughed for quite a long time. Only read it carefully, slowly, from beginning to end.

I do not know about you, but I found it hilarious. One might say the man wrote it “straight from accumulated suffering.”

And that is probably all. It is easy enough to shove хуй into a song. Such words are short and can be inserted almost anywhere. But to place them in such a way that they carry at least some semantic weight, that they do not appear alien, that they amuse rather than irritate—that actually requires skill.

Therefore: if you do not know how, ladies and gentlemen, then do not swear.

Many contemporary poets suffer from a particular affliction: an unwillingness to use punctuation because they do not know how to use it properly. Yet punctuation marks are just as much full-fledged participants in the linguistic process as letters themselves. Without them, a text looks naked and impoverished. Curiously enough, prose writers always use punctuation. All writers—from the classical Turgenev and Tolstoy to contemporaries such as Bykov or Pelevin; from science-fiction authors like Oldie or Dyachenko to writers of mass-market detective fiction such as Dontsova—every single one of them uses punctuation. And, damn it, they use it correctly. If a writer cannot manage, an editor steps in. And I simply do not understand why, in poetry—which is no less important a literary domain than prose—so many people do not consider it necessary to descend to the level of punctuation.

The first and principal reason for using punctuation marks is that they simplify reading and comprehension. Precisely so. A poem that is syntactically and punctuationally грамотное is far easier to read. The reader knows where a pause is required, where some sort of enumeration occurs, where a sentence ends, or where some logical segment of the poem concludes. For declamation, punctuation is absolutely indispensable. A reciter can analyze a properly punctuated poem far more deeply in preparation for performance.

In recent years, the practice of writing poems “in a single line” has become widespread. Many strong poets write in precisely this manner. Among them are the much-praised Alya Kudryasheva and Vera Polozkova, among others. Older poets rarely resort to such a method, although the poetry of Gennady Zhukov—for example, “Recitative for a Pipe”—comes quite close to it. Yet the point is not this. When poetry is written “in columns,” natural pauses are still more or less created by line breaks. But when it is written “in a line,” those pauses become smoothed away, and punctuation marks remain the reader’s sole guides. In my own work, I have considered it necessary to dispense with punctuation only twice. One instance was in the poem “Silence”, where the absence of punctuation pursued a specific purpose. It seemed right to me that the poem should be performed as a monotonous recitative, with pauses only at the ends of lines and without any emotional coloring whatsoever. From this one may derive a principle: we have the right to omit punctuation marks if we wish to emphasize the monotony and emotional flatness of a work for the performer.

The second time I dispensed with punctuation was in the more recent song “The Meat Machine”, written under the influence of Vladimir Sorokin and at one time causing quite a stir among admirers of his work. Again, in “The Meat Machine” I pursued the goal of demonstrating the meaninglessness and monotony of everything taking place. Two instances out of four hundred—that is, roughly 0.5%—constitute the entirety of my own syntaxlessness. And, in my opinion, that is a perfectly normal percentage. Very rarely does a poem truly benefit from the absence of syntax as an expressive device.

The most foolish excuses invented by young (and not-so-young) poets to justify the absence of commas and periods are the following:

• “I have transcended the boundaries of punctuation!” = I do not know how to use it
• “It restricts me!” = I do not know how to use it
• “I do not consider it necessary!” = I do not know how to use it
• “I do not know how to use it...” = at least that is honest, though still a poor excuse: one ought to learn to write correctly. Lingva latina non penis canina est.

There is another strange excuse as well. People say: “My poems look much better without punctuation than with it.” There is only one answer to this. If you say such things, then perhaps you should stop engaging in graphomania altogether. Punctuation marks—with the rarest exceptions already discussed above—can only improve a poem. If they make it worse, then the punctuation marks themselves are superior to your opus. And if punctuation marks are better than your opus, I can well imagine what kind of thing you have written.

Incidentally, all of this applies equally to another matter—capital letters. In poetry, capital letters should appear exactly where they do in prose: at the beginning of every sentence, that is, after periods, exclamation marks, question marks, ellipses, and so forth. If you are not writing “in a line,” it is best to capitalize the opening letter of each line as well, since this corresponds to certain established conventions of poetry. Still, the latter is not obligatory: Brodsky, for instance, managed perfectly well without it. But if, for whatever reason, you decide to dispense with punctuation marks entirely, then capital letters become absolutely essential in order to distinguish one phrase from another in at least some fashion.

