Brodsky in Retrospect

...Essence and existence being opposites what could "essence of existence" be...

...As for meter, the scansion here is scandalous THE THIRD likely candidate for superior achievement would be the title poem, "So Forth " Consider the first stanza Summer will end Septembei Millcome Once mote it's okay to shoot duck, woodcock, patttidge, quail "You've grown long in the tooth, a belle max sigh, and you'll cock up your double barrel but to inhale moie owgen fathei than to unpei il giouse And the keen lung will twitch of a sudden whiff of apncots On the whole, the world changes so fast asij indeed at a cei tain point it began to mainline some muck obtainedfioma swcu thv alien "Shoot" and "tooth" will do as a half-rhyme, but "mainline" and "alien" is outlandish—or, at least, phomcally phony One can no longer describe a girlfriend as "a belle," with its antebellum ring You cock your gzin, you do not "cock up your double barrel", a "cock-up," Brodsky s specialty, is a blunder or a mess "On the whole' and "indeed" are deadwood, "at a certain point" is scarcely better "Muck" as a synonym for junk (heroin) is strictly from hunger "Swarthy alien," for pusher, is insulting The second stanza meanders on to this conclusion "A train in the distance runs whistling along the rail,/ though you will spot no smoke inspecting its inventory / But in a landscape's view, motion is mandatory" The distant train whistle is perhaps the hoariest of all poetic cliches In the next verse, after we get past the misleading word order (it is not the smoke but vou that does the inspecting), we still wonder why and how anyone would inventory a distant train It turns out the meaning is merely that the tiain is so far away, we cannot even see its smoke What a cumbersome, near-impenetrable periphrasis as a smokescreen for banality In the third stanza, "per se" rhymes clumsily with "you see,' and, worse yet, "the edge of the forest echoes a rustling junction " But a train junction makes noises far too harsh for comparison with forest murmurs "And it's not a lump but a hedgehog that fills your throat" is grotesque without being evocative "An airplane's callous/ profile looks odd on high, having lost its haloes" is a trope meant to convey a detail-obliterating distance Do invisible propellers make a plane seem callous' rathei than sleek...

...No, one craves or demands them Whereas light could be a valid subject here, "speed of light," a mere attribute, does not work as the necessary agent I can't see why the "blue armor plate"—the sky—would' prize" being punctured, even by a star Anyway, how could a star, the poet's heavenly incarnation, be a mere puncture, a pinhole...

...This kind of manipulative new fangled cleverness is no better than the old-style obtuseness Neither is his casually tossed-off pseudopro-fundity "Come to think of it, virtue is horizontal" And much as we may enjoy Brodsky's enthusiasm, we bridle at the pronouncement that Rilke's three lines beginning with "She was already loosened" constitute "the greatest sequence of three similes in the entire history of poetry " Windy hyperbole blows neither analyst nor analyzed any good How seriously, indeed, can we take an exegete explaining Eurydice's sleepwalking "Who9" as "oblivion's own voice Because forces, divine powers, abstract energies, etc , tend to operate m monosyllables, that's one way of recognizing them in everyday reality...

