In yesterday's Crimson, Richard Dey, poetry editor of the Advocate, brought us up to intermission in an essay-review of Yevtushenko's January poetry reading in Madison Square Garden. What follows is the conclusion to his two-part story.

I

IT HAPPENS I spent three years in the Army, two and a half of them in Washington, D.C. as a writer on the staff of the Army's official magazine. Because I did not want to fight in Vietnam and, in any case, because I wanted to work as a writer, I sought the job and it was created for me. Naively, I thought I could write poems for the Army and the U.S. Government. I agreed to become a journalist of sorts.

With something of a cavalier, soldier-poet of fortune attitude I walked into the job. I wrote poems for the Army. I wrote magazine articles. I wrote poetic captions for an entire double issue that told the "Army Story" in pictures, and I even covered the Pentagon for awhile. I prostituted myself to the government, and my art--though it was in the name of that art--to propaganda. I managed to do so for about six months. Fan letters from four star generals and a host of others rolled in and got me-promoted a couple times. It seemed like I got more pats on the back than I ever got for scoring a winning goal in a hockey game back when I lived for and played the sport. Then, for a multitude of reasons, I caught onto the Army and to myself.

I stopped writing Army poems altogether, and concentrated on magazine pieces. That lasted for maybe a year longer. Then I began going to the office in the morning drunk. Lunch hours lost themselves in Georgetown and Capital Hill saloons. Road trips were spent in NCO clubs and the brawling, fleshy dives that make up the strips outside Army posts. I had realized that reporting and telling it like its not were two very different things. Soon I began deleting my byline from stories. I threw out the fan mail and avoided the Pentagon information types. My last stories, which I wrote so they could not be rewritten, went unpublished. The Army is not all bad. But at a time when I, along with thousands of others, was also marching in moratoriums and in midnight candle processions around the waxy White House, it became impossible to write exclusively about the not bad. Each day in the office was a battle for one hint of truth or another. Exhausted, I rode home on my motorcycle each night to my Alexandria studio cursing Mediocrity till my bike nearly crashed into the front door. Then I quit writing altogether, and worked my last four or five months as a photographer.

THIS IS NOT a confession: given the same circumstances, I would go through it again. I recount it only to tell the experience of one man's sensibility. You can't write a lot of glorious shit for long and maintain an unjaded sense of truth and dignity. You can't know one thing in your heart and operate with your mind in another way. You gotta believe in what you're doing. After awhile, even the several masks become holloweyed. Your conscience--and you acquire one fast if you didn't have one--goes crazy: with guilt, with sorrow, with anger, helplessness, with a gut feeling of desperation.

I attempted to justify myself over and over again by rationalizing that, what the hell, the professional soldiers in the field and the fat cats who run 'this man's Army' believe the propaganda, or want to believe it, so why not write it for them. Let them believe what they want. This is just a job, President Johnson's and General Westmoreland's idea of patriotic duty. But I found, "teamwork" and "the frontiers of freedom" to the contrary, that one's sense of to duty himself is the greatest duty, the most difficult to perform.

Yevtushenko must think he can pull it off, that he can write in a way that will please his government and still squeeze out some truth somewhere, somehow. The craft becomes craftiness. Skipping the mess in your own backyard and writing about what's on the other side of the fence doesn't get it: the act is a cop-out and the man doing it is a sellout.

II

I want to be a mailboat for everyone divided by the ice of estrangement, a craft before the coming of large navigation, moving through the drifting ice with letters and parcels.

--Yevtushenko, from his introduction to Stolen Apples.

SOME YOUNG THING from the East Side flashed by like an apparition wearing an intimate, black backless gown: "Yevtushenko and Friends: Poetry in Concert" was the event of the evening in New York, and the Felt Forum was the place to be seen. A saxophone playing warmed-over Coltrane swelled over the audience, followed by the angelic choir bursting into rock musical fireworks.

Barry Boys oozed back on stage with his phony theatrical accent to read "New York Elegy," a kind of sleepy zookeeper's political poem set in Central Park. After a flute drifted in and out, the choir turned itself into a chorus line that danced and horsed around like teeny boppers. They transformed the poem into a rock song with the refrain, "lost children of the earth." Yevtushenko joined Boys. Both sat on the edge of the stage as Judy Garland used to do, and listened:

At night beneath this snowfall, its whispered secret having made us one, America and I sat down together in the place for lost children.

Nice lines--seeds for a Broadway musical? John Updike translated them but an inspired Rod McKuen could have written them. They are harmless lines. One sees the Soviet bosses sipping coffee and reading about their cosmopoet in the morning paper. And one sees them having a second cup over these lines from an untitled love poem: