kapovich

Grace Cavalieri:The program is the “Poet and the Poem,” from the Library of Congress. I’m Grace Cavalieri. Our guest today is Katia Kapovich, an émigré from Russia. And she came to us from the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1922-1991] in 1990, and here she is with an opening poem.

Katia Kapovich:The poem is called “Generation K.”

“Generation K”

There is one lucid dream with open eyes:I lie down on the floor, the ceiling a stage,and see us gently floating, white-on-white,or hanging still like bats in Plato's cave.

We all adore loud colors, drink on the stairs,smoke too much and speak too loudly,drive ramshackle cars with broken gearsfrom hill to valley.

We mumble in English with heavy accents,dropping the articles like cigarette ashes,and suddenly forget at the end of a sentenceits initial station.

We don't really care what clothes we wearand still enjoy French movies for their smackof sexuality. We raise the collarsof our raincoats, turning our backs

on a stray foreigner finding a hotelin the dark capital where we stay as guestsuntil we transit to a better worldas painlessly as moving to the West.

Grace Cavalieri:The voice of Katia Kapovich, and she writes in Russian and English and has a wonderful new manuscript sitting before us that is called “Gogol in Rome.” This will be in hardcover before very long, I predict this. Your whole manuscript gives us the history of a person struggling to find autonomy -- spiritually, emotionally and politically. And you say you were a literary dissident. Now, we know what political dissidents are, what is a literary dissident?

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Katia Kapovich:A literary dissident is, kind of, strange, fuzzy notion, which was pretty normal for the young literary person back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It meant that you were involved in always -- some literary groups, certain literary activities. Probably, what we did, and it would very often [be] the case, you would sit in your kitchen with a typewriter on your knees, and you will hide the typewriter when somebody will knock on the door. And you have a big stack of paper. If you print, you basically print--

Grace Cavalieri:Underground material.

Katia Kapovich:Underground material -- then you, kind of, try to put it together, all the papers and spread it around.

Grace Cavalieri:But you were punished for this.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, we were, several times, our little literary group, were arrested and questioned by [the] KGB. Certain people, two friends of mine, one of them was a wonderful, wonderful Russian poet, was thrown out of the country.

Grace Cavalieri:So it’s very serious.

Katia Kapovich:It was serious, yes.

Grace Cavalieri:And Joseph Brodsky was in a labor camp because of his poetry, quite hard for us to understand. Katia is here with us because she is the Witter Banner Fellow in Poetry at the Library of Congress chosen by our poet laureate, Billy Collins. And this is really quite a wonderful honor, and it’s a career, I see in her, that is a meteor just starting up in America, and I think this is going to become a tremendous energy boost underneath your work, which is some of the freshest stuff I’ve heard. Let’s hear some more.

Katia Kapovich:Thank you.

Grace Cavalieri:This is the “Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. I’m Grace Cavalieri.

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Katia Kapovich:“Diogenes”

In lethargic October worn sneakers hang from a tree, a plastic bag starts a dervish dance in the driveway, high pitched ambulance sirens grow louder every day, as if trying to shout each other down.

   Saturday comes, and I sit down on the balcony, facing the rain. A homeless man in the private parking lot packs his blankets into a black plastic trash can. He"ll soon go away for the winter and the trash can, his summer home, will be chained to the fence.

Grace Cavalieri:Give us another, we’re just getting used to you.

Katia Kapovich:I’ll read more about past. I used to live in the Urals where I studied late ‘70s.

“In the Bathhouse”

And when at last I used to leave the house after the lazy Sunday rest, the sun was high. It saw a town in drowse; a golden rush of leaves lay to the west. All northern Russian towns are quite alike: a river, a long street along the river, a square with a statue of a leader stretching his right arm forward like a guide. The crowd headed where his finger pointed: to a bathhouse on the river's bank. I walked along with the others, a poor student, a ghost of those blind alleys, nil, a blank. In the light and shade of my sixteenth October I carried but a parcel in my hand. The smell of soap, of public bathhouse timber  is what I call the smell of the motherland. And I remember skinny women's shoulders, curved spines and - with a gasp of awe - their loose and bulky bellies in the folds of many motherhoods.

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The old stone floor was warm and smooth under their bare feet, sunlight fell on it through the upper windows, rays intermixed with steam and water lit the hair of the bathing women. Their faces up, eyes closed, they stood under the showers, like in an ancient chapel, and listened to the choirs of migrant birds. With their necks craned and with their nipples relaxed under the water, with their palms caressing chests and falling to their hips, with bluish veins crisscrossing their slim ankles, they looked like water nymphs. Time, hold them still, save them like flies in amber!

   I look out of the window across the cobble-stone plaza. I see the autumn river which like a saw cuts through the log of the horizon. The eye finds only what was there before: the sky, the water, many rivers ago.

