Moscow Traffic

A friend posted this amazing photo of Konstantin Lakomov's on Facebook.

Ah yes, I remember it well. An American's first driving lesson in Moscow. My Ukrainian friends, writer-translator Oleg Atbashian and his cousin from Odessa were still drunk the next morning, and we had to be somewhere important at 9 AM.

They were madly popping little silver ball ginsing candies that were supposed to sober you up. Well, they didn't work. A stacatto of sugary little pellets like b-bs or cake decorations rolled across the backseat.

Since I was the only sober one in the crowd, The Cousins Karma-zov handed me the car keys to a seriously beat up rustbucket of a Chevy Nova with no shocks, bumper tied on with bailing wire. Rusted holes in the floor let wind, salt and slush in.

I was just wrapping my mind around a Nova in Moscow when...

Imagine the big Red Square circle, during rush hour: aiiii!!!!

The photo above lies— It shows lines on the road—it shows cars staying in orderly lines. It shows them patiently waiting for the babushka to cross the road.

Not when I was driving—the big roundabout was like driving like the freakin' Indianapolis 500 with bumpercars while avoiding road hazards—potholes the size of toilet bowls. 

No lines on the road—it was a free for all. I was weaving the traffic thread stomping the clutch, and grinding the gears, sliding my rear end with the best of them—just to survive.

Of course, I didn't know the driving rules—or what any of the road signs meant. I watched St Basil's onion domes and the Hippodrome whizz by me three times before I could spin out of the roundabout like so much splattered paint.

Plus, I had two howling Russian backseat drivers—Yevteshenko's favorite American idiom—backseat drivers shouting directions at me in Russian and in Ukrainian. A lotta good that did. My Russian vocabulary included nostrovia and chut-chut!

It was like a scene out of Monty Python' Ministry of Silly Walks on laughing gas. I was so shaken after driving the roundabout, I had to pull over and recover. Have a drink.

The New Zamizdat

OK, I must admit that I'm mesmerized by the new Blogger stats tool—in a shiny packratty sort of way. I am endlessly fascinated that I can now view what pieces are being read—how many readers, and what countries. Positively mind-blowing.

First, writing is a lonely business. Audience is a whole other hemisphere. Then there's the old saw: Who do you write for? Who are your readers? The publish or perish paradigm took off its kid cloves and flexed its knuckles and whistled, "hey kid 'comere!" when blogging was invented. Shades of Marshall McLuhan's Global Village.

I come from the American school of Samizdat or, rather, Tamizdat tradition. No, tamizdat is not a typo—as one well-intending publisher tried to correct one of my posts.

Russian samizdat, from samo- (self) + izdatelstvo (publishing house), from izdat (to publish). Coined facetiously on the model of Gosizdat (State Publishing House). (from AWAD)

Soviet samizdat was a form of illegal self-publishing in a seriously limited edition format, using ten layers of carbon paper plus ten sheets of clean paper—and an upright manual typewriter replete with a print ribbon you had to re-ink by hand. Typing through that many layers of paper was a real bitch. Weak ring finger strength equaled blurred "e"s in final copies. And pity the poor sot who was gifted copy #10—it was a bitch to the tenth power to read.

This is the underground tradition in which Soviet poetry (and secret texts including copies of Bibles) were painstakenly reproduced—and distributed, underground. I met one of Osip Mandelstahm's samizdat publishers in Leningrad, held a fragile copy in my hands—knowing that people risked their lives preserving his poetry. Mandelstahm & Blok's chapbooks still reeked of rancid printer's ink decades later.

Then there was the Leningrad Rock Opera singer Valera (aka Valery / Valeriy) Stupachenko - Валерий Ступаченко (who I did not marry because he loved his dead wife and God more than me—who could compete with that?) Valera treasured his dog-eared carbon-paper Bible. Cherished possessions from a time when religious worship too was illegal.

Letter to Ira Rosenstein

Dear Ira,

Dear friend of a friend

So you ask me if I love life? This is to ask if I also know death—the flip side of the coin. You speak of being held at gunpoint, & question where that passion comes from—if I’d ever had a similar experience because I live in a rural area.

This morning my uncle died, in less than 48 hours I leave for Russia for an unspecified amount of time, and I thought because my uncle tried to sell my grandmother’s house and land out from under her without her permission “for her own good” because I was growing up too wild and untamed (unfit for society’s restrictions) and he made her cry, bullying her with his first-born male energy—that I was somehow exempt from grief.

A son is a form of God in an Irish (or Jewish) family. My grandmother was a strong woman, stronger than most people of any/either sex and I inherited some of that strength and passion—what comes with the territory is the white-hot rage and anger—another socially unacceptable trait. 

I attacked my uncle, a 12-year-old who wanted him dead, and so now he is dead, and I’m surprised to find myself depressed, in a fog, suffering from grief—because I discovered that blood is thicker than intellect or emotion—no matter how disfunctional the family. 

I remember his wife washing my mouth out with soap and sending me to the bedroom for some minor infraction—she was unaware of the deeper mine of wrath and anger below the volatile surface. She labeled me as “child” but perhaps like Athena, I was born fully formed from my grandmother’s brow.

Do not assume that because we grew up in different circumstances that I led a ‘sheltered‘ life; it’s not that cut and dry. 

Growing up rural is a strength that has allowed me refuge from the traumas that followed my family. I’ve faced death both in a global and a personal context. 

No, I have never been held at gunpoint, other than at a roadblock deep in the Guatamalan jungle—with no witnesses. We were lucky and escaped with our lives. 

No, I have never been held at gunpoint, but I watched the campesino sleep with studied indifference as the soldiers practiced kickboxing with uzis slung over their shoulders (a sweet US/Israeli deal—arm the army). 

The other side uses AK-47s. I’ve seen both. 

And in Peru, we came upon the body of the lawyer dumped in front of the Chorillos tunnel in Lima—his crime, a good lawyer for the other side. 

No I cannot shake the larger images of war from my mind, it wasn’t my own life I was worried about, but the perpetual genocides committed by both factions in the name of liberty—for whom? 

The passion is genetic. I am the grand-daughter of a revolutionary. My (IRA) grandfather, while working for the city jail, shipped suitcases of guns from San Francisco to New York to Ireland during the Rebellion, and knew Parnell and Liam Mellows first-hand. 

And was there when India struggled for independence—anything to be on the side opposing the English. When Indians weren’t considered human, not allowed to own land, he sponsored them, bought land under his name for them. 

Recently I came across the engraved invitation from the Indian Consulate dated 1945, inviting my family to the Independence celebration in San Francisco. Another letter from Seamus (James) Mooney, the famous longshoreman and political prisoner of the ‘30s who killed someone during a union riot (I was surprised to hear a lawyer, speaking of ethics, refer back to the Mooney case). 

My grandfather took the city on, suing them and winning (he was his own lawyer) when they discriminated against him, firing him to give his job to someone else. It's down in the lawbooks as a landmark case. Reilly vs SF. To fight is to survive. My family emigrated to America after the Famine, so, genetically speaking, we know no other way than passion to survive.

My second cousin, a mathematician, was whisked off right out of high school to a PO Box address in New Mexico. When she died of cancer, the story came out. Manhattan Project. Fermi Institute. 

In Santa Fe, I stood at the bridge where the Rosenbergs were captured, and shivered in the sunlight—born during this age of Light, I have no choice but to weave the stories. 

