Reading the
poem “Mayakovsky” by Frank O’Hara
(1926-1966) I couldn’t help but wonder about Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) visiting
New York City in 1925. He loved the city, and wrote about it,
including poems about Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge. O’Hara spent the last
fifteen years of his life in New York, and wrote many poems mentioning his
cultural contemporaries, but it’s noteworthy that he looked up to Russia’s most
influential poet of the early 20th century. Mayakovsky dabbled in
numerous mediums, from cubism and avant-garde, to blatant propaganda slogans for
the Communist Regime of the 1920s.
O’Hara’s
poem is a tribute, and a metapoem. A metapoem is a poem about itself, an author
writing it or another poem, or the medium of poetry in general.
I love you.
I love you,
but I’m
turning to my verses
and my
heart is closing
like a fist
Words! be
sick as I
am sick, swoon
roll back
your eyes, a pool,
and I’ll
stare down
at my
wounded beauty
which at
best is only a talent
for poetry.
The
emotions O'Hara communicates through these three stanzas are like some poems Mayakovsky
wrote about the woman named Lily who was the love of his life. Lily loved
Mayakovsky’s poetry, and he dedicated a lot of his work to her. His own
“wounded beauty” was often the subject of Mayakovsky’s self-gaze in his
writing, including the 1913 stage tragedy written in verse and titled after
himself. O’Hara channels that self-gaze.
Now I am
quietly waiting for
the
catastrophe of my personality
to seem
beautiful again,
and
interesting, and modern.
Themes of perfection
and modernization of the self in their own writing are parallel for both
writers. It’s curious that Mayakovsky is O’Hara’s idol and a father figure of
sorts, because Mayakovsky’s daughter was born the exact same month of June 1926
as O’Hara. There is no supernatural or superficial connection, but it is true
that O’Hara and Mayakovsky’s daughter were conceived around the same time and
on the same continent of America’s East Coast.
Nonetheless, knowledge of Mayakovsky’s daughter only came to
light in the 1980s during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its
Communist Regime. (Jangfeldt 2014) O’Hara probably never knew that Mayakovsky had a daughter.
Mayakovsky wrote some metapoems, too. In his poem “A Talk With A Tax Collector,” Mayakovsky talks philosophically, and with
humor, about the place of a poet and poetry in society.
I have here
a
business
of
a delicate nature:
about the
place
of
the poet
in
the worker’s society
Mayakovsky
goes on to discuss wittingly the question of expenses and deductibles a poet
should be able to claim on his taxes. He says his work is just like any other work,
and has its own hardships, including the difficulty of rhyming words.
You start putting
a
word
into
the line,
but it
doesn’t fit –
so
you press and you break it.
Citizen tax
collector,
I swear,
for a poet
the
cost of these words runs into money.
Mayakovsky
compares language to currency, and claims to be in debt, which should
excuse him from having to pay taxes.
I dash
around,
tangled up in advances and loans.
Citizen,
won’t
you consider a pass?
Reading the
poem, I couldn’t help but wonder: how did Mayakovsky have such humor regarding
finance, and where did he learn finance if the Soviet Union had a communist economy.
But sure enough, there was some temporary capitalism Mayakovsky witnessed
before he visited America. In the Soviet Union, the early Communist party had
temporarily installed the New Economic Policy (NEP) and private for-profit businesses were
allowed starting in 1923. NEP greatly improved the Soviet economy before Stalin
ended the program in 1928. (Russiapedia)
No comments:
Post a Comment