This all started out with the intent to celebrate Anna Akhmatova’s birthday for seven or twenty-four days, the latter of which is equal to the number of “official” entries in her Poem without a Hero. It also stemmed from noticing that on Facebook Walt Whitman received many, many accolades on his birthday and I got all snarky and said yeah well, who will say anything about Anna Akhmatova’s birthday. Grace said I better remind everyone then. Grace. Fittingly, on or around 23 June, I fell ill. It’s a flu. For a while, couldn’t think nor read but am getting back. Akhmatova was born 23, June 1889 making her 122 years old this year. She was born in the Ukraine out at Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa. I wish I was there. For now, I’m in Ukrainian Village. There's a contradictory or ambivalent impulse in me right now. On the one hand, it would seem now is the era of the memoir. Not that this is a newsflash. As with Facebook itself, just because it happened to a person, next up is to tell the world. Yet, simultaneous to this is a totalizing disappearance of history, and to some extent of the dialogic nature of historical narrative. Or, maybe the collapse of storytelling. At any rate, there does seem more than enough of this is my life. Is it, as is said in The Sheltering Sky that “other people’s dreams are boring?” I thought mine were interesting and everyone else’s dreams were boring. No. I didn't love The Sheltering Sky as a film, but then I dug the part when Paul Bowles appears and utters those lines, lines that never leave me. Lines I carry with me daily. "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
There is a poignant truth in that and I’ve done my share of taking moments for granted. Like, most of the time. Things did not seem so limitless to Akhmatova. The fundamental structure of the statement hinges on death being off at some distance. In this sense, I hope for you dear reader that the Bowles quote is more relevant. For Akhmatova, death was never at a distance, things didn’t seem limitless, yet in her work she established a Classical limitlessness that I cannot apprehend fully. Ever. I’m just getting used to her work. It was about four years ago I really started reading her closely when teaching “Daring Truths” on parrhesia (this is from Fearless Speech, which is now out of print) and poetry as witness. Greg Purcell had Joshua Clover, Simone Muench, and myself up to The St. Mark’s Bookshop Reading at Solas. Simone and I were reading from our collaborations, which have now come to fruition in Disappearing Address.
I would defer to scholars of Ukrainian Literature on many matters. I know not yet the languages necessary to communicate. I do know that Akhmatova’s style combines what seems at first glance to be “easy” reading, syntactically speaking. It is declarative, alive…as “Requiem” opens. This is a different inclusivity than Whitman’s. Conditions were different, true. Completely different. People had to memorize her work in order to preserve it.
No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings –
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
Instead of a Preface
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I answered, “Yes, I can.”
Then, something that looked like a smile passed over
what had once been her face.
What had once been her face. She was there in the lines to try to see her son, who was arrested for being. How did Akhmatova live with Typhus, enduring the executions of lovers, incarceration of her son, and countless other agonies while also producing a poetics that speaks with these agonies but is not beholden to them by any means? And even though it is a dumb question, why aren’t more people reading her now? The radical disjuncture between American Contemporary Poetry and the historical context of imperial political oppression and total war has been cemented by hundreds of well-intentioned academic elites who seek to groom their protégés into some funhouse version of Kasey Kasem meets Norton. Unemployment, racism, speciesism, sexism, sexual oppressions, the Empire – all. The poet doesn’t have to be political, but call me old-fashioned, I recall Mnemosyne. Memory. History. We are killing ourselves. A people without a we. The poet who has no sense of History could use a heavy dose of Akhmatova, and who could not?
