THINKING OF YOU, BORIS

[RonPrice]

THINKING OF YOU, BORIS

Part 1:

The famous Russian poet Boris Pasternak(1890-1960) said that to be a great poet it was not enough to write poetry. One must also “contribute in some vital way to the life of the times.”1 It is essential that such poets, Pasternak emphasized, “respond submissively to their high and lonely destiny.” Such poets do not chose poetry as a vocation; they are singled out, in some unmistakable fashion, by destiny. Pasternak was “overcome by an irresistible urge to write poetry; poetry literally seized possession of him in 1912/13." In the next few years he was confirmed in this overpowering sense that poetry was an experience which came naturally to him. But it did not consume him, and he did not project himself as a poet with its intermittent inspirations, at least not in those first and early years.

I was attracted to this analysis of Pasternak and his work in Max Hayward’s introduction to Olga Ivinskaya’s biography of Pasternak:A Captive of Time: My Years With Pasternak(Fontana, 1978). I had a similar experience, not in my early adulthood, as was the case with Pasternak, but in my middle age, in my late forties. At first I, too, did not project myself as a poet. By my early sixties, the early years of my late adulthood, a period from 60 to 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists, I had begun to become comfortable with this label, this literary avocation, this terminological assignation.

Part 2:

This new, this fresh and personal poetic nomenclature has been part of my patina, indeed, as the years advanced into my 70s, part of the lustre and gloss that I recognize as my literary life and its several accomplishments. I had contributed to my society in a vital way as a teacher for 32 years, and as a student for 18. After that half-century my emotions and perceptions have gone through fifteen years(1999-2014) of an exceptional pitch of intensity, an impetuous flow of language. This language had been released in a flow which shows no signs of letting up as I write these words in the first months of my 70s.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Max Hayward, “Introduction,” A Captive of Time: My Years With Pasternak, Olga Ivinskaya, Fontana Books, 1978.

It was not a revolution and a love affair
that brought on this impetuous flow;
I’m not sure I will ever know for sure
but it was another type of love affair
that had slowly ripened over decades,
so unobtrusively amidst the ragged bone
and chouder shops, amidst the fatigue, &
all the talking--the endless talking not to
mention listening, surely one of my life’s
most demanding tasks, especially after
those fifty years(1949-1999) of being
subjected to an excess of speech, and
what were, it seems to me, its deadly
poisons which can devour heart & soul.

I, too, Boris, had my melancholy and depressions,
so low I fell in love with thanatos, easeful death;
but, as you said, there would appear once more
things that had long lain dormant; they were
noble, creative and great things for a time of
final accounting, an accounting which you had
planned for so long, it seems, as I read your story.

Boris, I think of you now that you have been
gone for more than half a century1, especially
after reading how Zhivago got out from your
woodsman's retreat where your long apparent
insouciance allowed you to enjoy life's comforts
before making your claim to be part of, possess
the tragic Russian soul, to assuage your guilt, &
express your desire for martyrdom2, to suffer as
all true poets do and must: must they Boris???

1 Boris Pasternak, Front Page in Olga Ivinskaya, op.cit., Pasternak told his readers to think of him after he has passed on, when life would be richer and more fruitful than ever before, at a time of a great accounting.
2 For these ideas, this view of the last years of Boris Pasternak, go to Frances Stoner Saunders, "On the 'Zhivago' Story," The London Review of Books, V.36, N. 18, 25/9/'14.

Ron Price
26/7/'07 to 25/9/'14.

[ton321]

My sentiments entirely