Archive for 2021

Today is the 86th birthday of Yevgeny Rein, one of Russia’s leading poets and winner of the prestigious Pushkin Prize. Fortunately, Los Angeles Review of Books editor Boris Dralyuk reminded me of the occasion on Twitter. What better way to celebrate than cite the comments of his friend, the Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky?

Both were in the quartet of “Akhmatova’s orphans,” the group of young poets who were protégés of Anna Akhmatova in the years before her death in 1966. The quartet also included Dmitri Bobyshev and Anatoly Naiman.

Brodsky called Rein “metrically the most gifted Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century.” He continues in a 1994 Commentary introduction:

“… the death of the world order for Rein is not a singular event but a gradual process. Rein is a poet of erosion, of disintegration—of human relationships, moral categories, historical connections, and dependencies of any nature binomial or multipolar. And his verse, like a spinning black record, is the only form of mutation accessible to him, a fact testified to above all by his assonant rhymes. To top it all, this poet is extraordinarily concrete, substantive. Eighty percent of a Rein poem commonly consists of nouns and proper names. The remaining 20 percent is verbs, adverbs, and, least, adjectives. As a result, the reader often has the impression that the subject of the elegy is language itself, parts of speech illuminated by the sunset of the past tense, which casts its long shadow into the present and even touches the future.

“But what might seem to the reader a conscious artifice, or at the very least a product of retrospection, is not. For the surplus materiality, the oversaturation with nouns, was present in Rein’s poetry from the beginning. In his earliest poems, at the end of the 1950s—in particular in his first poem, “Arthur Rimbaud”—one notes a kind of “Adamism,” a tendency to name things, to enumerate the objects of this world, an almost infantlike thirst for words. For this poet, the discovery of the world accompanied the development of diction. Ahead of him there was, if not life, then at least a huge dictionary.”

He concludes: “Russian poetry has never had enough time (or space, for that matter). This explains its intensity and wrenching quality—not to say hysteria. What has been created in the existent parameters over the last hundred years—under Damocles’ sword—is extraordinary, but too often colored by a sense of ‘now or never!'”

Well, read the whole thing here, along with Brodsky’s selection of his poems.

Nota bene: Photo above taken by East Bay photographer Terrence McCarthy. We worked together at the Michigan Daily long ago. The photo is reproduced in this year’s The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline. Read more about that book here.

The Book Haven’s roving photographer Zygmunt Malinowski has photographed a New York City Covid Christmas for us – since we can’t be there in person during a time of plague. He shares his observations below, as well as his photographs.

On the Sunday before Christmas, Rockefeller Center as well as the surrounding streets were crowded, despite repeated dire news reports that Omicron was rapidly spreading in New York.  Locals and visitors – mostly masked, with children in tow – came to see the lit-up Christmas tree and holiday window displays on 5^th Avenue, yet the usual high energy of the event this year was subdued.  

“Rockettes Christmas Spectacular” closed after a short run. Other Broadway shows cancelled performances and several sports events shut down. This year the giant snowflake overhanging 57^th Street and 5^th Avenue was missing, instead the image of a Christmas tree, several stories high, stood out on a nearby Vuitton building corner. On several 5^th Avenue sidewalks several holiday trees glistening with gold, were placed alongside a large yellow toy taxi and oversized gift wrapped boxes.

The promenade of Rockefeller Center, a pedestrian favorite because of its spectacular view of the tree and ice rink, was unusually crowded considering pandemic warnings, while the back area closest to the standing tree was completely closed off for security reasons after a decorated tree a few blocks away was set aflame by a vandal. Opposite the plaza across the street by Saks Fifth Avenue holiday windows, children were happy to meet visiting Mini-Mouse and Grinch (who normally roam Times Square), as they viewed “city children-inspired theme” featuring their dreams of games, getaway and carnival.  

A few blocks up, the theme for the extravagant Bonwit Teller windows was “The Present Moment.” Around the corner at “Playfulness Moment” window, life-like cats and a few mice (some on fire escapes), seemed to be exploring a colorful city wonderland  as amused passers-by watched, while several others bought hats and scarves from a street vendor to ward off the chilly breeze.

