AL FILREIS:
Hey Poem Talk, people. This is Al Filreis. In the episode, you're about to hear number 171 in our monthly series. Our discussion of Eugene Ostashevsky's poems take us to the great Ostashevsky in topics of knowledge otherwise somehow alienated, of language that embodies a kind of violence, of the difference between knowing and saying no and their similarities, and his sincere and no doubt Russian absurdist influenced plea to "teach us love, teach us love, teach us love, even though we are wholly unfamiliar with it." Because the episode was recorded before the February 24, 2022, Russian military invasion of Ukraine, listeners will have to reckon for themselves the many places in our conversation when we would no doubt have commented on the war and on the role of the avant-garde Russian-American poet in relation to Russian cultures, historical and contemporary. So now on to the show. I'm Al Filreis, and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem.

We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities and, we hope, gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound Archive writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today, I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House and our Arts Cafe in person by Kevin Platt, professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, right here at Penn, where he directs the periodic Russian American Poetry Translation Symposium called 'Your Language My Ear', whose scholarly work focuses on Russian poetry, culture and history, and who is the author or editor of several books, the most recent of which is 'Global Russian Cultures'. And whose book 'Border Conditions about Russian Culture in Latvia' is, as we record this episode in the final stages of preparation. And by Ahmad Almallah, a poet whose amazing first book of poems, 'Bitter English', was published by the University of Chicago Press, who is also a specialist in Arabic poetry and has written a book about Arabic love poetry called 'Pure and Sensual', who is a member of the faculty here at Penn in the Creative Writing Program at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and will soon have a major essay- a reflection on teaching Arabic poetry in the US and other matters coming out in poetry magazine.

And by Matvei Yankelevich. Poet, translator, and editor whose publications include 'Take a Breath, al', 'Some Worlds for Dr Vogt'. Alpha Donut, 'Boris by the Sea'. 'Today I Wrote Nothing- the Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms', and most recently, the 'Chapbooks from a Winter Notebook' and 'Dead Winter', and who, back in the 90s, co-founded the now legendary 'Ugly Duckling Press', producing a variety of books, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides. Co-edited 'Six by Six Magazine' and curated the Eastern European Poet Series, and who teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Matvei, so good to have you back here in Philadelphia. Actually, have you been much to the Writers' House?

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
A few times. Yeah, I'm sure I've been here with Eugene. Actually. I think we did a reading or some kind of talk. And then here for 'Your Language My Ear' a few times. Sometimes in this space.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. A bunch of times. And we were on Poem Talk together. But that was in Boston.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Yes. I joined you in Boston in the Boston studios of Poem Talk to talk about Ann Lauterbach at that time.

AL FILREIS:
That was great. That was a great episode. Fantastic. Kevin, good to see you.

KEVIN PLATT:
Super to see you, Al.

AL FILREIS:
Let the record show that Kevin over the holiday has decided to go Trotsky on us with a nice big beard.

KEVIN PLATT:
I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

AL FILREIS:
Am I the first one to say, look like, you look like Trotsky? I think so.

KEVIN PLATT:
You know, people come up with different things. I've been given Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev. I think that with the waxed mustache like this, it's actually closer to Stolypin, the minister of the interior, who was assassinated in an opera in 1911. But...

AL FILREIS:
And you respect the more obscure comparisons, I take it.

KEVIN PLATT:
Absolutely.

AL FILREIS:
And then there was Freud. Somebody on Facebook said.

KEVIN PLATT:
Alright. Yeah, a mix of Trotsky and Freud.

AL FILREIS:
That was me.

KEVIN PLATT:
Was that you? Yes.

AL FILREIS:
Ahmad, congratulations on the poetry piece. Do you have a one-sentence description of the thing? You just finished it. It's hot.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I don't. I read the whole thing when it comes out.

AL FILREIS:
OK, fair enough. Well, today, the four of us have gathered here to talk about two poems by Eugene Ostashevsky. They are the 'Anatomy of Monotony,' and 'Language.' Those are the titles of the two poems, and they were performed together and recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on July 26, 2005. The entire reading is available at PennSound. Ostashevsky page, along with a treasure trove of Ostashevsky-ana. I just made that up, but it is a treasure trove. The two poems that we've chosen appear in print in 2000, the year 2000 in the chapbook, 'The Unraveller Seasons', published by Eugene Timmerman in San Francisco. So here now is Eugene Ostashevsky, performing the 'Anatomy of Monotony' and 'Language.'

EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY:
"There were two of us there me and despair. I resembled a salad that resembled a mallard. It resembled a parrot that resembled a pirate, that resembled an island, that resembled an eyelid that in its turn resembled something either assembled or disassembled. We watched my life retreat ebb and diminish, and I said in my incomplete English, should I bulge my cheeks with silence? Should I devolve to a fish or maybe a clam, since I already am invertebrate? Despair said, Prate, don't prate, no one will hear. I've crammed 1,085 roller skates into the collective ear. I said, "Excuse me. despair, are you really there?" When we banter, are we like the poles of a centaur or are you totally other than me? If one woman wed us, would it be bigamy? Despair said, "It would be anomie." I said, "You just said that because it rhymes. You're only an echo! You don't really exist. I can do anything! I can be all that I can be! Despair showed me its tallow fangs. Despair showed me its fellow clangs. Despair showed me its shallow tanks. It showed me its trunks, it showed me its yanks. It must have thought it pointless to argue. 

Language
You look like a soup, you eat like a meal. Around your various figures steal. They steal. They wave their arms, they wave their legs. They eat stir-fried dogs. They pop eyeballs with wooden pegs. In smashed corpses. They burned corpses. No scent worse is. You move them. You approve them. Illusionist you remove them. What is death? What is pain? What is what You do not Explain. Oh, breath. We say to you, Teach us love. Teach us love. Teach us love. Teach us love. You say, Know reads No. That's all you know. That's all you do not know. We say, Teach us love. Teach us love. Teach us love. Teach us love. We are wholly unfamiliar with it."

AL FILREIS:
Matvei, you were smiling the whole time. So tonally, these are a pair. They may be about content-wise, different things, but tonally they're a pair. What is that tone? Why were you smiling?

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Well, I don't know. It's it's no matter how long I've known Eugene's work. And I think some of these poems were included also in Literature, which came out with UDP in the early 2000.

AL FILREIS:
So you edited, they published it.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Yeah. So they weren't just in the chapbooks. They came out again. And these are chapbooks that I've had in my collection, which are pretty, I guess there are 100 copies of each. And anyway, this stuff never fails to elicit a certain smile or laugh for me. And partly I think there might be a certain understanding of Eugene's humor and also its literary lineage that particularly gets me since we both worked on translating the Oberiu poets, and a lot of the conversations we've had since the late 90s about those poets, 'Daniil Kharms,' 'Alexander Vvedensky' in particular, are about things that actually merge in these poem's techniques, illusions, kind of ironic references, not to mention the sort of immigrant perspective on language which we both share and we've talked about quite a lot. So...

AL FILREIS:
So, a smile of familiar appreciation and I know that voice. The voice, it's a voice you know well.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
And it's really funny. It's performance is over the top.

AL FILREIS:
So, let's go to over-the-top Ahmad, over-the-top performance. You too were smiling.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Well I mean they are... There is all this kind of language play that is happening throughout the two poems. 'The Anatomy of Monogamy' even interrupts the play with the meta-poetic gesture of asking about the rhymes. But what amazed me about the two pieces that by the end, like it's dead serious. So, it's like...

AL FILREIS:
Teach us love, teach us love.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah, I thought that was that was really we are wholly unfamiliar with it. So I really like this kind of playfulness that you have to kinda follow throughout till the very end of the poem. It felt like this is a very difficult kind of poem to pull off. And in both instances, there were performed and to the very last gesture of seriousness and success, I think, for a poetic text.

AL FILREIS:
Kevin, Matvei referred to a lineage he was hearing in this voice and in this tone. Can you take that up and talk a little bit about what's in the background of this kind of voice, this kind of rhetoric, poetic rhetoric?

KEVIN PLATT:
Well, you know, Matvei, first of all, pointed to the Russian absurdist poets that both Eugene and Matvei have translated, and they translated together some things. And there's definitely that taste for absurdism. And it also should be said that Eugene has been thinking about these questions. Questions of language philosophy since doing his PhD at Stanford. And it would be easy to assimilate this, these were written in the 1990s to kind of a sort of a postmodern stance towards language, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's totally wrong, I think, to do that, he's much closer.

AL FILREIS:
...To us critically to.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah. He's much closer to the Oberiu poets or to other members of the Russian avant-garde who were invested in this idea that if you deform language enough, that reality is going to seep through in a different way, that there's going to be a kind of a magic involved with realigning the way that words relate to the world, which is going to allow them to better, more capaciously somehow allow us to grab hold of the world. And I think that that's what's going on, one of the things which is going on in this poem, you know, teach us love, teach us love, teach us love. We're wholly unfamiliar with it. This hope, somehow that all of these possible identities which are set up in the poem would somehow align if we, like, jiggle them in the right way. He doesn't get us there.

