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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures, featuring talks by poets, scholars and educators presented by Poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear poets Vera Pavlova from Russia and Valzhyna Mort from Belarus, speaking with the director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, Ilya Kaminsky. Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1981. She has received many awards for her poetry in Europe and made her American debut in 2008 with the collection 'Factory of Tears'. You'll hear Mort describe how the Belarusian language and literary history was nearly eradicated by the policies of the Soviet Union. As part of the effort to revitalize the language, she writes in both Belarusian and English. Vera Pavlova was born in 1963 in Moscow. She was educated in some of Russia's best music schools and has written extensively about music, including her thesis on Shostakovich. Pavlova began writing poetry after the birth of her first daughter. Since then, she has published over a dozen collections of poetry, and her work has been translated into many languages.

In addition to poetry, Pavlova has written four opera librettos and lyrics to two cantatas. We'll hear her read a poem in Russian by Maxim Amelin, as well as some of her own poems. This conversation took place at the Poetry Foundation in October 2012. It begins with Vera Pavlova giving a quick description of the current poetry scene in Russia. Pavlova speaks in Russian and Valzhyna Mort provides the English interpretation.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

I'm very afraid of big words.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

I'm very afraid of conversations about general topics.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

For example, poetry.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Just like Daniil Kharms, I prefer to joke about it. Poetry is just a cupboard.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

But for me, poetry is not the cupboard but my telephone book.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Well, in general, my telephone book consists of phone numbers of poets.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

About ten phone numbers to different taxi drivers and the rest are poets.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

And I would like to talk about all of them.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Because I love all of them.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

It is not true that poets do not like each other. They're jealous of each other and that they are at each others' throats.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

In truth, when two poets see each other on the street, they jump to each other to hug each other.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

And they get to meet each other not only on the streets of Moscow, but at different festivals around the world.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

For example, Valzhyna is sitting in front of me right now…

VERA PAVLOVA:

(LAUGHS).

VALZHYNA MORT:

..and I got to jump up to her and hug her, not only at a festival in Rotterdam, but also on a small island of St Lucia and now here in Chicago.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Now to my list.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Well, first name that starts with letter A, first letter of the alphabet is (UNKNOWN).

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

And another A is a journal, a literary journal (UNKNOWN) and (UNKNOWN) is its main editor.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

And all that an American reader needs is to learn Russian and to buy a subscription to (UNKNOWN).

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

(UNKNOWN) is a Russian equivalent of American magazine Poetry.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

But while Poetry is published monthly, Russian (UNKNOWN) has enough poem, good poems, to be published only four times a year.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

But I can assure you that if you read this magazine, you will get a very good idea of the state of contemporary Russian poetry.

ILYA KAMINSKY:

Could you perhaps tell us about one particular Russian poet that you would like Americans to know more about?

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Can I read the list?

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

I have no time…

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

..to tell about my friends.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

What misery.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

You'll have to invite me again and give me some three, four hours.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

OK. I'm going to start with a poem of Maxim Amelin.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

He's not just my good friend.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

But one of the best contemporary Russian poets.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

He's not just a very talented poet, but he's also a scientist of a sort.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

He has a wide range.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

For example, he has fully translated a book by Catullus of Verona.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

And he really knows Greek and Latin.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

He has also published the famous (UNKNOWN) of the 19th century Duke Khvostov.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Amelin develops an interesting and not very developed area of Russian verse.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

Through having stepped over the Pushkin's head, he turned to the poetry of 18th century.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

He's inspired by (UNKNOWN).

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

And with this highbrow language of the 18th century, he writes about contemporary, relevant Russian issues.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

The poem that I'm going to read addresses the tragic events in a Russian Metro.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

As a result of an explosion at a metro station, 41 people died.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

"The epigraph. Amelian, how dare you write poetry after 9/11? (UNKNOWN)

Every blooming day, save Sundays and holidays when it makes no sense to leave home to go downtown unless for a pressing reason. The subway with unbearable racket. Din squealing, scraping and clanking that grate on eardrums and drill right through them, snatches me up and whisks me as usual at breakneck speed, past the spot between the Avtozavodskaya and (UNKNOWN) stations, the very spot where a friend of mine, not a close friend, a quiet chap, a real family man, a rarity these days, a great drinking companion and a bookworm whose honest work had not brought him a single penny in savings, whose name was (UNKNOWN). Remember that name in your prayers the living, was blown to shreds by a bomb blast on Friday, February six, Anno Domini, 2004 at 8:32 in the morning on the way to work during the rush hour, and the poor man knew not that he was destined to end up 54 days prior to his 43rd birthday, oh the absurd coincidence. In the thick of it, which at times drives me to cursing in anger. Those who without a shadow gave the terrible order and those who knowingly and deliberately carried it out. May they never know peace, neither here nor in the hereafter.

