Talk for Sarah Lawrence night honoring Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky was my teacher between 1984 and 1985 in the Columbia MFA program, I can't remember which semester—Sven Birkerts was also Brodsky's student, and described him as "at one and the same time the worst and the most vital and compelling teacher I've ever had." On the worst side, he mentions "a slightly bored contemptuous edge" which I recognized—on the vital side, he describes Brodsky as sharing "an expression of who he was and what he believed about poetry."

Although Brodsky was fervent about being an American, the wisdoms he left me with were not American—he chided us for our American idea that poetry should be directly autobiographical, or about our feelings—and said instead that poetry is about the relationship between a poet and a language—a revelation whose implications are still unfolding for me, as poet, reader, and teacher, almost thirty years later. As he lectured meticulously on poems of Auden and Frost and his beloved Hardy—and most life-changingly for me, the poems of Zbigniew Herbert from Polish and CP Cavafy from Greek—he would ask not "What is this poem about?" and not "How does this poem make you feel?" but "For the sake of which word was this poem written?" He said once in an essay, "any more or less serious poet knows that he is not working for his audience, that he is writing because language is dictating to him. He is doing this for the sake of the music and the language."

Russian seems to me one of those languages from which it's hard to recognize a great poet in English translation—in Greek and Polish, for two examples, you can tell for yourself—but with Russian I at least have to be told, as his beloved Akhmatova told when she inscribed his first book, "To Joseph Brodsky, whose poems seem to me magical." I don't know that I would describe his poems in English as magical, unless directed—Seamus Heaney has a poem lovingly referring to this, describing his friend Joseph as "Nose in air, foot to floor/Revving English like a car." This poem I'm about to read was ostensibly translated by Derek Walcott, although Walcott has made it clear that Brodsky's was the guiding hand. It was one of the poet's favorites of his own poems translated into English—it's called "Letters from the Ming Dynasty." He says about it somewhere, "I was trying to combine two things, Beckett and Mozart," maybe akin to two things he describes elsewhere as grief and reason, and about which he taught me things I keep, gratefully.

Letters from the Ming Dynasty

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