...On Gnef and Reason (484 pp , $24 00), prose These books confirm my feeling that, at least as he came through in English, Brodsky was better as a prose writer His poetry in Russian is not for me to judge Not only because of my merest smattering of Russian, but also because the Russian concept of a poet differs radically from the Anglo-American Russian poetry to this day is more emotional than intellectual, more conservative than experimental (with some notable exceptions), and, even on intimate subjects, more public Russian poets read aloud a good deal, performing often in large venues such as sports arenas, they are public figures followed by the masses, somewhat like athletes in America Becoming an American poet then is especially hard for a Russian In this respect, even what I view as Brodsky's rather limited achievement must be seen as genuine success But the great, if not insuperable, problem with all of his wilting is its mannerism, its attitudinizing He wrote prose as if it were poetry, and poetry as if it were prose His prose is often apodictic and obscure, his poetry, especially the later verse, discursive and diffuse On Grief and Reason is a gathering of essays, introductions, speeches, lectures (some to students), and reminiscences These last, whether of his early days in the USSR discovering the West through such things as Tarzan movies, or of his later years associating with the likes of Stephen Spender, are informative and entertaining Other subjects range from Horace to Ramer Mana Rilke, Marcus Aurehus to Thomas Haidy, the Muse of history to Robert Frost Still others include "How to Read a Book" and "In Praise of Boredom " There is a whimsical account of a literary conference in Brazil, and a speculation on what the women who inspired poets may have looked like In "An Immodest Proposal" Brodsky advocates selling inexpensive editions of poetry in all sorts of places, thus making it as universal as, he thinks, it can and should be In a commencement address he tells graduates what to expect and, more pointedly, what not to expect from life In an open letter to Vaclav Havel he takes issue with the Czech writer and political leader's optimism about the future In a talk to the Foundation for Creativity and Leadership he tries to define creativity, especially as it differs in the arts and sciences We get here both the Nobel lecture and the short acceptance speech Strangest is a long essay on Kim Philby and the nature of espionage An odd piece on travel posits a composite city" of the memory A WANDERING, EVER-INQUIRING MIND, you may conclude, that absorbs much and passes it on generously augmented with insight and speculation Well yes, but beware the pitfalls Brodsky was a bit of a flibbertigibbet, phantast and show-off A poet may sometimes indulge m free association, butterfly maneuvers, for the essayist or lecturer seeking to convey apprehensible ideas, orderly flow is superior to capricious flight Add to this the desire to astound, to shock, to solicit forced camaraderie The favorite devices are paradox, the mighty revelation stripped down to catchy but often opaque apothegm, the euphoniously formulaic utterance tailored for memorization instead of comprehension The omnipresent master idea is that of the poet not creating his language, but being created by it With this goes the correlative conceit that the inanimate may (may because Brodsky usually hedges his bets) be scanning the animate as much as, or more, than the reverse Otherwise put, the infinite scrutinizes the finite For Brodsky, that is what poetry is really about We read "The finite [life] always mistakes the permanent [art] for the infinite and nurtures designs upon it That, of course, is the permanent's own fault, for it cannot help at times behaving like the finite" "It's quite possible that from time's own point of view the murder of Caesar and World War II occurred simultaneously, in reverse order, or not at all" Or take these formulas On the uses of uncertainty "It is better to agonize than to organize " On mingling with the multitude "Try to be more like them than like those who are not like them, try to wear gray Mimicry is the defense of individuality, not its surrender" On poetry "It should be as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves I don't see why what's done for cars can't be done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further' And soon, "before literacy is replaced by videocy" A longer passage tries to epitomize Frost's "Home Burial" "[The poet] was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language's most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry's indelible ink Frost's reliance on them almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this ink pot had to do with the hope of reducing the level of its contents, you detect a sort of vested interest on his part Yet the more one dips into it, the more it drips with this black essence of existence, and the more one's mind, like one's fingers, gets soiled by this liquid For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason" What a hodgepodge...

...And even if reality is one large rhetorical figure, why that "you are lucky if it is just a polyptoton or a chiasmus...

...THE CUTESIEST PIECE in On Grief and Reason is "Letter to Horace " It concerns Ovid, approvingly, and Virgil, disapprovingly, as much as its nominal addressee Curiously, Brodsky seems to prefer Ovid to Horace, pei haps because Ovid was a womanizer, permitting a fellow ladies' man to wonder whether he looked more like Paul Newman or James Mason "Time,' Brodsky allows, were it to compose a poem, "would include leaves, grass, earth, wind, sheep, horses, trees, cows, bees But not us Maximum, our souls" Bizarre as this exclusion is, "maximum" for "at most" makes it more so, and how could a poem about our souls not ipso facto be about us...

...Very little Then comes one of Brodsky's familiar crutches, not to mention,' and, finally, what does make sense here, "one's features The gain, though, is promptly forfeited as we read on "Perhaps your ancestors also ended up on this wonderful beach in a fashion similar/ to mine Hence, your attitude toward me In your eyes I am/ at the very least an island within an island' Nothing could be more prosaic than the first two verses here Is "wonderful beach" ironic...

...Do those impressively melancholy closing lines add up to more than a facile paradox, with "forgetting' where you expect remembering...

...Hardly A prose aphorism is as economical as a verse epigram And why make economy so important...