Grace Cavalieri:The voice of Katia Kapovich. Now, I have been reading this work for a month, of yours, and trying to answer some questions, my own questions, what do I find that is so distinctive about these poems? And I think it is because you’re so uninhibited about using dialogue, situation, characters, events. It’s almost as if you have given us prose, but it’s in poetry. You tell a story, and you do everything. You’re not afraid to do anything in a poem. You’re totally uninhibited. And what I admire most is the long form. Because to sustain that story that you’re telling without losing the energy and making it sag, it is masterful work. And to be writing in a second language, I’m really, really impressed. Is it because of your training in Russian literature, and in the language of Russian that equips you to do this?

Katia Kapovich:Actually yes. Actually it’s a very true observation. Certain moments, certain traditions in Russian poetry kind of provide me with this kind of trampling, this starting land. And we like, in Russian, to tell stories, we like to tell stories and we like to listen to others. So, poetry was also the means of communication between people. It wasn’t only self-expression but it was means to reach people and to talk to them.

Grace Cavalieri:And you talk about memorizing as a little child of 11, memorizing long verses of poetry, which is not something we do with our children in this country.

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Katia Kapovich:Yes.

Grace Cavalieri:So that also gave you sustenance, maybe. The long ribbon of strength to write like you do. Do you write your poems in pieces or do they come out all of one fabric?

Katia Kapovich:Well, it depends. I cannot really think of a solid, kind of, answer here because sometimes it happens that I write a piece and come to this piece after a year, in a year. And sometimes, like “Bathhouse,” was written in 15 minutes.

Grace Cavalieri:That was a blessing given to you, right? Because you tell a narrative story, and sometimes there’s a plot that you’re telling about someone who you thought was dead and reemerges. And so that would seem to me that it would come out as a novelist might write, more the long distance runner than the sprinter, that kind of writing.

Katia has been writing English and Russian and she has had English language poems which have been published. “London Review of Books,” “Ploughshares,” “Harvard Review,” many, many other literary journals, and she has collections of her work in Russian, which includes a novel that is “The Prompter.” I would love to read that. Is that translated yet?

Katia Kapovich:Not yet.

Grace Cavalieri:I would love to read that because novels by poets are something quite different. That was in ’98. Richard McKane has translated her Russian poems in his anthologies” Poet for Poet” [and] “Surviving the 20th Century: Ten Russian Poets.” And there’s a new book now out. What is the title of that?

Katia Kapovich:It’s “A Break for Smoke,” which was just published in some pieces of work by the very prominent, heroic publisher, was the first to publish Brodsky and so—

Grace Cavalieri:And he’s still in existence, his publisher.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, yes. He’s reasonably young. He’s in his 50’s.

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Grace Cavalieri:Were you surprised to learn that it was being published, or were you expecting this?

Katia Kapovich:Both, actually. I was hoping then I was surprised when we, Russians are very passionate and at the same time very authoritative as publishers. And he gives me orders. I, a little, I’m used to being under such command. So, I was surprised—

Grace Cavalieri:How long did it take to get into print?

Katia Kapovich:Very fast. It’s just the process, the printing process is fast.

Grace Cavalieri:I love the title of McKane’s translations, “Surviving the 20th Century,” which I feel is so apt for your book. This book is a book of a survivor. I mean, when you read your poetry, you know what the human heart can endure in an alien climate, and yet have a love for the motherland at the same time. I can smell the wood smell you talk about. But the colors of the book are gray and black and there is much which breaks the heart. If one read this book, “Gogol and Rome,” what do you think they know about Russia and the USSR?

Katia Kapovich:I would like my reader to be sensitive to little things, to nuances. I do not much care about general appearance, general show of this country, but little things like smells, like colors, little colors somewhere in the corner a night. People sometimes catch something bright on this completely dark background and suddenly, the eye catches something bright. And that’s why I can afford sometimes to be funny and humorous, about, saying with humor, about dark things too.

Grace Cavalieri:You still love the place, though.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, of course, I do.

Grace Cavalieri:What do you miss about it?

Katia Kapovich:What do I miss? I miss people, first of all. It’s not only Russia that I miss, more of Moldova, where I grew up and lived to age 30 until I immigrated. And Moldova

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is a very special country within Russia. It was not always Russian, it was part of Romania. So when I describe Russia, it’s my Urals where I had to go to study because my father was a political prisoner. And there was no chance in hell I would be able to attend university in the capitol. But, so I went to a very remote place, where I hoped that people wouldn’t be able to trace our history, dissident history of our family.

Grace Cavalieri:Katia Kapovich. Your father was a leading architect for the state before he was imprisoned in the late ‘70s. What caused that?

Katia Kapovich:It was a political process. He was fighting for independence for artists and for architecture. And he was very good, actually. He organized a group of architects and engineers building houses in very abandoned places, deserted places, where nobody, government didn’t care to build things like bathhouses, bath cleanings, or schools. And so it was good times and it was bad times and on good days they were safe, but on a bad day they were caught up and the political process was pretty severe. He received eight years of prison and camps.