Nor could I stop crying at Los Alamos—what we’ve done in the name of an idea. Remember the Bay of Pigs? The scars go deep, and I cannot stop writing about it. Bearing witness—it is this writing I cannot get published because it’s too dark.

Yes, I too am uneasy about the new Russia, as I am about the new Latin America. Now that we’ve had our cake, we (who really do see the other side of the coin) have the audacity to tell them they can’t have it—when we’ve set up the wish list of ultimate attainment to begin with. 

I know we can’t convince the Olegs of the world—they are incapable of seeing out of the trench of their miserable lives, and there’s something in the Slavic character, that will continue to hold them there—the root word “slave” speaks volumes and needs no interpretation. 

Need I say that what I admired in Oleg while we were in the Ukraine evaporated on American soil? Oleg’s limited vision and inability to look inward for root causes is a microcosm of the whole; have we deluded ourselves into thinking that the ideals of communism (vs. anti-capitalism) or another system could overcome some basic human traits?

Of course, no matter the country, it’s the same old story—war between the sexes, only I’m no one’s footstool. I love life because I love my art—and every man, no matter how enlightened, seems to want that space for himself. 

Yes, I learned the term “foetid’ from Durrell’s description of an abortion in the Alexandria Quartet— Brit. spelling, but then Durrell’s Irish, as I am. Did you notice the hidden word “foe”? And having been the victim of men’s basic inconsistencies—love/mysogeny, pregnancies/abortions, I too know first-hand about death, having long-term infections that nearly killed me for my decisions to take life. 

You see, I was the product of a divorce; I saw my mother go crazy (and the suicide attempts that followed), an aunt and drunk husband & co. where violence and poverty is second nature to breathing. I knew better than to leave myself at the mercy of society as a single mother. I’ve been the psych wards and have no intention of becoming an inmate.

I love life because I know first-hand how easy it is to abdicate—the way my 17 year-old cousin did at 4 a.m. in downtown Santa Rosa on a Harley. Maybe drugs were involved. I don’t know. 

But when someone close dies, I am usually there in my dreams with them—and I never want to wake up to hear the news. I dreamed the darkness, the fog, and the red light of my cousin’s death—only we’re not supposed to remember these things during our waking hours. My mother banging on the door to wake me with the news, but I refused to waken, because waking was worse than the nightmare. 

There are things I tell no one, but it comes out in my poetry; sometimes I worry about there being too much death in my work, but I am a witness, and this is my most foetid art!

Eileen Mavorneen! (Rosenstein). What a great name. And what’s she doing with an IRISH first name, pray tell? Is it the Black Puerto Rican, or the Jewish side? 

You know of the Irish kids kidnapped and shipped to the Caribbean by the thousands by the British? This is why most Blacks have Irish in them (or Irish last names) I haven’t time to properly introduce delectable British forms of genocide, but suffice to say, centuries later, they continue to practice on the Irish. 

I know Eileen’s disappointment—looking for the bright ones—and the despair that follows when whole classes show nary a shining star. I wonder why the hell I’m bothering to reach them—but ultimately I have faith. (Faith: something scientifically unproveable). 

Then my faith in humanity is restored when a little 2nd grader, Trevor Yeats (great-grand-nephew to WBY) writes to me: 

“This body is to ask

this question of the mind: 

Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?

Is the hole in the ozone layer to stay as big? 

Tell me, tell me, where is the answer? 

This is the breath, to breathe this air.”

         Trevor Yeats

Well, since my work overtakes me, I’m not so sure I can write in sonnet format It has its own thoughts & forms—probably why I hated poetry as a kid was because it rhymed! 

Well, I’ve got to go miles and miles—to the other side of the earth—before I again sleep—and I still have to pack all this shit, or I’ll weep ere the morning comes, and have a fit of despair, with all this packing to do, or go nowhere at all, except deeper into the mystery. 

Maureen

PS Give my love to Edwin too.

10/91

Letter from Oleg Atbashian

Yan Martsinkevitch, Maureen Hurley & Oleg Atbashian

Maureen,

I created a new font Oleg Leningrad, which is the same Leningrad 24, but with the key map same as Smolensk. So, all the files we had in Smolensk, can be easily converted to Oleg Leningrad with the only problem that S-k is 12, and L-d is only 24. With the LaserWriter you can reduce it on “page setup,” as we did earlier, or use Adobe Type Manager, whatever works better.

What we have in Leningrad, let’s leave in Leningrad, and you should also leave it in your system, along with the new Oleg Leningrad. Convert only Smolensk text. It may be a little confusing, but it’s only a one-time thing.

Me, Oleg Atbashian & Yelena Buyevitch reading from Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost, Cherkassy, Ukraine. 1990-91.

I converted your poems on this disk into Oleg Leningrad, and some of the Am. kids poems translations. You’ll see. All the rest of Smolensk typeface you can convert yourself, like you do it with English fonts.

I also converted all the poems in Am. kids poems file from Draw on into Draw Off, which took me a while, but I still didn’t do this to Am.KIDS-90 file. It’s easy, you can do it yourself. Here’s the instructions:

-Press Power key + J, and you’ll get “Draw.” (let me use PK for Power key.)

-Click on “A” on the Draw menu.

-Click on the poem on the right side, and a box will appear.

-Highlight the poem in the box as usual, cut it by pressing PK + X . It’ll disappear.

(If the poem doesn’t get all on the screen, click on the beginning of it, then scroll the text to the end, press “Shift” and click at the end of the last line. It’ll work).

Then press PK + X .

-Press PK + J , and you’ll be out of “Draw”

-Click on the place you want to paste the poem, and press PK + V (paste).

-Convert the text in Smolensk into Oleg Leningrad.

-That’s it!

Sorry, I’m so busy now, I even have no time to take a shower in many days, especially now, as John leaves and I have to accomplish all the paperwork for my business etc.

I wouldn’t have been so busy, and just send stuff via modem, but — the greatest frustration I had in a while — after we payed money to GlasNet and tried the modem making local calls, the day we were supposed to make our first connection with Moscow, the modem died. To be specific, two microchips died because of some misterious reason, possibly power surges. I couldn’t believe it. I literally spent a whole week running with foam dripping from my lips from place to place trying to get the chips. Finally I got one, but the other one is not found yet. 

We sent a telegram to Paul asking to send the chip here. I hope it’ll be worked out eventually. The whole thing worked as a sudden damb across the river, crashing all of our plans, and stopping many projects for an unspecified period of time. After a week of unresultive galloping around, there occurred a real flood of papers gathering and gathering without any chance to break through to the destination, and no movement. I’m panicking because there’s still so much to be done, and John leaves soon, and there were so many unexpected things that stopped me from accomplishing our project.

I’m so sorry, and I feel really bad because I didn’t have a chance to translate poems yet. After John leaves, I’ll have more time, and poetry book will be the first project I’ll start doing. I hope, modem will eventually start working, and I’ll send you stuff e-mail (from e-male). It’ll look like bullshit because it’ll be in some English font, but after converting it into Oleg Leningrad it’ll be something.

Yan Martsinkevitch, Maureen Hurley, Oleg Atbashian,Yelena Buyevitch—we're being interviewed by a TASS reporter (I think.)  

After the modem broke I felt like I’m trapped, and I shouldn’t have taken to this job at all. It took me a while to feel better. 

You know, the work I’m doing now is also very useful for me as a writer because every day I meet new characters, and I learn a lot about people in a different context than before, and often I meet that kind of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, like high government officials, big plants directors and other types of important guys that wouldn’t have talked to me before. Now they appreciate my skills and knowledge, the things I also had before I started working for an American business person. 

