We Need the Future Now

...Ironically, as his death neared, Mayakovsky had been throwing off his ideological rigidity...

...On the Web, at www.museum.ru/Majakofskiy, you can take a virtual tour of the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow with, in Almereyda’s words, “its ostentatious lack of sobriety, its atmosphere of self-congratulation...

...The narrator becomes unsettled as he searches in vain for recognizable landmarks...

...The sky is painted with the colors of dawn to match the villages set on fire...

...overboard from the Ship of Modernity” its members proclaimed in the manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912...

...The book’s opening poem, “Walking,” recapitulates the sense of being lost in a landscape vaguely familiar but unidentifiable...

...The global economy defies regulation and invites crisis...

...All I can do is make another tour of the neighborhood, Hoping I’ll meet someone to show me the way And a place to sleep, since I’ve no return ticket To wherever it is I came from earlier this evening...

...The tenuous Yugoslav monarchy was abruptly overthrown by the Nazi invasion of 1941, followed by the Red Army’s “liberation” in 1944...

...Determined that it should be his Futurist colleagues rather than the subtler and less ideological Acmeists, he cultivated allies among the Cheka...

...It doesn’t take a social revolution to stoke creativity...

...Almereyda reprints Ron Padgett’s rather free adaptation of the 1930 poem “Screaming My Head Off ” (usually translated “At the Top of My Voice”), wherein the poet imagines how he will appear to You people of the future, Running back over the past, Shining a light back over your shoulder In a fusillade of surreal images, Mayakovsky mocks his readers then and now, claiming socialism is a living force that does not need books—even those of Marx and Engels...

...Ebola or Marburg fever can spread from a fairly isolated part of Africa throughout the world in a matter of days, thanks to air travel...

...The stance, he remarked, obliged them to eliminate from their own work “everything that presupposed even the tiniest bit of poetic education in the audience...

...We might similarly apply it to the Americans’ imperial aspirations or our fear of death...

...There are skillful artisans who write literate and well-crafted lyrics...

...Somebody’s stubbornly trying to break out of me,” he wrote...

...He now calls himself a Serbian American...

...Almereyda, who is a film director, also includes many of Mayakovsky’s drawings as well as posters and ads he and his friends designed...

...He struggled increasingly with what the editor calls “the compromises of everyday life...

...The terseness of the stanzas evokes someone trying to control a rising panic...

...Now we know that under the guise of literary lectures he is merely a propagandist for Soviet development and the glories of Soviet life...

...Human achievement has instead come to be associated with overpopulation and the despoiling of nature...

...Futurism initially envisioned a proletarian poetry devoid of a literary inheritance: “Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc., etc...

...And there was a further twist to his relationship with the Briks...

...But the volume does include his bestknown poem, the prerevolutionary work “A Cloud in Pants” (1915...

...Soldiers hunt down the birds that sing after dark...

...To read poems to an audience that is completely uneducated in poetry is just as thankless a task as trying to sit on a spiked fence...

...Perhaps because, as Keats said, imagined melodies are sweeter than the ones we can actually hear, this revolutionary writer was a major influence on American poets from the 1960s onward...

...He convinced himself that he was creating a proletarian vocabulary that would enhance meaning, not diminish it...

...Simic often addresses his verse “To those worried about the future”—that is, to a culture that has lost faith in “progress” and no longer promises freedom from disease or social injustice...

...Photographs of the poet attest to the commanding theatrical presence that captivated audiences at his readings and plays...

...Poetry needs to believe in the future again—now...

...In this call to arms, Mayakovsky’s was the loudest voice...

...Souvenirs of Hell” follows tourists as they pass leafless trees, the devil’s palace and ruined factories...

...Miss Harding is probably still at her desk, Sighing as she grades papers late into the night...

...The short-lived Russian Futurist movement budded in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, then enjoyed a brief but prolific Bolshevik spring before Leon Trotsky fled into exile and Joseph Stalin’s purges drove creativity underground...

...A prolific writer, he has won most of the major poetry awards, including a MacArthur “genius grant...

