Requiem
1935-1940
No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.
-1961
INSTEAD OF A PREFACEIn the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out ofthe torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
-Leningrad, 1 April 1957
a few years ago, a school teacher at an alternative school told me the story of Akhmatova’s Requiem. i was running a series of workshops for children of various ages at the school, trying to show them what i perceived as ‘poetic imagination’. the children’s laughter and curiosity at the morning’s session guided our lunchtime conversation that day, and she asked me about my practice. i flounder when people ask me why i do what i do. i find the the ‘inspiration’ question quite problematic, and more often than not, i hide behind the mask of my poems. but there was something in the way that she phrased her question that made me want to try and find words to describe my relationship with art, and with poetry.
i was younger, then - more naive, more impressionable, and more idealistic. i was caught in the torrent of student movements as i negotiated my own privileged subjectivity within larger questions of speaking truth to power, fighting for justice, and finding a ‘voice’. as i think about it now, i realise how that journey was about coming to terms with myself as an artist, and attempting to understand this role historically, while being useful in the present. it was the ideological impetus of social justice that addressed my response to the schoolteacher friend.
i shared with her Otto Renne Castillo’s ‘Apolitical Intellectuals’, stressing how it was one of the poems that inspired me to sharpen my vision of the revolutionary potential of art. she nodded slowly, and as i started getting carried away by the force of castillo’s rhetoric, i saw a smile light up her face. i asked her why she was smiling, and she told me that she understood exactly what the poem was trying to do. she went on to share with me the story of the revolutionary poet Anna Akhmatova (at that time the only thing i knew about Akhmatova was that she was once called ‘Russia’s Sappho’). I have shared this story before, and it is easily found on the internet:
Anna Akhmatova wrote her story of persecution into the minds of her fellow inmates. To resist Stalin’s ‘reign of terror’ while committing to public memory her testimony, she was forced to burn the poem Requiem, after writing it (during captivity). she taught the final version to her friends in prison, complete with punctuation, sentence layout and emphasis.
i think about this story often, and as i revisit it today, i realise that it is one of those rare positive instances wherein the contextual information of a poet’s life and struggle deepens the impression of the art that they created. (i say ‘rare’ and ‘positive’ because i believe that the shocking revelations about the character and life of Alice Munro and Neil Gaiman are still fresh in your minds, as they are in mine).
what does it mean to inhabit a text like a home? or a second skin?
this is a question of method, really, rather than craft, of aesthetics. there are poets and there are poems. and then there are people who read those poems, and those poets. but what does it mean to read a text with sensitivity? can one encounter a text without the gaze that has become second nature to the eye of the researcher and the modern commentator - that of critique?
sometimes, when i read my favourite poets, i feel their words in my body. i feel my heartbeat rise when i recognise the familiar rhythm of their thoughts. i sense their presence, and i feel as if we are in conversation. the text, meanwhile, finds a crack in the peeling wall of my perception, and with the wings of speculation it soars through unchartered skies. perhaps i am subconsciously endeavouring to mimic akhmatova’s friends in prison who inhabited ‘Requiem’.
did their bodies come alive with the fire of the words they learnt by heart?
often epiphanies find their homes in flesh before they are born in the heart of the mind; before they become breath, exhaled in wonder. this is the truth of insight. this is why art that is timeless is open. a poem becomes timeless not because it retains the fervour of its moment of origin in every retelling. it is not precision, or accuracy which defines the mysterious pull of the sublime. on the contrary, it is the text’s openness; its versatility, its capacity for multiplicity, and contextual transformation. my ustad used to say that the raag must sound different every time it is sung. this is how it is with poems that transform; poems that light fires in the minds of the throng; they are crafted with an eye towards the future.
i am surprised how interpretation always outruns intent in art. this is one of the things that distinguishes the process of human creative activity from AI, in my opinion. it is the unpredictability of emotion and mental activity that defines the spontaneous combustion of art and self that illuminates a poem. where artificial intelligence aims at perfection and draws from the archive, the poet’s creative hand is gloved by the surge of immediacy whose mysterious chariot is helmed by inspiration. AI cannot intentionally create error because AI hasn’t experienced error - and doesn’t all art lie at the edges of the beautiful mistake?
how is it that we are attached to certain places, certain visions, even though we are experiencing them for the first time? with what invisible strings do certain cities call to us? why is it that we feel drawn to the mountains, or to the sea? and when we experience new lands, new environments, how is it that, even as we are strangers, we feel safe?
is this not another way of thinking of home? listen to akhmatova tell of this feeling…
i do not know the background to this poem, but when i read it this morning, i felt it gave voice and feeling to my own experience of a land not mine. i felt as if the poet was seeing the same sunset, the same sea, even breathing the same intoxicated air. i felt communion. i understood her, intimately, and i knew what she was talking about when she said that the secret of secrets was inside her again.
i hope you, dear reader, feel what i have felt when you slowread the poem.
until the next, revelation, then… adieu!
Feel free to mail poetly@pm.me with any questions, queries, or comments. I will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.
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When Philip Roth returned to the U.S. from a visit to Eastern Europe's Soviet satellite countries during the cold war, he commented, "Here, anything goes and nothing counts. There, nothing goes and everything counts."