Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky spoke briefly to The Argotist
about poetry, memory and exile...

A.: [You comment on the value of "estrangement"to developing first an
individual perspective and second a writer's perspective. Is the one a
necessary prerequisite of the other and how much are you using
Shklovsky's concept of "estrangement", if at all?]
	J. B.: The former is surely necessary for the latter, and the other way
round I am afraid is also. Hence the answer to your Shklovsky
question.

["Appearances are all there is" (Less Than One). David Hockney has said
"all art is surface" and that surface is "the first reality". Are you
talking about the same thing and what depths are negated by privileging
surface?]
	There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomenae.

[In Less Than One you deny the hegemony of the "linear process", yet
immediately follow this with a (linear) paradigm -- "A school is a
factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of
panic." Again, shortly after arguing that narrative, like memory,
should be non-linear (ie digressive), you assert that history is cyclic
(a linear image). Would you comment firstly on the nature of these
contradictions and secondly on the problematic of linearity in your
writing?]
	Cyclic is not linear! See your laundry machine or dishwasher. I
don't believe I have "the problematic of linearity" in my writing. But
having said that I must admit that stanzaic composition indeed
possesses the kind of morphology similar to that of crystals
growing.

["Selected Essays" is, it seems to me, self-consciously
aphoristic: self-conscious in poetic rather than prosaic decision
making (eg "The more indebted the artist, the richer he is."). Can you
expand?]
	1) Do you expect a writer to be unaware of what he is doing?
	2) One gets aphoristic for reasons of economy.

[How completely do oppressive political regimes destroy individualism?
I am thinking that individualism may find alternative modes of
expression, that it is not something which can be cultured or
suppressed but is an innate predisposition. Similarly, in a "free"
society, expressions of "individualism" are often no more than a
reclothed lumpen consciousness.]
	Innate disposition is subject to the outward mental diet. The latter
can be reduced, thus conditioning the former. So you may find yourself
disliking,say, Mao instead of Wittgenstein. In a free society you can
do both; in a free society you have a better chance to define your true
enemy, which is the vulgarity of the human heart.

[You glibly put Sholokov's Nobel Prize (65) down to "a huge shipbuilding
order placed in Sweden" (Less Than One). How credible do you find the
"All Literature Is Politics" argument?]
	It's bullshit.

[Post-war poetry in the USSR and the USA has vast stylistic/ thematic
differences. First, are you now looking to become part of the American
tradition and second, how (critically) constrained do you feel in
relation to American culture?]
	I have no such inspiration. Nor do I aspire to the contrary. As for
the American culture, some of it I find revolting, some awe-inspiring.
Its diversity rules out a possibility of total approach.

[In the Preface to "A Part of Speech" you mention reworking translations
of your work to bring them closer to the original in terms of content
rather than form. Has this forced choice, emphasising content over
form, caused you to rethink your attitude to language in any way?]
	No it hasn't. You can sacrifice this or that aspect of a poem while
translating but not in the process of composition.

[How is poetry best read -- aloud to an audience or silently to oneself?]
	Both, but not one without the other.

[Although memory fails to adequately reconstruct the past (In "A Room and
A Half") has poetry allowed any successful reconstruction?]
	No. Nothing can do this. That's what time's passage is all
about.

[When Publius says, "Home!...where you won't be back ever." (Marbles),
is this Joseph Brodsky speaking to us directly or is it facile to draw
comparisons between an author and his characters?]
	No, it's not facile, and yes, it's my own attitude.

[Your work draws on many other literary sources making for more or less
esoteric writing. What is your attitude towards the accessibility of
your work?]
	I couldn't care less about this sort of thing, although I am finding
your remark highly surprising. If my stuff strikes you as being
esoteric then something is really off with the City of Liverpool.

*	Original is at http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Den/3776/arg13.html.

