The Present Work

by Matvei Yankelevich

Marcel Duchamp once “It all started with Gustave Courbet.” Should the avant garde of today pay for the mistakes of its inspirational predecessors? In The Present Work, movement and moment, Marcel Duchamp and Gustave Courbet, crows and poets, progress and chance, all toggle back and forth between each other, contesting history, primacy, ideas of beginning and ending. The continuum is broken, parts become autonomous. The moment is separate from all other moments—it drops out of the line, out of the set, out of the continuum. The Cast of Characters includes a Scrap of Paper, Definition, Back Home, Interjection, Martini, Synopsis, Transcript, unknown soldiers of poetry, and many more.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published July 1, 2006

About the author

Matvei Yankelevich is a translator of things Russian, and a writer of things English. He is the translator and editor of TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007). He is a co-translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006). His own writing has appeared in various journals, and he is the author of a long poem, THE PRESENT WORK, presented as a chapbook by Palm Press [http://www.palmpress.org], as well as the book, Boris by the Sea, published by Octopus Books. He teaches at Hunter College and the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Reviews

[Matvei]

one thing I know about The Present Work is that the author's name isn't "MATVEL"

I'm pretty sure of it, since it's my book.
but they won't let me change it, hence, i'm nobody...

kafkaesque? a little?

-matvei, a.k.a. "r. mutt"

[William Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've seen him read from this and look forward to the experience again. The epigram at the beginning is about as packed an opening as you could find, except for maybe that first line in Heather McHugh's Not a Prayer, and it flips you over onto your back when your not expecting it so that it can show you the vaulting sky that sits above you.

[Dusie Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is great! I am really excited that I got it in my Palm Press packet. I highly recommend it to all my po-friends, dadaesque or not!

[Robin Goodfellow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, really, really outstanding. One of my favorite contemporary poets.