AL FILREIS:
Or repeat them enough.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
So defamiliarize love to the point where we have to freshly think about it.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah, I mean the other like 90s reference that's going as know reads No, which is a reference. It's like a rewriting of know means no, which is another identity tautological statement in English, which is which in the 90s was unable to actually make sense of people's human relations. It's like it's you want know to actually mean no but very often it didn't. It still doesn't. And that was the problem with know means no. And he's playing with that and saying, "Well, we actually have to like somehow figure out how to make this language work in a way which will allow us to grab hold of what's really important death, love, pain, those things." So that's kind of where I am with...

AL FILREIS:
It turns out that language doesn't know.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
It doesn't know, or that's all you know, that's all you do not know. And the whole beginning of that poem is like language is, a it's an illusionist and it's, it also it, you know, it s in itself very much like language. Is this hell that you're in with these, you know, these people poking out your eyeballs and smashing and, like, burning corpses and stuff, which are part of what language both makes happen, approves, hides from view, and so forth. So it's almost this like this hell of language. And then it's like, oh, breath, we say to you, teach us love. Breath is equated here like the you becomes both language and breath that are like equated very Mandelstam and kind of equation. And then to me that's like this also anger at language as Vviedensky and also anger or futurist anger at language. We're gonna break language comes from, you know, because it can't handle what we need, need it to do, which I think is, in this yet we plead with it, you know.

KEVIN PLATT:
Exactly. And we're hoping still that like breath inspiration is going to get us there, but it's not gonna be as easy as it was for keets. Right, it's not that's all, you know. Great, but it's that's all you know and that's all. You don't know too.

AL FILREIS:
It's a bit of a quote from Keats. Yeah. Ahmad mentioned that it's hard to pull this off. And I think that's true. He begins the Anatomy of Monotony with a series of homophonic pairs that cause the absurdity of salad having something to do with mallard and parrot having something to do with pirate, although that works really well 'cause I imagine a parrot on the shoulder of a pirate. Island and eyelid. So starting with Ahmad, how do we deal, how do we hear these homophonic pairs as creating some kind of meaning? Or do they just sit there and don't create meaning? Is there a relationship you think of yourself as an exophonic poet? Right, a poet choosing to write and you're not, you're not writing, mostly you're not writing in Arabic. You're writing in English. So the reference to incomplete English follows from all this play that is the play for four language learning, you know, pretending to be amazed at how salad and mallard go together in English. And I think the idea of referring meta poetically to the my incomplete English makes you think back on the origin of that playfulness.

Does that make any sense?

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I think, yeah, I think that makes sense where these are before, they are words that carry meaning, they're completely new sounds and that is fascinating. They're not only new words, but they're actually sounds that you haven't heard before. They're just jumbles of sounds that are not available in for you from the background that you came from. And that's fascinating, I think. And that's why I think when you hear these new sounds, they also attach a sort of an imaginary meaning to them. And you start thinking sometimes. And this is what I did when I started learning English, is that for a while I learned, for example, be stuck in my head as meaning spoon, and I would go with the spoon, for example. But there was a time when...

AL FILREIS:
Why is that? Is there...

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Because it's such a new sound that I would attach it to an image that belongs to that sound in my head, and that makes it completely something else. So for a while, speaking of something I guess Russian for or a reference to, I read a lot of Russian novels when I came to the United States.

AL FILREIS:
In order to learn English better.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah, yeah, in translation, because I just, you know, I was drawn to Dostoyevsky and that kind of stuff.

KEVIN PLATT:
It happens.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah. And I was reading

KEVIN PLATT:
To learn English from Dostoyevsky.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah. And then when I heard the word spatula, I thought, this must be... This must be the thing that you drink whiskey from. This is the flask.

KEVIN PLATT:
That's awesome.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
It sounds like the tool for drinking alcohol. And I went with it for a while. I thought spatula is the flask for...

KEVIN PLATT:
Serve me up a spatula.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Exactly. I love that.

AL FILREIS:
Matvei, this (CROSSTALKS). I can't wait to turn to you on this because not only do you think about where Ostashevsky is, I mean, he came over here to the US quite early. So English is not, it's a second language, but it's a quite natural at this point when he's writing this. But still, when you read, "And I said in my incomplete English," you know, there's a nod to the freshness of having a second language. Not only that, you're an expert in whatever you're about to say because you work with him on translation. Have you ever translated any of this back into Russian?

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
I have not, but there are translations of Ostashesky's work back into Russian, which is really interesting. And there's a lot of it's difficult work to do that. And some great translators poets have worked with him on that. But I was going to say that there's of course, the language learning. There's a certain kinda outsiderness and a certain kind of provocative aspect to this because the lyric poem in English is associated always with a kind of sense of mother tongue. And there's a lot of bias against writers writing, in a new in an adopted language. And Eugene was 11 when he came here. And he also kind of, I think, embraces his accent and his manner in these performances, especially the early performances. Even now, though, he still does that by slowing down. He's not as loud, but he's actually slower and kind of more methodical. So you get that kind of metronomic quality that you hear in this, in this early work. You hear it in the corpses. The corpses, corpses no scent worse is like that kind of almost mechanical robotic sound.

