From that sad reverie of love. Yevtushenko moved into his surprise for the evening--a surprise courteously announced in the New York Times earlier in the day--a poem he had just composed on the bombing of the office of the cultural impresario Sol Hurok, noted for bringing Soviet talent to the USA for many years. Barry Boys said outright that this was not poetic journalism, but that of course is precisely what it was. Yevtushenko stood smiling and looking very pleased as Boys began the poem. He stood in the glory of his art the news is just what our cosmopoet needs. His poems are often the products of news just as he himself is a product of the international media. Yevtushenko had said as he has said over and over again in poems prefaces and interviews, "I must write this poem to heal a terrible wound." The poem ran along the lines of "bombs for balalaikas" and "hatchets for ballerina's feet." and toward the end included the rather dubious but in his case consistent line: "Applause is the right response to art." And so, lo, there came Big Applause.

WHEN YEVTUSHENKO read the poem it seemed to be what we could expect from him what he expects from himself--or at least, what the bosses of the Union of Soviet Writers back across the Berlin Wall (which in another poem, pierces through him) apparently expect of their chief literary export item, who came into world prominence during the post-Stalin thaw. Yevtushenko recited his poems by memory, but this poem, being but a few hours off his poem pad, he read. There was about it the quality of improvisation, complete with jazzy tone changes: bombs to balalaikas. Here was Yevtusheno the opportunist at work. At least one can say he is open about it. "My feat of not expressing myself on some topic," he says in his preface to Stolen Apples, "makes me express myself at times too superficially." That's honest enough, but what kind of poetic premise is total topical expression? A journalist's? A traveller's?

As he finished the poem, his right hand arched upwards into the smoky spotlight air in a mighty gesture of evangelism. Yet the cosmopoet was always stagebound, always in his political poems, judging the audience's response. A nervous sense of commercialism shackled his ascent. The sublime, that mostly mystical state of imaginative transport, eluded him and certainly his audience. And certainly one can not expect to find his highest excellence of art in the nuts and bolts of topical evanescence in the bump and bulk of rush-hour urgency.

III

FIRST Barry Boys and then Yevtushenko read his well-known, early poem. "The City of Yes and the City of No," a poem heavy with dramatic contrasts between the intensities of anger and passivity. For the authoritarian "City of No", the piano grand slammed assorted dissonant chords; for the permissive "City of Yes" it bubbled in a kind of water music when it was not sneaking, like a villainous lover, up the winding stairs to the tower bedroom. The music and poetry were well co-ordinated. Yevtushenko almost broke into a rasping song. Teasing the audience who knew the poem well, he was at his stagey best. His showmanship gave the poem a fine sense of ironic melodrama. Obviously pleased. Yevtushenko bowed out snapping his fingers. An amused audience applauded. If the role of the poet along with that of the intellectual is to raise and not stoop to the public's standards. Yevtushenko came closest to that responsibility with this poem. Samuel Johnson thought poetry should teach by delighting its audience, not that these two values of poetry--the instructive and the entertaining--should be separate or conjunctive. Most often Yevtushenko's performance attempted to do one or the other, and frequently it struck wholly unresponsive chords as it submarined below the audience's general level of sophistication. The poet's power to awaken was more often used simply to recount; his power to unify was more often used to jam.

Barry Boys emerged out of his sleezy 19th Century elegance again to pitch and roll, oddly enough, with a poem called "Pitching and Rolling." (That's the 20th Century, folks.) With an unstirring, hovering voice, Barry Boys squeezed out the main word of the poem, "reeeeeeling!" He was so absolutely incongruous that he seemed to be a sailor chantyman riding shotgun on a stagecoach.

A group of 15 students called the Bijou Singers from Rider College in New Jersey had been sitting attentively on an elevated platform at the back of the stage, behind the piano. As Yevtushenko bellowed the unballasted "Pitching and Rolling," the angelic choir, clad in bell bottoms, backed him up with seastorm voices. They took to hooting and whistling while Yevtushenko writhed in the fog of 20th Century pain, a favorite theme of his. Then the chorus began to chant "push-and-shout, push-and-shout, zig-zag, zig-zag" and they howled an assortment of animal groans. This was done in a kind of dialogue with Yevtushenko and Barry Boys who at some point began to alternate verses. I don't recall if the poem ended on a zig or a zag, but end it did.

IV

AND THEN, amidst all this panoramic pandemonium, Stanley Kunitz appeared like a revelation. Revelation? Perhaps his coming was more like the salvation of the American poetic sensibility. He, like some of the other American poets who followed him, had translated Yevtushenko's poems in Stolen Apples. Since most of the translators do not read Russian, they were evidently given literal translations to adapt, according to their own styles, into English. "The result--these English adaptations--" writes Anthony Kahn in his translator's preface to the book, "are interchanges between one poet and another." Accordingly, I suppose, Kunitz and the other American poets were asked to appear with Yevtushenko in a gesture of appreciation and international brotherhood. And certainly someone realized that they might give the reading a little dignity and that, at such a major event, it would be generally healthy to have a few American poets in the wings. How else to explain their appearances I don't know. No one, including Yevtushenko, according to the New York Times, received any money for their reading. It is possible that their egos and desire to be part of the Big Event led them to do it, but somehow I don't think that's plausible.

Stanley Kunitz, one of the finest lyric poets of our time, introduced himself quietly as if to establish not only his own identity but his separateness. First he read one of his own poems. "The Illumination," and immediately I was aware of the music of poetry, a music not heard all evening. Kunitz appeared very relaxed as he switched microphones to read one of his "translation adaptations" of Yevtushenko, "An Attempt at Blasphemy." The poem, he explained before reading it, "has more of a witty, metaphysical turn than most of Yevtushenko's poems." The angelic choir crooned in with race car engine voices that somehow worked. The act had a subtle humor to it.

NEXT, out of nowhere--he had not been billed as one of the evening's bards--came Allen Ginsberg. He actually wore his clothes, faded jeans and workshirt, and a string of beads hung from his neck. Without any oms or antics, and without even introducing himself he read with his very cultivated, jazzy flat beat voice "On the Question of Freedom," a poem of Yevtushenko's translated by his croonie Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg is normally considered, and not necessarily in a bad way, to be slightly looney; but in comparison to Yevtushenko and Barry Boys, he struck one as being beautifully urbane and sophisticated.

As Yevtushenko read the same poem, the speakers overhead seemed to transform the one-ring Felt Forum into a rally hall of what kind I was not sure. The doubt was not clarified when Eugene McCarthy strode professionally up on the stage. McCarthy wore a dark three piece suit. A ragged book of some kind was shoved in his left pocket. He looked and evidently felt a little out of place. It was hard to see him in place anywhere, but this forum of poetry and politics seemed as good a place as any, a place both beneath and above him. He read a war poem of his own making in which he nicely contrasts images of the American war machine such as corrugated steel against the natural beauty of South Vietnam. A reading of a poem by a Vietnamese poet followed. The most applause of the evening went out to him as he slipped off stage, never to be seen again.

Jazzy piano music picked up the tempo. Yevtushenko and Barry Boys returned to alternate verses of another journalistic, but not bad poem. "Freedom to kill." It operates out of shame, and contains these lines:

Lincoln basks in his marble chair,

bleeding...