May their bodies enjoy no sleep, neither in cold graves, knowing hot beds, may their souls be punished harshly. And at times I humbly reckon that this is not our lot to grasp the mysterious waves of heaven that in vain we apply to them our earthly yardsticks the birth, life and death of mortals are in the hands of the creator, who calls all the blessed back. May those I love abide by me, and at times dark premonitions overwhelm me. If it turns out that the philosopher of the Common Cause is right and the future resurrection will require exact and measurable evidence. It is available here and in a refutation of bitter claims of some thinkers, it will be possible to prove that after Auschwitz, the Gulag, after the bloodshed of upheavals and wars, after Hiroshima, Baghdad, New York, poems indeed can be written. But what kind? Who knows? Maybe like this one."

ILYA KAMINSKY:

Thank you. It's a powerful piece. And interesting I think it's a poem about a real world, about a real tragedy. And at the same time, it goes through the layers of language going back to the 18th century diction.

In some ways, it reminds of other innovative Russian poets, even Brodsky in 1960s back to the age of (UNKNOWN) Russians to recover a certain diction and to change Russian further, to feel it is a new content. So it's wonderful to hear this poet do it again. Would you perhaps share with us one of your own poems as well, Vera?

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

With pleasure.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

I'm going to read two poems about poetry.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

VALZHYNA MORT:

The first poem measures my chances for immortality. You'll see that by my estimation, they're rather modest.

VERA PAVLOVA:

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Writing down verses, I got a paper cut on my palm. The cut extended my lifeline by nearly one-fourth.

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN).

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

A poem is a voicemail. The poet has stepped out, most likely will not be back. Please leave a message after you hear a gunshot.

ILYA KAMINSKY:

Thank you very much, what a great way to end. Hi, Valzhyna.

VALZHYNA MORT:

Oh, hi.

ILYA KAMINSKY:

If you don't mind speaking to us a little bit about poets perhaps from Belarus whose work you would like to share with an American audience. That would be really wonderful.

VALZHYNA MORT:

Well, to continue with our topic of poetry after sudden events and gunshots, I have to say it is surprising to me that there is any contemporary Belarusian poetry after the history of Belarusian poetry.

While it.. while poets studied writing in medieval ages, kind of religious and state texts, the Belarusian poetry completely disappeared off the page, while Belarus was a part of Polish and Russian empires because Polish and Russia languages were mediums of communication and literature, and only in the late 19th, early 20th century, poets turned back to Belarusian language and started writing a lot and kind of trying to compensate for the centuries of silence. However, Belarus is a very small country and poets are very catchable (CHUCKLES) by their regime. And so when Stalin came to power in the '30s, everybody was captured. And for instance, only in one night, the night of from 19th to the 20th of October in 1937, 34 young poets were shot together. So Belarusian literature had to really embrace that period of social realism and that's the heritage that poets in the '90s and today have to work with. So there is a lot of excitement about reinventing Belarusian poetry or rather just simply inventing it, but also a lot of frustration of working without a long tradition and having to, having a tradition of people who were either killed because they did not compromise themselves or people who were very talented but had to compromise themselves to survive.

So today it's a poetry that develops in all directions. We are located at the cultural crossroads between the West and the East. So there is a lot of influence of Russian poetry, but especially of Silver Age and then Russian avant-gardists, but also Polish poetry and Baltic poetry and West European poetry. And it's also poetry that kind of develops hand in hand with Ukrainian poetry. And while those poets in the earlier 20th century were trying to write the so-called national poem, poets today are more concerned and frustrated over just writing an epic, right, because we have to start from the beginning. So we have to start with Homer. We have to recreate centuries of literature, and a lot of it is done through translating world literature into Belarusian and thus appropriating it instead of writing it out. And while the attitude towards having to correspond to the great epics and to the great canonical authors of the West today is taken more ironically than it was in in the '90s. For instance, a young Belarusian poet (UNKNOWN) writes a poem about creating Homer. I will just read it out. I think it will speak for itself.

"Creating a Homer is less complicated than you might imagine. All you need is exquisite taste and some patience. A pair of scissors. There are still countries almost unknown. Otherwise, there are words with vague meanings, enough beautiful names, and besides abundance of archives and forgotten poets, at least a week at max, half a century will be needed to montage and leave and to form a circle of incurably blind madmen that everybody would take for a school on Rhode or Kias Island. And it would be good to keep it all a secret. But especially the slogan Homer gets only the best, and then everything will work out."

ILYA KAMINSKY:

It's a very interesting parallel. Vera just read for us a poem in Russian. It sounds beautiful in Russian, because it takes ages old techniques and bringing some inter modern relevance. And then the other has just read a poem in Belarusian, which speaks back to tradition and makes it very relevant today, making the new tradition today.

