Love as Principled Powerlessness: An Interview With Russian Poet Galina Rymbu

"...Today in Russia an intellectual or an artist simply must become an activist, if only for the rights of culture, while the activist is not obliged to become an artist or an intellectual, aestheticizing his or her struggle." Now up at Music & Literature, a conversation with Russian poet Galina Rymbu and her translator, Joan Brooks . They talk about forms of solidarity within the "boom" of politically engaged cultural production, growing up in a factory settlement in Siberia, how poetry works within these realities, her own work, and more. An excerpt from this must-read:

JB: Let’s talk a bit about the formal qualities of your poetry, which are quite idiosyncratic. You write in free verse, but it’s full of syntactic parallelisms, repeated constructions, at times even forming “lists” of one kind or another. What are you trying to capture with these repetitions? Or is it a specific rhythmic quality? It’s clearly not the traditional type of poetic repetition, like rhyme or meter, but something more rhetorical, related to the structures of speech.

GR: The poetry that appeals to me most isn’t the kind that presents a history of personal development as experienced in language. Poetry should be a form of public speech and thought, written as if there is someone else present, someone concrete, not just an abstract reader. When I write, I’m not alone. There is a community around me, classes of people, even my friends, their speech, and it’s as if I’m answering them, speaking “here and now.” But poetry is the kind of place where you are constantly disappointed in your presence and in the presence of the other, and this forces you to reestablish your conviction in this presence again and again on new foundations. And, in this sense, my poetry does have much in common with rhetoric and oratory, based on devices like repetition, clear performative constructions, the desire to convince. Here there is also something (either a single subject or a community) that insists on its presence in speech.

Read the full interview with Rymbu at Music & Literature. And a feature on her work, introduced by Eugene Ostashevsky, is here.