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When the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky visited America in 1925, he needed to admit that there was one thing grand in regards to the nation. He was amazed by electrical energy and railroad stations. He stepped onto the Brooklyn Bridge, he wrote, “as a crazed believer enters a church”; of the skyscrapers, he marveled, “Some buildings are as high as the stars.” But he was conscious of darker currents. A staunch Bolshevik, Mayakovsky felt that capitalism had made Americans money-obsessed. He additionally noticed the racism teeming round him. Back within the Soviet Union, Mayakovsky printed his observations in an account referred to as “My Discovery of America.”
In her poem “Mayakovsky in New York,” the author Annie Dillard took snippets of this travelogue and compiled them into her personal “found poem.” Reading it’s like seeing Mayakovsky’s work in a fun-house mirror. The surprise and apprehension are nonetheless there, however stripped of context, Mayakovsky’s descriptions sound surreal: Bridges leap over trains; buildings shoot upward by the minute. Even with the echo of the previous work reverberating, although, the brand new one achieves completely different ends. Dillard stated that when writing discovered poems, “the original authors’ intentions were usually first to go.”
She’s conscious, then, that the discovered poem shouldn’t be a lot a tribute as it’s a theft; a supposed “discovery” regularly privileges the one who occurs upon one thing that already existed and modifications it for their very own functions. Dillard found Mayakovsky’s work as Mayakovsky “discovered” America: He spent a lot of his transient stick with different Russians, on condition that he didn’t converse any English, and stated himself, “I saw America only from the windows of a railroad car.” (Dillard referred to as his account “a hastily written piece of travel journalism of some sixty-one pages.”) Still, upon his return, he was considered a specialist on the U.S. and gave lectures throughout the Soviet Union.
Dillard’s poem additionally hints at a good bigger and darker “discovery”: America’s violent seizure of Indigenous land and life. “They are starting to evolve an American gait out / of the cautious steps of the Indians on the paths of empty / Manhattan,” Dillard writes. Because a discovered poem eternally oscillates between the unique and its reinterpretation, the previous is all the time there, haunting what’s been pressured into its place. So if it seems that Americans have written their very own story on a contemporary sheet of paper, she implies, “maybe it only seems that way.”
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