...Mayakovsky was torn between wanting to belong to the tradition of the writers he most admired—Pushkin, Rimbaud and Whitman—and the impulse to forge a “people’s poetry” for the masses...

...Wonders of the Invisible World” takes its title from Cotton Mather’s treatise on witchcraft in New England: Wine had bloodied your lips and tongue, When you whispered your tale Of how young witches Used to ride married men Through the sky on a night like this...

...The Revolution appealed to him because he wanted the white-hot intensity of romance unfettered by relationships that fizzle out and the necessities of making a living or of behaving in socially expected ways...

...There is plenty to talk about in such poetry, yet somehow I’m reminded of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: eerie disconnects and spooky subjects substitute for genuine surprise...

...Naturally, those writers who survived to chronicle the darkening of Stalinist oppression despised him and veered away from the paths he explored...

...Mayakovsky’s tragedy was to embody the early hopes of the Revolution: its vigor and romantic faith that a new, classless world was coming into being...

...His depression was worsened in part by the realization that the state he had worked to bring about was turning language into propaganda to deceive people, not free them...

...But they cover common ground...

...Now that the Soviet Union has vanished Russians are re-examining his innovative use of language, his surrealist techniques and the sarcasm many of his contemporaries missed...

...Had he lived a few more years, it is likely that he would have been one of Stalin’s casualties since he was never one to compromise...

...The shortcoming inherent in this sort of poetry is predictability...

...Therefore we cultivate indifference in order to go on with our own lives...

...His death came at the moment when the Russian intelligentsia recognized that the Soviet dream was turning into a nightmare...

...Mayakovsky attended art school for a while, and his work with other illustrators, among them the inventive Aleksander Rodchenko, shaped the rugged, modernist look that marked the early days of Soviet design...

...After Mayakovsky’s 1930 suicide at the age of 36—the same age at which Pushkin died—Lili and her husband convinced Stalin that her onetime lover ought to be remembered as the model poet of the Revolution...

...For much of his adulthood, he lived with the Briks, romantically attached to Lili while largely supported by her husband, Osip Brik...

...He whistled as he walked through the graveyard...

...Nevertheless The rooster brought in chains is crowing, The flowers in the garden have been forced to stay open, And still yet dark stains spread over the palace floors Which no amount of scrubbing will wipe away...

...When his family immigrated to the United States in 1954, Simic already identified himself as a refugee without a country...

...Clocks and watches are destroyed...

...Yet he suggests his poems personify the spirit of the people in a way that will guarantee their lasting value...

...The writer’s imaginative universe contains an “Encyclopedia of Horror,” numerous stories of the survivors of bombed-out cities, abused children, homeless women, and tortured prisoners...

...His point is that misfortune, atrocity and catastrophe so encroach upon our consciousness that we cannot allow them to overwhelm us...

...His lifelong love for his friend’s wife did not prevent him from compulsive womanizing...

...His response to present terrors bears resemblance to that of the postAugustan Silver Age Latin poets who, soured by the imperial drift toward corruption and debauchery, turned from tragedy and the pastoral to decadence...

...Simic intends for us to hear echoes of other poetic voices: “bare ruined choirs where once the sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73) or Blake’s “dark Satanic mills,” to name only two...

...In his debut volume, Dismantling the Silence, his disjointed imagery and terse forms illustrated the way repressive regimes affect even the most ordinary aspects of life: the lies and distortions, the sense of incongruity and displacement...

...He cultivated a tough-guy, in-your-face persona and what Almereyda calls a “proto-punk ferocity...

...Osip Mandelstam, leader of the rival Acmeist movement that included Anna Akhmatova, disapproved of the Futurists’ anti-intellectual rhetoric...

...A shake-up is essential, for the purposes of transformation...

...during his visit to the United States, Mayakovsky fathered a daughter by a young American woman...

...We could also draw links to the Nazi occupation of Europe during Simic’s childhood or the Soviet Union’s rigid control of its satellites...

...When he journeyed to the United States in 1925, a disillusioned Chicago newspaper wrote: “In older, better days, all we knew about Mayakovsky was that he was a Futurist...

