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OUR SEMESTER
While our semester was intended to be dedicated to poetry, we knew we were going into our project nearly blind – we had little experience with the genre of eastern European literature, let alone poetry. We didn’t want to spend our first several weeks trying to find a handhold. Instead, we wanted to arrive at our first meeting ready to discuss something real and relevant. We agreed that reading an eastern European novel – and a strange one at that – would be the perfect way to fully immerse ourselves in the genre before confronting more difficult, condensed, and cryptic texts. Thus, during winter break we read Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars. This novel comes as close to poetry as a novel can – written in three sections adhering to the conceit of dictionary entries, the novel tells a story of a lost fictional people called the Khazars and their struggles with religion and humanity. Anyone familiar with the principles of magical realism and postmodern writing will see these reflected in Dictionary of the Khazars. The strangeness of the novel offers no explanation; instead, it demands blind acceptance of the absurd. In this way it becomes more mysterious than explanatory, more poetry than prose. The book is a sublime experiment that confronts how we interact with our past, knowledge both new and old, and what our history means for our future as well.
Our Semester: About
In the opening weeks of the semester, we took a swift and headlong dive into poetry. We began reading our guiding anthology, Emery George’s Contemporary East European Poetry, which would stay with us throughout the semester. We picked up the first of our collections of poems by a single author, Daniil Kharms’ The Charms of Harms: Selected Poems. Though Kharms wrote children’s poetry (due to being prohibited from writing and publishing otherwise in Russia), the poems in his collection were tangibly political with overtly mature themes. Sneaky and subtly clever, they seem to nip and scratch suicidally at the foundations of Stalinist totalitarianism. Indeed, Kharms was eventually arrested for his writings and publishing work, and he died in 1942 in prison during the siege of Leningrad at age 36.
Our Semester: About
Following Kharms, we turned to Poland and opened Zbigniew Herbert’s Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems. This collection of poems spans forty years of Herbert's career, from his early writings all the way through his later days. From him we learned how a distant, universal voice can simultaneously be a relatable one. We learned how to fabricate the thinnest of metaphorical membranes to not-quite mask political and personal strife. We learned how to shine a light from behind to illuminate the shadow of what we were trying to describe, how to create emphasis without the aid of punctuation, and how to engage with literary and cultural traditions without necessarily surrendering to them.
Our Semester: About
Next we dove into The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of little-known Czech poet, Ivan Blatný. Fluent in multiple languages and writing poetry in each one of them – oftentimes including more than one in the same poem – Blatný emigrated to England upon the communist seizure of his country, and he sought sanctuary in a psychiatric hospital. He spent the rest of his life there and continued to write, and though the actual state of his mental health remains unclear, his notebooks upon notebooks of poetry were confiscated and, luckily, were kept in secret by one nurse who took an interest in his writings. The surreality, gloominess, plain-spokenness, and wandering lyricism of his poems brought incredible and unique light to his poems’ imagined landscapes and narratives, and his work helped us focus on how language impacts a poem (and its translations).
Our Semester: About
Our final collection before spring break was Paper Children by Romania’s Mariana Marin. After Blatný’s melancholy lyricism, Marin was a wakeup call – her poems blistered with a barely-restrained anger, balancing content and emotion with stark language and pristine self-loathing in a way we didn’t know was possible. She rivals Louise Glück for bare-bones bitterness, and she makes Berryman seem a soft and tender lover. She taught us how a writer can be brought into their poems as both a character or an object, and how to put the self and the writer’s purpose in tension with one another.
Our Semester: About
Deaf Republic-- the much-loved book by Ilya Kaminsky-- served as one of the primary collections we read in our poetry seminar in the spring of 2019. This collection sparked the inspiration for this MAP in the first place. A warmup for our return, we read it until the conclusion of spring break upon which we immediately jumped into an earlier collection by the Ukrainian poet, Dancing in Odessa. Both collections are framed narratively, centered around a place and a people. These concerns are set at the very heart of Kaminsky’s writing. He writes narrative and prose poetry unlike any other, rendering tenderness as well as unyielding, unapologetic brutality, and we were excited to learn from him how poetry can tell stories as well as yoke them together into a world and a collection.
Our Semester: About
As our semester came to a close, we focused on two more female poets. First was Valentina Saraçini, a Macedonian poet, and her collection Dreaming Escape, a barely-punctuated, mythology-focused, reader-addressed series of confrontational and intertwined poems. And last, but certainly not least, we read Genya Turovskaya’s short collection Calendar, a series of twelve poems framed around each month of the year. Turovskaya was born in Ukraine but was raised in America, and, like Kaminsky, writes in English. From these two poets we learned the purpose of pain in poetry, as well as the intentionality that resides in a poems length. Finally, from these two remarkable women we learned how to structure and stitch a collection into a seamless, cohesive whole.
Our Semester: About
Throughout the semester, we also read several theoretical essays to guide our discussions and discoveries. The first several came from Seamus Heaney’s essay collection Government of the Tongue and included “The Poems of the Dispossessed Repossessed,” “Atlas of Civilization,” “The Impact of Translation,” and the titular essay, “Government of the Tongue.” Additionally, we read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “The Politics of Translation” and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s “Why I Choose to Write in Irish: The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back.” We selected these essays in order to keep ourselves mindful of the fact that we were unavoidably reading translations of these poetry collections, and therefore could not possibly hope to capture every nuance of each and every piece.
Our Semester: About
Finally, as this website attests, we wrote poetry throughout the semester. Each week we wrote and workshopped a new poem based on of the eastern European poems we had read the week prior. We wrote 12 poems in total, including a warm-up poem over winter break and two extras over spring break. We have agreed to include our 10 best on this site after many, many revisions and meetings centered around peer-critique. We thank you for taking the time to read through the fruits of our semester, and we hope you enjoy exploring the site and the many poets listed above.
Our Semester: About
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