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ITERATURE
Poetry. "Eugene Ostashevsky combines elements of the Russian Absurdists with a very contemporary and very American performance idiom. The result is a poetry at once witty, incantatory and slyly subversive. And a great, careening ride..."--Michael Palmer. "Eugene Ostashevsky's Iterature goes out of its way not to be too careful, reveling in off-rhyme, visual rhyme, and any other method of linguistic play that might push the poet's language to the border of nonsense--or worse, incompetence. [...] A subterranean non-English grammar inform[s] his choices. [...] Not quite defeatist, he turns a wry, self-deprecating eye on everything and goes out of his way to dispel gravity"--Brian Kim Stefans in The Boston Review.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2005
31 people want to read
About the author
Eugene Ostashevsky
30 books13 followersEugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University. Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad and then immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 years old where they settled in New York City.
Ostashevsky has a PhD from Stanford University.
His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series.
He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.
Ostashevsky has a PhD from Stanford University.
His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series.
He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.
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February 27, 2008
Eugene Ostashevsky’s first books of poems, Iterature, is broken into five sections, all of which are titled and given a relatively broad date of composition. The first section, “The Gangster Who Lost His G,” indicates that the poems were written in both St. Petersburg and San Francisco between 1995 and 1998. This fact is interesting given what a reader might draw from how this cross-cultural experience initiates a sense of the bilingual and divergent geographies. While the poems seem less concerned with experience and geography, although some poems do name other foreign countries and are littered with an understanding of the cultural American landscape, they seem to erect a heightened sense of formalism given to acts of linguistic subversion. The poems also make references to literary figures such as Ovid, Sextus Propertius, and the Russian poet, Alexander Vvedensky, whom Ostashevsky has translated among many others associated with OBERIU. In his introduction to OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, his writes as a generalization of this group of writers: “We can regard their critique of language as a reaction to the ever-increasing mendacity of their linguistic environment. We can read the violence, despair, and fragmentation of their late work in terms of what was happening in the apartment next door.”
This is not a clever way to distract from Ostashevsky’s poems, but perhaps a way to enter his own work that is surely inflected by his work as a translator. If we are to speak of his stylistic choices that repeatedly occur throughout the poems, the most arresting of his choices as a poet is the forms the poems take. Written largely in rhyming couplets, the linguistic environment becomes a way in which to parody traditional forms in both American and Russian poetry, and to subvert logic. Ostashevsky, as far as I’m concerned, is not concerned with melopoeia as expressed by Ezra Pound, but more with the idea of subverting the logic that might be traditionally equated with sounds and words. Here we read from the poem “Senselessness For Vvedensky”: “An angel, at haec, is hit by a rock. / A demon sits brooding on a language block. // An eagle plays chicken with a Mack truck. / Each is a cuckoo you’d like to clock.” What I mean to specifically address is how this formal technique becomes a means rather than an end to interrogate logic on a philosophical and linguistic level as a way to play off of other realms of meaning. I am often confounded by the turns the couplets take as they seem want to fulfill the rhyme as a device, and do so by cramming different intelligences together to create the illogical, often befuddled articulation.
I’m not quite sure if I could characterize Ostashevsky’s overall project, nor am I privy to the facts or his poetics behind the work. Perhaps I could point to the opening poem, “Autobiography,” where Ostashevsky says “Then I found myself with no native tongue, / only two prosthetics to flap among [.]” I am tempted to read the speaker’s lack of a native tongue as a nod towards a sense of foreignness or in-betweenness, where language is pushed to a kind of shadow space. Although the arc of the poems do invite the sense of foreignness, and comments upon the vocation of being a poet, the various lexicons employed throughout the poems, as also noted in an essay by Matvei Yankelevich, such as street talk juxtaposed with higher diction, produce an effect that moves beyond the autobiographical. The poems while focused on language, negate the sense of language offered by traditional poetry as well as by language dispensed by the state.
This is not a clever way to distract from Ostashevsky’s poems, but perhaps a way to enter his own work that is surely inflected by his work as a translator. If we are to speak of his stylistic choices that repeatedly occur throughout the poems, the most arresting of his choices as a poet is the forms the poems take. Written largely in rhyming couplets, the linguistic environment becomes a way in which to parody traditional forms in both American and Russian poetry, and to subvert logic. Ostashevsky, as far as I’m concerned, is not concerned with melopoeia as expressed by Ezra Pound, but more with the idea of subverting the logic that might be traditionally equated with sounds and words. Here we read from the poem “Senselessness For Vvedensky”: “An angel, at haec, is hit by a rock. / A demon sits brooding on a language block. // An eagle plays chicken with a Mack truck. / Each is a cuckoo you’d like to clock.” What I mean to specifically address is how this formal technique becomes a means rather than an end to interrogate logic on a philosophical and linguistic level as a way to play off of other realms of meaning. I am often confounded by the turns the couplets take as they seem want to fulfill the rhyme as a device, and do so by cramming different intelligences together to create the illogical, often befuddled articulation.
I’m not quite sure if I could characterize Ostashevsky’s overall project, nor am I privy to the facts or his poetics behind the work. Perhaps I could point to the opening poem, “Autobiography,” where Ostashevsky says “Then I found myself with no native tongue, / only two prosthetics to flap among [.]” I am tempted to read the speaker’s lack of a native tongue as a nod towards a sense of foreignness or in-betweenness, where language is pushed to a kind of shadow space. Although the arc of the poems do invite the sense of foreignness, and comments upon the vocation of being a poet, the various lexicons employed throughout the poems, as also noted in an essay by Matvei Yankelevich, such as street talk juxtaposed with higher diction, produce an effect that moves beyond the autobiographical. The poems while focused on language, negate the sense of language offered by traditional poetry as well as by language dispensed by the state.
Displaying 1 of 1 review