Grace Cavalieri:Katia Kapovich. And I’m going to mention something Billy Collins said about her, because he is a great fan of hers, and is the one that proposed she be the Witter Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress for this year. He says, “Katia Kapovich possesses one of the freshest, most arresting poetic voices I have heard in a long time. She can sway effortlessly from the most common detail into zones of sheer imaginative wonder. That she offers a rare view of a poet’s daily life in Soviet Russia only adds to the broader significance of her writing. ‘Gogol in Rome’ is a powerful gathering of her best work in English.”

And I have to second that, because I can’t compare it to anyone else I know writing which is very interesting. And I thought that might be a function of the voice that comes to English from another literary history that has a different take on each word. Just a fresh take on each word because you hear each word anew when it comes to the second language, and it’s an asset.

Of course you can louse it up if you’re not a marvelous poet. And I read this book, and I just kept thinking, “Wow, this woman’s wild.” She tells a story and she, all of a sudden, drops a remark in there that’s a slang remark and then she goes to high a cultural remark, and then a scarf and then the eyes and then slang. It’s just very venturesome work. So, let’s hear some more of it. We’re at the Library of Congress. This is the “Poet and the Poem” for the Library of Congress, I’m Grace Cavalieri.

Katia Kapovich:

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“A Death”

My first love died in the Afghan war, but not from bullets, not by the hand of Mars. He drowned while swimming in Ferry Lake. That’s why they didn’t bring him back to us, but buried him there, in the sands of the desert. The soldiers did not shoot into the air eighteen times, which was his quicksand age. No drums broke the sirocco silence. My first love died because he couldn’t swim. They had marched across the desert for two weeks, he saw a lake, a blister on the lips of the earth. He sneaked out to the bank and jumped into the water. Then his heart stopped. A water-nymph looking a bit like me pulled him by hand ashore. There he lay on dry mignonette and watched the clouds marching across the desert sky. 

Grace Cavalieri:I wondered how you got to that last line.

Katia Kapovich:See, when you love somebody, you visualize this person whether he is alive or dead and, actually, maybe, that’s what makes you a poet, visualizing people you love, visualizing places you love.

Grace Cavalieri:Occupying a reality. We have to mention that was the Afghan-Russian war [Soviet-Afghan War].

Katia Kapovich:It was Afghan-Russian war, late ‘70s, ’79.

Grace Cavalieri:But the event is so fictional, practically. He should jump, he could not swim, but he was so parched that the jumped into the water and drowned. That’s so amazing in itself, but to see him afterwards lying, watching the clouds march in the sky, that is a perfect piece of surrealism for a poem that I don’t know how else it could end which would not be maudlin.

Very interesting, because when reality becomes too much, you fly. That’s when you fly. Let’s hear another. This is going to be a book called “Gogol in Rome.” And it’s looking for a publisher right now. I don’t think it’s going to take very long.

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Do you believe in applying to these many contests that read for publication throughout the country?

Katia Kapovich:I don’t know what to think about it. It’s very -- the concept is very new for me. I’m, maybe, trying to apply now. But we never did it before.

Grace Cavalieri:Many poets have success with it. You see, this work is so good that I’m not afraid of that. But there are at least 50 or more contests a year in America for top publications. And it takes persistence and mailing out, you know. But I feel that may be the way that you will be a winner because it’s mostly getting read in this country.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, my husband, a wonderful poet, Philip Nikolayev, he just won a contest, literary contest, and his book “Monkey Time” will be published by Verse Press, which was “Verse” magazine.

Grace Cavalieri:Oh, right, a time-honored magazine. So that’s an example then. He just threw it into the lottery. Well that’s encouraging.

Katia Kapovich:So it’s very encouraging. So I started to--

Grace Cavalieri:We know they get read. In contests, we do know that they get read, whereas we don’t always know otherwise. Katia Kapovich.

Katia Kapovich:It’s another poem with Russian structure, mental structure.

“Something to Oppose”

As the third generation of dandelions is turning gray, I'll visit Moscow, where my father and his friends still prod kitchen walls with their shoulders, drink cheap wine, chat politics, grow older than their own fathers. The great wars are over; death does not draft us into the defense of death. A domestic paradise of ancient photos, on several of which I'm one of those sunny spots without features in Eastern Europe's twilight. The ceilings are so low they make you stoop

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in this early-"60s-built "Khrushchev home" type of block of flats. On the kitchen table I find my father's "victim of repressions" special privileges card. Fully exonerated. "So what privileges does it grant you? Can you get a visa and visit me in the States? - "No, but I can ride the subway all day for free,  if I ever get that bored." Of Putin he says, "Shitty government but its very shittiness contributes to the development of political culture, because at least there is something to oppose." A classic "60s dissident, my father couldn't live in the West. There's nothing to oppose there. He says the atmosphere of freedom makes him shrink.