But I think there's another poem that I remembered that, where he says, he says that he has no native language. It's this. I'll read these four lines. "In my head, I heard melodies. I deformed rhymes, misscanned syllables. But I have no native language. I can't judge, I suspect I write garbage." And this is, you know, like if you're writing in a new language, how do you know whether you're writing garbage or not? And I think that this is part of this thing that's occupied, Eugene, for a long time. I mean, there's which is what do you do without a mother tongue, without a native language where you aren't writing in your so-called native language. I would just add that, there's also this intertextual play not only with other a lot of Russian literature and styles of and with English literature but with the anatomy of melancholy is suggested here, of course, with the Anatomy of Monotony and then despair. But and the Keats, but also so much Russian literature that's hidden from the American reader.

So it's kind of an in-joke or an insider language in a private kind of joke, perhaps, but it does something to the English, which is to absurdity these connections. And the rhymes for me, the rhymes that you were asking Ahmad about are of Vvedensky and function, where you just decide that the content is going to be determined by rhyme rather than the other way around.

AL FILREIS:
That's right. Yeah. Kevin, I one of your main interests as a poetry person, as a scholar of the avant-garde is the potential freedom, counterintuitively, that comes from the claim that I have incomplete English or even more radically, I don't have a native language. Does to the extent that that's true, that one can derive some freedom formal freedom or vocabularistic freedom or a freedom from making sense to the extent that that's true, do you find it here? And is that one of the pleasures that this gives you is this is a particularly these are early poems, and maybe it's less of a factor later.

KEVIN PLATT:
I think it becomes more of a factor later. Like later, Ostashevsky he gets more polyglot. First of all, he goes off and spends a lot of time living in Europe and acquires pretty good French and pretty passable Italian and German. And he starts writing simultaneously in all of those languages and using them to deform one another as well as the Russian. These ones feel pretty much like American poems to me by comparison with his later stuff. The other thing is rap. He was thinking about it a lot in the 1990s, and you can read a lot of these lines as rap lines, but, you know, freedom to write garbage and then to call it good, I think is the thing. It's like you are freed from tastes a little bit, if you like, just admit that you're not gonna submit this to some native language set of functors and do your own thing, which I think is what is part of the key to.

AL FILREIS:
So, it does verge on it's not obscene in any way, but it does verge on tasteless, the comparisons.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah.

EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY:
What is death? What is pain? What is what you do not explain? Oh, breath, we say to you, teach us love, teach us love, teach us love, teach us love. You say, Know reads No. That's all you know. That's all you do not know.

AL FILREIS:
Let's turn to language for a second. So, it's the year 2000 is when the comes out in the chapbook. Although discussion in the US avant-garde of language, language poetry precedes that by some years. But if you hear a poem called 'Language', you begin to think, OK, how meta-poetic is this? But then, Ahmad, they appear at the beginning of that poem, a language. 'You look like a soup and you eat like a meal. Around you various figures steal.' OK, so if he's addressing language, then language is the thing surrounded by figures ominously, who steal and then they steal. They wave their arms. Can we and try to understand, is they sinister? Who are these? Who are these various figures? And what do they have to do with the plaint at the end? The longing for love or wanting to be taught? And is it language still being addressed by the time we get to teach us love? Language teach us love as he still addressing language. What do you do with the they? Sorry to throw this at you.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I just feel that language is one is not a very constructive kind of stance for a poet. Language as something more than one, as something that even even though you're working with your own language, as something you're translating back and forth between yourself is more accurate about the process of writing because there can't be any writing without the process of translation. And as long as we refer to the language as multiple, not as one, then we are closer to the actual process of writing than thinking that it's one and it's one, even with the body that is expressing it, because there is no way that that's possible. And I think the... I think that might be a key to reading the appearance of they. So they steal. And I think it's actually fascinating to have language being referred to as 'they' at the same time.

AL FILREIS:
So Matvei, there's they are causing all kinds of ruckus here. They're waving their arms and they're eating stir-fried dogs. And now we have corpses burned. Some kind of atrocity.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Yeah, I have my interpretation of it is, is actually I mean, I agree totally with Ahmad that there was there's a problem with the singularity of language. But my interpretation of that, they was really more along political lines, that language is a political instrument that is making these kind of, these acts possible. It also is making the poetic act possible, which itself, in Eugene's case, is a kind of transgression from one language, subjectivity into another. And but to me these they, were opposed to the We's. You know, we say to you. So who are the We's? We are left out of language. They are the ones that are operated by language or stealing. Stealing meaning like stealing kind of their around. But he repeats it. So you get both meanings of steal like they might be lurking, and they might be actually thieving something. And to me, this is this hell like they burn corpses no scent worse is which is itself a corruption of the syntax of English. But the fact that you, language, move them, you approve them, illusionist.