...Surely not something that dispenses with past and future What does "life without mirrors" do to pronouns other than, perhaps, the "I...

...why in heaven would such "forces" use monosyllables, and who on earth could recognize them thereby...

...The closing essay, a tribute to Stephen Spender, is engaging, but once more another poet obtrudes heavily "If in your undergraduate days you meet Wystan Auden, your self-mfatuaI HAVE STRESSED the weaknesses of Brodsky's criticism as a counterweight to the hero worship that surrounds his figure My aim is to warn readers, particularly young and impressionable ones, against swallowing this unquestionably intelligent erudite and talented man whole That would seem virtually impossible, however, with his poetry, especially in its later phases Without indulging in Brodskyan overstatement, I can affirm that the one or two long and 60-odd short poems collected in So Forth constitute about as poor a volume of verse as any I have ever encountered from the most minor of poets In the liminal poem, "Infinity, a Crusoe-like figure addresses in his mind the natives of his island He contends that "Islands are cruel enemies/ of tenses, except the present one And shipwrecks are but flights from grammar/ into pure causality Look what life without mirrors does to pronouns/ not to mention one's features...

...Weirder still is a discussion of the vowel sounds and caesura in a line about Hermes, "The god of faring and of distant message," where Brodsky finds "quite a lot of 'airing' in 'faring ' That he should be totally oblivious to this being an English translation is remarkable Rilke's German, "der Gottdes Ganges und der werten Botschaft,' contains none of the airy-fairy, or airing-fairing, stuff Yet even had Rilke been writing in English, would there really have been "airing" in "fairing...

...Would Frost be so much less smart than Brodsky as not to realize the staining power of this curiously bipolar ink...

...Why these two rather than, say, anaphora and praetentio—are those more difficult...

...Either Brodsky is skipping intermediate steps of his argument, or he is parading non sequiturs for our bedazzle-ment There follows "Wooing the Inanimate," where, as with Frost, Brodsky tries to rehabilitate Hardy through textual explication But along with genuine insights he heaps up overstatement subtleties that plainly are not in the text, grandiose assertions that the poems cannot quite sustain And plain nonsense, as when Haidy's idiom is described as "both down-to-earth and metaphysical," and Brodsky continues 'Well, metaphysics is always down-to-earth, isn't it' The more down-to-earth it is, the more metaphysical it gets, for the things of this world and their interplay are metaphysics' last frontier, they are the language in which matter manifests itself" To declare the things of this earth metaphysics' last frontier is like pronouncing Mexico the last frontier of the United States, confusing the first of B with the last of A In addition we are told Hardy's poems "have the feeling of being detached from themselves, of not so much being poems as maintaining the appearance of being poems"' First off, poems don't have a feeling, we have it about them Second, how does a poem get detached from itself9 Third, if these poems merely have the appearance of poems, are they worth discussing...

...Most needlessly puzzling is the conclusion The poet, reminiscing, is clearly not forgetting, so he must mean "Why should I forget...

...Is the poet so old as to be a risen ancient Roman—perhaps even our old friend Marcus Aurelius...

...Hemisphere" is a bit weak If he were, say, in Alaska, and she in Patagonia, the distance would not be diminished And mcan-tatory as the cadence may be, "beer" is (dare I say if) pretty flat in a romantic context Also, if "the sun is setting," don't we know it's evening...

...In his blood...

...toward and from whom all poetry flows I have a healthy admiration for Auden, but I think he has to share the heights with Yeats, Eliot and Pound on the grand scale, and, on the smaller one, with such masters of the short lyric as D H Lawrence, John Crowe Ransom, Louis MacNeice, and especially Robert Graves But the way Brodsky keeps quoting him, often referring to him simply as "the poet," and holding him up to us as the paragon, I find untenable IN AN ESSAY on Rilke's "Orpheus Eurydice Hermes,' we read 'While it's silly to suggest a hierarchy among various realities, it can be argued that all reality aspires to the condition of a poem if only for reasons of economy" So, although one must not suggest a hierarchy, Brodsky does—with poetry, his thing, at the top Reasons of economy...

...How does the opaque second half of the quatrain, casually introduced by a 'thus," relate to the first half...

...And what is "pure causality...