...As Mayakovsky told his readers, if you want to write about something with a new perspective, take a bumpy bus ride: “The appalling jolting will serve to throw into relief for you, better than anything else, the charm of a life transformed...

...But his loyalty to revolutionary ideology tarnished his integrity...

...Francine du Plessix Gray has written about his affair with her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva...

...Poets, they argued, should feel “an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time...

...The more his poetry matured the less “the people” understood it, and his audience dwindled...

...In one of this volume’s most memorable poems, “The Lights Are on Everywhere,” an unnamed kingdom refuses to admit that night must come...

...This allegory might suit one of Hans Christian Andersen’s bleak fairy tales...

...American poetry has entered its own Silver Age...

...In Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 270 pp., $27.00), editor Michael Almereyda combines some recent attempts to render the verse into English with excerpts from the poet’s autobiography, I, Myself (1922), memoirs by Russian contemporaries, plus essays and poetic tributes by later authors...

...Along with innovative artists like Rodchenko, composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, and writers like Gorky and Isaac Babel, he thrived within a creative environment full of promise...

...As Almereyda indicates, Mayakovsky’s influence has spread outside his own culture, not only as a cult figure but as an inspiration for such countercultural American movements as the Beats and the New York School of poets...

...Ethnic conflicts flare up—most recently in Simic’s native Serbia...

...When Maxim Gorky told him he had a great future ahead of him, Mayakovsky plaintively responded, “I want the future now...

...Having studied Baudelaire, Mayakovsky understood that in the capitalist West advertising devalued language and made the poet’s work more difficult...

...All other inhabitants have unaccountably vanished from the city: And that schoolhouse with the red fence...

...Simic polishes his lyrics to a dark, gothic luster...

...The bummer is, I can’t find the street...

...Martial composed savagely witty epigrams, Lucan imbued his lines with dark images and pathos, and Petronius practiced a ribald satire...

...In death, he was canonized as a Soviet hero and his poetry became a mandatory part of the Soviet educational curriculum...

...Is it what the elderly feel like when they leave home and cannot find their way back...

...Simic is never less than polished and each lyric packs a punch but he tends to repeat himself...

...In addition, there are tantalizing stills from the surreal movies Mayakovsky made with his longtime lover, dancer Lili Brik...

...Now, however, he is beginning to seem slick...

...exuberance is forced or absent...

...Yet that is not quite the end of the story...

...That Little Something (Harcourt, 73 pp., $23.00) is his 18th collection...

...An excerpt from Lev Kassil’s Mayakovsky Himself, written for Russian adolescents in 1940, describes a reading at which Mayakovsky baited his audience with provocative statements, taunted hecklers, and ostentatiously paused to drink tea on stage before bursting into sonorous declamations of his verse...

...On Poetry We Need the Future Now By Phoebe Pettingell The Futurist poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) derives its effects through wordplay, rhythms and similar devices almost impossible to translate from Russian into English...

...Still, a more honest aspect of Mayakovsky remained in his meditations upon the subjects that have always attracted poets: the difficulties of love, the cruelty of fortune, and the struggle to uncover one’s true voice...

...When Charles Simic was appointed the 15th U S. Poet Laureate in April 2007, he told the press he was touched because he did not speak English until he was 15...

...Night Wraps the Sky unwisely omits “The Spine Flute,” Mayakovsky’s great love poem to Lili Brik...

...Osip became more and more convinced that the Soviet government would bless only one of the then competing schools of poetry...

...Much contemporary poetry follows this pattern, and our current laureate sees connections between our leaders and those Roman tyrants who fiddled while their capitals burned and their fearful subjects awaited the barbarian invasions...

...Decadence hardens into a clich...

...Born in Belgrade in 1938, Simic grew up during an era of upheaval in the Balkans...

...Is this a once familiar place that has changed in his absence, or merely suggestive of a neighborhood he knew in childhood...

...He was nonetheless naïve about the risks he ran in turning his talents to composing odes to the superiority of Communism...

...Brik probably was responsible for Mandelstam’s being sent to the Gulag, where he ultimately died...