And that is all. These were merely reflections prompted by the poems people send me for review.

ON THE BAD

Graphomaniacs multiply like mushrooms after rain. And every bad poet considers it their sacred duty to write at least three poems on religious themes. Particularly dreadful poets strive to produce no fewer than twenty such works. I am not criticizing the subject itself: the topic is broad and fascinating, one could write an enormous amount about it. Yet the overwhelming majority of poets limit themselves to meaningless retellings of the Bible and similar material.

Sometimes such poems are sent to me for review. I write back to the author: awful, pure unadulterated trash. Because all of this was written two thousand years before you, and you have invented absolutely nothing new. Then they begin to argue, and their principal argument is usually: “You do not understand the Bible, you have not read the Bible, you are an agnostic,” and so forth. Well then. I have read the Bible. Which, incidentally, those aforementioned poets did not write. I am not judging the Bible—which I have no right whatsoever to judge—but rather their own works, which relate above all to bad poetry.

Thus, bad religious poetry may be divided into three categories. If your poem falls entirely into one of these groups, it would be better to hide it away and show it to nobody: you have produced a failure.

1) Retelling the Bible. The most widespread category. Vast numbers of young versifiers simply read the Bible and then versify isolated episodes from it. This has been done so many thousands of times that one can no longer count them. Nobody benefits from yet another repetition. The process is simple: imagination works poorly, so one takes a ready-made plot, sticks some rhymes onto it—usually primitive ones—and out pops a little poem.

2) “My life was terrible, but then I met Jesus and everything became wonderful.” The second most common plot of terrible religious poetry. This motif already existed in Pushkin’s day, but at least back then it still possessed a certain freshness and originality. Today it has been battered, exhausted by crowds of scribblers, and mutilated by endless crooked rhymes and clumsy rhythms. There are minor variations: the hero may feel better not only after meeting Jesus, but after entering a church, reading the Bible, receiving revelation, and so forth. In the end it all boils down to the same moral: come to church and happiness will be yours. All of that may well be true, but why drag it out into an entire poem? There are also broader variations: “how terrible life is without God, how wonderful with Him.”

3) Philosophical reflections on Biblical themes. The most terrifying category of all. It is one thing if the writer is genuinely intelligent. But far more often such topics attract people entirely lacking in erudition. The results are horrifying. Such poems usually conclude with moralizing slogans: do not kill, do not steal, go to church, do not commit adultery.

There is another amusing peculiarity. Poets of this religious persuasion diligently capitalize every word remotely connected with religion. Words such as “богоугодный,” “ангелы,” “церковный,” even “подаяние” or “паперть.” Convincing them that only a very small number of such words should actually be capitalized is impossible. Explaining that the word “God” is capitalized only when referring specifically to the Christian God the Father is equally futile. And so on. Well, all this merely amuses me, nothing more.

ON THE GOOD

Yet it is, strangely enough, entirely possible to write magnificent things on divine themes. Truly magnificent. Works that do not fit into canons, that are not forced into prefabricated molds. Works that compel one to think. They cannot really be systematized. One can only read them. For example, God appears again and again in many poems by Alya Kudryasheva. But how He appears! He is everywhere, always appropriate, always harmonious, exactly as He ought to be. For instance: ...Господь не то чтобы сжал ладони — он просто пальцами шевельнул..., or “...ты играй, Господи, в шахматы и нарды...”.

In these examples, they are merely quotations, fragments woven into the poem. But there also exist poems written entirely about God, Jesus, the Crucifixion—poems that are in no way banal, but truly magnificent. I shall quote several examples here (though I cannot vouch for absolute accuracy, since many variants of these poems exist):

Dmitry Rastaev. “Let Us Invent a New God…”

Joseph Brodsky. “Every man stands naked before God...”

And so on. One could cite many such examples.

