Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From that sad reverie of love. Yevtushenko moved into his surprise for the evening--a surprise courteously announced in the New York Times earlier in the day--a poem he had just composed on the bombing of the office of the cultural impresario Sol Hurok, noted for bringing Soviet talent to the USA for many years. Barry Boys said outright that this was not poetic journalism, but that of course is precisely what it was. Yevtushenko stood smiling and looking very pleased as Boys began the poem. He stood in the glory of his art the news is just what...
...poem about the end of an affair with a young girl came next, read first by Barry Boys and then recited by Yevtushenko. It came across better in Russian, as Yevtushenko brought to it the intensity of his experience. His delivery was perfectly timed and controlled. His arms waved through the air like a swimmer like a discus thrower in slow motion. The words "let's not," fairer sounding in Russian than in English, are repeated throughout the poem. Writing poems for the public arena necessarily affects the poet's style. He will employ the devices and genres that best...
...poet create life in the solitude of his art, he goes through the process all over again on stage: each reading becomes, at best a writing. Life becomes lived at the heightened level of art, just as art is given the breath of life. During his reading of a poem, the poet performer becomes the poem itself. The interaction between the poet and his audience depends on the degree to which the poet is able to become the poem and transmit its being. Paradoxically, it is when the poet is able to forget the audience that this interaction is most...
WHEN YEVTUSHENKO read the poem it seemed to be what we could expect from him what he expects from himself--or at least, what the bosses of the Union of Soviet Writers back across the Berlin Wall (which in another poem, pierces through him) apparently expect of their chief literary export item, who came into world prominence during the post-Stalin thaw. Yevtushenko recited his poems by memory, but this poem, being but a few hours off his poem pad, he read. There was about it the quality of improvisation, complete with jazzy tone changes: bombs to balalaikas. Here...
...finished the poem, his right hand arched upwards into the smoky spotlight air in a mighty gesture of evangelism. Yet the cosmopoet was always stagebound, always in his political poems, judging the audience's response. A nervous sense of commercialism shackled his ascent. The sublime, that mostly mystical state of imaginative transport, eluded him and certainly his audience. And certainly one can not expect to find his highest excellence of art in the nuts and bolts of topical evanescence in the bump and bulk of rush-hour urgency...