Grace Cavalieri:He sounds like a real literary character. If you lived there now, what would life be like for you as a writer? Would you become famous? Is the climate accepting of a poet like you? Could you get what you want there?

Katia Kapovich:Yes, yes. I would be, my Russian poems, my Russian career even without me there, which is a very crucial moment always for a poet, and I’m not really one of those who like to be in the corridors of the publishing houses and. But yes, I think, even without that it’s pretty successful. So, I think I would have found that maybe, a good share in some magazine.

Grace Cavalieri:And enough money to live comfortably?

Katia Kapovich:I do not need much, actually, I’m pretty--

Grace Cavalieri:But is there money enough there, for a literary person?

Katia Kapovich:I think people who work for magazine, fat magazines in Russia, they make a certain amount of money. And plus, they give readings, they go up road, so that’s how they survive. It’s not much money, but you can live in Russia on little money.

Grace Cavalieri:Well, how about this. You get famous in America, and you get famous in Russia at a parallel track. You’re young enough and the world is small. The world is

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shrinking so much. I think that’s the way you’re going to go. I don’t think you’ll be forgotten in Russia.

Katia Kapovich:But then it’s a danger of split personality when you become too famous in both countries.

Grace Cavalieri:Well I think you have to worry about your image then. You’re one place and you’re image is in the other, right? But it’s worth a try. And do you know what? The work is what’s important, and getting the work out. You can’t stop that. I mean, what people think of it, you’re not in control of. And so if you get a lot of laurels let’s take them. We’ll take them.

We’re the Library of Congress and we’re talking to the new Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry. And it is wonderful to have a person of such scope and range as she bringing such a world of literature to her own English language poems. We’d like to hear another.

Katia Kapovich:It’s more domestic poem.

“Black and White”

Twice a year - right before my birthday and on Christmas Eve - I climb on a chair, fetch a dusty Adidas shoebox from a shelf and lay out ancient black and white photos from Russia on the dinner table, noticing that the glossy paper has yellowed in the corners.

   “One day, in the year, say, 2012, I'll be spreading this ritual solitaire over a bluish tablecloth, and my teenage daughter will float out of her room, head in earphones, look at the collection and ask with lukewarm curiosity "How do you get them to be black and white like that?" 

Grace Cavalieri:The wonderful thing about a poet is that she can go imagine cross time, flash-forward and backward across time. Because when, I think, you wrote that you didn’t have a three-year-old daughter, right? When you wrote that poem?

Katia Kapovich:No, I did, actually.

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Grace Cavalieri:Oh, you did have the child, and you imagined her as a teenager coming out saying, “How do you get pictures to be black and white?”

Katia Kapovich:A poem called “Christmas 2001” was written, I have to make this confession, a week before Christmas 2001, and prediction, a little prediction came out true.

“Christmas 2001”

A dry northern wind at Christmasbrings clouds of seagulls to Cambridge,landing them at 10 A.M.upon Harvard's stadium.I am dishonest,I steal my way in to run hereonce in a while without authorization,but right now I'm just passing by.

Tall bleachers to my rightacross the hollow amphitheater of winterseem ready to surrenderto snow, but there is none.

A man in a greasy Santa uniformambles from the direction of Mt. Auburn Cemeterywith an empty cigar box in his hands.He sets it down on the curbstone.‘Free. Take anything you need,’reads the handwritten inscriptionin fat purple highlighter.

Grace Cavalieri:We’re at the Library of Congress. This is the “Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. I’m Grace Cavalieri. Our guest is Katia Kapovich. “Fulcrum” is what you’re working on now. It is a literary magazine, brand new, the first issue just coming out, almost 300 pages?

Katia Kapovich:Yes.

Grace Cavalieri:And you are the co-editor, with your husband.

Katia Kapovich:

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Yes, with Philip Nikolayev. He’s editor-in-chief.

Grace Cavalieri:What madness. What madness? I mean, thank God, bless you for doing this. But it’s like a pound of flesh, isn’t it?

Katia Kapovich:Yes, Philip was very brave to start this enterprise.

Grace Cavalieri:Tell us about it.

Katia Kapovich:Actually, the concept is completely his. I was just very supportive. It’s 12 parts of the English speaking world in issue one, number one, a map of English language poetry. That’s how we’re planning to proceed with this, just publishing multi, multi -- very diverse map of poetry, bringing people from all over the world. And there are very famous people, some of them are very famous like August Kleinzahler in the USA and Robert Kelly, Brian Henry, critic Marjorie Perlow, and she gave us a beautiful article about Beckett for the first issue.

Grace Cavalieri:So you take essays as well as poetry?

Katia Kapovich:Yes, essays about poetry and about literature, but with this kind of tint of poetry, poetic.

Grace Cavalieri:Must be by poets.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, philosophy of – also criticism must have poetry. And in Australia, poets from Australia, from New Zealand, John Kinsella is a famous Australian poet.

Female Speaker 2:How can a person get a copy of “Fulcrum?”