...Either way, the meaning of the stanza eludes me But rhyming "import" with "ink pot" is cacophonous Neither rhyme nor half-rhyme, it is a kind of grating three-quarter rhyme "And although the speed of light can't in nature covet/thanks, non-being's blue armor plate,/ prizing attempts at making a sifter of it,/ might use my pinhole, at any rate " Does one covet thanks...

...IF THE best is not at the beginning of a collection, perhaps it is at the end There we get the poem "Taps " It starts "I've been reproached for everything save the weather/ and in turn my own neck was seeking a scimitar/But soon, I'm told, I'll lose my epaulets altogether/ and dwindle into a little star" What is 'in turn ' doing there...

...I can see how the island of your shipwreck cuts off the past and the future But what are "flights from grammar"—which, after all, is not exclusively about tenses?doing here...

...A bit grandiose, that As the stanza progresses, it becomes somewhat clearer, albeit not less clumsy Some folk traveling abroad are like an ancient Roman surfacing today The poem's final octave is a total jumble, leaving us gasping for breath as we grope for meaning Absurdity and risibility dog this collection A quasi-sequence of five poems about centaurs begins "They briskly bounce out of the future and having cried 'Futile...

...Why, in any event, would poetry's very quiddity be something deleterious...

...The epistle continues "Next to [Ovid, aka Naso] somebody like the Viennese doctor—never mind not catchmg the reference—is kindergarten, child's play And frankly, you [Horace], too And so is Virgil To put it bluntly, Naso insists that ui this world one thing is anoth-er That, in the final analysis, reality is one large rhetorical figure and you are lucky if it is just a polyptoton or a chiasmus Within a man evolves into an object, and vice versa, with the immanent logic of grammar, like a statement sprouting a subordinate clause With Naso the tenor is the vehicle, Flaccus [i.e., Horace], and/or the other way around, and the source of it all is the ink pot" The context being dreams and reality, "Viennese doctor" is plain enough, so why the condescending "never mind not catching the reference...

...How do we get from this to "chance" and "a ripple effect...

...The lumping together of that vague threesome ("forces," "powers," "energies"), troubles me, as does the slatternly "etc " that may mean anything More to the point...

...And why that bathetic anticlimax, at any rate," for closing...

...Our desire for elaboration—or, in the au-thor's case, over elaboration—is equally powerful These are contrary currents that coexist in us—like grief and reason, you might say Brodsky can, to be sure, hit the nail on the head, even if I have emphasized his misses For example "On the whole, the representational partem in myths boils down to the man-is-his-purpose principle everyone is defined by his action This is not so because the ancients were unwitting Sartreans but because everyone was then depicted in profile A vase, or for that matter a bas relief, accommodates ambiguity rather poorly " But he promptly falls from perspicacity by asserting that "definitions normally bespeak the presence of an alternative,' which is either obvious or absurd It is interesting to read that a "parenthesis is the typographical equivalent of the back of one's mind," but how does it follow that it is the "true seat of civilization in modem man...

...As for "one thing being another," is that not the way all imagery works, with Ovid holding no patent...

...Tenor" (the thing compared) and "vehicle" (the thing compared to) are terms out of I A Richards, whom Brodsky casually co-opts As for the ink pot as primary source, where else should a poet dip his pen...

...Does love come under either rubric...

...There is no apparently" about it They were hearing their own language, we hear something four centuries old And what is that sneered-at "progress' from which it is silly" to retrospect...

...WHters & Writitig BRODSKY IN RETROSPECT BY JOHN SIMON LAST JANUARY 28 Joseph Brodsky's heart gave out at age 55 The English language has proved hospitable to foreign prose writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen and Vladimir Nabokov, but Brodsky wrote poetry and that, as we shall see, may require a finer ear Moreover, he came to the United States at the comparatively advanced age of 32 In 1964, the Soviets sentenced Brodsky to five years of exile and hard labor in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia for "parasitism' Allowed to return to his native Leningrad after serving 18 months, he continued to be harassed by the KGB and on June 4, 1972 was forcibly deported to Israel via Austria In Vienna he met W H Auden who deflected his destination westward, and with whom he would form a not unprofitable mutual admiration society In this country Brodsky had affiliations with numerous colleges and universities, and was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke His true home, though, was in Greenwich Village (Having settled into marriage with an Italo-Russian translator in 1990, he moved three years ago to Brooklyn Heights) Brodsky published essays and criticism as well as poetry, which he gradually began to co-translate, translate and ultimately write in English A history of heart trouble notwithstanding, he had a good life reading and lecturing and round-tabling around the world He became an American citizen in 1977 and earned among other honors, the Nobel Prize in Literature, a MacArthur fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award and two consecutive Poet Laureateships We now have his last personally overseen collections, issued by Farrar Straus Giroux So Faith (132 pp $18 00), poetry...