In short, write about whatever you wish. But if you choose to address a difficult theme, a theme already explored countless times before you, a theme rather narrow in scope, then make the effort either to invent something new or to express the old in new words, so that your work does not turn into a graphomaniacal opus. Incidentally, Leonid Kaganov expressed precisely the same idea—only much more briefly and succinctly—in his article “Bad Advice for Poets: How to Write Poetry”, in the section entitled “How Should One Write?”

I have long wanted to write an essay about free verse. And I have my reasons.

An enormous number of contemporary graphomaniacs write nothing but free verse and sincerely believe themselves to belong to the poetic brotherhood. Unfortunately, they are mistaken. There is one golden rule of free verse: it is dozens of times harder to write a good free-verse poem than a good poem burdened with rhyme and meter. In a “proper” metrical poem, one can conceal absolutely any defect of meaning behind skillful wordplay, behind rhyme and rhythm, behind a system of stresses. One can disguise any nonsense whatsoever. A poem may become beautiful simply because its form pleases the ear (or the eye).

Free verse possesses neither meter nor rhyme. Therefore the entire emphasis falls upon the semantic weight of the poem itself. A free-verse poem must contain no unnecessary words. In a metrical work, we may insert some epithet or additional phrase merely in order to satisfy the rhyme or meter. But in free verse we must be able to explain precisely why this particular word stands here rather than some other one.

Another rule: a person incapable of handling rhyme and rhythm cannot write good free verse. Nev-er. If you genuinely believe that “to you — already” constitutes a satisfactory rhyme, then you should not stain paper even with unrhymed masterpieces. By definition they are not worth a penny. Only after mastering the basics of poetry does a person earn the right to move on to experimental genres. The great architects—Gaudí or Aalto, for example—did not immediately begin by constructing revolutionary masterpieces. No indeed: their earliest buildings were perfectly ordinary “student projects.” Only after mastering the foundations completely did Gaudí begin covering his structures with elaborate stone ornamentation.

Unfortunately, ninety percent of free-verse writers fail to understand this. If we calculate percentages among poets who write in a more or less classical style, then perhaps thirty percent of them are worth something, while the rest are graphomaniacs. Well, perhaps not thirty—perhaps twenty. But among free-verse writers, ninety to ninety-five percent produce utter nonsense, which only further proves how difficult this genre truly is.

I shall never forget the horrifying poetry festival “Order of Words–2006” in Minsk. In 2007 I wisely avoided returning to that nightmare on Elm Street. On the day I attended the event, various poets performed—Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, a thoroughly mixed crowd. The overwhelming majority, perhaps ninety percent, recited nothing but free verse. One particular young woman remains vividly in my memory. She was introduced as practically a new Tsvetaeva, a laureate of countless awards, and so forth in the same spirit. She walked onstage, thrust one leg forward, and began declaiming: “There once was a girl who wanted to smash her eye against a table! There once was a girl who wanted to smash her eye against a chair! There once was a girl who wanted to smash her eye against a windowsill!…”—and so on for five entire minutes. I found it hysterically funny, while everyone else wore grave expressions and listened intently, so intelligent and profound. And finally the whole performance reached its quintessence: “And at last she smashed her eye against a gas stove!” That was all. The climax: we were in hysterics. But the audience was ecstatic. They applauded seriously—as though they had witnessed a masterpiece.

The second horror was a fellow who recited palindromes. He read them aloud while I automatically checked them in my head—reversing them to verify whether they actually worked. And I discovered that they did not work at all! He declaimed, eyes bulging wildly: Я сам мяса! (this is Belarusian, specifically “мяса” rather than “мясо,” so that part is correct). I reverse it and obtain: А сям мася. I walk over and ask what exactly is going on. He proudly replies: “I have transcended the boundaries of the traditional palindrome!” And that was the end of it. Farewell, logic; goodbye, meaning. By such reasoning, one can label absolutely any phrase a palindrome and simply explain that it exists “beyond the boundaries.”

After that festival, I remained convinced for quite some time that free verse was utter garbage (forgive me!) and that the genre had no right to exist within Russian culture. But eventually, though only rarely, I began stumbling across genuinely good free verse. I simply caught myself realizing that I actually liked a particular piece.