Katia Kapovich:We will have a subscription, and it will be advertised.

Grace Cavalieri: Should we say an address here?

Katia Kapovich:Yes, meanwhile, it's --

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Grace Cavalieri:Is it already printed?

Katia Kapovich:It's coming out --

Grace Cavalieri:Any minute?

Katia Kapovich: Any minute. So it's -- I think next week it will on the shelves of the stores.

Grace Cavalieri: How are you going to distribute it?

Katia Kapovich:We have a company, distributing company helping us.

Grace Cavalieri:There go your Sundays. Really. Well, I think we ought to give some method by which people could reach you, maybe even an e-mail address. Would that be easy? So they could order one. We can't give the price, because it's public radio, but they can contact you and find out about it.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, I will give at the end, maybe --

Grace Cavalieri:That will be great.

Katia Kapovich: I will give an e-mail.

Grace Cavalieri:Would it be your own e-mail?

Katia Kapovich:It will be Phillip's e-mail.

Grace Cavalieri: Okay, we can do that. And I'm sure you might get a few takers there, because it sounds a little different from the usual magazine, although we have a number in this country, the life of a little magazine is not more than five years. Some have been -- since, you know, 1900, “Poetry” magazine, but it is so hard to get the

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money to do this great service to proliferate literature. I wish you all the luck on this.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, thank you. We had luck already with very generous friends of ours, one of whom actually just got a big journalistic prize and was in the winners, among the winners for Pulitzer this year. I think she's still a candidate for a Pulitzer, Ellen Berry from “Boston Globe.” And she is also one of the editors and supports the magazine.

Grace Cavalieri:You mentioned August -- is it Kleinzahler?

Katia Kapovich:August Kleinzahler.

Grace Cavalieri: He mentioned your work. And he says -- he calls your vignettes “indelible.” I think that's very good. He says, "Her indelible vignettes introduce us to the eerily desolate landscapes of the post-glasnost Soviet Union, often through the filter of that dream-like transitional consciousness, peculiar to the recent émigré to America."

That's interesting, “The filter of that dream-like transitional consciousness peculiar to the recent émigré to America.” As if we're just seeing it through kind of smoke filled glasses, what you are seeing.

Has your vision changed much since you wrote these things? We do get that surreal idea of a poet coming to another culture when we read your work. Is your present work in the same vein?

Katia Kapovich:I'm trying to change myself a little to be more, more specific about reality that is here in the States. I'm really very involved in life here, and as much as outsider as in the marginal person in general. I still live in the stairwell smoke, a pack a day, but still I am involved with people with different activities. So I want to write about my life and their lives here.

Grace Cavalieri:Well, naturally, your poetry would change because your life is so different now?

Katia Kapovich:Because it is different, it is.

Grace Cavalieri:Yes, and how is it different?

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Katia Kapovich:It is different actually in a very good way, I suspect. Sometimes I'm afraid of it. I have the same kind of boost of energy I used to have from being marginal, from being outside in Russia. And many people would confirm the same thing, say the same thing. They, the special situation in Russia helped them to realize themselves to become poets. But as I've been here for ten years, I understood that I can be a free person, too, unlike my father.

Grace Cavalieri:You don't have to fight so hard?

Katia Kapovich:I don't have to fight, because there is always some fight going on, and there is always a fight. And even, you know, taking position in this fight, mentally, in your mind, just philosophically, arguing with yourself sometimes.

Grace Cavalieri:It's enough?

Katia Kapovich:It's enough to be part of this fight.

Grace Cavalieri:Because it is like you -- the artist is always the other anyway. The artist is always outside of society looking in, and so that will never change. But what you see today will be very different from what you saw ten years ago.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, and I am happy about it. I want to change. I think a person needs -- changes need to see, needs several pairs of eyes, and from time to time, it's a dramatic change, like Nabokov used to say, it was a dramatic change for him to switch from Russian into English, and he wasn't able, actually, to come back to Russian writing.

Grace Cavalieri:Did you love him?

Katia Kapovich:I still love that book of --

Grace Cavalieri: I think he's one of my top favorite poets. And you can read his English was like -- how many languages? I think he spoke nine or something, but English was his second language. And you can read a page of his work and have to go and look up a word. He had such a grasp of the English language, having come to it

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secondarily, that you cannot believe that. And he knew words I did not know existed. It's just one mind that will never be matched, I guess.

And Brodsky, did you know that he learned English in the labor camp by translating T.S. Elliot line by line?

Katia Kapovich:Yes, I read his memoirs. I'm not completely sure it's true. I think he always kind of exaggerates certain things. I'm sure he was interested in English poetry in general.

Grace Cavalieri:It made a good case.

Katia Kapovich:But maybe he was, yes, celebrating an English -- he had a lot of time in this camp where he was sentenced to.

Grace Cavalieri: Seven years, yes. Katia, Katia Kapovich. We're going to hear some more.