___
			Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1987

		Swedish Academy
		The Permanent Secretary
				October 1987

		---

			Joseph Brodsky



	This year's Nobel Prize winner in Literature was born in Leningrad
and lives in New York. Aged only 47 he is one of the youngest ever to
have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. A sign of the luminous
intensity of his writing is that he has already been translated into
more than a dozen languages.
	Brodsky is chiefly a poet and essayist. He belongs to the
classical Russian tradition with predecessors such as Pushkin and the
Nobel Prizewinner Pasternak. At the same time he is a masterly renewer
of poetical language and poetical forms of expression, inspired by Osip
Mandelstam and Anna Achmatova among others.
	Another of Brodsky's sources of inspiration is English poetry from
the metaphysicist John Donne to W. H. Auden, he who wanted to be a
lesser, atlantic Goethe. That language is the stuff that empires are
made of is a vital thought with Brodsky as well.
	For Brodsky, poetry is a divine gift. The religious dimension that
one meets in his work is of a nature that adheres to no creed.
Metaphysical and ethical questions are paramount.
	The east-west background -- literary, geographical, linguistic --
has greatly influenced Brodsky's writing. It has given it an unusual
wealth of themes and manifold perspectives. Together with the writer's
profound insight into the literature of earlier epochs it has also
conjured up a grand historical vision.
	The change of environment and language after Brodsky had left the
Soviet in 1972 naturally involved a severe nervous strain for the poet.
In the poem [1972] in the collection [A Part of Speech]
(1980) he depicts how he will gradually lose hair, teeth, consonants,
verbs, and endings. Nevertheless he is now engaged on a prolific
poetical work in Russian. Parallel with that he takes an active part in
the translation of his works into English and sometimes writes directly
in this language to great effect [History of the Twentieth
Century] (1986) is a series of poems in a tone of raillery and
parody, written with a quite amazing mastery of the English idiom.
	All literature really is about what time does to people, Brodsky
has said, thus indicating a main theme in his writing. Parting,
becoming deformed, growing old, dying are the work of time. Poetry
helps us, gives us basically the only possibility of withstanding the
pressure of existence.
	Poetry's role in the world is another central theme. It may apply
to totalitarian societies, in which the poet can become the mouthpiece
for those who apparently are silent, or to open societies in which his
voice threatens to be drowned in the flood of information. In the
brilliant collection of essays [Less Than One] (1980) Brodsky
feels his way in towards the core of the problem from various
directions. The poet is a word craftsman, a master of language. Poetry
is the highest form of language. Brodsky sees it also as the highest
form of life. The poet becomes an instrument with a questioning sound.
	The Swedish Academy's citation aims at the great breadth in time
and space which characterizes Joseph Brodsky's writing and at both the
intellectual and sensitive side of this rich and intensely vital work.

___
			Remembering a poet: Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass

		PBS Online NewsHour: Brodsky
		Transcript

				January 29, 1996

	[Joseph Brodsky emigrated to the United States after being expelled from his native Russia in 1972. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. His books of poetry include "A Part of Speech" (1977) and "To Urania" (1988), both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.]

		---

JIM LEHRER: Joseph Brodsky appeared on the NewsHour in 1988, and talked about the thing he liked most about America; its spirit of individualism.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: (November 10, 1988) [In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the--well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature. I happen to love the latter two, but you ought to have some sentiment. You also have to, to--in my case, well, there is something else. I simply loved all my life, loved is the stronger word, but I had a tremendous sentiment, partly conditioned of course by the reality of which--of where I grew up--for the spirit of individualism, for the idea of your being on your own in a big way. Well, so in a sense, in a sense when I came here, this is what happened, this is what I found.]

JIM LEHRER: Now two eminent poets on Brodsky and poetry in America today. Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He's a Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages at the University of California at Berkeley. Robert Hass is the current poet laureate of the United States and a professor of English at Berkeley. Gentlemen, welcome to both of you. Mr. Milosz, how would you characterize Joseph Brodsky's poetry?

CZESLAW MILOSZ, Nobel Prize Winning Poet: (San Francisco) He was a very great poet and great successor of very great period of Russian poetry in the beginning of the 20th century. And he was my very close friend.

JIM LEHRER: Why does the word "great" apply to him?

