December 12, 2003
Two poets and prose
Last night I reread "A Poet and Prose," Joseph Brodsky's paean to the poetry and prose of Marina Tsvetaeva. The essay brims with fascinating ideas, many of which contain the gravity of serious intellectual reflection without losing the quotability of our best aphorists. Some of these I want to memorize and repeat to myself like mantras. A select few:
"What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word's specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk within an elevated state of mind."
"Tsvetaeva's sentence is constructed not so much in accordance with the principle of subject followed by predicate as through the use of specifically poetic technology: sound assocation, root rhyme, semantic enjambment, etc. That is, the reader is constantly dealing not with a linear (analytic) development but with a crystalling (synthesizing) growth of thought."
"The most awful thing about service to the Muses is prepcisely that it does not tolerate repetition--either of metaphor, subject, or device. In everyday life, to tell the same joke two or three times is not a crime. One cannot, however, allow oneself to do that on paper; language forces you to take the next step--at least stylistically. Not for the sake of your inner well-being, of course (though subsequently it does prove to be for its sake as well), but for the sake of language's own stereoscopic (-phonic) well-being. A cliché is a safety valve by means of which art protects itself from the danger of degeneration." (Emphasis mine.)
The essay was translated by Barry Rubin and appears in Less Than One: Selected Essays, which I recommend highly. It's often available on the half-price literature shelves at Strand Books here in New York.