All former Communists are now straight Capitalists wanting to do Big Business and make Big Money (which is actually still better than what they did before). It’s funny to work with them, it turned out that they are just naîve and greedy kids in their souls, which is even touching in a way. As for their cruelty, you know how cruel kids can be without even realizing it — they can kill an animal just from curiosity. 

Actually, “early” Communists that made the revolution were also just kids, ill-bread and not very smart. If you are an ill-bread not very smart kid, and you have good ideas in your heart, you make a good “early” Communist. As soon as you win, you provide a good basis for smart ill-bread kids with bad ideas in their hearts. That’s whom we had at power in the U.S.S.R., after all not very smart kids with good ideas were massacred by bad kids in the 1920-30s. 

Now, as they failed, all these greedy little creatures conform very quickly to the people they persecuted before, because they realized that business will satisfy their greediness much better than the former (ridiculous to a Westerner) privileges in a robbed and hungry country. After the coup when an investigation against the Communist party began, it turned out that feeling their end, the former Communist leaders illegally invested hundreds of millions of the Party money (not always earned legally) into different businesses, and made themselves the directors and managers of half private enterprises. Yepp... Luckily, those are only part of the businesses I work with. Of course, I don’t want to support them, but at the moment I just have to work with the material available, planting good seeds for the future.

The song that we recorded in Santa Rosa provides quite an impression on people who understand music here. Unfortunately, those are not the majority. Artemi Troitski whom I counted on to support our project, became a big shot on the Russian TV. He spends too much time abroad. 

There was also a scandal, when after the coup failed, he promiced publicly on TV to bring best of the world’s rock’n’roll musicians to Moscow to play in the concert to celebrate our freedom. The day was announced, a big stadium was rented, but the concert didn’t happen because nobody of the musicians showed up. 

As you understand, the public wasn’t very excited about this. Artemi got very frustrated, and left for Paris, France, to organize another concert to celebrate our freedom. This time he was a success, but it happened in France, not in the U.S.S.R. I don’t think I shall count on him any more. Now that Ukraine became independent from Russia, it’ll be even more difficult. Still, there are two local companies that said they will consider about sponsorship.

I didn’t ask any questions about your relationships with Valeri. I can’t tell you more than I’ve already said. I just hope everything will be OK, and you will let me know how it is going. I wish you the best of what I can only wish and I want to know that you are happy in the forthcoming New Year.

MERRY CHRISTMOUSE! 

Oleggy

12/91


See also:

Ukrainian Glasnost: An Insider's View (March 28, 1991) Oleg Atbashian, the author of this essay, is a writer from the Ukrainian city of Cherkassy. He came to the United States last October on a private cultural exchange, working with poets and writers in California to translate Russian and Ukrainian poetry. In this essay, he remembers some of the events of 1990 and comments on the changes then taking place in the Ukraine under glasnost.

Note Bene: Ironic, the Soviet poetry translation project was my baby, and traces of me have been expunged, no credit, other than here on my own blog. And yet I diligently credited Oleg for his translations. When Oleg returned to Cherkassy in the summer of 1990, he went back to his wife. On emigrating to America in 1994, Oleg reinvented himself with, not one, but two right wings. But I know where the bodies lie. His wife, Nadia used to send me hate email, she hated living in New York and blamed me for their relocation, and not the fall of the USSR. After 9/11 I heard from Oleg, he was working in the American Express building, next to the Twin Towers, he was running late, missed the train to work, and lived to tell the tale. I wish him well, but we are light years apart from that fateful day I met him in August in Cherkassy. I haven't heard from him since. 

This poem is where it all began.

ROAD TO UMAN

Raw at Creation

As we celebrate another anniversary, old myths resurrect themselves to sustain our passage across the sky.


If poetry is news which stays news, as Ezra Pound said, then September 11 is poetry at creation, too raw to be crafted into words. On the anniversary of 9/11, we sit around the table celebrating a birthday, a relative describing how she sipped coffee from the 109th floor -- just two days before. Kismet. Windows on the World, the dizzying flight of birds, a portent of things to come. In the space of time it took God to make the world, the towers returned to primordial dust and stone, taking with them the slender thread of hope from the new millennium.

She came to visit at summer’s end, evoking a gentler time when there was time enough to vacation with families, when summer meant a change of residence. Or of mind. That ritual of return from Long Island to the workaday world. A book out of childhood, or a Frank Capra movie in black and white, starring James Stewart, where another idea of America existed in literature and culture. Tir na nóg! my grandmother called it, the land of youth, or was it the land of death? More like Elysian fields.

We stood silent on the Fields of Mars in Leningrad before the Fall, the purity of snow hid and nourished the imagination. My translator Oleg told me stories of the 900-day siege, how starving Soviets stripped canvasses from frames to save paintings from Hitler’s advance. Da Vinci’s Madonna and Carravagio’s food rolled up like holy scrolls stored in empty cupboards awaiting liberation. A piece of art was saved for each death. Sacrifice for three million. Enough art to feed the eye.

At the Hermitage, a madman confronted Picasso’s blue period every day at closing time. For seven days I watched him as Matisse’s dancers dizzied me into their arms. I was drawn to that pure flame of Impressionist light because I was haunted by all the dead underfoot, the fluttering wing and crunch of snow hiding a multitude of sins. Oleg led me across the square snow-blind, during the Thaw, we were blue spots dancing between line and vision. Later, ash and dust chased him through the canyons of Manhattan. He ran and ran and ran from a horror more grisly and real than anything he imagined in the USSR -- even Siberia. There’s nothing to ease his burden. The guilt of surviving haunts this man I held in my arms as the myth of communism unwound -- just as he held me when the myth of America began to unravel.

We change partners with the seasons. Another man sits beside me. When the world fell apart he didn’t hold me, his arms were filled with his own darkness. But in the mirror, I heard words like whispering metal hangers in a closet violently opened into unexpected light. He brushed them aside as if they were the strings of an Aeolian harp. I am trapped by a need to translate urgent closet whispering into prose. I weep unexpectedly at found art: the image of shoes, a twisted fire engine door, a contorted girder of steel becoming a companion piece to image of Brancusi’s birds bursting into flight.

As we celebrate another anniversary, time greets us with our mother’s eyes, our grandfather’s chin, a hint of dewlaps to soften the resolve and clean sweep of jawline, the tiny advance of crow’s feet. As I approach my own half-life mark, I am mute. What is the point of examining the soul in a time of fire? The only thing I know how to do well has abandoned me at the altar. I am both jilted bride and groom, priest and witness. Scrivener of raw news, not poetry. I am raw at creation.

At Ground Zero, we are of two minds, envisioning both monument and building rising from sacred ground, because the land is too valuable for sentiment alone. Traditionalists and modernists argue over what kind of art to choose. A melted steel girder evokes support for abstract images of Brancusi’s birds alighting towards that moment of flight. Between wars, his mythic Maiastrae deconstructed into golden phoenixes and steel birds in space -- essence of flight without benefit of wings or feathers. Ascension of flight. Ezra Pound worshipped Brancusi’s flight of perfection, insisting it could only be understood in aesthetic absolutes divorced from the mediocrity of daily life.

