Jackie,

How about that? No, I was not aware of your anthology. And now I am feeling
depressed, since all this time I thought Third Wave was first! Yes, I'd love
to see the book, of course.

Do you know John High's new anthology from Talisman (or is it Zephyr Press--
now I can't remember)? It gathers many of the folks in Third Wave but with a
good number of additions.

Here is who is in Third Wave, for comparison with your list: Tatiana
Shcherbina, Alexei Parshchikov, Vladimir Druk, Ilya Kutik, Arkadii
Dragomoshchenko, Nina Iskrenko, Dmitri Prigov, Sergei Gandlevsky, Olga
Sedakova, Lev Rubenshtein, Nadezhda Kondakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Andrei Turkin,
Vladimir Aristov, Pavel Pepperstein, Mikhail Aizenberg, Elena Shvarts, Timur
Kibirov, Viktor Krivulin, Yuri Arabov, Aleksandr Eremenko.

I, too, often wonder how the poets are doing. Some, I know, have gone
abroad-- Prigov, Kutik, Parshchikov-- and are doing well. But most are still
struggling back home. It's a very depressing situation, and I know that some
have suffered greatly-- the wonderful poet Ivan Zhdanov, I hear, died from
the effects of poverty and alcoholism not too long ago. You probably know
that Nina Iskrenko died over a year ago after long illness. Dragomoshchenko,
a great poet and beautiful man, has had a very tough time of it. But all in
all, I've lost track, and I must say that I can't claim to have done my
share, after the book, to keep in touch and to help, and I'm not proud of
that.

Third Wave, like your book, has a very odd history attached to it. I thought
I'd go ahead and send here the preface to the anthology, which explains the
unbelievably fortuitous circumstances that gave rise to the project.
Preceding that is Marjorie Perloff's blurb from the back cover. With her
legendary generosity, Marjorie played an important role in encouraging the
collection forward.

I hope some of you will check out the book. It contains some amazing work.

Kent
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"Johnson and Ashby's Third Wave represents the poetic counterpart of
the political revolution now in progress in what was until recently the
Soviet Union. The 21 poets included in this groundbreaking anthology
are at the cutting edge of Russian poetics, their language experiments
marking the renewal of the great avant-garde spirit of the beginning of
the century. Many of the translators--Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer,
Forrest Gander--are themselves important poets; others are leading
Slavic scholars. From the excellent introduction by Alexei Parshchikov
and Andrew Wachtel to the Afterword by Mikhail Epstein, Third Wave
provides fascinating reading, illustrating the remarkable affinities, as
well as differences, between the New Russian Poetry and our own. "

-Marjorie Perloff

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    Preface

As WITH SO MUCH ELSE in the Soviet Union over the past decade, poetry
has undergone an accelerated process of exploration and change.
Indeed, the spirit of linguistic and conceptual experiment that has
characterized a new generation of Soviet poets may be seen as
approaching a "paradigmatic" moment in Russian literature, analogous in
significance with the avant-garde surge of the early century and the
poetic revival that accompanied the liberalization of the 1950s and 1960s.
It is in this sense that Soviet critics have begun to speak of a "third
wave" of literary iconoclasm and innovation building at century's end-- one
that anticipated, and now parallels, the remarkable social and cultural
revolution that unfolds.

A noteworthy feature of this new poetry is that nearly all of its
representatives are in their thirties or forties, But more significant than
generational criteria is the fact that these writers share a
self-consciously oppositional stance toward the established literary
culture, publishing almost exclusively, up until the past few years, through
the underground channels of samizdat. What is opposed, as Mikhail Epstein
explains in his afterword to this book--and as do Alexei Parshchikov and
Andrew Wachtel in their introduction--is not only the stultifying legacy of
"socialist-realist" aesthetics, but the bardic, oracular style that has
typified the dominant mode of "second-wave" verse since the 1950s. As
Epstein, with an ironic twist, put it in an unpublished essay sent to us in
the early stages of this project, the new poetry realizes "the ideal of
mystical communism ... in the sphere of linguistic practicums, as the
expropriator of sign systems from all epochs and styles, enacting the
destruction of their value hierarchies ... [and] the abolition of
lyricalness as a relic of ego and humanism."

