Dust

by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Russia’s leading founder of Language poetry, in his new collection of essays fuses seemingly disparate elements of poetry, philosophy, journalism, and prose in an attempt to capture the workings of memory. At stake is not what he writes about―whether memory, Gertrude Stein, immortality, or a walk on Nevsky Prospect―but how he writes it. Formally, Dragomoshchenko never tires of digression, creating playful games of patience and anticipation for his reader. In so doing, he pushes story and closure into the background―arriving, finally, but not to a destination. Ultimately, Dragomoshchenko “carefully seeks out the dust of traces from the period of oblivion,” which evidently lead to the oblivion of minds.

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Essays

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2009

About the author

Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko (Russian: Аркадий Драгомощенко) was a Russian poet, writer, translator, and lecturer. He is considered the foremost representative of language poetry in contemporary Russian literature.

Dragomoshchenko fused elements of poetry, essay, philosophy, journalism and fictional prose. He "explores the way our perceived and conceptual worlds are constructed through language. Self-consciousness, mannerism and a degree of abstraction are inevitable hazards in this territory, they are also concomitants of an individual voice obstinately pursuing its own themes. The fundamental characteristics of his work remain constant and may be summarized in the title of his first American translations — Description.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was shelved in my library as new release: fiction, but it is not fiction. Instead, it's a series of eliptical but probably not technically lyric essays. Reflections, pensees, whatever, that's what these are.

A lot of the individual essays seem concerned with questions of presence and absence: what are we seeing in front of us, and what are we missing; when we write, what disappears and what is made visible. Kinds of things like that, and the writing itself, while difficult in places, is also very finely grained and milled, like a luxury soap:)

For me, the best essay in the bunch is "Do Not a Gun." I think that's the title, at least, a long travelogue type piece, mostly about NY and NYU, where D taught for a while, with a sidebar into the Winchester House in CA. The language in this one felt more immediate than similar pieces, for example, about the aura that surrounds Petersburg. It's not just that I know the Village a little; the writing style actually felt different, more direct.

That said, I liked this overall and would strongly consider reading more from Dragomoshchenko.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko was a "language poet" and translator of (primarily) American poetry (John Ashbery etc.) into Russian. It should consequently come as little surprise that DUST collects an assortment of essays that are essentially doing poetry by other means. These are essays that couldn't be further away from Montaigne; indeed they are often as not closer to Mallarmé. Mallarmé probably isn't right at all. There is more to DUST than language languaging. An intransigent materialist, I have never been interested in having metaphysics mixed in w/ my philosophy. But poetry? Yes. Poetry can and should be the domain of metaphysics. Poetry can address things far beyond the Big Questions, and can do so by pursuing inexact truths exactly. Dragomoshchenko, in writing these poetic essays, opened-out as they are, uncontained, spilling out and expressive of a radical formal plasticity, is definitely forging out beyond the Big Questions, or else phrasing them in opaque but nonetheless vivid poetic language. Space and time would seem to be his central concern (memory becomes an obstacle course of confusions), and as w/ the cinema, the splice would seem to be the central agent of his ontology. Everywhere spatial relations are troubled, disrupted, imbued w/ obscuring energies, and nothing possesses continuity, contiguity, clean linearity. Even when Dragomoshchenko writes at his most conventionally essayistic, as in the marvelous "Do Not a Gun," he fragments it, plots supremely unconventional connections, and appears to strive to conceptualize outside the domain of influence. He may passingly mention a Heidegger or a Žižek or a Blanchot, there may even by a near encounter at his work place w/ "professor Derrida," but at all times we are aware of being in the hands of a frontiersman (if not a mystic). The autobiographical often enters the picture, but in the end we have the sense of consciousness as an orphan without a seat, always passing through. It would be fun (and maybe instructive) to quote at length many of the remarkable and uncanny insights the book contains. I will simply quote one line from near the end of the final eponymous essay, the only piece composed of epigrams (a debt to Pascal?): "The dream of reason generates metaphors." Hold the phone: I need to include a second quote. In the aforementioned essay "Do Not a Gun," Dragomoshchenko writes of Winchester-heiress Sarah Pardee's famous architecture-experiment Llanda Villa, a demon-haunted house of hundreds of rooms, stairwells to nowhere, and doors only big enough for a doll. Dragomoshchenko, practically describing his own process, calls this "resistance to what the term architecture implies " and a "house-as-process, wavering like smoke in the imagination, (becoming) a never-ending epistle to the spirits and demons, a missive abounding in intricate allegories, crafty displacements of meaning, ellipses." This is totally the heart of DUST. And what of dust? This is not some portentous dust-to-dust metaphor. Dust appears throughout the book (well before the final piece named for it) and it does so as particles ... particles that disrupt the atmosphere, innumerable little splices in the plane of the given. Dust is even said to, in concert w/ a certain quality of light, make the stars imperceptible.

[Nirvana Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

How Dragomoshchenko turned a meditation on memory into a sensualist experience is beyond me. You’ll question the meaning of life. This will make you reconsider the idea of comparison, the quantification of time, the need to chronicle life. This will inspire the freeing acceptance of the futility of existence and its resulting lamentation. This made the dryness of the vernal equinox seem romantic. This made Kamchatka taste good. This reset the notion of “what is”, if “is” is even anything. A modern-day Proust covered in Nabokov’s poetic prowess and Dostoyevsky’s searing insights. Astounding.

[Anton Relin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Semiotic pondering of New York, wrapped with bluntness about how stories are told (from which we can conclude, to believe Sedaris’ stories are true would be naive), all supported by language poetry and the inner monologue of a man who embodies Russian-American-ness. Wonderful

[Alan Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

"each tooth has it's own dentist"

[RJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful little book I happened upon by chance. I don't know that much about "Language poetry" or Dragomoshchenko as an author but I really enjoyed the work here. This book occupies a space outside or in between genres, each piece having elements of the prose poem, essay, short story, and memoir which blend together fantastically, and elude you just when a concrete definition seems close. I particularly enjoyed the skillful way the author veered between high academic language and subject matter and deeply personal, highly emotional imagery. This is a slim volume which I think will stick with me.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, thoughtful, wandering essays that explore the fleeting thoughts of the mind. A wonderful experiment in prose containing really poignant moments alongside funny and nostalgic.

The way the essays are structured (or maybe not structured) reminded me of the awesome, infuriating structure of mind and memory.

[Janice Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and haunting! One of my favorite books I've read this year.

[Jeff Laughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I'd write a review that mirrored Drago's style, but I don't think i have the guts. I liked this, but it is CERTAINLY not for everyone. Holy lord, what a difficult book.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cool. I need to read more of his books.