Of course, free verse “entered the mainstream” thanks to Walt Whitman. It existed before him, certainly, but Whitman created the style of classical free verse as such—most notably in his famous book Leaves of Grass. Yet Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and others belonged to the traditional American school. Introducing free verse into the Russian tradition is extremely difficult because Russian poetry has always been far more closely aligned with blank verse—if we are speaking specifically of unrhymed poetry. Let me remind you that blank verse must still possess meter.

So what, then, is good free verse? That is difficult to define, because in free verse there are essentially no laws. Still, one may formulate several principles of good free verse:

• as few unnecessary words as possible;
• preferably some presence of wordplay, wit, and other ornamental devices that do not depend upon meter and rhyme as obligatory components;
• for heaven’s sake, it should actually mean something!

Nature-descriptive free verse of the following variety:

…can go wander off into the woods. That is utter nonsense.

Well then, having rambled on at perhaps excessive length, I should probably provide examples of what I personally consider good free verse. For instance, the Saint Petersburg prose writer, poet, and translator Sergei Volsky occasionally produces remarkable “playful” free verse poems.

In truth, it is a brilliantly witty poem in which the words are chosen so delicately and charmingly that one scarcely notices the absence of rhyme.

And from the same Volsky—a completely different sort of poem:

Once again, the words are chosen with truly filigree precision. And there is really nothing more to add.

Quite often free verse turns into aphorism; indeed, it seems to me that this is precisely what it ought to become. As an example, I offer Yevgeny Kharitonov’s free-verse piece “Respect the Critics.”

The result is a work that reaches the listener (or reader) and carries a certain idea out into the world.

From time to time I also encounter rather good translated free verse, such as the following text by Walter Lowenfels (translated by Vladimir Rogov):

So here is what I shall tell you. Free verse is, in essence, an aphorism. Simply a long one, broken into lines. It must contain an i-de-a. I repeat: an i-de-a. Not merely a collection of words. A rhymed collection of words may, with some effort, still be called a poem; but an unrhymed collection of words has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry. Therefore, if you have written a free-verse poem, ask yourself honestly whether the trash bin may not be its rightful destination. There is a ninety-five percent chance that it is. God grant that you fall into the remaining five percent.

One is forced to draw an utterly banal conclusion from the enormous number of poems sent to me for review. Painfully banal, in fact. The problem with the ever-growing quantity of contemporary graphomaniacs is not even their technique. Yes, their rhymes are primitive and their meter limps in every possible direction. But lately I no longer even bother criticizing those rhymes and meters, because they are trifles. Why quarrel with technique when the poem contains no meaning whatsoever? None at all. The person simply wants to rhyme, and that is all. Once again I shall resort to a quotation from Leonid Kaganov’s article “How Not to Write Poetry”: “first of all, even if you have absolutely nothing to write about—you must write anyway.” That is satire, in case anyone failed to notice. And immediately afterward Kaganov provides an example of such a masterpiece:

The average modern scribbler functions approximately as follows. He sits at a desk. Suddenly inspiration strikes him. The word “walked” rhymes with the word “departed”! Astonishing! What a discovery! And immediately our scribbler begins to write; rhymes pour out of him by the bucketful, though the guard still does not surrender, and barely keeping pace, he manages nevertheless to record his masterpiece.

That is all—the masterpiece is complete. It is grand and magnificent. In one hundred percent of cases, this masterpiece contains no exposition, no climax, no resolution, no moral, no theme, no essence, and so forth. In one hundred percent of cases, the masterpiece is merely a meaningless collection of words, philosophical meditations upon the tree growing outside the window, and similar nonsense. I shall anonymously quote several outstanding quatrains from various authors:

I simply marvel at these fragments. And there are many of them, characteristically enough. Of course, here I am tearing lines out of context; but believe me, even when read in full, everything remains exactly the same :)

There is another method as well for discovering a theme suitable for graphomaniacal creation. One sits down at a desk, stares blankly for a long time, and painfully squeezes the slave out of oneself. And then—there it is, born at last.

A monumental work, is it not?

