Mandelstam's arrest photo

Russia is on fire. The unprecedented heat wave in much of the Northern Hemisphere means that temperatures in and around Moscow this summer have reached record highs. On top of that, much of the Russian lands are covered in peat (due to natural vegetation but also bad Soviet agricultural practices) which is now lighting on fire along with the dried-out trees.

Voronezh, a city several hundred miles south of Moscow known for its fertile black earth, is now partially charred (see a photograph here).

I can’t help but think about the concept of poetic justice right now. Here’s why:

Voronezh is the city to which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled to from 1935-1937 after his poem, the “Stalin Epigram,” got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. At first he was crushed (he had even tried committing suicide), but later managed to write some of his most brilliant poems, collected in the “Voronezh Notebooks.” In 1938, he died on the way to a Soviet GULAG (prison or labor camp).

Mandelstam tried to write honestly under a totalitarian regime and was repressed. He almost lost faith in the power and role of poetry (his ironic prophecy before his death: “Only in Russia is poetry respected — it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”). But he still managed to write poems that are now celebrated and translated for their bitterness and their eventual idealism.

Here is one of his Voronezh poems, written in 1935 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin):

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

(Another great one is called “Black Earth” but I can’t find it online).

Voronezh is the place of exile for one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets, where he managed to write despite deprivation.

The Soviet government irresponsibly drained these lands in the 1960s for agriculture and mining.

Now they’re burning.

I’m certainly not insensitive to the tragedies of the raging wildfires (much of my family lives in Moscow), but I just had to point this out. It’s too weird when life and poetry meet.

Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut

There is little more harrowing, more ecstatic or strange, than to find oneself plunged into a world in which words—-which had hitherto been so prized, so steadfast (perhaps), which could be trusted to bubble up to the surface of the mind’s pool in those moments of dire necessity and slip as spindrift from the tongue’s crest to fall, with variable accuracy, upon the ear of a listener, and to often be understood in some half of their intent—-become utterly useless.

Nothing so starkly brings out that grunting, that gesticulating and speechless animal, lying seemingly clothed within language, yet pulling always nakedly the body’s strings beneath, as this.  I am become prehistoric man, stubbled, scrawling hieroglyphs of lamps and computer adapters, modems and cooking pots, among intelligent, effortlessly communicable individuals, gripped again by that frustration, that immediacy of thought and absence of object, which led us first to construct signs to describe our common experience of this place…

For in April—-which is, of course, intolerable—-when the trees (which I have no way to describe save by pointing, so look, if you will, at the trees!) when the trees have gone from bare to a fire of blossom to bare again in a matter of some two weeks, and the trunks and branches rouge slightly with a blush as if of blood from heat returning and days of rain and the tiny leaf buds and every limb upraised and waving—-what word is there between us to describe what moves them?  What sound but the close-cropped mane of every hill a horse’s neck bowed running?

Even with a common tongue their are vast discrepancies in our understanding.  Imagine if I were from Gansu, China, and you from the Great Gold Plains, and we two stood suddenly in an immense and empty whitewashed room with no paper or pen between us, how quickly we would exhaust our conversation.  There is a saying here:  Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut (”as a chicken looks at a cow, as a cow looks at a chicken”).  We would be as two animals, mute, occupying space.  Perhaps we would mumble something unintelligible now and then, gesture with our arms, begin to talk eventually to ourselves, but the rift between us would be impassable.

That is until we began to construct a new system of signs.  For our old ones would be impotent here, in this space bereft of referential objects, from which our strange words could bounce and become illumined to the observer.  Here, however, if I crook my right arm, and splay my fingers perpendicularly to the incline of my forearm, it means the Ga Chi bird will bring a welcome guest.  It means my neck aches; the floor is hard.  And if you distend your stomach, grinning foolishly, stand on your right leg, and wave your left arm in circles above your head, index finger alone extended and pointing down, you are telling me the ornamental rug has been misplaced, and the walls are caving in.

This is all just to say how wonderful, how positively improbable it is, that you have some idea what I mean when I say, “I’ve dropped my notebook”, “My glass is empty”, “I will see you at 5:00″.

Allow yourself to lose yourself, be it at your lamplit desk, or your moon-washed backyard.  Find us out there, mumbling aloud, wandering around, asking to listen.

heart candy.

In preparation for the endless holiday season, New York’s Overlook Press has sent over a copy of Jerry Williams, Ph.D’s newly-released must-buy contemporary break-up poetry playlist:  It’s Not You, It’s Me.  Culled from poems that have consoled him through various states of distraught over the sharper edges of monogamous love, Williams and Overlook have created an anthology certain to provide comfort to purchasers of niche-collections everywhere.  Friend dumped?  Dumped yourself?  Dumping someone and don’t know how to say it in your own words?—

Read more »

Does it matter to you who's behind the pen?

I spent a lot of time on the couch and in front of the TV this past week and not because I’m unemployed (as was the case not so long ago).  A week into being a happy working person again, I catch some mystery thing that “could be meningitis, could be the swine flu, or maybe pneumonia” (thanks, Doc – lots of help).  As I struggled to recover what turned out to be one major asskicker of a flu, my stiff neck always managed to keep the remote just out of reach and I caught a helluva lot of commercials.  Now, it’s been some time since I’ve viewed TV commercials in their natural form (despite my love for the ad world) – like most, I only ever see them because I had to catch something on Hulu or needed to YouTube an ad that was actually hilarious and needed to be watched again.