Dali said while we are asleep in this world we are awake in another. Dreaming he was a bird, da Vinci drew a diagram of flight. But it took ages before the Wright boys would awaken it. The two brothers plotted against gravity to conquer the wind from the seat of a bicycle. They never dreamed of weapons such as these as they ran across meadows of Kitty Hawk with wings made from sails attached to their arms -- modern day Icaruses seeking the eye of the sun while Dedalus hugged the coastline of tradition. In that 12-second flight that changed the world, they flew the distance of half a wingspan of a Boeing 747. Faced with the ability to sail beyond the sunset, the idea of distant worlds shrank to a pinhead.

On the anniversary of September 11th, the sky was strangely silent. A pause of flight. A dite of sky angels passing. Old myths resurrect themselves to sustain our passage across the metaphor of time. We filled glass jars with mementos, cantos, and thousands of origami birds like at Nagasaki, to send to the World Trade Center, the personal experience transcending pain, becoming universal poetry. Images of planes and fiery towers burned on the retina transformed into thousands of paper birds fluttering like snow to the streets below. On their wings they carry messages and stories toward the next world in a chrysalis of light.


© 2002 Maureen Hurley Reprinted from Killing the Buddha Raw at Creation

On Writing & Dreams

Have you ever had the experience of making mental notes to say this or that to someone, something terribly important (or at least half-way intelligible) and in their presence, despite best intentions, you turn featherbrained on yourself, betrayed by a cheesecloth-that-stands-for memory/mind: whatever thoughts you had, driven clean out of your head, only to re-emerge at the oddest hours—say, at 5 AM, in a strange flat (and country) not your own—even the cats have deserted you because your tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminds them of the bilious sea, and water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved.

(As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the sanitized public, it was "piss" versus "fuck". As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why San Francisco society was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended, there she was in a peacock sequined gown, Tallulah brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, speaking in a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby and into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

This mental indulgence exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one. Nocturnal epistolic documents, personal essays produced under duress by the obsessive urge to write. An unwillingness to let go.

Ah, one could say, self-indulgence is a fine thing, as long as it goes no farther than the page but essays demand an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. These, my indulgences—not poems (too self-absorbed and convoluted), but poet’s work.

Practice for scholarly glosses in the margins of what may later become a poem (if one is lucky).

I like Brodsky’s attitude on writing and the personal essay: A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking. He elaborates that a writer is caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language. . . . where . . . ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of [the poets’] endeavor.

This of verbal excess began in earnest when I had a Ukrainian boyfriend. Suffice to say, in 1989 letters rarely reached their intended destination, the KGB (or NKVD or NVKD—they were forever changing their acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress/oubliette in the krasnaya heart of Moscow) working overtime to intercept love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets of Soviets and Americans.

So we wrote everything in a gonzo journalistic fashion, in triplicate, mailing one copy, sending the others via “couriers.” (Yes, our mail was opened.) I met many Russian couriers traveling to the USA, I received mail postmarked from all the cities of the free world, or got late night calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting to talk with someone—anyone who'd been there—a sort of sympathetic magic. The friends system was amazingly good.

Luckily, there were many Russian delegations traveling back and forth because of the efforts of people like William Mandel, a NPR radio commentator, Armand Hammer, the baking soda king, and the stuffed toy animal king, Henry Daiken. They all were couriers for me, they allowed me to stay in touch, to communicate with my Soviet lover—who now lives in New York and shared afternoon coffees with Josip Brodsky—who gave his Nobel money away to struggling Russians.

Strange offerings I received from people I didn't even know from Mother Russia—pre-revolutionary peasant dresses, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches, belts and pins. The Russians sent things of value to the west to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket out, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.

Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out dozens of letters, lacy silver spoons and tea glass holders, and more US currency than I arrived with, I was afraid I would get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they handed me an old icon. Ironically, I’d smuggled in as much money from Russians working in California for their families to live on; a thousand dollars was worth more than a year’s salary in Russia.

I chased elusive dreams to distant countries specifically because they were off limits, I purposefully slept with the enemy because in 5th grade I learned of a mythical Russia with troikas in the snow, in love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, and little did I know it was somehow tied to the frozen canals of Holland—Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates—

I lived in St. Petersburg one winter, small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by the ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to die. Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than here in Amsterdam.

Only later I learned Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after this city we now inhabit. That inhabits us and our writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy. Amsterdam was his window to the west.

Of course, I’d be sentenced to spend time here looking out these windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learn history through the back door, as a traveler in search of some elusive mystery. For what reason? Why do we write, and who for?

I need that reassurance of the personal conviction as testimonial. For poetry makes us whores— it is a relentless, unforgiving mistress. I’ve found myself in unusual circumstances for the sake of poetry. I’m merely the scribe.

And this Celtic insensibility—of course I skirt the issues, isn’t that Celtic nature, the Gordian knot? The muse comes in strange forms I no longer question. And so dawn nudges the trams into play, here, as in Russia, still I can’t sleep, but soon oblivion will find me like all the rest.

The cats are semi colons at the foot of my bed: I dream of people before I meet them. Crazy? A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable. I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s.

Then, my grandmother spent her free time wandered about the house muttering Cromwell; the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat. When I was a child, I thought they were swearwords. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. And so when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. There’s a word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).

I don’t want to “make” precognitive dreams come true. Once I went to great lengths to try to change them. To my horror, the circumlocutions were also part of the dreaming cycle. If anything, I err in being too passive, waiting for them to unfold, & then wonder what the (fuck the) significance is. It’s not like a storyline, it’s a series of isolated moments, that upon waking, I sometimes mistakenly string them together into a narrative thus confusing the picture.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.

I didn’t get a chance to tell you I dreamed I had to memorise 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce the Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence.

Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms. Poetry is a two-way mirror. The inside looking out. The outside looking in. You have to be ready to reassemble the pieces, wrote David Meltzer.

Once Vins and I went to Louven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering the city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel. To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. A college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.

How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart).

I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war.

Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.

As I watched the stairs, I remembered subject/ object/ verb, but not the details—like inside vs. outside. I got to WH Smith bookstore 10 minutes early, I went downstairs 5 or 10 after 3, but didn’t think to go outside, and there he was out there all the time standing in the rain. I sat in the bay window, the rain falling, thinking Paul had gone home first, and got caught up in something. The story of star crossed lovers stood up by a miscommunication, the clock kept chiming the quarter hours with a vengeance.

What I recall of Ted Hughes’ animal poems in Thought Fox, I liked very much—especially the one about the horses. I need recommendations to “get” a particular poet. Maybe it’s because I’ve never “gotten” his voice in the small bits of anthologised poetry I’ve read in Norton, etc.

Of course, at the time (early 1980s), feminists were blaming him for Sylvia’s death. . . I was still new to poetry. So much to learn. . . In context to Ted’s poems, Heaney’s seemed a bit flat, but I was already familiar with many of the poems.

Some poems take their own time coming in.



© Maureen Hurley 2002. A shorter version/ variation of this piece, Anim Chara, takes the form of the epistilary letter—actually a confluence of two posts to Walo Rojas, Chilean poet, and to Paul Evans, Welsh poet and translator. The original piece dates back to 1996 when I was living in Amsterdam, after participating in the Poetry International festival. Amsterdam is very much a dreamlike city. For years, I repeatedly dreamed of the canals of Amsterdam, long before I ever went there. It was already part of my dream psyche, only I always thought the shining city of light was San Francisco with weird mantle clock houses. I was shocked to recognize the place of my dreams in Amsterdam.

Sleeping with the Enemy

LOST or abandoned thoughts often re-emerged like ghosts in a country not my own. Sleepless nights even the cats deserted me because my tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminded them of the bilious sea. Water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved.

(Actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time her story reached me, it was phiss versus fhuck. As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why society wasn’t ready for that Anglo-Saxon word.

My first opera: Tallulah was in a peacock-sequined gown, brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, her sotto voice carried across the marble lobby into the streets where the homeless peered in from the pages of a Dostoyevsky novel, City Hall’s verdigree breast thrust in the mouth of the hungry sky. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

Nocturnal epistolic documents produced by an obsessive urge to write, or an unwillingness to let go. Images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind. Self-indulgence is fine, as long as it goes no farther than the page, but writing demands an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. 

When death came to visit, language abandoned me, I practiced stillness. Called ambivalence. After the silence that followed the deaths of my parents and uncles, and when the raven sat on my shoulder, the words themselves abandoned me and fell silent: this prose, my indulgence—not poems, but practice in the marginalia of what may become a poem if one is lucky. Josip Brodsky said time loves language. A writer is caught up by the centrifugal nature of language [where] ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of endeavor.

My lover from the Ukraine wrote: we dissidents are called white ravens—varonas. Our letters rarely reached their destination. The KGB (or NKVD—they changed the acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress in the krasnaya heart of Moscow); they intercepted love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets.

We wrote in triplicate, mailing a copy, sending the others via “couriers.” I received mail postmarked from the cities of the free world, and calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting any contact, no matter how tenuous. 

The system was good because of the many delegations of people led by William Mandel, Armand Hammer and Henry Daiken opening up the East. They allowed me to communicate with my lover—who eventually emigrated to New York and shared afternoon coffees with Brodsky—who, in turn, gave his Nobel Prize money away to émigré Russians, including Oleg Atbashian.

Strange offerings I received—antique peasant dresses, marriage proposals, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches and pins—the Russians sent things of value to the West to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.

Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out letters, lacy silver spoons and tea cup holders, and more US currency than I arrived with: I was afraid to get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they wanted me to take an old icon. Mary’s beatific almond-eyed face with rosebud lips anointed in gold was a bridging of East and West.

I chased elusive dreams to distant countries because they were forbidden, I slept with the enemy because in school I learned of a mythical Russia, troikas in the snow. In love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, I didn’t know it was tied to the frozen canals of Holland —Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates.

I lived a winter in St. Petersburg with the pop singer, (Valeriy) Valera Stupachenko of the Leningrad Rok Opera (Singing Guitars) who performed Andrei Vosnesenski's   (J)Yunona and Avos/Juno & Avos at Fort Ross. Small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to let death in.

Oleg said he was jealous of my happiness. When he saw me with Valera, suddenly it was all very real. But he wouldn't leave his wife, like the way Valera couldn't leave his God. Or throw away his dead wife's clothes. Ghosts of Lady Haversham shrines in and out of the closet. Who could compete with that?

Valeriy Stupachenko

Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. I am haunted by fragments of memory: On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than in Amsterdam. Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after a city that inhabits my writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy; Amsterdam, his window to the west. 

I was sentenced to spend time looking out those same windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learned history through the back door, a traveler in search of the elusive mystery. Why do we write, and for whom?

© 1997, revised 2000 what month was this written?

On the death of Joseph Brodsky

Gene Ruggles called to say that Joseph Brodsky had died. The evening's libation had run dry, so he sought solace over the phone. Brodsky wasn't that old. Only 55. Heart failure, they said, but his stout heart never failed him. Sentenced to five years hard labor in Arkhangelsk for writing samizdat poetry without permission. When interrogated as to where poetry came from, Brodsky said: I thought it came from God. When I last saw Iosif at Poetry International, in Rotterdam, he seemed healthy enough, but bitter cold. His crotchety, oratory voice was like that of an impassioned preacher. Hellfire and brimstone. A dissent of the spirit, he railed against the drabness of the totalitarian state. Oleg thought the sun and moon rose over him. In NY cafes, they'd roll cigarettes, Russian style, enjoy a smoke over bitter coffee, and talk of the homeland. Exiled poets. Everything has its limit, including sorrow.

1/29/1996
added & rev. 11/17

Joseph Brodsky, Exiled Poet Who Won Nobel, Dies at 55

Judge: What is your profession?
Brodsky: Translator and poet.
Judge: Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?

After the poetry reading: all roads lead to Moscow

Last night, after the poetry reading, we discussed a mutual friend, Christine Gonzalez Larson. I said she went to Russia. Also, a translation company called asking for Oleg Atbashian, wanting something translated from the Ukrainian. 

Last night I wrapped myself in my Russian shawl and all the images have little to do with Moscow. In St. Petersburg, Oleg in the Ukraine, my shawl and me in California. 

But Moscow is the capital, all roads lead to Moscow, like with Mexico City, it is the collective unconscious of Russia. It is the mother of cities, the umbilicus. 

Poetry Unites the World by Dr. Andrei Bantaş

from
THE REVIEW OF FOREIGN REVIEWS, ROMANIA LITERATURA
5-21 Dec. 1993,
POETRY UNITES THE WORLD
by Dr. Andrei Bantaş

BUCHAREST—From the Pacific Coast, California, there comes to us a cultural surprise and exceptional reading: a poetry magazine—or rather a tabloid review, like our weeklies. It is not a mere publication meant to convey to readers the latest production of American poets (as many other poetry reviews do) but an entirely uncommon one: a sort of Secolul XX (the 20th century) of the Romanians, yet devoted to poetry alone, in order to spread publications which the public has few opportunities to know.

The first issue of Uniting the World Through Poetry (UWP) is devoted to Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost, a 24-page tabloid, with a similar format to our Romania Literatura, is full of translations from Arabov, Slepynin, Lubenski, Soloviov, Kulle and many others—verses written in the last six or seven years.

With the decoration of the journals—or perhaps it’s pop-art—with press clippings, photos, collages, and vignettes, an entire page is devoted to a poem of Oleg Slepynin’s, printed in the shape of a cross, with the title buried in the center: SYNCHRONIC.

Some general data, with a short excursion into history, and with substantial topicalization, are offered in the essay entitled, “A Poet in Russia is more than a Poet” by the Ukrainian poet of Armenian descent, Oleg Atbashian (who, with UWP editor, Maureen Hurley, did most of the translations).

The general presentation of the themes and aims of the review is made by the two UWP editors, Herman Berlandt and Maureen Hurley. Berlandt is chairman of the National Poetry Association, and editor of Poetry: USA, a quarterly, and after more than 30 lectures on this very theme of uniting the world through poetry, he decided to publish these international anthologies with Maureen Hurley (an educator, graphic designer, photographer, and writer, with poems translated into Spanish and Russian.

She is an initiator of an international conference of writers for the 30th anniversary of California Poets in the Schools (CPITS), tenatively scheduled in San Francisco, in October 1994. An earlier CPITS conference, (the 25th) was joined by more than 150 poets from the U.S. and Mexico.)

The second issue of the review is entitled Mother Earth, with the same internationalist motto as the subtitle “Let the voice of the poet be heard throughout the world”. These 24 pages bring together (in translation, or in the English original) the voices of poets from Bulgaria, China, Poland, Hungary, Holland, Macedonia, India, Pakistan, Italy, Israel, Greece, Great Britain, Argentina, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, and—surprise—Romania: Geo Dumitrescu (translated by the late Dan Dutescu with post-translation by Maureen Hurley) and Ana Blandiana (translated by Andrea Deletant and Brenda Walker, as well as by Andrei Bantaş, also with Maureen Hurley). They are accompanied by fine engravings by Victor Brauner and a Romanian stamp.