In short, the verdict is this: if inspiration overwhelms a person, then one should write the thing down, admire it, evaluate it—and throw it into the trash. If, after some time has passed, there arises a desire to retrieve the work from the trash bin, then perhaps there really was something in it, and it may be worth attempting to revise it. Re-vise it, rather than immediately posting it in some public community for everyone else to laugh at.

1.

From the works sent to me for review, I draw a variety of conclusions. Of course, young—and not so young—authors do not always know what to write about. Of course, their rhymes and meters suffer from various severe illnesses. But there is yet another aspect deserving separate discussion: the complete inability to construct sentences and express thoughts clearly. For some reason, all graphomaniacs believe that if a text is poetry rather than prose, then word order may be manipulated in absolutely any manner whatsoever; that one may constantly employ shortened adjectives, nouns, and particles; that in order to fit the meter one may insert utterly meaningless words and invent horrifying neologisms. In this essay I wish to address the question of word order and sentence construction.

In reality, the word order of a poem should remain as close as possible to ordinary prose. Yes, naturally poetry differs from prose by its heightened density of meaning, spirituality, form, and strict structural laws. Yet from a purely technical standpoint, poetry is no less obliged than prose to satisfy the stylistic demands of language. Let us examine a canonical example from Mikhail Lermontov.

Had Lermontov wished to express the same thought in prose, he would have written: В голубом тумане моря белеет одинокий парус. Что он ищет в далёкой стране? Что он кинул в родном краю? Naturally, for poetic purposes Lermontov alters the ordinary order of words, yet he never crosses the boundary: we do not stumble over the unusual syntax, nor do we sense anything unnatural in such arrangement. An inevitable question arises: where exactly does that boundary lie? What is permissible, and what is not?

It seems to me that I can answer such a question. The answer is very simple. The closer the wording of a sentence in poetry remains to the corresponding formulation in prose, the better. Read Joseph Brodsky, for example. Many of his poems are no more difficult to perceive than prose, although the thoughts contained within them are extraordinarily deep. The same may be said of Oleg Medvedev or Mikhail Shcherbakov.

Of course, this principle did not always hold true. Of course, in Pushkin’s time entirely different laws of versification existed—which Pushkin himself, incidentally, violated with genius. Yet even Мой дядя самых честных правил… is formulated perfectly: extremely close to prose in its literary expression of thought. I remind you once again that I am speaking here solely about technique, not about content.

There are brilliant exceptions. Tsvetaeva, for instance, is like a nerve stretched taut as a string—those dashes and colons, those broken phrases and mad, magnificent images. We simply have no right to judge such poetry. Yet in general, these principles are highly useful for young poets.

2.

And now, let us proceed to a crash analysis using concrete examples. All of the examples are taken from works sent to me for review by various authors. I shall not mention any names, since in this case it would amount rather to anti-advertising.

2.1.

In this quatrain, the word order has been distorted in an absolutely dreadful fashion, especially in the second line. As a result, the meaning changes radically, producing something along the lines of наступает срок к словам и стихам, which is extremely clumsy and incorrect. The reader does not immediately realize that it is not the “appointed time” but rather the “passion” that relates to words and poetry. In this case, it would make sense to reformulate the entire quatrain so that the phrase becomes something like срок последней страсти к словам и стихам.

2.2.

Without even delving into the semantic absurdities of this passage (such as the phrase живительная жертва Голгофы), let us instead examine the remarkable construction of the line и какой нам всем ждать катастрофы. Quite apart from the fact that the phrasing itself reads awkwardly, normal literary usage would require the order “всем нам” rather than “нам всем.” But evidently the author preferred it this way.

2.3.

This colossal catastrophe belongs to the same author responsible for example 2.2. I swear on my homeland, I understood absolutely nothing of what this was supposed to mean. “The essence of translation shall comprehend the hopes of the people”… Yes, evidently not every crooked tram has caught up with everyone. In truth, however, this is not even the record for clumsy formulation: believe me, things can be far worse. I should note that in other poems this same gentleman distinguished himself with marvelous masterpieces such as:

…and so on :)

2.4.