Katia Kapovich:“At the Young Pioneer Camp”

That summer day was dim, the yellow dorms of our Young Pioneer camp winked through the fence of rain, when the bus stopped by the doors of the main office building, exhaling us.

   Uniform white shirts, blue shorts, scarlet neckerchiefs, we headed upstairs for our physicals, were checked for diarrhea, headaches, chickenpox, bad teeth, and humiliating lice.

   Are you a boy or a girl?" - a nurse asked me. I blushed and whispered that I was a girl. At thirteen I was as flat as veneer, wore short haircuts and bit my nails.    I'd been eating unwashed fruits for a week hoping my tests would reveal parasites and they'd send me home. I walked heavy-footed out of the lab and into the night.

   The rain had stopped, crickets were trilling, my roommates were asleep, a lonely lightbulb

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under the ceiling lit their faces against gray flat pillows on ancient standard bunks.

  An iron frame, a mattress with bad springs, a clock above my head without one hand... I opened my journal and wrote "childhood stinks" and closed my eyes. They were full of sand.

Grace Cavalieri:Someone has mentioned you in relation to Chekhov. I think that's a good comparison. Do you?

Katia Kapovich:I do see now after the person has mentioned it, because I love details. I love --

Grace Cavalieri:It is so, true, yes. And if you were to say who -- what your fixation on Gogol is -- first of all, tell our audience who Gogol was.

Katia Kapovich:Gogol is the first and most interesting writer and poet in prose who was born in Russia. And he was a friend of Pushkin, not a close friend, but according to Gogol, who liked to imagine things, he was a very close friend. At least, he was influenced by Russian great poet Alexander Pushkin.

And he wrote what was his opus magnum, “Dead Souls,” and “Inspector- General.” His -- my fixation on Gogol, since childhood, one of the first -- he wrote also books for children. Or at least children could read his books, because it's fantastic really. Many things -- very mysteriously, intriguingly happening not happening situations, historical situations. He was -- it was Russian romanticism influenced by the Jain school in Germany very close to Hoffmann and Mérimée. So he was a scholar of romanticism. He became a scholar while reading these authors and also translating them. And of course, every child of Russia was interested in this also, in Gogol.

So that's how I got, I met Gogol. But then I was writing my dissertation on Gogol and that's when I discovered many things for myself. So I wrote my dissertation on Gogol. It's called “A Representation of Madness.”

Grace Cavalieri:And you don't give that among your credentials?

Katia Kapovich:Right.

Grace Cavalieri:

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And it should be published.

Katia Kapovich:Right, I --

Grace Cavalieri:That's important.

Katia Kapovich: It was a long time ago.

Grace Cavalieri: That doesn't matter. That's a very important part of your career, because you imagine him, you imagine him in Rome, you imagine him in Jerusalem, you imagine Gogol in New York. He becomes a persona that you keep creating and placing different places in the world. What if, what if he did this? If not, where would he have been? That's a very important -- now I see why he's an integral part of your life because as a child, he captured your imagination.

Katia Kapovich:Yes, he's my Vergil.

Grace Cavalieri:And so fitting, then, that he speaks in your ear. And I imagine that your whole career, that you will never abandon him.

Katia Kapovich:Right.

Grace Cavalieri:You will find --

Katia Kapovich:He never abandoned me, actually. As much as --

Grace Cavalieri: Your spirit guide. Gogol and Cambridge now, huh? I remember -- yes, reading in the '50's, “Dead Souls.” I mean, it took us somewhere we had never been before. But I was wondering if an American child would read that kind of work, even if it were accessible.

I think the Russian child has a very different approach to books. Now maybe Harry Potter is kind of the first large reading assignment that our young people will tackle. It's not like Americans to give children huge things on their plates to read. We spoon feed. And get good results. I mean, as one method. You

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know, I approve of it. But when you were growing up, you were given a big dose of literature as a child.

Katia Kapovich:Yes. We were well fed with literature, serious classics at a very early age.

Grace Cavalieri:And did everyone take to that? Are there more of the percentage of non-readers in Russia because of that? Because in America, we go more towards democracy in readership rather than an elite kind of intellectual readership.

Katia Kapovich:I'm not sure about the proportions of literature made it possible to reach people or something else like for example, we didn't have TV's. We didn't have discotheques. We seldom went to the movies. Plus, literature was an institution in itself. It substituted for many other institutions probably which were here available for a young person and so that's our -- it was our resort. So for many people who probably, it was a resort also, a access a way to reach something, to reach other worlds, especially.

Grace Cavalieri:To reach other worlds. And let's hears some of your own literature.

Katia Kapovich:“Gogol in Rome.”

Annoyed with the parochialism of the "fantastic city" of St. Petersburg and close to the unexpected end of his life, Gogol escaped to Rome. He settled in a colony of Russian artists, sharing lodgings with his bosom friend, the painter Alexander Ge. On their long walks they discovered “the inner meaning of everything." Gogol, a perpetual titular councilor, was almost happy there: he could forget the petty insults of the civil service and a failed career at the University. He was secretly working on Book Two of his magnum opus, Dead Souls, stealing bits of furniture and parts of the domestic atmosphere from paintings of his late-Romantic friends into the mansions and orchards of his grotesque characters. His own descent into madness occurred in strongly marked ages.

