Word: yevtushenko
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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...
...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 likely to occur, for then he is able to escape time. Yevtushenko in personal poems such as "Let's not..." seemed capable of this transformation...
...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...
FIRST Barry Boys and then Yevtushenko read his well-known, early poem. "The City of Yes and the City of No," a poem heavy with dramatic contrasts between the intensities of anger and passivity. For the authoritarian "City of No", the piano grand slammed assorted dissonant chords; for the permissive "City of Yes" it bubbled in a kind of water music when it was not sneaking, like a villainous lover, up the winding stairs to the tower bedroom. The music and poetry were well co-ordinated. Yevtushenko almost broke into a rasping song. Teasing the audience who knew the poem...
...group of 15 students called the Bijou Singers from Rider College in New Jersey had been sitting attentively on an elevated platform at the back of the stage, behind the piano. As Yevtushenko bellowed the unballasted "Pitching and Rolling," the angelic choir, clad in bell bottoms, backed him up with seastorm voices. They took to hooting and whistling while Yevtushenko writhed in the fog of 20th Century pain, a favorite theme of his. Then the chorus began to chant "push-and-shout, push-and-shout, zig-zag, zig-zag" and they howled an assortment of animal groans. This was done...