MR. MILOSZ: Already since his beginnings and his trial in Russia the aura of greatness surrounded him. It's very difficult to define what it is.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Hass, for those watching, listening now who have not read anything by Joseph Brodsky and this is the first time they're coming to his--he is coming to their attention, what would be your No. 1 recommendation as to what they should read to get the essence of this man as a poet?

ROBERT HASS, Poet Laureate: (San Francisco) I'd say to begin with, the first of his two books that were published in this country, Jim, a book called [A Part of Speech]. I guess the thing that should be said about Brodsky for us readers in English is that we're reading him in translation. He's a--he's a poet of immense verbal brilliance, lots of pyrotechnics, and when people try to bring that into English, what you often get is almost pyrotechnics, and almost brilliance, so partly you read his poetry in English as an act of faith, but I think the poems in the book [A Part of Speech] conveys the--his passion and his irony and a kind of a ferocious intelligence that will give people a sense of what he's like. His great work in English is the essays.

JIM LEHRER: The essays.

MR. HASS: And a book of his essays I think might be another place to get the quality of his mind and energy.

JIM LEHRER: In addition to the--reading the poetry.

MR. HASS: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. When you use the term "pyrotechnic," are you referring to his uses of words,--

MR. HASS: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: --the way he arranges them, or his ideas?

MR. HASS: Both. All three.

JIM LEHRER: All three.

MR. HASS: But mostly, mostly the, the--he puns a lot. He plays a lot with language. He surprises with rhyme. There isn't much like him in American poetry right now.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Mr. Milosz, what was it about Joseph Brodsky that the Soviet authorities didn't like, that causes them to put him in, in--to try him and then put him in prison and then eventually to exile him?

MR. MILOSZ: You know, his attitude towards the world was sort of detachment and he really didn't acknowledge the existence of those authorities. He went his own way, and that was extremely irritating.

JIM LEHRER: And that's why--that was the only thing? I mean, he was not--he wasn't a--what you'd call a dissident poet, was he, in the--in what we normally refer to as people who are writing poetry against the state and all of that?

MR. MILOSZ: Not at all. He considered it below his dignity to quarrel with the state. He simply considered that the state is something ruled by low kind of individuals.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Mr. Hass, I read somewhere today that in describing where Joseph Brodsky came from, of course, which was Russia, they described it as the land of the poets. Are we a land of poets?

MR. HASS: Oh, I think we are. You know, one of the things that Joseph said about his years in Russia reading American poetry was that American poetry was for him a long lecture on autonomy, on freedom, and when he came here, he brought with him a passion for English language poetry, and he was one of the people who's made this country a sort of dazzling center of poetry in the world during the last twenty or thirty years.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Milosz, do you see the United States as a dazzling place for poetry?

MR. MILOSZ: Yes. I must say that Joe Brodsky was very happy being in America, and I consider that America is better for poets than, for instance, Western Europe.

JIM LEHRER: Now, why is that? Because I say--the common thing here is that we are not a poetic people, that we are very pragmatic and we read our stories but we don't read our poetry, but you don't see it that way.

MR. MILOSZ: Well, judging by interest in poetry on the campuses, we would say that this is not quite true.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Hass, I read today also that Brodsky said "that poetry is the only insurance we've got against the vulgarity of the human heart." And, in fact, I mentioned that in the News Summary at the beginning of the program. Is that a basic truth for you poets?

MR. HASS: Oh, I think it's a basic truth. You know, Yates, a great Irish poet whom Joseph loved, said it another way, he said, "We have filled our hearts with fantasy and our hearts grow brutal on the fair." One of the great things about poetry is that besides being an enchanter, it's a disenchanter, and a truth-teller, and Brodsky more than any other poet was one of those who managed to disenchant us out of the stupidity of our fantasies, and create more durable ones.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Would you agree with that, Mr. Milosz, that his poetry had that ability?

MR. MILOSZ: Yes. Yes. I consider that, that through his poetry one can apply the epithet sublime.

JIM LEHRER: Sublime.