In the third issue—devoted to East European poetry, Romanian poetry (including Valeriu Matei of Moldova) is represented in over three pages by the same Geo Dumitrescu and Ana Blandiana as well as Nichita Stanescu, Maria Banus, Nina Cassian, Daniela Crasnaru, Carolina Ilica, and Mircea Dinescu.

The translators are the same, with the addition of poet Fleur Adcock, the version being reproduced mainly from Silent Voices: an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Women Poets, published by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant in Britain about 5 years ago (when they also published Mircea Dinescu’s Exile on a Peppercorn—their persons and books were proscribed in Romania—but well-received in Bulgaria!)

Highly valuing these new tokens of appreciation offered by foreign publishers and translators of Romanian poetry (I happen to know of the financial efforts made by these two English women and the editors of UWP), I am taking the liberty of asking two rhetorical questions: What are we doing for ourselves and for our poets, for our literature, as a whole?

Suppose I rounded off my anthology of 20th century poets (Like Diamonds in Coal, Asleep, Minerva Publishers, 1985) with poems formerly banned by censorship as well as with those of Romanian poets abroad, who would publish it? (today, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. . . .?





Note Bene: Dr. Andrei Bantaş, with whom I had the pleasure of corresponding, in order to collect Eastern European Poetry, was the compiler of the Romanian dictionary, an eminent translator and a Professor of English Literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania. I had no idea of his fame as I embarked blindly on this translating adventure. Those Romanian stamps we used in the collages were Andrei's. —Maureen Hurley

Igor Tishler: A Fantasy Come True 5/1/92

Igor Tishler in his Guerneville studio.

Over and over, he goes in clumsy circles,
into the blind darkness
Vladimir Tatlin spreads his mechanical wings…

the domes and the crosses grew dim.

—from "Vladimir Tatlin" by Vladimir Salimon
(transl. Maureen Hurley & Oleg Atbashian)

By Maureen Hurley

Igor Tischler

When the elusive golden window of opportunity opened for Igor Tishler, a fantasy painter from Russia, he didn't hesitate; he grabbed his paintbrushes, canvas, and paints, clicked his heels, and said dosvedanya to the USSR. And landed, not in Kansas, but Colorado. Oz came later.

When a friend sent the artist Igor Tishler an invitation to visit him in Boulder, Colorado, little did he know, he'd end up in exhibiting his work in Guerneville, California—on the Russian River, of all places.

Tishler's first major US art exhibition opens May 9 at the new Curtis Chase Framing Arts & Gallery location on Main Street in downtown Guerneville.

The soft-spoken 37-year-old St. Petersburg artist said he'd sold two paintings at an exhibition in Germany—just enough to buy his Aeroflot ticket to America. But all was not synchronicity once he landed in Boulder, a self-proscribed anti-Russki cowtown.

Though Tishler managed to create new works while acclimatizing to America (he wasn't able to take any of his old work with him—customs officials wanted to charge full value for his paintings), and display art at two exhibitions, no one was buying. Tishler said of Boulder: “It is…how do you say it?… a very western place; not a very good audience.”

A chance visit to California last November, brought the self-taught artist Igor Tishler and a friend to Guerneville, where Tishler met Stumptown luminary, Tom Lynch. Tischler's friend later returned to Russia, but Igor stayed on with Lynch at Southside Resort.

“Here, people like my work. I sold three or four oil paintings, and maybe, ten watercolors in two months—California is so different. For me, it seems people are more interested in different cultures, not just the western style. Maybe it's because California has more different nationalities.”

Raised in Moscow, close to the Russian "White House" and embassies along the River Volga—the birthplace of Slavic culture—Tishler had a typical Soviet childhood, attending school #407. There's a rote Russian saying: Povtoreniye mat ucheniya. Repetition is the mother of knowledge.

Even with glasnost, Soviet schools place an emphasis on orderliness, right/wrong answers, with no allowances for creativity or personal expression—especially in art. Stress is on accuracy and neatness; drawing and painting realistically according to a rigid prescription (Social Realism). Though proscribed fantasy exists in Russian fairy tales and cartoons, children are discouraged from inventing their own make-believe realms.

However, Igor Tishler's active imagination wasn't extinguished. He describes an early childhood experience at the family dacha outside Moscow. “I was four or five, walking with my younger brother on the way to the forest, we saw a giant 12" fly-bee sitting on a bench, and I watched our reflections in her faceted eyes.”

The Tishler brothers ran away in fear, but the memory lingered. When they were 10 and 12, they invented a magic planet, called the Crystal Ball—with jade mountains, castles, princesses and dragons, a dose of good and evil, etc. “This was a strange mix from real life (politics, religion, dreams). Peopled with prototype heroes and villains from the '60s.”

In Igor Tishler's world, there was the Dictator Castro versus the Little People who made up songs and poetry. “They took energy from their songs; their food, magic honey from giant rainbow bees. This country was called Breadland. In the other country, people wore masks; they couldn't be individuals.” Breadland in a country of little bread….

“In 1977, when I was 24, I had a strong dream,” recounts Tishler, “A little man, Rigvanda, from the crystal planet, called to me. He said he'd take me away from earth, turn me into a giant fly-bee… But I was not ready, I was afraid.” So Tishler began to paint and write about that make-believe world.

In 1978, Tishler was drafted into the Red Army, and stationed two years near Lake Baikal in the Chitah region near the Chinese-Mongolian border, where the army put him to work as a graphic artist, cartographer, and calligrapher. In 1980, Igor married, and moved to St. Petersburg, where his wife, Natasha, was an art student, and later, a professional illustrator. (One of her commissions included rendering The Wizard of Oz.)

After the birth of his son, Sasha, Tishler explained, “I tried to write a book on my crystal world for children. This was fantasy, like Tolkien. But I didn't ever read Tolkien because in Russia, we have no translation of him. We began to draw illustrations. At first, when I read Lord of the Rings, I was shocked, all my fantasies broke [shattered]. Some episodes from my book were like from Tolkien.”

Tischler painted his first two big pieces on cardboard, “about a magic town. After that, I think, maybe, I can paint a little bit.” He experimented on/with different materials—nails, rocks, wire and mesh—“like collage.”

“My grandfather, Aleksandr Tishler (1898-1980), was famous artist.” Igor remembers visiting his grandfather's studio. The odor of linseed oil, the dark golden mystery of the ikons amid wood sculptures of dryads carved from the branches of linden trees created a special atmosphere that fired young Igor's imagination.

Tishler said, “My grandfather taught me very strange things, I could not understand at the time what he meant. After maybe two - three years, I understand some things. It was like a secret program. He told me fantasy is not like a sea or a lake; it has limits, like a pond.”

“I was not an artist: I was more industrial draftsman, musician, hippie…” Igor played guitar and drums, dabbled in zen, studied art, iconography and calligraphy; in 1987 Tischler began to paint in earnest.

“My grandfather didn't want me to study in the Cruzhok (the pot) art circle. He said 'This will destroy your talent.' When I drew, I felt no good, I was bored. I can paint real things, but I don't like to. I like hallucinations, fantasy, Surrealism. My father had many art books, Cubism, Dadaism, Dali. I knew about this art. Sometimes people think my grandfather was a Surrealist too, but it's not true. He liked combinations of styles.”

(Salvador Dali's work was banned in the USSR; he was labeled too decadent by the art police.)