This author certainly will not be forgotten after death. “Death presumed for the duration of painted fools”—wow indeed. That is to say, death will apparently continue being “presumed” throughout some mysterious span of time incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, and then at some point it will cease to be presumed. Incidentally, the “multi-deck underpants” mentioned in one of the earlier essays emerged from the very same pen.

2.5.

Savor the grandeur of the formulation раздался смех до дна. I never did understand what exactly the author intended to say. As the saying goes: what I have is what I shall insert. The same author also delighted me with such little gems as:

2.6.

Just try to imagine what exactly the man is sitting by the window with… The same author also delighted me with the astonishing metaphor: …вороны — варёные — мчат через мост… In truth, whenever an author attempts to write about something lofty without knowing how to formulate it properly, the result turns out, first and foremost, unintentionally funny.

2.7.

The executioner who депрессией срывает с тормозов. Save our souls!

Well then—phew. One may now more or less draw a conclusion. The ability to choose the right words, to formulate thoughts properly, to find a natural and comprehensible order of words and sentences, to create human and unforced imagery—all of this is tremendously important. Perhaps even more important than all rhymes and meters taken together. There you have it.

Almost every batch of poems sent to me for review provokes in me a variety of thoughts directed against graphomaniacs. Sometimes I feel like laughing at them, sometimes like instructing them, and sometimes, excuse me, like killing them after first stretching them upon the rack. Yes, the preamble is a grim one. But that is not really what this essay is about.

A quatrain is a difficult form. If you are writing a long work, after all, you may decorate it with whatever little flourishes and ornaments you please. And in the process you may end up with a sufficiently coherent and beautiful piece, one perhaps not burdened with much meaning at all. A prose work—for instance, a short story—contains exposition, a main body, a resolution, perhaps even some faint trace of a moral. But now let us write merely a few sentences: “Sidor Petrovich rose from his chair and drank some milk. The milk was cold. Sidor Petrovich choked.” There is no meaning here, because the passage describes some random state of some random person; there is neither wit, nor plot, nor moral. Whereas the sentence “Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of,” from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, is an aphorism. Because it is complete; it contains within itself a thought, an idea.

The same requirements apply to short poetic forms—quatrains and couplets. A quatrain must be aphoristic, witty, perhaps even humorous; it must contain a complete thought. If a quatrain consists merely of four lines torn out of context, no matter how beautifully or correctly they rhyme, then only two roads remain open to it: either continue developing it into a larger poem, or throw it away and forget it. Let us examine, through concrete examples, what a quatrain may be: good, interesting, and a complete poem in itself.

1) A quatrain may convey wisdom or moral insight; it may function as a witty phenomenon within a sharply social context. Here, beyond all doubt, one both can and should cite as an example the incomparable "gariks" of Igor Guberman, the eternal classic of the genre.

The second piece is absolutely brilliant :) In any case, a garik—or any other quatrain of this sort—must be witty. Without that, it goes nowhere. And note: neither of the two gariki quoted above is actually funny. They are tragic. And extraordinarily truthful.

2) Setting aside broader social issues, one may create a quatrain connected with one’s own experiences—yet still striking and capable of resonating, to one degree or another, with a large number of readers. This is not easier; it is simply different. In such cases, the conclusion is probably what matters most.

From my own experience—limited though it may be—in composing quatrains, I can roughly describe how they are written. Usually the idea comes first, and it is realized in the final two lines; afterward, the opening lines are “adjusted” to fit them. But that is merely my own method and certainly does not apply to everyone. It is simply easier for me that way.

3) Well, a quatrain may simply be hilarious. It may aim directly at provoking laughter and succeed precisely in that. This does not exempt the quatrain from the necessity of containing at least some thought, although if the result is re-e-eally funny, one might perhaps forgive the absence of deeper meaning :)

4) All the quatrains mentioned above are, in essence, timeless and eternal. Yet one may also write briefly and concisely about topical matters of the day. Perhaps in a hundred years no one will understand them anymore. Or perhaps posterity will simply adapt them, reshaping them to make them more accessible to audiences not yet born in our own time.

In conclusion: if you are writing something brief, then strive to make it concise and substantial. In truth, I do have tucked away a number of examples demonstrating how quatrains ought not to be written. But I shall refrain from quoting them, because I do not wish to provide negative examples.