You remove them or in other words, you hide them from view to me or you maybe get rid of them altogether. So language is in control. Language is politically potentially violent and so on.

AL FILREIS:
So, I take it you're saying partly that the violence is the cause of the degradation or the reversal of knowledge of language, you know, no sent worse is kind of the result out of that violent derangement.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Yeah. And know reads No. Know reads No, is funny because it's what the immigrant has trouble with in terms of homonyms. How do you know that is like W, why is it? Is it a vowel? Is it not a vowel? What is up with W? What is up with KN? Like? How do you understand silent letters if you come from Russian? So knowledge means negativity unless you understand. Kevin, what happens?

KEVIN PLATT:
I was thinking about what Matvei was saying about violence and language, and I was thinking about some of Bob Perlman's poems from the 70s, where he's doing similar kinds of things, that to what Eugene is doing. The first line, "You look like a soup, you eat like a meal on the second line, it's like an advertising jingle. And it reminds me of some of Perlman's sort of early play with that sort of thing that then suddenly turns out to be about the Vietnam War.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. And I think there's some kind of weird thing with the U there that who is, you know, is it you look like a soup that one eats? Or is the verb eat being no longer transitive? But this kind of intransitive like reversal, is the thing that is eaten. So there's a lot of actually like a lot of meat on that bone, so to speak, like, because the kinds of problems that a learner of English has with the ambiguities of English syntax are right there in those verbs and those U's and et cetera. So...

KEVIN PLATT:
The soup is an alphabet soup, really.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, alphabet soup. And also...

KEVIN PLATT:
It's taking you back to childhood where you were like this poor Russian immigrant looking at his alphabet soup and trying to, like, put it together in words. But the figures, are they inside or around or are they just figures of speech which are in language and running around doing all of this, like, awful work?

AL FILREIS:
Exactly.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
And they're distracting you and they're causing violence. Various figures, rhetorical figures.

KEVIN PLATT:
So, yeah.

AL FILREIS:
If you, so language is being addressed. So you could be language, but it could also be the speaker addressing himself. You move them, you approve them. This is what you, the writer...

KEVIN PLATT:
It could be.

AL FILREIS:
...Does. And if that's right, Ahmad, illusionist calling yourself the speaker calling himself illusionist that's very much in line with what the poet is trying to achieve, to escape from the kind of actual violence that's here. I wanna ask you about that, but I also wanna get to teach us love. Teach us love, because you're the one who said at the beginning that this poem gets kind of serious at the end. So feel free to go there if you want to talk about what he's saying with this repeated refrain.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
What I read for the most part, is language play is the language performing all of this... All of this violence. I didn't think of the they as sort of like a political external forces. I thought the pronouns could be referring to language, whether it's you or they, and they're just the nature of language is can take it from figures of steel and then they steal that kind of associative language, just kicks in, and then the language becomes they and then goes back to you. Now, illusionist, you could be also the language that is being illusionist. And then the interesting is that we say, we say to you. So language is performing all of these kind of tricks. And maybe we say to you, teach us love, teach us love, teach us love.

AL FILREIS:
Meaning, stop with the tricks already. Kevin. What in language or about language caused us to be unfamiliar with love, if that's the case? How did we get to this point? And is that Ostashevsky's point? We are wholly unfamiliar with it because why? Because language has enabled all of this atrocity and violence, or because of all this illusion. Is he trying to strip us clean of that? Assume this is assuming we take the end of the poem seriously.

KEVIN PLATT:
Well, I think we do take the end of the poem seriously. And once again, I think I can only just agree with Ahmad here that it's like the problem is, if language is this very complicated structure full of all kinds of other people's figures that steal our experience from us, that actually are giving us pre-formed know means No that don't actually work. When we actually wanna communicate about love, we don't wanna have to do the protocol. We wanna actually communicate with people and see into their souls. That's what we want to do with language, right?

AL FILREIS:
But language is getting in the way of that.

KEVIN PLATT:
Exactly. Once again, like, it drives me all the way back towards like, the the 20s and 30s. It sounds like a manifesto from that period which Eugene was deeply reading into at this time. And it also like it reminds you of Wittgenstein a bit with language games. Ahmad was saying, and I said, no, we were all reading Wittgenstein in the 1990s too.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Yeah. And the soup is actually like a bear. You reference a little buried harms reference. You know, that's a kinda a constant 1920s language. And soup is a trope in the Oberiu poets. You get that?