Igor showed me two art books of his grandfather's work. Stunned, I recognized a famous drawing of the poet Anna Akhmatova I had admired at her salon-house in Leningrad. Apparently the well-connected Aleksandr Tishler knew many of the belle epoch luminaries: Chagall, Picasso, Modigliani, and Mayakovsky.

Igor recounted a story his grandfather had told him: “Akhmatova wrote, only two artists understood her poetry: Modigliani, and Tishler.” Weighty praise from the mother of modern Russian poetry.

Aleksandr Tishler wasn't mentioned in any of my Russian art books, but then, this blanket omission also includes artists Kasimir Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. An iron curtain hid the Soviet artists who didn't toe the line. We, in the West, have little concept or grasp of that kind of blanket censorship.

Aleksandr Tishler's work was delegated to some of the best museum basements the repressive, anti-Semetic Stalin-Brezhnev eras had to offer—the lower depths of the Pushkin Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Bahrushkin Museum of Theater in Moscow, to name a few.

When I was in the Soviet Union 1989, I also found no Chagalls or Maleviches at The Russian Museum, but in 1990, in a back foyer of the Hermitage, I rounded a dark corner and was confronted by five glowing Kandinskys! I stood in rapt attention listening to his symphony of color. Even post-Glasnost Russia, I had to aggressively hunt down the works of these otherwise famous artists of the Western world.

Cut off from European influences of Cubism and Constructivism, (Peter the Great's window on the West closed up pretty tight after the October Revolution), Supremativism was considered to be the first purely indigenous Russian art form of the 20th century (Malevich). Constructivism (Vladimir Tatlin), and Fantasy (Chagall), two other important Russian art movements followed.

Though Tishler the Elder, was of the generation after Malevich and Chagall (who emigrated to America), he incorporated many of their styles in his work. Born in the Crimea, Aleksandr Tishler studied at the Kiev Art School (I visited it in 1989), and was also a sculptor and theater stage designer. He became stage director for the Jewish state theaters in ByeloRuss, Moldova, and Ukraine.

In collaboration with the great Soviet poet Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Tishler' s experimental work in Formalism, Constructivism, and Cubism had a profound effect on the direction of modern theater, launching new concepts into the art world.

While Igor's grandfather, a member of the Artists' Union, wasn't prohibited from painting or exhibiting his work in group shows, Igor says “they were usually held in inaccessible places.” The newspapers gave him unfavorable reviews, citing his work as “bad art.”

Like the Writers' Union, the Artists' Union was a monopoly that had the power to create or destroy artists—by denying them a studio space, living stipend, art materials, and public access to exhibitions, and potential buyers. Repetition is the mother of knowledge.

If you were an accepted official artist, all manner of doors opened. Other Artist Union perks included paid vacations at artist colonies, and use of summer dachas. I was constantly asked if I was an official artist or writer. At first, I didn't know what that meant.

When Akhmatova was banned from the Union, she received no wages, accommodations, or access to publish any of her poems. She, like most of Russia's great cultural heroes, was lavishly reinstated after her death.

igor's grandfather, Aleksandr Tishler died in 1980, before Perestroika; it took his widow four years to gain permission to display a posthumous retrospective of his work. “I went to my grandfather's show and saw his paintings. I was so upset, I Icould not paint for two - three years,” recounts Igor. “I thought I was original artist, I saw only his later work, but he was working on my ideas long before I was born. Am I unconsciously repeating him?”

Igor's own work conjures up visions of Persian miniatures, Russian folkloric lacquerware, but with a New Age twist. Interesting aside to note that the Russian River was a spawning ground of psychadelic fantasy painting. Mad-hatterly LSD parties made vast inroads in people's perceptions during the late '60s and '70s.

A whole generation, appalled by the absence of spiritual values, rediscovered Art Nouveau, in their romantic quest for a new lifestyle. The Beatles, Rubber Soul. Listen to the color of your dreams —Tischler learned English at school, and from Beatle songs.

Tishler's watercolors have a similar playful quality like Dutch pop artist Peter Max's illustrations for Yellow Submarine—which, of course, Tishler's never seen. He explains, “I don't use drugs for my ideas.”

He shows me a chart of two inverted pyramids. The artist works from the superconscious to archetype, to the subconscious level, where the mind visualizes it as dreamlike symbols, and recreates the vision in a painting. He describes how ideas come to him “like a vibration, I can see them, like a hallucinatory slide.”

Some of the pieces in the show include Sad Song, a painting of a trumpeting snail facing the last battle. He describes some of the fantasy creatures as his “small, personal army.” When asked how his work is influenced by California, Tishler replies, “my colors change, I have new ideas, not exactly new, but transformed, expanding ideas. The bicycle is a new idea. I have no car. I ride a bicycle everywhere.”

Tishler shows me whimsical paintings of bicycles, rabbits, moles, and fish—where steampunk mechanical gears predominate. And the Wild West has had an influence as well: designerly paintings of katchina dolls, turtles, horses and women. Tishler's Native American Horse with cloak, animatedly carries designs of the universe and the essence of horse as proudly as the ancient Chinese burial bronzes of flying horses.

In the Babylon Temptation of Eve; Eve's headdress is a ziggurat with gold foil—reminiscent of Gustav Kilmt who was profoundly influenced by the flat surfaces of Oriental prints. Art Nouveau, Surreal, and organic forms rich with symbolism—like Klimt's Byzantine portraits with gold leaf, and intricately patterned material.

Curtis Chase framer/artist Craig Timmerman does an excellent job of showcasing each art piece, enhancing its jewel-like quality.

Some of Tishler's oils are a bit uneven, he admits it's a new medium for him. Where his work excels is in the jewel-like tempera boards, and illustraterly watercolors. Prices for his watercolors and temperas range from $30 to $80, oils from $300 to $1000.

Since 1989, Igor Tishler's work has been included in over 15 exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg, with traveling exhibitions to Finland, Germany, Israel, Japan, France, and England. His work at the Ariadna gallery, “Art Today,” was featured on Leningrad television, and his work from Germany's “Red Gallery” was aired on Moscow television.

Many of the exhibitions sponsored by Soviet joint ventures with Japan, Germany, Switzerland, etc., have given Tishler good exposure, and afforded him a living. A member of the Young Artists of Leningrad (LOSH) Artists' Union, he figures he's sold some 40 pieces ranging anywhere from $500 to $4000 rubles each (the equivalent of 6 month's Soviet wages—a few US dollars) during the past two-and-a-half years.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union, it's hard to predict what the future of these joint-ventures will be. Artists' Unions, along with the Writers' Unions are collapsing along with the old Communist party system. What will take their places is anybody's guess. Nouvelle censorship of the arts due to poverty? It will be interesting to see what will happen with the uneasy marriage of arts and free enterprise in Russia.

Art always takes us full circle. The European artists—the Impressionists, Art Nouveau painters and designers—all looked east, toward the Orient, for their inspiration. Russia is where east meets west, and St. Petersburg is the fabled window to the west. Igor came to California to where west meets east. Fertile ground. It will be interesting to watch his career develop on the edge of the Pacific Rim.

Tishler hopes to stay in America another 6 months, perhaps a year, or maybe two, if he can get his visa renewed, but he finds life in America isn't as easy as it seems. “Sometimes it's very difficult to live here. When I have no money, it's like a depression. At this poverty level, I cannot live like most Americans.”

Though Tishler misses his wife and son, he feels he can help his family more by staying here. As to what the future might bring, he looks glumly “I don't know. I have no idea. I wait for when Rigvanda comes back to me and turn me into a big fly-bee.”