...Does family...

...Good observations in a long essay on Marcus Aurelius are undercut by such cryptically gnomic utterances as "A Stoic s life was a study in ethics, since ethics buys nothing except osmosis " That enthymeme could easily pass for a rebus Again, "Toward the wrong and atrocious, Marcus was not so much forgiving as dismissive Which is to say he was impartial rather than just and that his impartiality was not the product of his mind's fairness but of his mmd's appetite for the infinite, in particular, for impartiality's own limits " This is hairsplitting to do a sophist or Jesuit proud 'You were an island, Caesar," Brodsky apostrophizes the emperor, "or at least your ethics were, an island in the primordial and—pardon the expression—post-mordial ocean of free atoms " Add bad puns to the Brodsky repertoire "IDEALLY, PERHAPS the animate and the inanimate should swap places," Brodsky opines in "A Cat's Meow " Perhaps the dictionary's definition of creativity as "ability to create," he goes on, "is nothing more (or less) than matter s attempts to articulate itself" Later "Matter, I believe, comes to articulate itself through human science or human art presumably only under some kind of duress This may sound like an anthropomorphic fantasy, but our cellular makeup entitles us to this sort of indulgence Matter s fatigue, its thinning out, or its oversaturation with time are, among a host of other less and more fathomable processes, what further enunciates chance and what is registered by the lab's instruments or by the no less sensitive pen of the lyric poet In either case, what you get is a npple effect In this sense, the ability to make is a passive ability a grain of sand's response to the horizon " Note, first, the hedging, those "perhaps"es that "more or less," "I believe," "presumably," and "some kind of" To disprove the notion of "fantasy," Brodsky invokes the equally subjective "indulgence " Are "fatigue" and "thinning out" conjunctive or disjunctive concepts, and how does "oversaturation with time"—whatever it exactly means—enter into the picture...

...Why, in the first place, rhetorical figures, which are primarily the orator's, rather than tropes, such as metaphor and simile, which are chiefly the poet's...

...Though "pen" echoes 'pennant" nicely, what could it mean here...

...Does religion...

...What sort of pennant may stars fold...

...The first hemistich sounds like "thats whats peeds" and is grating Butjust how was that belle, complaining of dental longitude, right...

...Only to rhyme with 'haloes," I fear The poem contmues "That's what speed's all about The belle was right What would/ an ancient Roman, had he risen now, recognize...

...A wet dream suggests a sexual one, but wetted with ink...

...For one thing, Brodsky is putting that word 'progress" into our mouths, for another, where else can we look back from except from where we are...

...immediately thud back up to its cloud-clad summit / A branch bends burdened w ith birds larger than space—new style,/ stuffed not with daw n or feathers but only with 'Damn it, damn it ' Note how mechanical it all is "Future" leads automatically into "futile," though the centaurs should, properly come from the past The indicated "stuffed with down" undergoes an arbitrary vowel shift to "dawn " "Summit" wants a rhyme and conjures up the ludicrous double "damn it" "Cloud-clad" is a facile way out of the cliche "cloud-capped," but lands in an overalliterative jmgle, even more thudding than the four b's of the next verse, capped with that "burdened-birds heavy-handedness In "Centauis IV, Brodsky comes up with a verse deserving inclusion in any stuffed-owl collection "This century's serial number matches a rooster's croak " Capitalizing on the prosiness that current poetasters have apparently legitimized, Brodsky treats poetry like bubble gum, and sticks a line break wherever the gum snaps His flaccid meters and tortured rhymes resemble crooked teeth topheavily capped, and every so often there are unsightly gaps in meaning His earlier poetry was better, lending credence to the old saw about hunger being the true muse, the later work, begotten on satiety, mistakes ambition for necessity But how many artists have been able to recognize that their future was in their past...