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He saw that everything was alive in Mother Nature - trees, stones, sand on the beach, seashells - and everything called for his empathy. He stopped eating, stopped drinking wine (that blood of grapes), turned almost into a Jainist. His friends were appalled; his mother freaked whenever she received another of his strange and ambiguous letters, full of advice for the improvement of the Fatherland. His doctors prescribed enemas, hazardous treatment which seeps potassium out of the body, causing a deterioration at the heart. He destroyed his novel, throwing four hundred pages into the fireplace, and would now spend his days mostly in bed, covered with three woolen blankets. "It's cold in Italy, it's dark!" he complained to his servant. The doctors bled him with leeches until he was dead.

Grace Cavalieri:What of theater in Russia? What of the theater world, playwrights now? We have our greatest, the greatest plays and theater once came out of that country. What's going on now?

Katia Kapovich:I'm not very much --

Grace Cavalieri:You don't hear too much.

Katia Kapovich:But very much in course of the events there. I think theater is doing all right in Russia.

Grace Cavalieri:We don't get it here, though.

Katia Kapovich:Maybe it's difficult for them to travel, but I'm not really a theater person. I've never been. But poetry has its own theater.

Grace Cavalieri:Oh, yes.

Katia Kapovich:But I think theater is doing better than other, other fields of art.

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Grace Cavalieri:The state funds it?

Katia Kapovich:Maybe partially the state funds, but they also have their resources. Some people can help theaters and theater lovers. Again, I'm not sure about it.

Grace Cavalieri:From your work, of course it was life ten years ago, and as a teenager, you had to sneak away to go to see an Italian film, because this wasn't property for everyone. I mean, you had to show ID to get in. That was where they served wine, and the poem is so amusing, because it says that a celebrity falls over your feet, and he's drunk and you realize the people are coming not to see the film, but because that's where they can get wine. So we see the life of austerity and artistic austerity, where you were so thrilled to go see an Italian film. Things are different now, right?

Katia Kapovich:It's very different. I had been there two years ago. It's a different Russia. It's much more --

Grace Cavalieri:But still open? Everyone is allowed to partake of every cultural delight, would you say? That can afford it?

Katia Kapovich:First of all, not all of the people can afford it. But secondly, I think certain hierarchies and political stubborn structures took hold after a while. After perestroika, perestroika made it possible. Freedom really blossomed in the days of perestroika, but actually answering your even previous question, which was difficult -- would I be successful there? I'm not sure now. Because I think certain kinds of, certain kinds of processes go in breeding Russia to stagnation take place now.

Grace Cavalieri:A little conservative?

Katia Kapovich:A little conservative. More conservative.

Grace Cavalieri:Remind of what glasnost was. That was under Khrushchev? Remind me about it. Glasnost was an opening of windows –

Katia Kapovich:Gorbachev.

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Grace Cavalieri:Oh, Gorbachev. It was an opening of windows and fresh air was supposed to be coming in. We were widening our boundaries, right? And you felt that there was some success?

Katia Kapovich:It was success. It was a big change for us. My father received amnesty. It was amazing that political prisoner came out of the prison. Usually it never happened.

Grace Cavalieri:They opened prison doors?

Katia Kapovich:They opened prison doors for political prisoners, not for criminals.

Grace Cavalieri:And he had a free card. He could ride the subway all day if he wanted. That was something.

Katia Kapovich:So it was big change, physical change. But these days, again, I'm not the best judge. It's just my way of seeing things. I spent three months, almost three months in Russia. But I noticed that certain kinds of bad process taking place.

Grace Cavalieri:A little bit of backpedaling?

Katia Kapovich:Yeah, backpedaling.

Grace Cavalieri: Another poem, please. Katia Kapovich. We're at the Library of Congress. This is the “Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. I'm Grace Cavalieri.

Katia Kapovich:

“A Waltz”

A Russian accordionist in Harvard Squareplays a familiar antique waltzand I suddenly remember the lyrics,which have escaped my memory for years:those warriors sleep on Manchuria’s hills,where no Russian words can be heard.

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Our school’s choir once rehearsed itfor a New Year’s Eve performancefor hours in a big cold auditorium:a dozen boys in navy blue uniformsand seven girls in brown dressesand a shabby piano in front ofempty rows of chairs.

Some of those boys now sleep on Afghanand Chechen hills, some of those girlssing with the angels, afraid to mess up a note, while the old music teacher scratches his beardand waves his conductor’s baton.

Another poem.

“A Wolf.”