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah. But I also kind of like that when we think about poetry, we think about language that saves itself from being language in the sense that it takes language from the familiar, and it defamiliarizes language in a way that we haven't, we experience it as though we're experiencing it for the first time in a way, teach us love, teach us love, teach us love is you know, teach us how to say the poetic thing, not the fucking bullshit.

KEVIN PLATT:
Exactly. Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Do you think, one last question before we do final thoughts. I'm stuck on Kevin's idea. Literary, historical idea, really that at this point he's looking back to the 20s. He's looking back to modernism with its greatest radical hopes. That period. All those manifestos and so forth. Such an interesting move to make at the end of the 90s. I didn't mean for you to give us a literary historical background, although that would be highly recommended that sitting around with Kevin Platt and hearing that. But I'm really asking about what is that. Is it a radicalization? Is it a skipping over the 60s, 50s, and 40s to try to get back to some kind of immaculate modernism that no, right? It's not nostalgic. It's a kind of re-energizing. What is it? How can you generalize about this attitude? There's so many references back here. We have to do something with it.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I can say something about how it seems to have been a part of Eugene's literary evolution since then, too. He has always been searching for a way to get to this direct speech with... In sincere emotion and sincere contact with people to get outside of somehow the figures into your heart. And he's gone through a lot of cycles with this, too. So it's like those persona poems were like at his most ironic, I think, for like a number of years in the 2000 where he was always writing in someone else's voice continuously. Although there are moments in those that are so beautifully poignant that, like the end of the Morris and Pasternak, the philosopher who became a violinist, who would come every Sunday to play first movement love, second movement love and loss, third movement, just loss, which gets me every time. I love it so much. But then he's actually come out the other side of that and his more recent stuff is extraordinarily direct, even though it's written in this polyglot way- the sonnets.

Yeah, the feeling sonnets are really full of feeling. Coming out soon, I think. Yeah...

AL FILREIS:
Feeling is straightforward.

KEVIN PLATT:
Not straightforward, but feeling.

AL FILREIS:
Teach us love.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah. Except that, so here there's that combination. He's got this like ironic wordplay which then ends in this direct speech where like, suddenly the rhymes go away, we're totally unfamiliar with it.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
And it's not just homonymic, it is synonymic. It's the same rhyme, four times in a row. Twice. Look, I was trying to get you to say, but you didn't agree, which is fine. What this gesture means to go back to a previous period? And when I think of that in the Anatomy of Monotony, I think of, should I devolve to a fish? Yes. Or rather, a clam since I already am invertebrate? There is a kind of funny longing to be a simpler being, and I think of the first wave of manifesto-driven modernism as that clearing, as so many of them use the metaphor of clearing the field, wiping out the mountains, getting started over again. And that's the impulse that I'm hearing. And the devolving into a fish sounds like a really good idea for a human poet. Anyway, I'll just throw that out there.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
I mean, I think it's what I'm saying that evolution or devolution is an interesting like also intertextual kind of connection to Mandelstam, especially in the mid-30s dealing with, you know, and poems like 'Lamarck'. He's dealing with evolutionary ideas, but he's also thinking about origins. And he even goes back to early Mandelstam, when the word becomes the seafoam in that poem about Aphrodite. Language kind of devolving and also the idea of the human body itself going back or like tracing this kind of geological also biological moment. And I think there's like a funny hidden reference to that here. But I also see this deflation, this always Ostashevsky and mode at the end of each poem. The deflation into prose, but also the deflation of I guess there was just nowhere to go with this conversation. It was pointless to argue or we're unfamiliar with it. That's partly an Oberiu gesture of moving from building to oblivion like to a nothing at the end, a zero, but also a very Prigov Dmitri Prigov kinda postmodern way of destabilizing formal Russian poetry by adding this final, quippy short, usually and rhythmically on non-matching line that sort of both highlights the formality or the sort of constructed-ness of what preceded, but also deflates the whole poem.

KEVIN PLATT:
It's also very Kharmesian like...

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah, that movement to nothing. You're referring to Daniil Kharms.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah. Daniil Kharms which, who Matvei has translated so brilliantly and Eugene a little bit but that this crazy series of absurd happenings and at the end it's like. But I wasn't interested in that. I went the other way.

AL FILREIS:
It's that deflation and the kind of acknowledgement of a literary device that has occurred that has been played out and emptied.

KEVIN PLATT:
And there we go. We're done.

AL FILREIS:
In this poem, there's a moment where despair says, pray, don't pray. No one will hear. So that's that kind of stop with the BS. But then right afterwards, look what he does. I crammed 1,085 roller skates into the collective ear. Absolutely wild move...

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
After that it's like Mayakovsky.