Meanwhile, his small personal army of fantastical creatures is intent on rediscovering the lost land of Oz on the Russian River.

Reception for the artist Sunday, May 9, from 1 to 4 p.m.; the exhibit will be on display through May 30 at the new Guerneville Curtis Chase Framing Arts & Gallery location at 16355 Main Street (707) 869-2041.

May 1, 1992, The West Sonoma County Paper

Teaching journal, 1/26/92 LBC, CAC, Dream Vessels

1/26/92 I finished our El Día de los Muertos class with Inga Laskowski yesterday. Some 14 kids returned on a Saturday, a three-day weekend, to take a hour-long workshop which was heartening, a miracle. I never had faith in the after school, or a weekend workshop idea, but I can see that it’s working. I also had a little faith in the organization of it as well, but it worked out fine.

We did more freewrite and a group poem as well as letter poems. The group was a little more scattered and didn’t achieve the quality I had hoped for from the letter poems, but the objective was to get some poetry,.,. Hopefully it all goes with the portraits. It’s very hard to get good work and only two sessions.

I read translations of the poems etc. to the class. Rocio Nunez writes of her mother’s death, of her drunken father, and her brutal sister-in-law. Her pain and fierce determination to survive is extraordinary. I will never leave school, she says. A heart wrenching and superb writer. She writes of Calaca, Lady Death, lovely images of birds, a real gift she has. This is why I teach.

Afterwords, Inga looked at my travel photos of Russia, Peru, Ecuador, I haven’t been able to look at my South American photos since John Oliver Simon and I broke up, which is a bit jarring. I wasn’t feeling well as I had some trouble sleeping and my eyes feel like sandpaper. I think I have a touch of that virus or a sinus infection.

Friday was a loss. I met with John Marquitos of John Reed School to discuss a California Arts Council Grant, it’s iffy and it’s due on February 7, with the Witter Bynner grant due on February 1. I’ll know more on Tuesday whether or not I have a CAC sponsor. I got a nibble at Monte Rio school if John Reed falls through, but it’s not exactly enough time to plan a residency at this point.

I sent out 20 letters the first week of January and only got four responses, all on schools I expected, With the exception of Alexander Valley School. Probably no poetry at John Reed this year, he wants me to do a mural but that will require some research and I’ll have to do a bid as well. This is the second mural job I’ve been offered. The first one only had a $500 budget so I can’t imagine doing a mural for that amount now. There’s a lot of logistics involved like coordinating the kids, researching their history, coming up with a design, etc. So much to do.

I reread my November to June 1990 journal from the beginning—it was filled with doubt about Oleg, I accidentally opened it to the same day as yesterday, one year earlier and it’s interesting to look back at the space of the year to see where I was. I certainly was sick a lot last winter, a clue that something was wrong.

Some interesting writing too, especially on the Gulf War, which was I want to type up. I think it will help with my Dream Vessels poems. The IRS is breathing hard down on my neck and I want to work on my Dream Vessels poems and send out some work and everything is to do, doo, due.

AFTER THE COUP

AFTER THE COUP

                                                Language is a virus.

                                                  —William S. Burroughs

Yelena, I want to write you a poem of the men we've loved,

how their names, oval like honey, cling to our lips.

I want to say to you we are sisters; there is no cure

for Tuesdays, Bach, revolution, and snow falling from our memories—

always in another country. The children we don't have,

words lost with meaning, a revelation: the senses fade, or do they?

How do we measure generations, when you and I,

who, following our hearts, sleep alone

because our craft is hidden in the very definition of snow?

The Inuit have 52 words for snow; how many have we for love?

Who will recobble Kutzovsky Prospekt now the barricades are down,

the tanks withdrawn? They say the fallen will be buried in the Kremlin Wall—

even if they have to disinter someone to make room for them.

Who will it be: Lenin, Stalin, John Reed?

Someone pinned onto my jacket, Demokratia,

a concept imported like independence, economy, and freedom.

Shall I tell you how I can't sleep in the hollow

where my lover's body made a lasting impression;

I have to move against the wall in order to find rest?

But you know of these things we've never alluded to,

having no common language between us—

To those who could translate our thoughts,

we would never divulge such secrets.

The weather is changing,

they're pulling the statues of repression down to their knees.

Both Vladimir and Iron Feliks were found to be hollow inside after all.

Opposite the Bolshoi Theatre, Marx still stands amid graffiti—

I apologise: I was wrong. . .

I can still see you walking down Shevchenko Street;

snow collecting in the blue pockets of your scarf.

There is something about snow that illuminates the face

into the purity of angels—

no matter that it is dirty, or a symbol for the old guard,

and the shelves still empty.

I always thought of Russia or the Ukraine

as a dark place in winter;

I forgot about the reflective quality of snow.

Or that East and West are somehow buried

in the curious fact that, in Arabic,

there is no distinction between ice and snow.

And there are no words for democracy or orgasm

in China. Tianenmen Square.

If the revolution succeeds or fails,

will language dictate thought?

I think of you on that street named after the poet,

your lover sneaking off to marry someone's intended wife

while mine is unaccounted for. How does one measure grief

when the collective beds of the harem are so full,

they buckle and strain and calve like ice floes in spring?

They say only a small portion of the iceberg is visible above water-line.

The ice in our lemonade (sweetened, no doubt, with kolkhotz sugar beets,

not honey) demonstrates this with consistency—

We fall from the blueness of our lover's eyes,

the iceberg, another summit to be scaled, like all the rest.

I want to tell you how the fragrance of nectarines or apples

in the cloistered stillness of a room in late afternoon

is like that opening to sex.

We are haunted by the everyday things in our lives;

the slippers under the kitchen table,

forgotten clothes still holding the shape of the man.

The air grows colder, I wear flannel nightgowns,

the full moon is a reminder of walks along the Dniepr

midsummer, when there is little palpable difference between air and flesh.

It seems as if the woman is always lying down a harvest for the man,

no matter what country, century, or season. What of Akhmatova?

Sometimes it feels there is no end to this concert of silence.

We become experts in the business of waiting,

calling our advocation our art.

These indistinct words spill onto the snowblind page;

shadows of bare branches,

feeble attempts of fruit trees holding laden skies.

Our lips aren't jaded, they're made of common stone.

Maybe we did live other lives in other countries,

maybe the small boy skating on thin ice was your only child;

the treacherous river is dark, brooding, and vengefully swift.

If you look onto the white expanse, they've cut holes into the skin

of the river, plummeting the icy depths for small treasures.

The river's children glisten silvery, as if the moon hid in their bellies.

They are not the Savior's body, they are feeding on the moon,

each month she reminds us of the red tide,

squeezing out slave's blood, drop by drop.

Coral beads in the snow, on the sheets swaddling our hearts.

Someone cautions me: Give even-numbered flowers to the dead.

I cannot begin to count all the bouquets in Red Square

to see if I'm among the living.

As honey ages, it darkens, turns bitter the sweetness

of long-withered blossoms buried in its core.

What generation of bees enters our lips to reconstitute spring—

as if you could cage the very air with memory?

Winter nightclothes grow multiple arms to hold us

as we journey towards the longest night,

drinking resurrected light from the moon.

21 August 1991

1991 Soviet coup d'état

1992 Louisville Review, KY
1992 Richard Eberhardt Poetry Prize, Florida State University, First Honorable mention
1992/93 Sundog Florida State University