JOSEPH BRODSKY
533
categories clearer: spirit, flesh, and so forth. And therefore the strug–
gle was much more intense. But in the later poem, there's less cer–
tainty. There's a sense of exhaustion - maybe even a spiritual
exhaustion. Instead of snow, there's the heat. You repeat the word
"stifling." And also, there's the sheer weight of the material world.
Despite the list of objects, in the earlier poem there's a sort of resur–
rection. In the later poem, everything seems to be drugged, heavy,
as if it can't wake up. What do you think of this reading?
JB :
There is some similarity, come to think of it. I never thought
about it. I don't really know. Perhaps this is a valid comparison and
a valid observation, and perhaps there is some sort of a genealogy of
the kind that you're talking about. But I don't think so. I think the
only thing it testifies to is, at best, not so much the evolution of the
views as the consistency of the device.
I sort of like "Lullaby of Cape Cod." You should be aware of
the fact that it's ninety-three lines longer in the translation than it is
in the original. In the original, it's a bit more concise. And I think it's
a far more lyrical work than "Big Elegy." In "Big Elegy" there is in–
deed a certain clarity of the spirit.
It
is a vertical job from the
threshold. But "Cape Cod Lullaby" I was writing not as a poem with
a beginning and end, but more as a lyrical sequence.
It
was more
like playing piano than singing an aria. Actually I'd written that
poem because it was the Bicentennial, you see, and I thought-well,
why don't I do something? There is one image there, I think, where I
use the Stars and Stripes.
DM:
As you did with the word "stifling," you often use repetition and
anaphora.
It
seems to me, your poetry is centrifugal. You start from
a center and move outward, turning and separating different aspects
of the subject. Whereas Akhmatova would be more centripetal.
JB :
True, there is obviously a difference of temperaments. She
seldom operates in big forms. She is a poet of great economy, and
she's a more classical poet. Well, I wouldn't like to be compared to
her.
DM:
What gives you the least confidence now in poetry? Is there any
particular problem that you're trying to solve?
JB:
The poems are always particular when you are writing this or
that one. I'm not trying to bill myself in any spectacular fashion, but
I think as somebody who has always written in meter and rhyme, I
do increase the purely technical stakes. Those two aspects, especially
rhyme, simply are synonymous with compounding your own prob–
lems from the threshold, from the first impulse to write, which is
