The Arm of Displacement

There might be more to the action of a Homeric epithet than it being a reliable way to fill the space of a two-week oral telling or a signifier of limited imagination. According to M.I. Finley, “Poets and audience alike rest frequently, so to speak, as the familiar rose-fingered Dawns and the messages repeated word for word roll forth. While they rest, the one prepares the next line or episode, the others prepare to attend to it.”1 Perhaps it is no coincidence that when I hear someone whistling “I got Sunshine” on the train, I start singing it while doing the dishes. As human beings, we seem to be inherently programmed to code, recall, and perform various shared pieces of information, be it for purpose or for culture. Although I would argue that culture is purpose. The first strings of written word, poetry, literature, and historical accounts, first rang in the installments of the oral tradition, spoken by a bard and participated in by the audience. Therefore, repetition, anaphora, the Homeric epithet, serves as a binder that reflects both the consolidation and architecture of a closely-knit group of participants, or citizens.

In her collection of translated Russian poems, “Alien Matter,” Regina Derieva employs the significant markers of anaphora to paradoxically call into question the state of a shared common tradition, when we are at the brink of overindulgent faux-internationalism and, also paradoxically, in less communication with the people around us than ever before. Here’s the loop: if the origination of written poetry and lyrics began with the oral tradition, and this then beget a sense of nationality that depends on one voice or perspective to bind people together, and with the fact that we live in a virtually isolated world, then the utilization of anaphora within a “private” written poem becomes an ironic trope that disillusions the citizenry of the traditional Homeric epithet, making it and the reader feel weak and isolated.

For example, take the poem “I Don’t Feel at Home Where I Am”:

I don’t feel at home where I am,
or where I spend time, only where,
beyond counting, there’s freedom and calm,
that is, waves, that is, space where, when there,

you consist of pure freedom, which, seen,
turns that Gorgon, the crowd, to stone,
to pebbles and sand…where life’s mean-
ing lies buried, that never let one

come within cannon shot yet.
From cloud-covered wells untold
pour color and light, a fete
of cupids and Ledas in gold.

That is, silk and honey and sheen.
that is, boon and quiver and call.
that is, all that lives to be free,
needing no words at all.

In Russian, “that is” can be loosely translated to “this” as well, which still triggers the same effect. The narrator is seeking encouragement in her association of facts, figures, and shapes. She doesn’t “feel at home” with her singular position in her spatial and cultural world, and is trying to grasp at seemingly tossed about objects that surround her so as to achieve a stability of meaning and association. But all she ends up doing is repeating the conditional — “That is,” which becomes more of a question than a callback.

In a more political poem, “Theory of Recruiting”:

Sons of bitches
were born
with hearts of stone,
cherishing this stone
all their life.
Children of
sons of bitches
were born
with hearts of grenade,
in order to blow to pieces
everything,
and to leave as a message for their descendents —
entrails
(still smoking entrails)
of sons of bitches.

The refrain is cold and impervious. The subject matter is frightening. But this is a familiar place; Russia has experienced its fair share of terrorist bombings and brutality. Therefore, the inherent paradox that differentiates the anaphora in this poem is the fact that the narrator is speaking from a common, shared sphere of her known region, but it is of “sons of bitches … with hearts of grenade.” The twisted can be extended even further, I’m afraid. If Homeric epithets were meant to bring a type of people together and invoke a sense of commonality and sharing in a particular culture, then this poem succeeds on an altogether different and more disturbing level. We are all sharing in the “sons of bitches” and the “smoking entrails.” We have all been exposed to this scene. The narrator “blows” up the national commonality factor into a universal perspective, and it is a frightening phenomenon.