AL FILREIS:
Devolution of don't pray. Well, look, let's go around for final thoughts. One thing that you meant to say today, but you didn't have a chance to about either of these two poems or about anything. So who wants, who's got a final thought ready? Ahmad.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Yeah. You know, I think Imagistically like the anatomy of monotony. Like, it's it's interesting how it kind of develops into this monster at the end. And you can trace it like, imagistically like it kind of moves from, like, the just pure language play to actually, referring to these, like, creatures that are combination between human and monster or human and animal. And then at the very end, I thought that was very, very smart. I can do anything. I can be all that I can be. And then we get this description of despair becoming this monstrous figure and then we have this kind of, like, end of the conversation gesture. So I thought, like, even imagistically like it starts with this language play, but then the language plays is kind of building into something that you can, you can really imagine if you put your mind to it. And I thought that was really brilliant. I mean, I could imagine like a monstrous figure kind of sitting in front of me and saying, that's it, we're gonna end this conversation.

AL FILREIS:
That's great.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
No more words.

AL FILREIS:
The tallow fangs, the fallow clangs, the callow tanks, and it's yanks. Yanks is a gesture of pulling, but also reference to Americans, I guess I don't know. Kevin, final thought.

KEVIN PLATT:
Oh, I don't have, like, very concrete final thoughts, apart from the fact that I absolutely adore Eugene's poetry. And I think everyone who's listening to this should go out and absorb a bunch more of it. He's gone so far as a poet. These are great, and his later stuff is equally great, and much of it can be purchased online. And I think everyone should go out and support the publishers of that stuff and buy some of these books.

AL FILREIS:
Wonderful. Great final thought, Matvei.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
From what Ahmad would say was saying about. I just was recognizing how this poem really does animate despair. It really does sink in and think about that thing that is both part of you and beside you, and not letting you go further. And that these poems are really funny and silly and performed so in an over-the-top kind of manner. But actually, this poem is really about depression, despair, melancholy, which it implies in the title. But the thing doesn't go away. We might stop talking despair and I, but it doesn't go away. It shows its fangs and I was thinking of that in relationship to the this rhyme-generating thing or the idea of resemblance itself is schematized in that... In that thing. But it resembled this and that resembled that. And it's the rhyming thing about resemblance. It is resemblance, it is rhyme, but then it resembles almost anything. So it's also the despair of not being able to tell any more of this from that.

AL FILREIS:
Nice. Wow. I've saved this idea for my final thoughts because, during final thoughts, nobody gets to rebut. Or maybe it'll happen, but I...

KEVIN PLATT:
Just try something out.

AL FILREIS:
OK, well, I just I had such a strong political reading of language. No scent worse. Is that is the smell of burning corpses. Essentially, it's a reference to mass killing and genocide here. And what is the relationship between language and the problems of language and that outcome? And every time Kevin and others referred to his interest in the pre-World War II, pre-super atrocity moment of modernism with all of its kind of weird hope in starting over freshly and its hope for language. And clearly, language didn't save us from what happened in the 30s and during World War II. So rather than dwell too much on that, I thought I would, just, for my final thought, read a poem, a prose poem published in the Poetry Project in 2017 as follows. And it is very much a political poem. "A certain pirate, a certain pirate had concern for his health, and so he emigrated to Germany. It was there he learned the best technique of effective hand-washing. Germans wash their hands in the following manner which is the best.

First, they take one hand, which can be the left or the right. Here the handler performs a and this word is all one English word discriminationavoidingeffort. Then they take another hand, then using the second hand they wash the first hand, and only then do they use the first hand to wash the second hand. It is never the other way around. That's the technique. That's how they do it in Germany. As a result of this technique, there are very few Germs. There are very few Germs left in Germany." What a fucking brilliant poem about language and possibly about the capacity for atrocity. I'm not sure. And about cleanliness and obsession and Ostashevsky. Wow, the politics is so profound.

KEVIN PLATT:
COVID too.

AL FILREIS:
Yes, it's even a COVID poem.

KEVIN PLATT:
No, oppression.

AL FILREIS:
It's even a Covid poem. Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of 'Gathering Paradise,' which is a chance for you to spread wide your narrow hands to gather a little something really poetically good. To hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world, or the art world, or the essay writing world, or whatever. Matvei, you temporarily forgot about 'Gathering Paradise', but you've had an hour to think about it. Got one?

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
I had an hour to only think about Eugene Ostashevsky. I do recommend a book I read recently of poems translated from Polish by its translator from Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, and published by World Poetry Books. And the author is Jerzy Ficowski, who was a specialist on Bruno Schulz, a favorite of mine. One of the first people to really write, and actually gathered a lot of his letters and drawings before they were published in order to publish them, and also worked on 'Roma Folklore' and 'Jewish Folklore in Poland, and did all sorts of amazing things and was in the resistance. I didn't know anything about Jerzy Ficowski, so I was fascinated. But the poems are awesome, and they have a bit of this absurd humor that we were talking about.

