Something Like the Ghost of Meter: On Matvei Yankelevich's "Dead Winter"

Matvei Yankelevich | Dead Winter | Fonograf Editions | 2022 | 40 Pages

Matvei Yankelevich’s new collection Dead Winter draws its poems from a longer sequence, still in progress, whose overall title is “From A Winter Notebook.” (Earlier poems from the series first appeared in a chapbook of that name in 2021.) As the name suggests, these untitled poems are dominated by the images and themes that cluster around the season—snow, sure, but also loneliness and isolation, obsolescence (“(machine now older than my father was),” or even, “I lick this postage stamp”), aging, loss, and death. This litany probably isn’t the best way to sell a book, but Yankelevich treats these matters not in maudlin or lugubrious fashion, but as it were according to the way awareness of them unfolds in our daily attention.

All of the poems in the collection have first or final lines which contain the word “winter,” as though mimicking the experience of looking out the window or stepping out the front door to a bare, frosted landscape, then following the movement of thought that ensues (or, in the case of the final lines, of having one’s reverie end in a return to winter’s obdurate fact). This movement of thought keeps the verse remarkably spry despite its occasionally heavy subject matter (“[so] sad to be sand,/sad sack; saudade”), creating the impression of having had a long conversation with a friend who was maybe bummed but basically all right—a speaker who “[muses] on some/last misunderstanding to find in that old failure/consolation”.  

This connects with one of the prevailing thematics of Dead Winter: aging. The book recurs repeatedly to the acknowledgment of time passing and opportunities lost, which comes across not so much melancholic as simply sober: “the journal/with a hundred poets and I the oldest/of those still alive.” It’s a welcome contrast to the cult of youth and novelty that dominates US culture, including literary culture. Nothing in these poems is formally akin to Yeats, but their sensibility brings to mind some of the Irish poet’s great verses on growing older.

Unlike Yeats, though, Yankelevich has a computer, with an “auto-responder” and a “status update,” and these poems stick close to the lived details of twenty-first century life—the poet navigating temporalities fundamentally different from those which confronted modernist forebears. Nonetheless, as Osip Mandelstam famously proclaimed, “The ship of modernity is the ship of eternity,” and each generation of poets since at least the Industrial Revolution has had to confront the unique facts of their own time in their work. Mandelstam, of course, met his own historical moment with an idiosyncratic and rigorous classicism, and it seems evident that Yankelevich’s years of researching and translating Mandelstam have seeped into this project (see the influence in a line like “Yet I taste the iron in the walnut,” for instance). The Germanist Matthew Vollgraff has called this phenomenon “phantom apprenticeship”—the appropriation of an admired master’s quiddity through the labor of translation, like Hölderlin’s Pindar, Baudelaire’s Poe, or Benjamin’s Proust. The picture may be complicated by the fact that Yankelevich is a native speaker of Russian, but his work nonetheless absorbs the qualities of a non-English author and brings them into English verse.

The author’s ambiguous position in language, caught between mother tongue and the second speech of composition which can never feel fully like home, is also staged through recurring instances of stilted syntax, oddball diction, inversions like “as the desk must/avocation make,” and other touches associated with “translationese”. These features dramatize the uneasiness that ensues from a precarious grounding in the vernacular that native speakers can take for granted. “what’s foreign when/i am at home, save me?”

Mandelstam is not the only voice or influence in these texts, where citation acknowledges and un-runs riot. (Namechecked poets include Goethe, Spicer, and Ovid; Stephen Rodefer and Keith Waldrop are among the cited, and Bernadette Mayer pops in, appropriately, as “the poet [who] wrote all of mid-winter day.”) Like writing outside one’s native language, citation calls into question the poem’s claim to authenticity—whose voice is the one speaking, really? More than Yankelevich’s earlier book, Dead Winter directly engages with the everyday demotic of the New York School in its many successive waves down to the present—but always asking the question of where and how someone not born here fits into the conversation. Since birth, land, language, and nationality remain fused together in the destructive paradigm that has dominated world history for centuries, this remains a powerful area for writers like Yankelevich to interrogate and destabilize.

Along with using the word “winter” in all first or last lines, many of the poems in Dead Winter are additionally constrained (constructed) syllabically. Even when devoid of familiar end rhyme, each line of the poem may still adhere to the same syllabic structure, a technique which results in a different kind of music. Take for instance the poem on page 10, in which each line contains thirteen:

Winter’s prison: fog, the titles I write down to read,
each night too short to write that letter you would rather
I not write. Here useless struggle’s worth my while, I cleave
persistent loafing, desperate inertia. To sing
without a tune, figuratively abstract: the sound
product of tying my shoes. Now, when I’m pulsed to change
a word, I often leave it, not – my suspicious friend –
for love of it as it is, but of serious boredom, 
so that you too may feel that drag, and this hang, also.

This technique hearkens to classical French, Italian, and other non-English verse traditions whose structural principle of composition is syllabic rather than stressed or accentual. In English, this purely syllabic method allows something like the ghost of meter—constraint in the lines which still leaves them variable and dynamic. (This is similar to the effect Louis Zukofsky sought in the late metric of five words per line that he deployed in the final movements of “A” as well as in “80 Flowers.”) Syllabics return us, as writers and readers, to the basic practice of counting (“tolling the eights on chestnut desk”). Aristotle defines the soul as a thing that can count—and because it can count, it can also reckon time. In these poems, the formal method ticks off, beautifully, the hours and days of a long cold season.