The Feeling Sonnets

These are our words. What do we do with them. 
We do things with them. What sort of things. 
Oh all sorts of things. For example.
Feeling things. 

The Feeling Sonnets, by Russian-born, New York- and Berlin-based poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky, is primarily composed of four 14-sonnet sequences—unbound by end-rhyme or meter. Energetic and allusive, humorous and multilingual, by turns aching and philosophical, these sonnets wheel down the page, full of wit and linguistic wonder, while Ostashevsky’s phonemic and semantic play among words and sounds in English, Russian, German, and other languages suggests and reveals freighted connections between language and place, nation, (im-)migration, generations, historical memory, and translation. The poems are also concerned with the effect of language on individual embodied consciousness:

My history has a depository of body tissue in it. Body tissue is
    studied under the Greek weaving term histos. 

As a merry, can-do “poet,” I am a weaver of my history. I am a
    we. 

My history is woven of woe. If woe is its weft then whoa is
    its warp. It wafts on pulmonary plumage. 

Ostashevsky’s associative lyricism drives the allusive leaps in “Teaching a Poem,” which begins with a slant translation of a line from Apollinaire’s “Le Pont Mirabeau”:

Under the Pont Mirabeau cool the Seine. 
A cormorant, black as a punctuation mark, comma.
The bridge is riveted. Are we riveted. We are riveted over the
    river.
We are riveted by rhyme.

We’re transported by Apollinaire’s love poem to the Pont Mirabeau, the bridge from which poet Paul Celan later jumped to his death, and we follow the speaker’s chain of textual associations, from blues singer Clara Smith (“Well I don’t mind drowning but the water is so cold.”) to Adorno (“It is possible that poetry is possible but not my poetry”) and beyond. In the poem’s closing line, we’re startlingly pulled back into the classroom suggested by the poem’s title, as the speaker realizes: “My students are waiting for me to say something.”