Poetry New York

Erik Podhora

Reviewing the Evergreen Reading Series

(Anna Moschovakis & Matvei Yankelevich)

Anna took the stage first and outlined the sequence of events that he and her husband Matvei had came up with in order to “break things up a bit.” She read first from The Blue Book.

“I tend to write long poems.” She said. Indeed, the poem she read was much more like a section from Iovis than The Bridge. Her poetry was full of names, distinctions, nullifications, qualifiers, assumptions and statements about certainty. Inherent in all of the naming was a sense of change in the poem. Even as she repeated some of the same lines, by the time that the line reoccurred, the experience of the same line was foreign. Change may be a quality of the long poem, but the progression from uncertain statements in the poem to statements with no qualifiers or indications of uncertainty was pronounced in Anna’s work. What I liked about this progression is that one was never left hanging in areas of slippery content, nor were there they suspended in a philosophic certainties.

Listening to Anna read makes me think of climbing a hill with no trail. At times the ground is firm, there may even be a tree to grab hold of. But at other times the terrain is so steep and loose that you do slide down a bit. But when you stop sliding, you may or may not be on firm ground again.

Another theme of Anna’s work was sex: the union of two people, two entities, the expectations involved, various degrees of communication and satisfaction, dominance and submission, intimacy, trust, all of these things were brought into play with Anna’s poetics of sex. There were no detectable pedantic tendencies in her writing about sex, she had nothing to say about what it should be. Rather, Anna was much more interested in what it has meant, might mean or can mean. It was a very personal kind of reflection, but one that was accessible and mysterious to the audience.

“Having sex with a new person is like creating a new language.” Anna says (though in the context of second hand information). There is a sense that the questions, successes and failures of language are important to Anna. She includes bookish references to the names one learns for the verb tenses one uses while learning a new language (“progressive” and “perfect”). Furthermore, the act of creation is essential in her work both as a translator and an English language poet.

Matvei took the stage next. He read a poem called “Buttons.” In the poem we find buttons in all their different places: in clothes (stuffed with thread), in a jar together, discarded or simply lost. Also we have a chance to reflect on the symbolism of the button. It holds something together but is useless unless it is bound to another surface (except for the purpose of reflecting on the purpose of the button).

In Matvei’s work we come to see objects in the context of other objects.

“You leave and all I can do is nap.” He says. In the poem we do not find an isolated “me.” We find a “me” through the reflection about “you.” Matvei’s objects exist in a sea of other objects. The things that we begin to have an understanding of, we learn about in terms of their relative distance from something else. Perhaps there is an underlying philosophical assumption about the nature of existence; that unless there is somebody to hear the tree fall in the forest it does not matter if it makes a sound.

But, this kind of reflection is not something one does naturally at one of Matvei’s readings. His constant stream of words at a brisk pace encourages attentiveness to the language. Only by my notes and my experience on the page am I able to take the poem so far away from the experience of hearing it. This to say that there is a kind of astonishing presence in Matvei’s reading. Perhaps the best way to listen is to simply sit still and attend to Matvei and the microphone (and perhaps record the performance for later if one is so inclined).

When Matvei was on his second poem and I was awash in his sea of objects I wondered,

“What are the politics of this poetic sensibility?” (Yes, it’s true, I actually thought those words. I laughed at me too) I was stumped for the longest time. It wasn’t until Matvei read from The Present Work that I found a peephole into this question.

Matvei said he trying to write something about the 20^th century while in Paris when he ran across a quote from Marcel Duchamp,

“It all started with Gustave Courbet…”

In his reading from The Present Work we were bombarded with names of inventions and a perspective that is conscious of the work that goes into producing these inventions. There was a sense that Matvei held a political position that the work that went into building the modern world was an exploitation of the laborers. But, one does not need to hold a political position in order to make this observation. So the work steered away from “political writing” or writing to inspire “political awareness.”

Also while reading from The Present Work, Matvei incorporated a list of people who introduced themselves with a what they call themselves first, what their “job” is second and a concluded with the statement that they write poetry. It seems like this might be a day in the life of an editor for a small press in a city like New York. It is more important for people to give a name and occupation before a vocation. The list included 17 people who all went about introducing themselves the same way. None of them simply came to him and said, “I write poetry” or “I’m a poet.” No, in today’s world we must first have a label and a way of feeding ourselves BEFORE we can talk about what we are called to do in this world. The list is so familiar that it makes the perversity of this situation apparent.

Matvei played with the accepted social norms of today. When the poem calls for help it has to be put “on hold” until a customer service representative can be with it. Also Matvei observes cultural differences,

“Imagine Cartalk on BBC.”

To which the audience chuckled. The idea of two Detroit mechanics taking calls from Brit’s with “car-problems” is quite amusing. The line points to American obsession with the automobile in a very concise way.

Anna returned with poems in conversation with books that tell us about our future. The poem she read was titled “The Human Machine-30 Chances.” The poem imagines a “human machine” through broken, painfully accurate and cold diction. The estimation of a human machine’s speech is accessible to us today because most of us have heard Microsoft Sam or some other automated voice speak to us, most of the time telling us what to do. Anna departs from her inquiry about sex, mentioning instead “smooth intercourse.” The difference between “sex” and “intercourse” may be instructive in Anna’s conception of the human machine. Intercourse sounds like a function, specifically a baby-making function. Sex, on the other hand, has all of the aforementioned implications that Anna is very interested in.

Next the two took the stage together and read from The Drug of Art by Ivan Blatny (a translation project that Anna was involved in). Anna explained that Ivan wrote in multiple languages, so she would read the Czech translation and Matvei would read the English (or the other way around, I can’t remember). Although the reading from this book was brief it was intriguing because we got to hear some very unusual syntax and, for that matter, unusual subject matter.

Matvei read from Today I Wrote Nothing, his translation of Danil Kharms. I had previously read the work in solitude and quiet. So, to measure Matvei’s reading was entertaining to me. He seemed to have the same reaction to “Blue Notebook # 10” that I did. He smiled and turned the page.

The audience got a chance to ask a few questions before the bar noise got unbearably loud. The response that sticks out in my mind is Matvei’s take on what it is to do the work of translation. He said that doing the work he feels like he is doing real work. Further, that he feels relieved that he does not need to do his own creative writing after working for hours on a translation project. Anna said that “everybody should be translating all the time. It is the best way to write and read.” For me, the satisfaction of creative capacities that Matvei said the work of translation achieved framed the project of translation well. It is creative, but with a guided goal of accuracy.  There is a certain care one has for the work of an author one respects and wants to make accessible to more people.

“For us, right now our country is closing down. Translation is a political imperative.”

If there is a politics in this couple’s poetics, it is definitely centered on the work of translation. They see that there is a whole world of literature that is not currently available to monolingual speakers of English. They want to use the tools they have at hand to do work for a common good. They are cultural workers in the truest sense.