21 - The Junction: Poems

Summary

HINSEY: In Marina Tsvetaeva's essay “The Poet and Time,” she writes: “contemporality is not the whole of my time.” Let's step back in this final chapter from chronological events and speak about your creative life as a poet. In our chapter on Sign of Speech, we discussed the impact of writing in Soviet Lithuania. But in exile the restraints of those conditions were lifted—

VENCLOVA: I’m far from a prolific poet. During my life—which is already long—I have composed around 220 poems I consider worthy of publication. In order to write a poem I usually need at least a week of undisturbed calm. Just prior to emigrating—in 1975–76—I wrote quite a lot. The poems from that period would have constituted a samizdat book—or booklet, to be precise— which I call, in retrospect, The Shield of Achilles. My first year in the West was simply too overwhelming to write poetry. I was often traveling and I was involved in extensive dissident and journalist activities, to say nothing of my teaching, job-hunting, and concerns related to citizenship status. My first émigré poem, “Museum in Hobart,” appeared in early 1978. The following year, in Paris, I jotted down three or four poems in a very short period of time. This was a sort of a breakthrough: from that time on, I generally produced several—sometimes up to ten—poems a year on a more or less regular basis. Frequently, however, just contemplating Florence, Rome, or Greece was enough for me: these impressions found their way into diaries, though not necessarily into stanzas.

In America, there was also the problem of audience. For me, poetry is an intimate affair, which means I do not need many readers. Nevertheless, I’m still concerned with publication and consequently with critical response. Luckily, there were some serious periodicals edited by the Lithuanian diaspora, and some good critics—one of them, Rimvydas Šilbajoris, a professor of Slavic literatures in Ohio, was on par with any American critic of that time. Now, all that is gone. Since independence, however, I have both readers and critics in Lithuania itself (I had attempted to reach my audience there earlier, of course, but with varying degrees of success).