> Jackie and Kent -
> I've just received a review copy of _Crossing Centuries_ and notice
> very few people with listings in both. Are there two Russian poetries with
> as strict dividing lines as here in the jolly us of a with no real president
> and direction?
>
> tom bell
Dear Tom
In 1987-1989 when Peter Mortimer and I were collecting our list,
underground poets were still emerging from fogs of suppression. It appeared
to us that the poetry scene was not divided but fragmented. They had been
developing in isolated cliques - what was remarkable is that nevertheless a
wide range of poetry had naturally developed which was comparable to the
range of poetry found in Britain or the US, there were equivalents to our
avant-gardists, if I am allowed that term after the recent heated
discussion, Movement-style poets (to name the two main categories), and many
off-mainstream varieties which would not be called experimental, or
conceptual in an architectural way (I interpret that this means the
structure of the poem is not based on language forms such as rhythm, rhyme,
syllabics, repetition etc. but on the kind of composition that visual
artists use, and presumably architects!
As for the missing names on lists (Third Wave and The Poetry of
Perestroika), some of them might not have been writing in 1987 - too young?
Also the Russia of that time is a world away. When Peter Mortimer, Steve
Walker and I arrived in Moscow as guests of the then powerful Soviet
Writers' Union we were asked airily where else we wanted to visit.
"Samarkand," I ventured. No problem. We were duly despatched on juddering
Aeroflots to cross deserts to Tashkent and Samarkand where we met Uzbeki
poets (one of which was translating Shakespeare into Uzbeki from the Russian
of Pasternak. "Hamlet is Uzbeki," he told us, thumping his chest.
The USSR was a bizarre surrealist landscape where the only thing in neon
lights were socialist quotations (too long-winded to be called slogans).
Poetry was intensely loved. One of our party, Steve Walker, was deemed
improperly dressed in his tracksuit to visit the Kremlin. "They're poets"
exclaimed our guide. "Let them recite Shelley," demanded the guard.
Fortunately Steve knew Ozymandias. Satisfied the guard allowed us to pass.
The Modern Poets of Northern England Raduga book sold out in four days. The
Soviet Union was almost a mythical place existing only in the minds of its
detractors or lovers. What I found never seemed to add up to either, for one
thing it was so immense, a forest of a place, a steppeland of a place, a
desert, vast plain, communications locked in 19th century bureaucracy, also
a country where poets were accorded power along with children and
grandmothers!
New poets must be arising in the maelstrom. A country with so much
attention to soul will never be redefined by the new commercialism. Will it?
Jackie
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