Such a synopsis is not meant to suggest that this collection was
begun with a privileged purview of its subject. In fact, the beginning of
this book was an incredibly fortuitous encounter. In early 1988 the
fifteenth anniversary issue of Michael Cuddihy's renowned journal
Ironwood had appeared and featured poems by Arkadii
Dragomoshchenko and Alexei Parshchikov. We were stunned by the
work and intrigued by the mention, in the contributors' notes, of an
active current of young, "experimental" poets in the Soviet Union
working in open contempt of the official literary establishment and
affiliated in two major groups called the Poetry Club and Club 81. It
seemed to us that such a development--particularly in light of the last
sixty years of Soviet literary history--was of some consequence.
Certainly, we thought, an anthology of some of this work in English
translation would be a timely document and make for an excellent book.

A few days after seeing this work for the first time, a leaflet came into
our hands announcing the annual Edward Lamb Peace Lecture at Bowling
Green State University: Dr. Nadia Burova, president of the Center for
Creative Initiatives in Moscow, was to speak the next day on the topic
"Building Bridges of Cultural Understanding." Her professional title
suggested that she might be able to provide us with some advice on
proceeding with such a project-- or at least perhaps give us a clear
indication that the idea was folly. Following a great many phone calls
that evening and the next morning to the organizers of the visit, we were
granted a five-minute audience with Dr. Burova, before a luncheon in her
honor with, as we were told, the University president, members of the
board of trustees, and local congressional representatives. Thus, we
were hurried to a conference room and solemnly introduced. Talking as
quickly as we could against the clock, we told her of the poems we had
seen and of how it seemed to us that a collection in translation would be
most appropriate given the growing spirit of glasnost and warming
cultural relations between our two countries. Did she, by any chance,
know about any of these new poets? And was there anyone in particular
who would be appropriate to contact?

She laughed quietly and leaned forward to say something fairly close to
the following: "Do you know that my husband is Dmitri Prigov, perhaps
the most famous avant-garde poet of Moscow and one of the founders
of the conceptualist movement and the Poetry Club? If you would like,
he would gladly contact almost all the important new poets of the Soviet
Union for you." At Dr. Burova's insistence our meeting was extended for
close to an hour, causing the luncheon to be canceled, but allowing us to
arrange the first essential details for the anthology. About three months
later we received from Dmitri Prigov a mailing of original manuscripts
from a number of Moscow poets, many of which are included herein.

A second crucial meeting took place a few weeks later at the Detroit
Institute of Art, where Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his translator Lyn
Hejinian were making their last stop on a national reading tour. Both
received our idea with enthusiasm, and their cooperation over the last three
years, like Prigov's, has been generous and invaluable. With Alexei
Parshchikov, they were instrumental in arranging for our attendance at the
"Language, Consciousness, Society" conference in Leningrad in August of
1989, where we were able to meet a number of the poets and collect new
materials of relevance to the project. The collaboration between
Dragomoshchenko and Hejinian, which dates
back nearly ten years, is primarily responsible for the significant and
multifaceted exchange that continues to develop between this generation of
Russian poets and American poets who are concerned with linguistic and
formal experiment. In many ways this book can be seen as yet another
outgrowth of that fruitful collaboration.

Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry, while constituting the most
representative collection of the new poetry to date in English, is far from
exhaustive. There are poets whose work might have been represented here, and
it bears pointing out that, to Soviet readers, some of the omissions might
be notable: Andrei Karpov, Mikhail Sukhotin, Iuli Gugolev, Oleg KhIebnikov,
Marina Koudimova, Alexandr Soprovsky, Igor Irtenev, Maria Avvakoumova,
Evgeni Daenin, Konstantin Kedrov, Vladimir Kucheryavkin, Elena Katsyuba, I.
Pivovarova, and Ludmilla Khodynskaya, would be only a partial list. In
addition, poets like Gennadi Aigi, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Viktor Sosnora,
though of the 1960s generation, are major figures whose formal innovation
and refusal of any
form of accommodation with the cultural establishment has strongly
influenced a number of these younger writers. The work of all these poets
awaits further translation and critical discussion in English.

The invitation is certainly there. As the prominent Moscow critic Viktor
Erofeev wrote to us in a letter accompanying the first poems sent by Dmitri
Prigov, "Here you have poets who are published rarely in the USSR, and some
who have not published at all in the USSR. But the young people of Moscow
and Leningrad love them (and often know them by heart). Perhaps American
readers will be offered a chance to get into the atmosphere of the newest
Russian poetical festival, not just as observers, but as participants. Let's
invite one another to dance."

Kent Johnson

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