Regina Derieva’s poetry is reminiscent of Anna Akhmatova and Lorine Niedecker. She is from the old country and is having problems finding a new-world home. “Alien Matter” is a chronological packaging of her work, dating back to 1978, and many of the poems here draw direct allusions to imprisonment, guards, lack of freedom, and the self-conception of the poet as a child of exile, seeking answers, clarity, and stability from a “parent” country, finding only her own voice. That’s where I believe the aspects of Akhmatova and Niedecker conflate. In the beginning poem, “At the Intersection,” we have almost a direct reference to Akhmatova’s long poem Requiem, which is dedicated to Stalin’s victims. For example, the first section ends with the stanza: “I should remember I am a human being / but the wild wind prevents me / and the happy children of the guards / look out from under marble eyelids.” The narrator is differentiating herself through tone and content from these “happy children,” and encourages the association that everyone but these protected children, and the guards, is in danger of being somehow “unhappy.” The suspicion and terror are close at hand. 

The Niedecker allusion involves Derieva’s more at-ease, private language. One particular poem reminds me of a Niedecker piece, “Wilderness,” that is actually written included in Barnes and Nobles subway series, and which starts with: “You are the man / You are my other country / and I find it hard going.” Derieva’s poem, “Monuments are Lies,” begins with, “Monuments are lies / embodied in stone. And a man — is a lie, / embodied in a body.” Another is “Winter, Euterpe,” where the second part ends with: “oozing pain. / As though I’d not / yet run clear to the very brim / of absence, of non-being, of that / winter that no one could dream.” The references to Niedecker and Akhmatova might seem miniscule until one considers how worlds apart they may have been in their respective lives. This unlikely pair might place the author of “Alien Matter” into the plane of an uncomfortable past and present, where tradition is tugging on the sleeve, and the isolation of reason and reality keeps throwing off the arm.

There is a danger in writing about cultural identifications, in that one may end up bringing up trite references that are too “easy” and too “used before.” As a fellow Russian-American poet who has also written about her migratory experiences, I too have written about “dachas,” Joseph Brodsky, and rye bread. The danger of the expression of migratory experiences to term certain aspects the same way is a small trifle. In fact, it may somewhat align me with Derieva in the shared-ness of our fragmented heritage. But then to be fair, I enjoyed these moments less than her longer sequence poems, which waned from prose series to special experimentations, as well as her poems of abstraction. Maybe that explains it then – I like when Derieva is being most abstract because she uses unfamiliar sights and sounds that when pitted against each other, create masterful works of art.

My two favorites are “Discovery of Shadowing,” and “The Cast-Off Remnant of a Centaur,” for their strangeness as well as their utilization of repetition. The “Discovery of Shadowing” makes a very serious statement even in the first of its three short stanzas: “A man comes crashing, / comes crashing…/ A man comes crashing / until he falls / to his knees. / What is left of the tower / that appeared / after him?” Apart from the curious Buddhist philosophy, this poem makes a statement of our inherent detachment from the pulp of human capacity to act as a unified substance. This coming from a Russian. Which makes the poem all the more strong: it is necessary to act as your own agent, but the estrangement of commonality is a hard thing to bear. That is why, in the second stanza of the poem, “The poetry has gone / from the poetry. / It spends the night under the tower / which is just about to fall. Somehow / there is a connection: / poetry and the tower, / the tower and the man, / from whom poetry has gone.” I’d like to give the “fall” more credit than simply alluding to a historical phenomenon, aka the fall of communism.

I’ll leave off with my favorite line from “The Cast-Off Remnant of a Centaur,” which is enjoyable less so for any political or emotional strife; it’s a wordy poem that is fun in its provocations. The line is: “God doesn’t wonder, was the creature there, / the way the creature wonders about God.” For Regina Derieva’s “Alien Matter,” the folk ego is replaced by the one-body, one-mind factor. God is hiding or dead. Poetry involves something else altogether, and yet that familiar tug at the elbow is too hard to resist. There is brilliant and variant translation work in this book’s making. I would ask for fewer “tears,” but those are commonly the first reaction when, as in Derieva’s poem “Since I Have Not Had My Home”: “Lacking even paper / I write on my heart / turned inside out. / That is why it squeaks / at night like the earth’s axis / that turns me face to face / with the impossible.”