Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Poets writing prose about poetry. Some fundamental contradiction here, and these writings betray their awareness of that fact. They are reluctant, overly insistent, convoluted, self-conscious or polemical. But here and there a sentence or an image arrests the imagination, and they speak like the poets they in fact are. So far I have read Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro, and the ones that still vibrate in me are Lorca (the Duende in art, in one's blood, the bullfight), Pasternak (poetry a sponge, not a fountain; the voice of life, the real), Montale (music) and Shapiro (the independence and unity of poetry). They speak eloquently of my present obsessions. Pasternak in "Some Statements": No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest ...

Razminovenie , or Non-meeting Though I dream all the time of union, cold air aerated by air, coursing water saturated by water, I’ll imagine never meeting you, my imaginary love. Perhaps you are in the apartment above mine, hooked up with my neighbor, cursing softly, and I wish you could read, here, the entry of your voice: fuck . Perhaps you are not so near in time and space. On a planet dried of air or water you survive by reciting poetry from memory, a line of verse— you’re exerting a force equal to the earth’s — a capsule taken, paradoxically, by spitting it out. This is not so ridiculous as some may think, for didn’t Tsvetaeva and Pasternak live like this, not on one planet, but on two hurtling asteroids. We have nothing, Marina wrote Boris, except words. A poet’s boast, carried by neither air nor water. But, oh, we can live for months by howling the medial syllable of razminovenie : no .

from Rachel Polonsky's review "A higher romance" of Catherine Ciepiela's "The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva" Although Pasternak fantasized about travelling to Switzerland with Tsvetaeva to visit the dying Rilke, and there were intermittent urges and unrealized plans to meet over the years, actual encounters played no part in the "love" that their letters mutually proclaim. As Tsvetaeva later wrote to Pasternak, "we have nothing except words." Her shrewd sense of how meeting in person might jeopardize the communion available to them in letters (and dreams) was part of a longstanding philosophy of "non-meeting" ( razminovenie ) with other great poets, which, in its turn, contributed to what Joseph Brodsky calls her retreat into an ever-expanding "sphere of isolation". I, too, have this intuition about meeting great poets, the fear of being disillusioned, but I did not know that there was a "lon...