You mention as well, true enough, that there are a lot of important influences on Belarusian poetry. Would you speak perhaps about that as well?

VALZHYNA MORT:

Yes, I think that Belarusian poetry right now is desperately looking for its form that would be its own, not the form of, not this melodic poetic texture borrowed from the Russian Silver Age poetry, but also not the, just the free, for example, American free verse, which is very appealing to some young poets. But they're looking for a form that would let the Belarusian language blossom in it, that would represent the Belarusian language. Because I think we have enough subject, enough topics and subjects to write about. And now the question is, what is the form? What is the mould into which we want to put the subjects? But also sort of how to talk about all of these issues without disturbing the silence that we had about them for centuries. Topics like, for instance, Chernobyl. There is a lot of talk about why Belarusian poets are not writing enough about Chernobyl.

How do you write poems after Chernobyl? And Belarusian poetic response have been mainly with silence because the forms available to Belarusian poets today are the borrowed forms, and we cannot write in them about something that represents such a deep wound of Belarusian people that we can respond only with silence to it. So how do you write about it? What kind of form can talk about it, but not disturb this much needed silence? And I think as a young poet, I would, cannot speak for everybody but as a young poet in Belarus, I turned a lot to the Polish poets and to see what kind of forms they were able to find. And I would like to bring up two names, a Polish poet (UNKNOWN) and Anna Swir. I think Anna Swir is known to American readers. There are her poems in anthologies and also Copper Canyon has a collection of her poems called 'Talking to My Body'. But I want to talk about her poems from a book Building Barricades, because that's a book that describes her experience during World War II. It's a book that took more than 30 years to write, and it took so long for Swir to write about these experiences. I think because she was looking for a proper form to express these experiences and the form that she ended up choosing is very different from Eastern European World War II poetry. It's not, again, it's completely stripped of this poetic texture. And unlike most of Eastern European poetry, it is not formal. It is very prosaic, completely stripped of images and metaphors, which again, are very characteristic of Eastern European poetry. So the poem that I'm going to read is called (SPEAKS POLISH). 'An Ashtray Encrusted With Diamonds." I'm going to read it in Polish, and then I'm going, actually translate it just on the spot, because just to make a point, because the lines, the syntax and the words are so simple that I didn't have to bring a translation.

(SPEAKS POLISH).

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

"She runs to a doctor and screams that her husband was shot in the stomach. She brings him money, she brings him furs, she brings him an ashtray encrusted with diamonds. Doctor did not go to that man who was shot in the stomach. Doctor was afraid to cross the street."

ED HERMAN:

That was Valzhyna Mort reading 'An Ashtray Encrusted With Diamonds' by Polish poet Anna Swir. She concludes the program by reading her own poem 'Factory of Tears,' first in Belarusian and then in English.

VALZHYNA MORT:

I will read a poem called (SPEAKS BELARUSIAN) 'Factory of Tears' in Belarusian and then in English. And I didn't have a chance to read a (UNKNOWN) poem but the form that he pursued was a kind of of a spell. The poems were spells and I think that's something that this poem, I try to do in this form.

(SPEAKS BELARUSIAN).

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

"And once again according to the annual report / the highest productivity results were achieved / by The Factory of Tears. / While the Department of Transportation was braking heels / while the Department of Heart Affairs / was beating hysterically / the Factory of Tears was working night shifts / setting new records even on holidays. / While the Food Refinery Station / was trying to digest another catastrophe / the Factory of Tears adopted a new economically advantageous / technology of recycling the wastes of past -- / memories mostly. / The pictures of the employees of the year / were placed on the Wall of Tears. / I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the heroic Factory of Tears. / I have calluses on my eyes. / I have compound fractures on my cheeks. / I receive my wages with the product I manufacture. / And I'm happy with what I have."

ED HERMAN:

That was Valzhyna Mort, reading her poem 'Factory of Tears'. The conversation with Ilya Kaminsky was recorded at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on October 23rd, 2012, as part of International Poets in Conversation, and was sponsored by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. Valzhyna Mort has four books of poetry in English. Most recently, 'Factory of Tears' and 'Collected Body.' Both are available from Copper Canyon Press. Vera Pavlova has written over a dozen books of poetry in Russian and one book in English titled 'If There is Something to Desire'. Translations of her poems appear in several anthologies, including 'Contemporary Russian Poetry' and 'New European Poets'. You can learn more about Vera Pavlova and Valzhyna Mort and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute by visiting Poetryfoundation.org, where you'll also find articles by and about poets, an online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Harriet blog about poetry, the complete back issues of 'Poetry Magazine' and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to Poetry Lectures from Poetryfoundation.org.