Writes poems, will travel
FOREST, JIM
REPORT FROM AMSTERDAM WRITES POEMS, Wa.L TRAVEL JOSEPH BRODSKY Joseph Brodsky was introduced to an audience at the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam last December not as a poet but as the poet....
...Otherwise you are just counting syllables...
...He started off the reading with "A Song," a poem with the refrain, "I wish you were here, dear," which concludes, "What's the point of forgetting/if it's followed by dying...
...Its route, well, it's not yours, that's all...
...Listening impassively to the introduction, Brodsky fiddled with an unlighted cigarette, occasionally placing it in his lips, until after about ten minutes-ending a drawn-out silent drama that upstaged his introducer-Brodsky finally lit it, inhaling deeply, then blowing out the smoke in a long thin stream...
...I try to bring out the euphonic aspect of the poem...
...In the pause, I told him about how his way of reading reminded me of the chanting of the Gospel, or the way a cantor sings the prayers in the synagogue...
...In him," said his friend and translator Kees Verheul, "we are faced with the poet, or rather the carrier of the poet...
...His toying with the cigarette resembled an erotic play...
...It is quite deliberate...
...There was something to be said for the writer packing his bags...
...Meters are meters...
...A poet is never ahead or behind his time, just operating on his own frequency...
...A good teacher requires a lot of memorization of poetry and requires you to deliver...
...applied spec...
...This way of reading creates a sense of no longer being in ordinary time or space...
...The artist is trying not to repeat his predecessors, to say the least...
...He lives in Alkmaar, Holland...
...Then "The Butterflies," about a life one-day long, a space in time just right for the blaze of a poem...
...This takes the orchid out of the writer's lapel...
...I made a similar comment in the public discussion that followed...
...And this is a great pity because in fact "poetry is an act of mental aggression upon the audience...
...Extremes of experience have a tendency to bring out banal expressions...
...It's just more palatable when it's a writer than with those possessing other skills...
...Of course they are deeply related," he said...
...The question was asked whether poetry could have anything to do with politics...
...He may have been born and raised in Leningrad/St...
...Thus he tends to read diffidently, taking some distance from his poem...
...Someone with another temperament may be quite irritated and preoccupied with the problem and even develop a philosophy of nihilism...
...You could understand modem poetry if you began with the poetry you do understand and work from there...
...But language has its own life, refusing to behave according to the tastes of a balding poet, even when he has the Nobel Prize...
...A poet," he concluded, "is like a bird...
...According to Aristotle, Brodsky replied, there are four different temperaments and each has to do with the location of bile in the body...
...The further away from his homeland the writer is, the better for literature...
...Petersburg, but his voice is at home in the New World...
...Brodsky said no, the reason being that the task of the poet is to avoid cliches, to create precedents, to make something new...
...To live elsewhere is a norm in the twentieth century...
...JIM FOREST Jim Forest is the author of, most recently, Living with Wisdom (Orbis...
...Brodsky said this was the result not so much to differences in the verbal content of the poem in its two forms but "how you read," and that this is greatly shaped by one's national background...
...The deacon, the cantor, and the poet are all practicing the "melic art," Brodsky responded, pausing like a good teacher to spell melic...
...Your recitation makes it clear to the teacher what you have understood...
...My manner of delivery goes back to the training I received in my Russian high school...
...to the strophic species of Greek lyric verse...
...A question was asked about nihilism...
...How can one make a philosophy out of it...
...Reading modem poetry "is like boarding a runaway train...
...His eyes wander toward the large windows and the view they offer of the sky and street and other buildings, like a child in school waiting for recess...
...Wasn't it hard for the writer to have to live in exile, he was asked, and isn't it a pity so many writers are exiles...
...Intended to be sung...
...In Russian we have the word nichtoe-nothing...
...The only respect in which this head differs from the one I carry on my shoulders," Brodsky commented after admiring the Caesar-like image, "is that it can't speak-and it can't kiss...
...Similarly, Brodsky's face, even while he chants the poetry with such concentrated purpose, seems a face in the audience rather than belonging to the poet...
...Later he quoted a Japanese poet: "I've got no principles, no conviction just nerve...
...Later, commenting on the euphony that exists in every language, he noted that "Russian words are two, three syllables, minimum...
...He said he hears people complain that they don't care for 6: 22 May 1992 Commonweal modem poetry...
...He was unhappy about the "big infusion of English words" into modem Russian...
...In this century, Brodsky continued, the poet in the West has the problem "of almost always being on the defensive, aware of the sardonic listener who will smirk at the poet's raptures...
...His own temperament leads him to shrug off the problem of death, as if to say, "You know you are going to lose...
...He noted that experience of extraordinary events does not necessarily produce a poem...
...Then came "Epitaph to a Centaur" with the line "...his animal part turned out to be less durable than his humanity...
...It doesn't give you a sense of limit...
...He reminds me of watching Vladimir Horowitz performing in a concert hall in Moscow, playing with total detachment as if, far from playing, he was listening, and perhaps not even listening to this particular piano...
...Thus it is sometimes said of a poet that he is ahead of his time...
...You may decide you don't like the train...
...But for himself, he went on, "nothingness is a lousy subject...
...To utter a Russian word is an acoustic event...
...Especially when reading in his native language, Brodsky recites like a deacon singing the Gospel in a Russian church, a kind of liturgical chant, the recitation of each line governed by strict rules of rhythm with definite places for rising and falling stresses, that are impartial to the content of the words...
...There is music in poetry...
...His first task was the unveiling of a bronze bust of himself, the work of the sculptor Sylvia Willink...
...He chirps no matter what twig he lands on-and mistakes the rustle of leaves for applause...
...Brodsky found it not so remarkable...
...This is an incorrect perception, he explained...
...OED: "Melic: Of poetry...
...You can survive Hiroshima or twenty-five years in a concentration camp and not write a single line, or experience a one-night stand and write an immortal lyric...
...The self-effacing poet should perhaps take the next logical step and shut up altogether...
...Someone commented on how striking the contrast was between the original poems that Brodsky had recited, and the reading by the translator of the same poems in Dutch...
...Russian stresses the music...
...You have guest workers and boat people, not only exiled writers...
...It suggests a journey...
...Commonweal 22 May 1992: 7...
...One's address isn't so important...
...I have no philosophy, only temperament...
...It was, he confessed, a pastiche of Auden's "Twelve Songs...
...Hence applied to poets who compose such verse...
...The reason, he said, is that poetry builds on itself: it has a kind of development through time...
...Brodsky's English is fast, fluent, almost reckless...
...Art," he said, "is older than any form of social organization...
...So what...
...There's nothing very significant about it...
...It's an interesting word with too many consonants...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
