“Lunch with Russian and Polish poets and Northwestern Professor Andrew Wachtel. Noon. Tuesday. Evanston.”
What might one expect?
Dark, brooding, distant Russians and intellectual Silesians, vodka-bloated, tobacco-singed and despairing, all moaning unhappy verses about the arrival of an untenable, new post-Soviet reality, raging against lost soul, with no clear enemy to hate, to blast like artillery with verse, and no foundations under the very new thought of free literature?
Long, tedious, difficult poems dripping with Slavic soul and obscure references to historical figures lost in time, some metaphors about the poisons of state control, along with the bitter sense that these artists feel they have been robbed in the night of something precious, and an eagerness to lean bleary-eyed over the table and shout, “What the hell do you know about poetry?”
Run-on sentences just as bad as those?
Nope. Not at all.
Alexander Tkachenko, 54, a pro soccer player in the Soviet era who is not shy about saying he had many women and lots to drink in his sporting days, carries no evident bitterness about anything.
He offers a healthy, lusty obscenity to his critics.
“There was a time when I could lift my left leg and 50,000 people in a stadium would cheer or not. What do I care what one person I don’t know thinks about a poem?” he says.
Anzhelina Polonskaia, 30, from Moscow, is silent except to note that she simply does not know why she writes poetry, just that she writes poetry. She has maintained her gymnast’s body and glows with abundant good health.
Pavel Marcinkiewicz, 30, Polish and the most quietly intense of the three, but in an intellectual way, goes to great lengths to recount his admiration for American poets. He lives and works teaching and translating English and American poetry in Opole.
Wachtel, with sterling academic and literary credentials and an eagerness to provide context and a little guidance, was there too, for what could become a confusing journey in at least a couple of languages, some aimed at the Thai menu, and some aimed at who knows what.
Tkachenko, Polonskaia and Marcinkiewicz were in Evanston as part of a conference called “Three Lands, Three Generations,” which has assembled some of the best-known poets from Poland, Russia and Slovenia, with a handful of American poets.
The conference began Wednesday and runs through Saturday (for information, contact the Slavic Department at Northwestern at 847-491-3950 or check the conference Web site at www.slavic.nwu.edu).
The big headliner, Andrei Voznesensky, couldn’t make the lunch. One of the most famous of the protest poets during the late Soviet era, he stands as a symbol of how much poetry in Eastern Europe has changed since the collapse of communism a decade ago.
Maybe the most significant difference is that the poetry that flowed from the Soviet Union with government approval (or against it in some cases) often carried literary cachet simply because it represented freed-up expression in a place that turned repression into an art form.
Sometimes, it was, well, crappy.
This trio of poets knows that. They don’t want to be punching up their predecessors in front of a journalist, but there is a sense that a lot of words have passed about what squeezed its way out of the Soviet empire in the old days.
When the empire collapsed, that style of poetry collapsed with it.
Marcinkiewicz states boldly that the whole idea of romantic poetry is dead anyhow, and that the next generation must find a new way to express itself in words.
Tkachenko says that if what is written is not organic, and not coming from the heart’s passion, then it amounts to swill and will quickly wither.
Polonskaia doesn’t say anything. But she offers a thin compilation of her work. She will let the poetry speak for her.
And it does, with a great passion.
“I leave you a section of the door jamb
from my Moscow apartment. Like the pawn that moves to
E-4 in the famous chess opening,
your body stiffened, it could not be sat at the table,
and it refused absolutely to serve
as a straight line’s continuation,
Like a fox, trapped in its hole by a stupid spaniel . . .
Where there is only emptiness between upper and lower lid,
where fear leads one to shut oneself up in an endless tunnel,
it is the same as waking up dying of thirst
and looking at the base of a pitcher,
guessing that it is where a worn-out table cloth is hanging,
and groping for a long time on the wall
as if on a dolphin’s smooth back.
You grope again, but you don’t find the switch.”
Maybe you don’t have to say much at lunch when you write that way.
Tkachenko is the most animated of the three, and warms to the conversation when it shifts to a discussion of the lasting nature of good poetry.
“We can’t talk about this without talking about Walt Whitman,” he says, then offers a silent moment to reflect on what he said, followed by a long joke that won’t translate well here but that basically has Whitman as the goalkeeper on the world-class poetry soccer team because he is so close to the leaves of grass on the soccer field.
The love of soccer is close to the surface in Tkachenko, and apparent in his poem “Requiem for Edward Streltsov,” a great soccer player of the 1960s whose career was cut short when he was forced to spend his best years in prison on what appeared to have been a trumped-up rape charge.
“This body of yours this glorious flesh,
its nerve cells now grown cold,
its genetic memory
for the pass, the shot,
its feel for ball and field
for the sudden heel.
A fifties pompadour,
a hairline receded since doing time–
The sum total of your movements,
or, better, their multiplication–
come to my mind in a flash:
Eddie, Eddie . . .
It’s unbelievable
That body of yours, that glorious flesh,
now unburdens itself
somewhere between heaven and earth . . .”
It is a long poem, too long for a newspaper, but fluid and powerful to its end.
Marcinkiewicz, in the vanguard of the search for a new poetry, has been described as “entangled in myths and stereotypes of pop culture.”
That’s the kind of language that always seems to pop up in the critical notes that accompany poetry books. There’s really only so much an outsider can say about a poet without drifting so deeply into academic measurement that the language makes sense only to university insiders.
But none of that has infected Marcinkiewicz’s poetry, which is spare and powerful.
He recommends a poem about Chicago, “Macinkiewic Walks Along Milwaukee Street.”
“Macinkiewic walks
Along Milwaukee Street
He passes shops
Soused bars
Slave bureaus
He passes a woman
Fixing her make-up
In a white cadillac’s open door
He passes kids in leather jackets
Trying to sell him
Broken umbrellas.
He passes an undressed gentleman
Napping on a bench
With a cocaine pouch for a pillow.
Milwaukee Street
Isn’t that different
From the other streets in this city.
Still Macinkiewic
Can’t help feeling
That he’s standing on the deck
Of a sinking Man-of-War
Neon signs
Shine, foreboding as Saint Elmo’s Fire.
Electric cables on poles
Wheeze like creaking stays
Sheets of newsprint
Flap like ruffled sails.
Foaming waves
Rush the sidewalk, roaring.
The crew members
Grab lifejackets, planks, cardboard boxes,
Leap overboard,
Vanish in the black surf.
Macinkiewic stays by the mast stump,
tangled in the rigging.
But he wouldn’t leave the deck,
Even if he could.”
The simple read on all of this is that wherever in the universe poetry comes from, it survived seven decades of Soviet dominance and, 10 years after the big flop, is beginning to flower once again.
Back at the table, the sense was that the discipline of poetry is evolving, moving rapidly away from the oppression that defined so much of literature in Russia and its satellite countries for much of the century and searching for new territory, if not to conquer, then at least to examine and explain.
The cliches are dying, much the same way as the shattered empire that spawned them.