...Does "multiply" in this sexualized context mean procreate, or does it, mathematically, tie in with "tables...

...With nothing around to care for, it's of no import/ if you are blitzed, encircled, reduced to ml / Thus wetting his dream with the tumbled inkpot,/ a schoolboy can multiply as no tables will" Who, I ask again, would conduct deadly warfare in heaven...

...If grief and reason are poison to each other, why would an increase in one produce an increase, and not a decrease, in the other...

...As for Hardy's language, Brodsky avers that "There is no such thing as antiquated diction there are only reduced vocabularies That's why, for example, there is no Shakespeare nowadays on Broadway, apparently the modern audience has more trouble with the bard's diction than the folks at the Globe had That's progress for you, then, and there is nothing sillier than retrospection from the point of view of progress' BUT, OF COURSE, there is such a thing as antiquated diction, as we know from some of Shakespeare and more of, say, Chaucer Does Brodsky want Middle English to be carefully stored in everyone's memory bank...

...Or, if such a danger exists, why not "Freud" instead of "good old Ziggy," as Brodsky patronizingly puts it elsewhere...

...Too facile, in that case Sincere...

...What is that "apparently" greater trouble we have with Shakespeare than "the folks" at the Globe had...

...Too trite then I am not sure, either, what a possible ancestral shipwreck has to do with the attitude of the present native population "An island within an island" is nice, but "at the very least" is merely a filler, like the "not to mention' above Next in the volume is the Audenesque "A Song," beginning I wish vou were here, dear, I wish vou were here, I wish you sat on the sofa and I sat near The handkerchief could be yours, the tear could be mine chin-bound Though it could be of cow se the other way around The end here echoes all those "vice versa"'s we encountered in the essays Such reversibility is better in a raincoat, and "chin-bound" is too obviously there only for the rhyme The alternative is even more pointless in the next stanza, where the lovers might drive off m a car "We'd find ourselves elsewhere,/ on an unknown shore,/ Or else we'd repair/ to where we've been before " Yes, that's the choice somewhere new or somewheie old But the archaic "repair' is unfehcitous, particularly in a car, it suggests engine trouble Most Audenesque is a transition from lyrical to mundane "When the moon skims the water/ that sighs and shifts in its slumber /I wish it were still a quarter/ to dial your number" Is that a plea for lower telephone rates...

...It is only through such retrospection that we can approach Shakespeare Next, consider this crucial passage "Language is capable of arrangements that reduce a human being to, at best, the function of a scribe It is language that utilizes a human being, not the other way around Language is ultimately the voice of inanimate matter, and poetry just registers now and then its npple effect" There's that old ripple effect, and an elaboration "I am far from suggesting that this is what Thomas Hardy was after in this line [from "The Darkling Thrush"] Rather, it was what this line was after in Thomas Hardy, and he responded "That, certainly, is a kind of metaphysics The animate and inanimate, for Brodsky anyway, did trade places To exalt Hardy, our essayist simply established links—how-ever tenuous and arbitrary—between him and Auden For what runs through Brodsky's entire critical thinking is rampant Au-denolatry a worship of the benefactor as a kind of Archpoet...

...This presupposes a nearness to death which does not seem to be the case Even if it were, wouldn't his not forgetting make dying easier, as a surcease from painful remembrance...

...The poem concludes I wish you were here deal in this heimspheie as I sit on the porch sipping a beer It's evening, the sun is setting, boys shout and girls are crying What's the point of forgetting if its followed by dying...

...They must be his tioops, for he couldn't escape so easily from enemy ones Yet why would such a bad officer command any troops...

...Who, these days would think of a beheading with a scimitar rather than with a sword or axe...

...Why are grief and reason the prime movers of poetry...

...What of that darkly hinted at host of other "processes...

...How does the plural predicate are manage to refer back to a singular subject...

...Only a Turk, or a person who needs a rhyme for "star' As "a sky s lieutenant' (a rather high rank for someone who lost his epaulets altogether), he will 'hide m clouds where thunder roars,' blind to the troops as they fold their pennant/ and run, pursued by the pen in droves " Are the troops the lesser stars...