Once when I was fifteen, I cleaned my roomand went to empty out the garbage bucketat the neighborhood dump, where I found a big dogthat was scouring for food leftovers on January snow behind the containers. When he raised its head and examined mewith a most attentive stare, inexperienced as I wasin matters of animal behavior, I was instantly aware:it was not a dog. Whether the angel of deathor an extraterrestrial, he neither wagged his tailnor lowered his gray eyes the way dogs dounder similar circumstances, but rather waitedfor me to dispose of the garbage and leave,When I looked back from my porch, his eyeswere still on me in the bleached air.

Another time, many years later in Israel,I went from West to East Jerusalemby bus, because I had to interview a PLO activist woman for a Russian magazine.Her hotel was not easy to find.I walked into the wrong lane and saw a manwriting Arabic graffiti on the wall of a building.His hand with a piece of a charcoal droppedas he fixed me with his slow and cold

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unblinking eyes. Our staring duel was short-lived.He outstared me, and then I left.

Grace Cavalieri:Katia, one of the earmarks of your poetry is that you often impute a human soul in another creature, in an animal. You transpose humanity toward animals and even a dead rat, which is a very interesting use of the spirit. And we will now hear a final poem and when I read your book, “Gogol in Rome,” my favorite poem was ‘Paper Planes,’ and I took it out and I gave it to my husband to read and I said, "Wow." If you just don't read the whole book, read this. And so now, would you please read that for us?

Katia Kapovich:It was also my first poem written in English.

Grace Cavalieri:That's amazing.

Katia Kapovich:

“A Paper Plane to Nowhere.”

Here was one autumn vulnerable light locked in the transparent and fragile objects of a mental hospital within my sight. I took my medicine without progress, which made me meditative but not bright.

   Each day I woke at seven, ate bland food, drank weak cold tea and walked under the escort of a physician in an unfriendly mood to a remote section. Here my imprisonment became almost inanimate, absurd.

   Among some loonies in the corridor I’d wait in a silent line for the door to open wide and let me in again. The male nurse called with a phonetic flaw: the stress fell either after or before, but not in the golden mean of my strange name.

   I was eighteen, morose, a little blind, bereft of glasses after that fistfight with a policeman. Thus I was arrested and woke up on a rough asylum bed. Evil regimes must kill, but understand

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who has an Achilles' heel, who an Achilles" head.   

Slow as a turtle after taking pills, I walked to the "art therapy" ward, where patients made paper boxes or "developed new skills," e.g. cleaning rusty irons, knitting mittens and socks for patient nurses and impatient docs. But I would always doze or, playing hooky, read a forbidden book under the desk with nurses in the background watching hockey.

   Then one good day they brought a bunch of kids, who limped, and drooled, and smiled with their wry mouths. They looked at us from behind heavy eyelids and couldn't do a thing. After two hours they were all taken back. Some fellows said: "Those kids looked really, really sad."

   Another day they came again and stared at us, the other patients. No one cared. They were mumbling a dark stifled cry, sometimes they touched the paper, gave a shy and happy sound of comprehension. Weird!

   They had no difference, but their clothes did. There were skirts and pants. A female child came close and bestowed on me a glance of admiration in her greenish eyes. I looked in them and saw an abyss of sadness, the asylum of our mutual madness.

 I looked into her eyes and saw my face and yellow spots of Russian swamps in April, a chain of golden lights, a lace of days, while she stood still, a little ugly angel. I made a box out of gray paper. That was all that I could give instead of wisdom to myself and to that orphan. But she seemed happy with my paper coffin.

   Her name was Carmen. Colorless and sloppy, her flesh was older than her mind. To stare at nothing seemed to be her hobby, as well as mine. That autumn, just to meet her expectations, I learned to make all kinds of paper things:

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planes, boxes, trains and even railway stations, and white, white ships, and cranes with widespread wings... They flew and swam across the dirty table, across the lakes of glue, and seas of paint toward the window with its yellow maple, whose autumn brushes always were so wet.

   That eighteenth autumn, all those ugly ducklings taught me to laugh at the slapstick universe. Forgiveness and forgetfulness, my darling, oh my Carmen! My life is also scarce and made of paper. In the evening, nurses would take them back to the orphanage and I would walk across the park which mumbled verses in the blind alleys for a lullaby.

Grace Cavalieri:We mentioned the literary magazine that's going to come out and take over America, and it's entitled “Fulcrum,” and you can contact these editors through the e-mail address, Fulcrum_annual@hotmail.com Once again, that's Fulcrum_annual@hotmail.com.

This is the “Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. Our poet has been Witter Bynner Fellow Katia Kapovich. She's the author of a forthcoming book, “Gogol in Rome.” The “Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress is made possible by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. It's produced by Forest Woods Media Productions. We wish to thank the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. Our engineer is Bill Haley. Postproduction is by Michael Turpin of MET Studios. I'm Grace Cavalieri.

Male Speaker:We thank the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., for supporting this program. The views expressed on the “Poet and The Poem “do not represent the Humanities Council or other funders for this series.

[end of transcript]

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