At practically any bard-song festival, competition, poetry showcase, minstrel tournament, and so forth, participants are required to submit the text of the song or poem. A commission with intelligent and serious faces sits there listening to you while simultaneously studying that very sheet of paper, sometimes tracing it with a finger and jotting things down in little notebooks. Well then, comrades. I maintain that this is complete and utter bullshit. Let me explain why I say so.

I agree: one absolutely should bring a printed copy of the lyrics to a competition. That is simply a fact. Preferably typed rather than scribbled by hand. But beyond that point my opinion comes into conflict with the esteemed members of the jury. To follow a song by reading the text is the same as watching a film while holding the screenplay in your hands, or attending a ballet with the choreographer’s floor plan beside you—and then becoming indignant because the ballerina danced a meter farther to the right than she was supposed to, the incompetent creature.

The text serves only one purpose. If the performer swallows a word or sings so indistinctly that the general thread of the song is lost, then one may briefly glance at the lyrics in order to regain the rhythm of the narrative or understand what exactly the performer sang. After the song is over, one may quickly skim the text in search of obvious stylistic blunders that may have caught one’s attention during the performance. But when I sing before a workshop jury, and that very jury sits there with the solemn expressions of predatory faces staring not at me but at the sheet of paper, I feel like stopping the performance and leaving the room. In fact, a couple of times I did exactly that. When someone is singing for you, you should overcome your aversion and look at the performer—not at the lyrics, and not at your own scribblings.

And listen, rather than read. Because a song and a poem are entirely different things. Ab-so-lute-ly different. A song is the union of words and music. It is a picture. Song lyrics without music may look dreadful, though sometimes they may not.

As an example, let me mention the wonderful singer-songwriter Atmoravi. He writes songs. Actual songs. When you hear them performed live, you become immersed in them completely, intoxicated by them. Yet on paper they look rather ordinary—just lyrics like lyrics, I could write a hundred such texts today. And when, during the preliminary round of the bard-song festival “Petersburg Chord” in Minsk, nobody listened to Atmoravi but instead stared at those sheets of paper, I found it absurdly amusing.

Mikhail Shcherbakov once replied to a request that he read poetry aloud during a concert: “You know, I write very few poems that can simply be read. All my poems are essentially song lyrics, and they must be listened to. So I would rather continue singing.” And he was absolutely right. A song cannot be read. A song must be lived.

This note is intended for composers. That is, for those who write music to someone else’s poetry.

The best remark about the art of composing music for another poet’s verses was made by my friend Andrey Panshin. Speaking about my poem “Sylvia and Christina”, which he later set to music, he said: “Tim, when you wrote this poem, you simply didn’t realize that you had written a blues. But I saw it.”

And that is the whole secret. The composer’s task is to perceive what the poet has written. And then a song will emerge.

Very often—far too often—you tell some graphomaniac that убегал–ругал” is a mediocre, monotonous verb rhyme best avoided, and the graphomaniac immediately produces a justification. The justification is always the same: “But Pushkin wrote that way! What are you saying, Skorenko—you oppose Pushkin? The whole country venerates the great poet, and you do not?” Arguing against such reasoning is pointless. The only comforting thought is that a person who employs such an argument will, thank God, most likely never become a poet and will frighten no one but relatives with his rhymes. Still, a precedent is a precedent, and I ought to state my opinion once and for all.

Alexander Pushkin was a great poet. Beyond question. I love and respect Pushkin; I have read nearly all of his works, reread many of them, and know some by heart. I am especially fond of “The Monument.” Naturally, I would defend Gumilev to the last breath as well, but anyone who dares to disparage Pushkin immediately loses a great deal of my respect. That is the first point.

Now for the second. In 1698, Thomas Savery patented the first steam pump. Later Thomas Newcomen improved it, and in the 1770s the great English inventor James Watt, building upon Newcomen’s pump, invented and constructed the world’s first steam engine. He introduced several hundred improvements into the design and proposed countless practical applications. Watt’s steam engines powered factories and machinery for more than a century; as late as the 1950s steam still drove railway transport, tractors, and much else besides. Watt became the herald of the age of technological revolution—for without Watt there would have been no internal combustion engines, no nuclear power, and so forth.