Among the hustle and bustle, there was a missing holiday presence – not so obvious to all but noticed by some New Yorkers: the absence of Salvation Army next to their red kettles, ringing bells for donations to the needy. The city Santas spreading holiday cheer were also missing, reportedly due to a Santa shortage. 

According to the experts the pandemic won’t be over anytime soon. It will stay with us for several years, and we must learn to live with it. A short distance away, a “Rapid Covid Test” van was standing trailed by a long line as a reminder. 

When Steve Wasserman, who now heads Heyday Books in Berkeley, left New York City to head the Los Angeles Times Book Review, author Joan Didion gave him some advice. Over a dinner at Elio’s on the Upper East Side, he recalls, “Joan gripped my forearm with steel in her fingers, and said: ‘Just review the good books.’ I laughed, and she said, ‘No, I mean something quite specific: Just because a writer lives in zip code 90210 doesn’t mean you have to pay attention. If the work is good, of course, but if it’s second-rate, or worse, don’t give it the time of day. To do otherwise is a formula for mediocrity, for the provincialization of the Review.‘”

Joan Didion died today of Parkinson’s Disease. She was the author of a score of books, including Slouching Towards Bethelehem in 1968. She won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. Steve wrote an appreciation of her at the San Francisco Examiner here. An excerpt:

“Joan’s death at age 87 leaves a gaping hole in the landscape of California letters. There really was no one like her. She was, in a way, the least Californian of our state’s writers, if by ‘Californian’ we mean ever-sunny, full of optimism, wed to the conceit that history is weightless. Didion cast an unsparing eye on everything she examined. Her aesthetic, perhaps shaped as much by her early stint as a writer for William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative National Review as it was by the dessiccated temperament of her Yankee forebears, was chilly, unforgiving, hard. She reminded one nothing so much as Chauncey Gardiner, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There, who liked ‘to watch.’”

“She was always the consummate spectator, refusing to taint her stories with any personal intervention,” he wrote. “And yet, and yet. For all her enviable craftsmanship and her gimlet eye, Joan’s work often risked ethical failure. She was so good that often her readers didn’t tumble to the sleight-of-hand that was baked into the DNA of her peerless sentences. The pixie dust she cast on the subjects she covered was dazzling, so much so that you often found yourself succumbing to the spell of her style, much as a genius cinematographer stacks the deck by shooting wonderfully and compellingly composed pictures. When the movie ends, you find yourself unable to look at the world — at least for a time — in any other way. Joan’s style was pitch-perfect. The framing was always impeccable and her skill so good that you tended not even to notice that she’d had her thumb on the scale. She often mistook her own sensibility for a general condition. The Wall Street Journal got it right when a review of her book on the atrocities of El Salvador was headlined: ‘A Migraine in Search of a Revolution.”

“Joan was something of a forensic writer, looking askance at the foibles of people, unrivaled in her understanding of the use and abuse of the English language. No one was better at deconstructing the syntax of power inherent in bureaucratic idiom. She understood with exemplary acuity how entire ideologies are concealed in the warp and woof of everyday language. She knew the devil was in the details. Almost every piece she wrote is an autopsy of the mentalities that have shaped American culture. Unusual for a writer who started out as a supporter of Barry Goldwater, Didion drifted leftward, always wanting, as she once remarked admiringly of former Ramparts editor Robert Scheer’s journalism, to know who does the screwing and who gets screwed.”

Read the rest here.

Tomasz Różycki and I met a decade ago, at a New York City party celebrating the publication of my An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. He was an up-and-coming poet then, a new generation, and I was told he was someone to watch.

I had met Poland’s greatest living poet, Adam Zagajewski, during my first visit to Kraków in 2008; he became an important reason to return to that jewel-box city. But I didn’t know of the connection between the two poets until The Los Angeles Review of Books‘ quarterly review (that’s right, the LARB has a print edition) published this marvelous homage: “Dark Coat: On Adam Zagajewski,” remembering the poet’s life and work before his shocking and unexpected death on March 21. The artistic reason for the tribute: the younger poet writes that “poetry is, finally, a mourning of each death, of every vanishing, witness to the ‘fury of disappearance.'” In this case prose will serve the cause as well.

According to Tomasz Różycki: “He followed his own path, and at times it seemed that he had been abandoned there, alone.” In writing a retrospective, he has written the best introduction to Adam Zagajewski and his work I know. (The translation of the essay, by the way, is by the poet Mira Rosenthal, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford.)