AL FILREIS:
What a great recommendation. Would you spell the last name or try to?

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
I can, I think J-E-R-Z-Y, Jerzy and Ficowski is F-I-C-O-W-S-K-I. And the book that came out recently, 'Everything, I Don't Know.'

AL FILREIS:
Great recommendation. Ahmad Almallah, what do you think?

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
Well, I'm gonna... I'm going to recommend Eugene Ostashevsky. This is the first time that I actually read Eugene's work. And I'm really fascinated by this. And I wanna read a lot, a whole lot more.

AL FILREIS:
So, Kevin, what is the next book that Ahmad should read? What's your recommendation for? Not just for him, but for our audience?

KEVIN PLATT:
Well, I think 'the Feeling Sonnets' is where I would start to that might be suggested. And there is a chapbook which I just noticed is available on Amazon, but there's supposed to be a book coming out and I couldn't figure out who it is that's publishing it with. There are a whole ton of 'Feeling Sonnets'. The chapbook only contains like ten or 15 of them. If you're, if you don't wanna like, go out for a book, there were selections that were published in Granta in 2019, I believe, and somewhere else. So if you look for Ostashevsky and the 'Feeling sonnets', you can get them. But then I would also go back and get literature or 'the Off Center' or...

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
The Off Center.

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
The Off Center. I love that book (CROSSTALKS).

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. So great. So you were into this?

AHMAD ALMALLAH:
I'm very much. I... You should have sent these to me way earlier than this. I love this stuff. This is wonderful. It does remind me of like even earlier stuff that I was writing that I haven't published and I thought maybe nobody would be interested in.

AL FILREIS:
But now you know there's a market for it. Well, I don't know about market, but we're trying to create a market.

KEVIN PLATT:
Yeah, we're working on that.

AL FILREIS:
Kevin Platt, Gather Paradise.

KEVIN PLATT:
Alright, I want to recommend a volume that came out a couple of months ago from Deep Vellum that I was involved with. I know it's shameless self-promotion, but it's not because of me. I was just a translator and there were a bunch of other translators too. It's called 'Verses on the Vanguard- Russian Poetry Today', and it's a collection of a number of pretty experimental poets who have not been previously translated into English. Maria Galina, Ekaterina Simova, Simonova, Ivan Sokolov, Nikita Sungaatov, Alexandra Tsibulya, and Oksana Vassyakina, who has been translated a bit. But many of these others actually are appearing for the first time in English in this book, and it's really fabulous and interesting, quite varied as well in what it's doing with language. Translated by a bunch of wonderful translators Elina Alter, Catherine Ciepiela, Anna Halberstadt, Ainsley Morse, and Valeriya Yermishova, and I translated Simonova for this volume. It was a project sponsored by the PEN America that we did during the first pandemic year, mostly through Zoom contact.

So, I think it's a really cool book. Everyone should get it.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. I have my Matvei gathering Paradise is a reference to a brand new book, 'Dead Winter.' I'm holding it in my hand, and I would like to cede the floor to ask you to read one of the poems. I picked it out. I'll just give it to you. Alright, here it is.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
Thank you, Al. That's great. OK, page, you said 31.

AL FILREIS:
Page 31. Yeah.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
It's a thrill to be here, by the way. And thanks for gathering this...

AL FILREIS:
You came all this way to hang out with us.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
I did. OK, so, yeah. This is a poem from 'Dead Winter', which is a chapbook published by Phonograph just this week, I think, or last week, it came out. And it's a part each of these poems is part of a longer series that is called 'From a Winter Notebook', or that is a growing or ongoing series. You can cut all that out if you like. "Had I your hands, I'd give up my ambitions. What matters now that far away you think of nothing but what's close at hand. To win your pity that it can grew to mercy. Is my burden. To speak it burdens others. This posture gets the worst of me. The better to walk your mile in my shoes and get nowhere. Somewhere winds a clock. I hear its grinding gears. Its bells in empty tower of my chest say, ancestors. They'll sigh, alright. Drink until insight comes or sleep. What's liquid must pour out and vessel empty of what memories a friend to lend a hand. Penitent, gloveless, sweeping snow from our last winter's windshield."

AL FILREIS:
Lovely. That's from 'Dead Winter'. Just out. Thank you so much. Well, that's all the devolving into clams we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk. The Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Poetry Foundation. Poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guests, Kevin Platt, Matvei Yankelevich, and Ahmed Almallah, and to Poem Talks director and engineer today, Zach Carduner, and to Poem Talks editor. The same amazing got his work cut out for him, Zach Carduner and a shout out to Nathan and Elizabeth Light for their generous support of Poem Talk. This is Al Filreis, and I hope you'll join us for another episode of Poem Talk.