Matvei Yankelevich: I am Matvei Yankelevich, and this is PoetryNow. Our culture is so focused on the new and there is, in poetry these days, generally kind of an interest in the political and the social beyond the confines of the personal. Especially overblown sentimentality has been out of style for a long time. (LAUGHS) Since Pound and the Modernists kind of pushed back against the florid Victorian poetry of the late 19th, early 20th century. And I’m interested in this more florid, more decorated style. I didn’t used to be. But I just suddenly got interested in it, as this kind of way of using word order that seems perversely old fashioned. I think part of it is an attempt to get away from even my own preferences and leanings toward a kind of American vernacular. This poem dwells, in a way that modern wisdom would say is unhealthy, on memories of amorous relationships, and kind of the impotency of memory to bring anything back.

(READS POEM)

* * *

A poem from From a Winter Notebook
 
As winter went on, every morning’s spoon of buckwheat honey
resembled more the taste of that isosceles at midpoint
of your weight, its smell brought sweetly back the pendulum-like pace
moving us from windowsill to floor, from floor to bed, and back
to floor, mapping haste’s measure of the room, our smell, but also
meubles, book dust, hanging smoke, an open bottle, everything
connecting now for me, as smells will do, things that don’t connect,
may not be mine in memory, like childhood’s corridors, cats,
other’s bodies, and maybe other minds. All this from the spoon:
sweet, grassy in my nose, cloying almost, bitter on the tongue.
Yet, as clear as memory of pace, of smell, of movement made—
strange: where is the sound of us as we moved with one another

* * *

The absence of sound in the poem was interesting to me in terms of the gaps of memory. Things like book dust, which is hard to say what that smell is, but it’s definitely in my apartment. (LAUGHS) And all these other things that are about time moving through people in space are present but what’s missing is the sound of voices, conversation, the words.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

Yet, as clear as memory of pace, of smell, of movement made— / strange: where is the sound of us as we moved with one another?

I’m interested in seeing if I can write a poem that is both pleasurable and uncomfortable. I’m making jokes with myself, poking at myself saying like, “You think you write this line?” Or, “Isn’t this line terrible?” (LAUGHS) So there is a kind of negotiation of taste. Even reading this poem out loud feels a little strange. But in the end, that’s what’s most motivating for me as a writer, is to put myself in that position.

Katie Klocksin: That was Matvei Yankelevich and his poem “A poem from From a Winter Notebook.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.