A couple excerpts, the first one discussing Adam Zagajewski’s renowned poem, “To Go to Lvov”:

It was a very concrete and Polish kind of poetry, as much as Polish recollections of a lost Lwów can be — and, at the same time, it was detached from our cursed Polish problems. It was different, worldly, free. Not because the poems were detached from reality, as Polish critics often accused them of being, no — they were about reality itself, since our reality is twofold, if only because of the fact that it’s made up of the visible and the invisible and, in addition, to quote Hegel, it is threatened by the “fury of disappearance” and, therefore, only accessible to us within the blink of an eye. Moreover, poetry is the awareness of this vanishing, an elegy, a farewell to reality, a moment of mourning, necessary for us to be able to cope with the loss and to deal with the overabundance of memory. 

I’m writing this because some things only happen once in a lifetime; we can pass them over in silence, but sooner or later that silence will overwhelm and engulf us. We can try to be thankful for them, however ineptly, but that gratitude by its very nature will be less than the gift we received. It’s helpful to gain distance from something in order to describe it. It’s even better if the object of description has been frozen, though that’s not possible in this case, even with the help of such a fixative as death.

***

His poetry seemed different from anything I had read before, especially from contemporary poetry, which was marked by some king of gloomy heaviness, some kind of dry, wooden palpitation of language. Within Adam’s poetry, there was breath, space; it was not cramped, but exploding with light. Within it, there was no confusion or great toil; it was exactly as he had written — “a search for radiance.” And it was a poetry of joy — the pure joy of being, of admiration for beauty and the world, of being a child in the world. Joy like the joy of swimming in the warm Mediterranean Sea. He understood and wrote about the fact that, in the same sea, refugees were drowning, just as he understood and wrote about the fact that Lwów, a city that he loved dearly, was the site of so much death just before his birth. “A poem grows on contradictions, but it can’t grow over them,” as he wrote in “Ode to Plurality.” His poetry did not absolve him of anything, but it took on what poetry has taken on from the beginning: a celebration of human existence, of human life. The world is sometimes difficult and unbearable, but it also deserves to be praised, life deserves our gratitude and good that is more powerful than evil. Czesław Miłosz adored how Adam’s poems were so “intoxicated with the world.” His poems are often ecstatic, orgasmic, starting with the concrete and transforming into a hymn — as in, among many others, the poem “Lava,” which could be seen as an attempt to answer Adorno’s famous assertion that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. So many poems tell of flashes of happiness — of those times, as Schopenhauer says, when “we are, for that moment, unburdened of the base press of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the workhouse of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still,” and which Nietzsche described with the phrase “eternal return.” Adam’s poetry is slight and piercing at the same time, and when I read it, I get the sensation that the calendar has made some kind of mistake again and forgot to note the holiday that the poem announces.

The Christmas season brings interesting surprises through the mail – and this year was no exception. Dana Gioia‘s new monograph Psalms and Lament for Los Angeles arrived in my mailbox, letterpress and hand-bound by Providence Press in Ojai. The press was founded by the celebrated printer Norman Clayton, who publishes some of the special editions for the Book Club of California. It’s not the poet and the publishers’ first collaboration: Providence printed The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz in 2018 as its first-ever project. (The book is now in its second printing.)

The three long poems in Psalms and Lament represent Dana’s “late style,” composed between 2018 and 2020 – the first two before the pandemic, the last one, “Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels,” praising his Latino origins (“a mutt of mestizo and mezzogiorno/The seed of exiles and violent men”), at the height of coronavirus.

They were previously published in The Hudson Review, Rattle, and First Things.

Here’s the first part of the second poem in the monograph, “Psalm of the Heights,” describing his native Los Angeles:

PSALM OF THE HEIGHTS

I.

You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles
Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.

Up in the heights of the Hollywood Hills
You can mute the sounds and find perspective.

The pulsing anger of the traffic dissipates,
And our swank unmanageable metropolis 

Dissolves with all its signage and its sewage— 
Until only the radiance remains. 

That’s when the City of Angels appears,
Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.    

The boulevards unfold in brilliant lines.
The freeways flow like shining rivers. 