But now it is the twenty-first century. Steam engines still in use today produce less than 0.01% of the world’s energy and are only rarely employed in everyday life. They have been replaced by electricity, internal combustion engines, nuclear energy, solar power—what difference does it make which? Of course, steam still performs an enormous amount of work in the form of steam generators at electrical power stations, for example. But between Watt’s device and such machines there lies an abyss; they resemble one another no more than a cockroach resembles a seagull. No one today builds engines the way Watt did. Different metals and alloys, lighter and more advanced constructions—everything has changed. Yet none of this diminishes Watt’s genius in relation to his own era. He was one of the Greats, with a capital letter.

And now I return to Pushkin. Alexander Sergeyevich went to Boldino and, in the course of one autumn, wrote the entirety of Russian literature. He carried out a revolution not only in poetry but in literature as a whole. He rhymed differently from those before him; he discovered astonishing images; he was an innovator, a genius innovator of his own time. In the twentieth century one might assign a similar role to Brodsky.

In Pushkin’s era, verb rhymes were accepted—and permissible—and even desirable. The theory of versification at the time looked entirely different, just as the classification of biological species and theories concerning the origin of humanity looked entirely different. And Pushkin’s genius lay partly in the fact that he deviated significantly even from that theory. Monotonous rhymes (if you consult some manuals of the time) were actually encouraged.

But time does not stand still. One hundred and seventy-nine years have passed since the death of Alexander Sergeyevich. Poetry has moved onward, because literature of any kind never remains motionless. Prose, incidentally, evolves as well. New genres are born, new rules appear—and new methods for violating them. One cannot say that Pushkin has become obsolete, but he has remained in the past; he has become one of the foundations, one of the cornerstones upon which modern poetry rests. Yet we no longer dwell beside that foundation—we continue moving forward.

Verb rhymes are merely a drop in the ocean. One may still use them today—deliberately, consciously, understanding exactly what one is doing. What is monstrous is that vast numbers of graphomaniacs employ such rhymes without understanding them at all. Simply because they do not know how to write otherwise.

A truly good poet may in fact permit himself absolutely anything—provided he has earned that right by demonstrating that he is capable of writing differently as well. Like Malevich, who arrived at Suprematism only after a long period of realist painting, having first proven that he could master perspective and color composition brilliantly. Like the great architects of the twentieth century, capable both of creating constructivist volumes of glass and concrete and of designing neoclassical mansions.

People also frequently invoke Pushkin’s name by saying: “You claim I made a mistake here, but Pushkin made the very same one…” I have nothing to answer, because the argument itself is meaningless. In Pushkin, ninety-nine percent of the time, it is not a mistake at all but either a deliberate allowance or simply an element accepted in his era. We ourselves no longer use words such as vyya or lanity, whereas for Alexander Sergeyevich they were perfectly ordinary and widely used. Moreover, instead of searching for mistakes in Pushkin—of which there are practically none—it would be far better to pay attention to one’s own writing.

I always cite Pushkin from a single perspective. Pushkin was not merely a magnificent poet capable of capturing the human soul or a landscape of nature. Alexander Sergeyevich was also a brilliant technician. He revised and reworked all of his poems many times over, sometimes spending hours laboring over a single line in order to perfect it. His drafts are mountains of crossed-out phrases and ink blots, from which masterpieces were ultimately born.

We possess computers—we can simply erase a bad line and write a new one in its place. To write flawlessly in a single attempt, without revision, is a colossal gift, an extraordinarily rare occurrence, perhaps one person in a million. Neither Yesenin, nor Gumilev, nor Brodsky wrote in such a fashion. Mandelstam, as is well known, often first invented technically intricate rhymes and only afterward filled the lines with content.

But none of this is ultimately the main point. Pushkin is not a brand name to wave about as a trump card. He is the man who laid the foundation beneath you, poets. The man who invented that metaphorical steam engine. So try not to remain forever at the level of the foundation itself. Continue the work, and build what no single human being could possibly construct within one brief lifetime.