MR. MILOSZ: Yeah. It's a very high praise, but undoubtedly his poetry is, is such. The trouble is, you see, and even I wonder his poetry is written in Russian, and it is in a way, its strength is linguistic, how it goes through translations, that's, that's another thing, not always go through translations.

JIM LEHRER: Sure. That was a point that Mr. Hass made a minute ago. Mr. Hass, you have a book of Joseph Brodsky's poetry there in your hand. Why don't--why don't you read a little bit. Tell us what it is, and give us--set it up, if it requires anything, and then read it, and we will say good night to you listening to Joseph Brodsky.

MR. HASS: Yes. Well, if Joseph was sublime, he was also amazingly clear and tough-minded, and here's a poem that--part of a poem sequence called "A Part of Speech" that might be a place to end:

		"...Life, that no one dares
		to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth,
		bares its teeth in a grin at each
		encounter. What gets left of a man amounts
		to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech."

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Hass, Mr. Milosz, thank you very much for being with us tonight.

MR. HASS: Thanks, Jim. It's a pleasure to be here.

___
			Peter Vail. Poets of the Empires' Outskirts

		(A Conversation with J. Brodsky about Derek Walcott)

	When Derek Walcott became the Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature for 1992, Joseph Brodsky was quoted in all the papers' announcements: "This is the best poet among those writing in English." What is important is not that one Nobel Prize Laureate praised another, but the similarities between these names and these literary figures, the fact that Brodsky said his words some ten years earlier, that he wrote about him an essay in the book "Less than One", that they are friends and, finally, that their poetic destinies resemble each other.
	Both are splinters of an empire. Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad, is living in New York, an émigré from the USSR, a citizen of the USA, a Russian poet, an American poet-laureate, an English-language essayist. Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia, a British colony which is an island of the archipelago of Lesser Antillian Islands in the Caribbean Sea, spent his youth in Trinidad, is living in the USA and is a professor of Boston University.
	As soon as his island received independence, Walcott was one of the first to exchange his status from being a subject of the British Empire, on which the sun never sets, to being a citizen of St. Lucia, which is twenty five miles long.
	It is amazing, but this island, whose size on the globe is that of a safety-pin jab, home to a hundred and fifty thousands residents, produced already a second Nobel Prize Laureate, becoming the absolute world champion in the number of Swedish Prizes per population. The first was the economist Arthur Louis, and if we take into account the fact that the prosperity of this island depends on a single industry -- export of bananas -- a prize in economics seems ironic. However, the poetic nature of the Caribbean Islands was never doubted. Alexo Carpenter called these places "magical reality", and Andre Breton described them as "surrealist" (maybe this in part could explain the prize given to Louis?). Walcott's friend from youth was V. S. Naipol -- one of the most brilliant English-language prose writers of our time, who was born in Trinidad to a family of émigrés from India. In Derek Walcott's own veins British, Dutch and Black blood mingle, both his grandmothers came from families of slaves. His first language was the Creole dialect. English, in which Walcott reached virtuosity, he studied in his youth as a foreign language. How can we not add here that the Russian Jew Brodsky amazes many Americans and English people with the depth of his understanding of the English poetic language. Thus when Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most logical thing seemed to speak about him to Joseph Brodsky, who himself was awarded the Nobel Prize five years earlier.
	-- [You have a rather good habit, instead of making friends with Nobel Prize Laureates, you make friends who become Nobel Prize Laureates.]
	-- I am indeed extremely happy. Happy that it is actually Derek who's received it.
	-- [How did you get to know each other?]
	-- This was in 1976 or 1977. There was such a wonderful American poet, Robert Lowell. We became friends, so to say. One day we sat and leisurely discussed who is worth what in poetry in English. And he suddenly showed me a poem by Derek Walcott, this was the long poem "Starappled Kingdom." This made a quite strong impression on me. Yet on the other hand I thought: well, a wonderful poem, so what? Everyone writes wonderful poems. After some time Lowell died and me and Derek met for the first time at his funeral. And it appeared that we both have the same publisher, Roger Straus (of the New York publishing house "Farrar, Straus and Giroux," -- P.V.)