Hi Sallyee,
Sorry I'm so far behind with my reading and writing these little messages...
and I hope it's worth saying that I tend to agree with Christina's comments
about the way you're using your lines and rhymes and words. At times it
sounds like a (clumsy-ish) translation into English! I guess a trip to the
hairdressers would do the poem a bit of good!
On a more quizzical note I wonder who the "we" is in the poem? The
pluralised we/our language is public oration yet I guess, I wonder, how that
fits with Pasternak's situation/temprement and how it fits in a society that
may be hardly familiar with his poetry (and only know about Dr Zhivago
because females took their males to the cinema so they could admire Omar
Shareef!). Then, in the middle, it's "I" - and I guess the inclusive "our"
that you use excludes Pasternak!
I also wonder how much I have to connect to Keat's "After Reading Chapman's
Homer"? I find a tad of an echo in the title myself. But the title may just
be alluding to a tradition of poets writing about other poets - which is all
I found myself.
Bob






>From: Sally Evans <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: New sub: After reading Pasternak
>Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 22:13:31 +0000
>
>here is a big heavy new sub, folks, on the lines of my "Eng Lit" poems. I'd
>like to know if your views on its problems are the same as mine. The lines
>are very long so I hope they dont split too confusingly. They  are long
>lined quatrains that end-rhyme aa,bb.
>
>After reading Pasternak.
>
>Totality a rink of fear, snowed in by purity,
>Yuri wrote with love's ink, through years of insecurity,
>his world filled with glowing visions, clamorously lilting views,
>wolvine familiar vistas, flowing elisions, glamorous hopes, ability to
>choose.
>
>Chosen, a country of the brave and willing who had forgotten the ropes of
>their fate
>when politics caved in, gave way to killing. Utterly hard to love or hate
>or to crystallise goodness, or hunt creation  out of the charred, wrecked
>chance
>life gave: to distil from the burnt blaze of a situation the perfect
>response.
>
>A country Nabokov and Brodsky differed from, it was your dove
>flying to stars of grace. MacDiarmid's mentor Lermontov
>and Pushkin who so splendidly provoked more fearsome than Byronic
>forces to stem him, in his tracks revoked. Tolstoy, that old beatnik,
>
>spilled tales across those wide wild wastes, between long rivers sneaking
>uncharted and unbridged:  we heard the pace and roar of your speaking.
>You penned down laborious pages, in languages we take small part in
>nor bother slaving with, while, we gather, you appreciated Greek and Latin.
>
>It was too much to ask of us to listen beyond light-programmes
>we could not help attend, while courts glistened, luring you to pogroms
>from servitude to servitude  of such  dimension we in Europe hardly dared
>to entertain, until our hordes were bogged in trenchment mud, not spared.
>
>How distant seemed your literary and political crossroads.
>Women heaved sickles, tackled boars and bricks and heavy loads
>while ours faltered and fainted, ribbon-goaded brothers awkard and inept.
>A new age carelesly painted unimagnable concepts.
>
>Boris, how was your fate unravelled? It is late and I am no Russky or
>communist  or even travelled. It is another century, another war
>and I so non-specific, neither a pucker poet nor a novelist
>nor worker, nor retired, prolific, aristo nor poor; an anti-genderist,
>
>for generalities are all I ask in general. Still, I shout in fright,
>I can respond to bookish tasks, these feats that must diminish under
>distant
>light
>where serfs, dearth, duels, haunt gigantic steppes beyond
>our flaunted ignorance. What would we expect of antique words like >fond<,
>
><warmth<, >fire< or >hope<? A poem that carries fire and hope I hope yet
>frees
>my heart, a heart still marching with earlier hearts like those your
>fantasies
>connect with. In our language Hardy's characters may be like them.
>As though we now consumed among our worldly stratagem
>
>antidotes to the searing senses, snows and forest leaves
>a scrap of foraged seed the wocked cuckoo dispenses, rotten harvest
>sheaves.
>Sure, laughing swallow, you may flee the river-beds and bilberry
>in tundra, your secret to follow, flight-led, unencumbered, fortune's
>poetry.
>
>c Sally Evans


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