It’s not a secret or even a great observation to say that advertisers and marketers have borrowed from the art industry.  Billboards, print ads, et cetera – that’s photography and graphic arts – things we can easily still call art in its most commercial form.  Jingles are (let’s not forget) the work of a composer and maybe even a lyricist.  And what about the snazzy slogans and zingy one-liners? Writing good copy takes a true talent with words – encompassing a product or service’s purpose and core in a single sentence is not an easy task.

So if advertising has already “taken” photography and fine arts from the art industry, is it that strange that poetry would one day find itself lurking in the ad world’s dark, dirty cells? Read more »

You don’t have to look too hard to find free fiction online these days, which is great, but it is slightly harder to find free contemporary fiction actually worth reading. So in the spirit of the holidays, here are 12 sources (because 12 seems to be the magic holiday number) for free, quality lit:

1. Featherproof Books‘ free mini-books are stories meant to be downloaded, printed out, and put together origami-style at home. Featherproof offers short stories as well as excerpts from larger works such as Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Amelia Gray’s AM/PM.

2. BlazeVOX is a free online journal of innovative fiction and wide-ranging fields of contemporary poetry. They also offer a catalog of “weird little ebooks,” also available for free.

3. Jillian Ciaccia, a.k.a. thefictionist, offers four volumes of inventive and also slightly trippy short stories–entitled absurdities, peculiarities, Monstrosities, and Curiosities–as either a downloadable PDF or a paperback, signed by thefictionist and bound by hand. Both options are free of charge.

4. Read more »

I examine his square face.  He stands with a single arm outstretched, reaching out for something ever-changing.  With his vacant eyes and through gritted teeth he inquires, “Meep?”

I am of course talking about The Lit Drift Robot who resides about a third of the way down our home page.  If you’re a regular reader, you know that Robot just wants to learn how to love.  “Meep?” he calls!  “Meep?” he asks.  “Meep?” he pleads.  Though the word is unfamiliar to me, judging from his body language and the context of his statement, I can only assume meep to mean “Will you teach me? Will you take me under your wing? Is there hope for me?”

Rather than assume that I interpreted Robot’s statement correctly, I looked up the word meep online.  According to Urban Dictionary, meep is a word of many meanings ranging from “an exclamation akin to ‘ouch’ or ‘uh oh’” to an exclamation that “can be used for any purpose whatsoever” or “sums up everything.”  Its origins are believed to be of The Muppet Show’s Beaker.

Though a versatile word indeed, meep is not as commonly used as… let’s say, blurgh. Unlike the more flexible meep, blurgh has a negative connotation and is often used to express frustration or disdain.  There is no real instance in which you can use the word in a positive manner.  What’s craziest is that when you hear the word blurgh, there’s almost no question as to what it means.  It’s not even really necessary to be a fan of 30 Rock to have a full understanding of its definition and application.

How is it that made-up words are sometimes so much more expressive than the real ones? Read more »

I have a special fondness in my heart for bad poetry. Partly because I’m a terrible poet myself so I can’t help but identify with fellow terrible poets. And also partly because, as I’ve discussed before, I think there’s a lot to be gained by disregarding the rules of “good” writing–how else are you supposed to further your craft if you’re not willing to take risks?

So in the spirit of taking risks, and of totally missing the mark, there’s Very Bad Poetry, an online journal featuring such gems as these: Read more »

Poetry is sort of a curious object for me. I enjoy reading poems. I love spoken word poetry, though I know it’s not for everyone. I love how poetry is about the joy of language, the purity of expression, etc. But I have an utter inability to write it. And often when I’m reading a poem I feel like I’m being confronted with some cryptogram that needs to be decoded, which is fun, sometimes, and then again sometimes not. It can begin to feel more like a math problem than a poem. And feeding my complex still: rarely do I feel so inspired to write fiction as when I am reading a poem.

Am I the only one that feels that way? That is: confused?

Anyway, in light of these thoughts, I thought I’d share some of my favorite poems. Read more »

Ever fall in love with someone and then find out that they’re kind of an ass? Yeah…me too. The first Rilke that ever crossed my hands was Letters to a Young Poet, and I still remember the effect it had on me. I felt as if I had found my soul mate….if he had been in the room (and alive) I would have jumped him on the spot. There is a vibrant grace and poignant longing in every bit of Rilke I have read, and the first elegy of his Duino Elegies has the power to hit some g-spot deep in my heart and bring me to tears. So finding out that he was actually kind of a whiney, narcissistic brat was analogous to finding out as a kid that Santa Claus didn’t really exist.

According to Robert Vilain, the Rilke I’m having an affair with in my head is NOT in fact the same Rilke who inhabited this planet. Real Rilke was “vain, self-pitying, obsessive, narcissistic, snobbish, whining, arrogant, childish, demanding, lachrymose and neurotic, as well as being given to tantrums and panics.” However, apparently my g-spot is not the only one he has been able to hit; even though he was a bit of an ass, Rilke was also “magnetically attractive to a series of women.” 

So what does it mean when you fall in love with someone who isn’t a very nice person? And should you try to separate the artist from the art? And why doesn’t Rilke ever return my phone calls?! Read more »

A familiarly young Wallace Stevens.

I was recently pointed digitally towards an article written by James Longenbach for The Nation—-a publication which appears both as an internet persona and in print—-pertaining to Wallace Stevens, a modernist poet whose work appeared between the years of 1927 and 1972.  Early on, the piece touches upon the seemingly strange duality of Stevens’ pursuits:  The first as the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he performed Surety Law; The second, the voice of reserved understanding we encounter in his poetry, a tone which we might recognize in The Snow Man: Read more »