The moving lights stretch into vast
And secret shapes, invisible at street level.

At the horizon, the city rises into sky,
Our demi-galaxy brighter than the zodiac.

The dedication for the monograph is to his friend Scott Timberg, the gifted Palo Alto-born journalist, culture writer, and editor who committed suicide two years ago this month – all too young at 50. He is best known for his 2008 book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press). You can read a retrospective of the writer over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here, or on the Book Haven here and here.

Here’s some exciting news: Dana Gioia’s dedication precedes another announcement: my publisher Heyday in Berkeley, Steve Wasserman, will be publishing Scott Timberg’s essays, in a collection called Boom Times at the End of the World. I’m looking forward to it. Hope you are, too.

Purgatory seems to be on people’s minds this year – we have several new translations of Dante’s canticle to consider in time for Christmas. Fortunately, we have Dantista Robert Pogue Harrison to do the considering for us in the current holiday issue of the New York Review of Books.

Your choices: a Graywolf Purgatorio translated by poet Mary Jo Bang, another translation by Scottish poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black (with a preface by Harrison himself – read about it here) from New York Review Books, and finally After Dante: Poets in Purgatory: Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue and published by Arc in Yorkshire. Harrison gives especial attention to a different kind of translation, from words into art: Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno by the late Rachel Owen, edited by David Bowe and published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Why the abundance of translations? “Given Merwin’s excellent version of Purgatorio, plus dozens of others in English, the only reason to undertake yet another translation of it—or any other part of The Divine Comedy, for that matter—is love. ‘Love makes me speak,’ as Dante said…”

Purgatorio is the most approachable of the three canticles of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has always been my favorite. As Harrison points out, it is the only one of the three in which time matters. And effort matters, too – its inhabitants are all in the struggle to work out their own salvation.

But there’s more. As Harrison writes: “Whereas Hell has no stars, sunsets, or seashores, on Mount Purgatory we are once again under the open sky, where the sun’s movement marks the hours and seasons; where night gives birth to day, and day dies into night; and where the shimmering seas of the southern hemisphere surround the island from all sides.”

“A palpable terraphilia informs the canticle. We find here a love of the planet and everything that makes it our cosmic home—its rivers, valleys, seas, and mountains; its diurnal cycles; its ever-changing light and color; and above all its celestial dome. Not to mention its plant life. After Dante enters the earthly paradise of Eden at the summit of Mount Purgatory, the fair Matelda informs him that he has risen above Earth’s zone of meteorological disturbance. The gentle breeze that graces the ancient forest of Eden comes, she says, from the heavenly spheres as they move from east to west around the planet. This rotational wind scatters seeds from the flora of that primal place to the rest of the planet below: ‘And then the Earth, according to its character/and where it is beneath the heavens, conceives/and by its various powers bears various plants.’ In sum, all the plant life of our burgeoning, self-renewing biosphere has Edenic origins.”

Harrison suggests that Dante had roamed Hell as an insomniac, and that his nightmarish visions were the result of extended sleep deprivation. “

In Purgatory he and Virgil are under strict orders from the angelic guardians of the realm to halt their ascent of the mountain toward evening and, at least in Dante’s case, to sleep at night. On each of the three nights he spends on Mount Purgatory, Dante has vivid dreams, and with each new dawn he wakes up restored.

“Indeed, restoration marks the very purpose of the purgatorial process. While Hell figures as a great gash in the body of Earth, where all the vices that disfigure the soul and human history fester, Purgatory is where the slow, laborious work of healing takes place. Dante, whose pilgrim arrives on the realm’s shores on Easter morning, calls it the soul’s rebeautification (“Creature who cleanse yourself/to go back beautiful to your Creator,” he addresses a penitent in Purgatorio 16). The penitential ordeals of Dante’s Purgatory—many of them as harsh as the punishments in Hell—are intended to restore the prelapsarian probity of human nature and prepare the way for a return to Eden, which Dante locates at the mountain’s summit. Dante himself will enter Eden at the end of his journey through the second realm, and so will all the other penitents after completing their purgation. From that garden of recovered innocence they too, like Dante’s pilgrim, will ascend into heaven.”

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript: Here’s poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black talking about his translation with NYRB’s Edwin Frank. It’s fascinating.