Shearsman 62: John Couth reviews Philip NIkolayev

Shearsman 62

John Couth

reviews Philip Nikolayev

Philip Nikolayev: Monkey Time
(Verse Press, Cambridge, 2003. ISBN 0970367295, 9.5 x 6 inches, 99pp, pb, £8.99 / $14.00).

Reading Nikolayev you become acutely aware of three things: firstly, you are encountering a man of many talents with a good intellect and mischievous sense of humour; secondly, your formal, rhythmic and semantic expectations are being tested; and, thirdly, that you are lifting the cover on an entrance to the Tower of Babel, where English though clearly recognisable sounds strangely foreign. Monkey Time offers a full and stimulating range of work from a poet always seeking to engage and who demands a multilevel and nimbleness of response in return.

He is a thinker who deals equally with Kant, aesthetics and postmodern theory, who realises that his own authorial death has already been pronounced but refuses to accept the diagnosis. As he understands it, it is the author who takes the reader on a personal journey, who does this not only formally, but by being a poet of the soul – something we might recognise as very Russian:

… but tease
with genuine pain and yet without complaint
that landscape of the soul, so hard to paint?

('Art for Whose Sake?')

Taken too literally this simplifies his achievements, certainly Nikolayev is a poet of at times deep feeling but it is in his intelligent responses to the stimuli of the life and language around him that much of his real uniqueness lies. He is conscious though of the absurdity of his position as a thinker, only too aware of the limitations of thought, and from this he derives much of his humour as he seeks to undermine the complacency of certainty. He challenges the neat ordering of the world in his poem 'Boxes' which begins: 'Boxes are hoaxes of the imagination', and again two poems later in 'Crystal Closed, Sonnet Immured' in which he suggests that "Form is a sense-formative grid that sleeps within the figured object' inviting us to juggle with the notion of form as we read it, by forcing us to examine two separate forms as one and one as two, each requiring different creative responses; if boxes are hoaxes, so too are structures and structures of thought.

Nikolayev offers five examples of the immured sonnet, and if the first two offer a mock/serious juxtaposition between the random and permanent nature of form, the final three position the personal world of the poet's Russian youth against the jargon, blather and dead syntax of computer/ad/ business-speak. Both types of language make up the formal unit and though you may prefer one type to the other, we are encouraged here to regard each as an active part of the contemporary language environment with which the poet has to engage.

The sonnet is a form that is returned to throughout the collection, a sacred cow of the world of poetry which he treats with affection and due irreverence. Rhythms can flow and jolt like speech, syllables evacuate then crowd back into lines, and rhyme can be sporadic or at best tenuous or be maintained precisely throughout. He makes us continually aware that it is the writer not the form, which governs expression; rather as Humpty Dumpty says to Alice about language: ' The question is, which is to be master – that's all.' The result is to endow the sonnet with a dusted off freshness for the twenty first century:

My kettle finitely boiling, I recover
from reverie. The windows after the shower
stand brightened, and the barricades of books
on the floor arch their philosophic backs,
bare their teeth. Unanswered mail piles. Coffee's ready.
Capitalist society is greedy,
Monthly bills like moth larvae eat my checks.

(Midlife)

Making use of pastiche and parody, he engages affectionately with other sacred cows of poetry in the form of its writers, the likes of such as Frost and Eliot, but not entirely with the notion of demystifying but by using a gentle humour to explore their thinking and writing styles. Though technique may be the starting point, there is always something more ambitious about the direction he takes.

I been farming, like the legend says,
several years in this area. In farming all
depends on sober calculation. What you get
is what you sow (plus under what circumstances,
plus how you do it). There will be variations.
If you time it right the moment for sowing, e.g.,
you can enhance your output by a high margin. Let's see,
I'm looking at how for years now I've always been able
to hit bumper yields in my best years
and to get nice results even in my piece o' shit years
by just timing the sowing process right. With this method,
will others succeed? You betcha! Which is why
I got up to speed myself. Capitalsim got me
right where I am. What will the next question be, mister?

('Frost Interviewed By The Boston Farmer')

As a challenger of meanings as well as form, the balancing of sense against nonsense recurs in his work as he seeks to extract from the linguistic puzzles he creates a new and revitalised language. Acutely aware that words in a language are seldom bearers of no meaning other than their own formal visual presence, Nikolayev treats us in a number of his poems to displays of semantic fireworks which, though often grammatically recognisable, are neither logically or emotionally coherent, but rely for their impact on the reader's/writer's intellectual selection and formal organisation – further evidence that news of the author's 'death' had been greatly exaggerated:

preternatural groaning
   deep layer clepsydra
same bed hose doting
   departing dry
have you not limbered
   dim lit calendars
subordinated only
   catapulted scarface
seventeen drove
   now skull duskfall

('Not Really Familiar')

On other occasions he seems quite comfortable in the nonsense worlds of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Indeed, the distance between a text that seems semantically to have imploded and the formal, grammatical but referentially bizarre world of the Nonsense poets is not vast, often sharing the same purposes in their humour and disruption of formal understanding:

When out of left and out of right
came dreams and whipped us with their might
on the high seas of treason
like mangoes out of season,

as we were going from here to there,
as we were going left to right,
because I usually like to wear
some kitchenware, some tableware.

('Job Prospects')

A linguist and a student of linguistics, he is attuned to idiom and the ever changing nature of language, and the immensely flexible way it can be bent to suit the needs of its users – a malleability which has as much to do with its mode of survival as its creativity. He records in his writing the everyday English he hears and reads around him: the English used by corporations (he constructs a found sonnet from an ad for carpet fragrance), by US citizens, by immigrants and the rest and which is contained within the vast potpourri of daily communication. Words and their meanings seem to survive their misuse and
distortion, both to his amazement and despair:

I whisper to you through my two lips of anguish:
Take a language, take an English language...

('Communications')

Both a poet of place and a traveller, for me the most fully satisfying poems in this collection, ones which seem to integrate all Nikolayev's qualities as a poet, are the those recalling his experiences in India. They bring together his learning, humanity and formal mastery in a way few of the other poems do. Although an outsider, his understanding of Hindi allows him to interact with the country's culture and belief systems. He seems entranced by a land, which he evokes with a tenderness and clarity he seldom seen in his poems about Russia and the West, with the exception of poems to his father. India reveals him as very much a poet of the soul:

Just as the lonely, wicked, wild and glad
eyes know and do not know by letting drop
in every detail of their daily dread
the flowering and rainfall and mishap
of birth, there's a benignness comes about
the streets. Well-lined eyelashes flutter by
like Kali's black bewildering butterfly
and life is tantra to the marrow, but
I do not know myself…

('Dusk Raga')

As this collection reveals, Nikolayev is not a cosy poet to be around but a challenger, subverter and humorist, someone who intersperses his language with large quantities of jargon, dialect, ideolect and neologism. The English he deals in has an ever changing, imperfect, enduring fragility but is the only tool he has to communicate the mundane nature of ideas and the everyday, which he does while managing to hint at the existence of something more profound.

Biographical details
Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US in 1990. They now live as husband and wife in Cambridge, Mass., where they edit Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. Both began writing in Russian but are equally fluent in English as their work testifies. Katia has maintained links and travels frequently to Russia where she is still widely published.