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Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Don Selby & Diane Boller
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Katie Ford's Poetry Month Pick, April 20, 2009

from "Poems for Blok"
by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941)
translated by Elaine Feinstein*

            5

At home in Moscow—where the domes are burning,
at home in Moscow—in the sound of bells,
where I live the tombs—in their rows are standing
and in them Tsaritsas—are asleep and Tsars.

And you don’t know how—at dawn the Kremlin is
the easiest place to—breathe in the whole wide earth
and you don’t know when—dawn reaches the Kremlin
I pray to you until—the next day comes

and I go with you—by your river Neva
even while beside—the Moscow river
I am standing here—with my head lowered
and the line of street lights—sticks fast together.

With my insomnia—I love you wholly.
With my insomnia—I listen for you,
just at the hour throughout—the Kremlin, men
who ring the bells—begin to waken.

Still my river—and your river
still my hand—and your hand
will never join, or not until
one dawn catches up another dawning.

Katie Ford Comments:
Where is Marina Tsvetaeva?

She is ferociously present, resurrected over and over on the page.  She is so close, astonishingly intimate, which is not something that happens with all poets, not even with the masters. This proximity is, of course, a poetic decision that some poets do not make. Instead, they keep their distance, crafting themselves away, far away, from the living ground of the words they write.

This distance is not a definitively bad quality, however, as it enriches our literature to have a variety of styles. Irony, for example, keeps a distance. Whimsy and zaniness, too. Personas in poetry, or the third person point-of-view, or the purely intellectual poem, for example—all of these can (but don’t necessarily) give us a sense that the living poet is at a remove from her work. Who’s there? you can ask a poem. No one, it might reply. Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” comes immediately to mind as an example of this distance and remove, a poem of chilling, harrowing human absence. This is the point of that particular poem.

Such poems can be brilliant, but if I had to choose—and Poetry Daily asked me to choose!—I’d live out my days with a poet of intimacy and heartbreaking human presence. In particular, I’d choose Marina Tsvetaeva. I’d take a poet who hits me in the gut, who makes me feel like poetry is a matter of life, of death, of necessity, urgency, communion, community, love and hate.

In the last year or so, I’ve found myself recommending her to my friends, my students, and other poets…Ilya Kaminsky introduced her to me a while back, writing her name in pen on a paper napkin. It was a time when I was tired of contemporary American poetry, including my own. I get fidgety and annoyed when my writing lacks lyricism, and when I’m stuck inside a prosaic passage of my own, I’ll do anything to find the music to save it from such plodding along. When I’d ask people whether they’d read Tsvetaeva, they say, I haven’t read her, what’s she like?

What’s she like? She’s like a starving lion.

Yet Tsvetaeva seems less talked about among poets and poetry readers than the other Russian poets of the Silver Age—Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok, and Boris Pasternak, to name a few of the giants of that time. These poets came into their literary powers during the first three decades of the 20th century, during which time the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War raged and Stalin came into power. The poets of this time, as you probably know, suffered greatly. Some to their death. Stalin’s deportations, Gulags, famines and executions saw to that.

“We are poets,” Tsvetaeva writes, “which has the sound of outcast.”

“We dare contend with godhead,” she says.

A poet is “the one who altogether refuses Kant.” 

“And yet the one whose traces have always vanished.”

April, as poetry month, seems a good time to “un-vanish” the poets who may have disappeared a little beneath the giant shadows of their contemporaries. I’m hoping the poem here on Poetry Daily will act as a trace of a voice so present her pages seem utterly ghosted. I offer here a bit of her sectioned poem, “Poems for Blok,” with the hope that you might feel her presence and then go find her work in its fuller volumes.

Perhaps you will love her work, and find that she is a poet worth carrying and passing on. If so, you’ll be passing on not only poems, but apparitions.

*Translation of "Poems for Blok, Number 5" © 1971 Elaine Feinstein,
from Selected Poems, by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein.
Reproduced by permission of Elaine Feinstein and Carcanet Press Limited.
All rights reserved.

About Katie Ford:
Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and Colosseum. Colosseum was named a "Best Book of 2008" by Publishers Weekly and among the "Top Ten Poetry Books of 2008" by Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award. 

 

 

 

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