with moss growing on you, lying for a million years
under a pale northern sun, and, in the winter,
under a cold northern wind.
Pitilessly diagnostic in his ability to gauge exactly how little he wants to help this suffering child, Medvedev’s calm voice fades out to a deserted polar landscape which seals the boy in an eternal irredeemability. These words have been unspoken on the street and are now being spoken belatedly, but still yield no pity. In place of a false empathy, Medvedev presents a new heroism in the tough love of reality.
The dark tone of his poetry, often garnished with a humor of the absurd, reflects Medvedev’s political goal of uncompromising truthfulness in creating without corroborating: “Political passivity also participates in history; it too is responsible,” he writes in an essay. In a post-Soviet world, censored and inflated with corruption, art must become political in order to sustain its own independence from politics, or risk becoming propaganda in service of the government that maintains it.
But poetry that consistently maintains a moral responsibility for the world outside must of necessity lose out on perfection in its own internal experience. It is true that Medvedev’s work inspires with its uncompromising candor, but it is also true that by definition one can only be uncompromising to one aim. And, as the aims of pure art and politics are by his own admission fundamentally irreconcilable, in straddling both of these realms his poetry risks not performing fully up to the expectations of either.
This loss is apparent in the limited scope of his work. He has chosen to use poetry as performance and public “Actions,” rather than as an invitation to voyage into the voluptuousness of words and their implications. Though Medvedev accomplishes the essential poetic task of conveying an experience in some irreducible way, at times his transparency can become offensively exhibitionist. For example, the use of capital LETTERS in poems throughout the middle of the collection is BOMBASTIC AND OVERDONE:
I also have love,
I love the two girls
who walked by,
I love the boy
who said “cunt.”
BUT WHAT SORT OF LOVE IS THIS?
THAT’S AN INTERESTING QUESTION,
BECAUSE I AM UNABLE TO EXPERIENCE
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