Word: poeme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nearly every poem glistens with irony: the man who is regularly censured at home is not one to go gentle into that good night. Muffled by Soviet bureaucracy, he seethes...
...Smith, a favored translator and friend, read English versions from Nostalgia for the Present, Voznesensky could be glimpsed in the wings, his slight figure rigid with apprehension, as if braced for combat. Following the English readings, Voznesensky moved forward to recite the Russian originals. Among them was a new poem: "Fighting eternal idiocy,/ born to the greatest deeds there are,/ the literature of Russia/ conducts civil...
...alternately playful, mocking and most often sorrowing. As a spotlight shot harshly into his face, his gaze turned inward in painful concentration. Asked why he appeared so pained, Voznesensky explained: "When I read, I repeat the process of creation. I remember my mood when I was writing a poem, as if I had walked into a forest. It is necessary masochism; it means suffering, but I like it." He even welcomes the intrusion of the spotlight. "It blinds me, and I forget about the faces in front of me. I lose all connection with people. I can say everything then...
...describe a peach too perfectly," William Gass has written, "it is the poem that will make your mouth water...while the real peach rots." Photography's grip on reality can seem so compellingly firm and immediate that it is liable to be more persuasive, and pernicious, in its distortions, evasions and half-truths than any other imagemaking medium. Accordingly, the same peach can rot much faster in a photograph than in a painting or poem, and is likely to rot all the more completely. Even the percipient mind that recognizes beauty in all things, and that understands how an artist...
...scientist (Jefferson: A Biography, Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Freedom), wrestles with these problems for 667 pages; the result is a fascinating draw. A self-described "Jeffersonian democrat," Padover exhibits an intimate and often lurid portrait. As an adolescent, Marx embraced Christ, then, in a long hysterical poem, identified himself with Lucifer. During the exhausting research and writing of Das Kapital, he was plagued by illnesses ranging from carbuncles to chronic liver inflammation. Padover shows the father of socialism distracting himself from the pain and humiliation of a carbuncle on the scrotum by quoting pornographic French verse...