“What language do you think in?” Voznesensky asked Allen Ginsberg once, and “Do you always think in words?” So Ginsberg asked, “Well what do you think in?” and Voznesensky replied, “I think in rhythms.” He was an architecture student when The Institute of Architecture in Moscow burned down, and he wrote a poem about it: “Fire in the Architectural Institute.” He understood that architecture had died in him and he was now a poet. “I believe in symbols,” he said, the fire being a symbol for death and regeneration. I’m glad I needed a less destructive symbol in order to become a poet. At nineteen, Martín Espada asked me if I was a poet when he signed my copy of City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, and I hesitated, thought about it, and said, “Yes.” He wrote, “For ——, Poet of the Future.”
Rock music wasn’t permitted in soviet Russia, which led to the exceptional situation in which poets could fill stadiums. Voznesensky was as famous as a Beatle, or Bob Dylan! The poet as a public figure is firstly, a rare occurrence, and secondly, a controversial one—should poetry live on the page, or on the stage? I’m of the opinion that celebrity and performance interferes with a poet’s true work and true function in society. Voznesensky seems to agree with me. In an interview he said he was “happy to see poetry separating itself from that.” If I could interview him, I would most like to ask about his poem “Antiworlds.” What are “antiworlds”? Physics? There is a duality implied, but I don’t understand what exactly an antiworld is. He declares, “Long live Antiworlds! They rebut / with dreams the rat race and the rut. / For some to be clever, some must be boring. / No deserts? No oases, then.”
-Morgan English