Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Xenia

Arkadii Dragomoschenko

Translated from the Russian by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova

[Digital edition in PDF file format]

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In 1990 Sun & Moon Press published the first American translation of the brilliant Soviet poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Description. That book garnered a great deal of attention in the United States and led one critic, Marjorie Perloff, to ponder about the possibility of influence of contemporary Soviet poetry upon American writers. Perloff notes that Dragomoschenko's "is a poem of the body, of the 'skin of sun that turned into the reverse side of touch....' Parody, pastiche, even irony -- these plays a subordinate role to passion, and especially to vision." Writing in The Hungry Mind Review American poet C.D. Wright concluded: "This is poetry. Immodest. Magisterial. More or less impenetrable. The relation of language is potential but not improvisational. The vocabulary for this is happily idiosyncratic.... Description is a radical exercise book for life."

In his new collection, Xenia, Dragomoschenko continues to explore the world about him, a world in which the natural, in which nature is more radical than most psychologically motived and realist-oriented poets have ever recognized it to be. "I spent a life / which no one here ever saw in dreams." As Dragomoschenko makes clear at the very beginning of this stunning and profound work: "We see only what / we see // only what / lets us be ourselves -- / seen."

Visionary that he is, Dragomoschenko allows the whole terrifying universe into his vision: "Yesterday there was still popular down -- but today / the children burned the ox."

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