The poet in America is no more than the poet. And if you attach Russian measurement, then sometimes less. For example, one of the best in this century, Wallace Stevens, worked all his life in an insurance company - and not only worked out a salary, but made a good business career.

For some time, however, in the USA there is a slightly mysterious position of poet-laureate. For the first time, she arose in England, where the laureate’s functions included the composition of the solemn OD for significant events in the royal family, and the venerable Ted Hughes, who held this post until his recent death, often became the target of critical sarcasm.

In the USA, where the laureate is appointed by the director of the library of the Congress, his task is to propaganda poetry. Joseph Brodsky, the most famous of these flagships of the American Muse, spoke at one time with the idea of cheap and ubiquitous publications of poetic books, instead of Bibles in motels and collections of crosswords in supermarkets. But the idea, I must say, did not inflate, despite the obvious interest in it and even some investments. A couple of years ago, in an Italian hotel, I fell into my hands a free book attached to the number. Here is its content: Maupassant’s story, an excerpt from the play by Goldoni and Mayakovsky’s poem-all three texts are parallely in Italian and English. It seems that the initiative has come to a dead end.

The current US laureate poet, Robert Pinski, turned to the people with the help of the World Wide Web - the most massive of all invented means of communication. His project, entitled " Favorite Poem ", offers everyone who wants to record their favorite poem in their own reading - any author and in any language. Initially, 100 such exhibits were supposed to be assembled, but they were already 1000, including 200 videos. Everyone can familiarize themselves with some on the Internet.

In his crusade for the revival of Pinski poetry, it goes back to its very origins when it was singing. Poetry for him is not a sheet of empty paper, it is primarily a sound. We give way to the sound - and since we are dealing with the Internet, the quality still leaves much to be desired.

Robert Pinski

In Poles-Bay

In the Ivnyak along the river to Pisager-Bay
Drozd sings, never a knee twice.
Here under the pine trees a little away from the road
In 1927, police chief
And Mrs. W. shot together,
Sitting in the relative. Ancient indestructible piles
And underwater blocks of sticky brick
The puzzles are full of puzzles at the bottom,
Where was the pier of the "hotel and the Price Theater".
And here the vessels were twice as a caretaker,
To spread the iron bridge. He pressed the levers
Like a skipper in the cabin where the device was sitting,
And the bridge moaned and turned on an average pylon,
To give them the way. In the middle of summer
Two or three cars were waiting for the iron farm,
Went sideways, and maybe only the child saw
The inscription on the stern, black and gold in white:
"Sandpaiper, Patsi-Enn, do not bother,
On the joke. "If the ship went with a load of whiskey,
The bridge with a clang was locked after
And they opened the coast guard boat again,
It is difficult, like a sundial - he always jammed.
The road was overlapped as if a rubble
The river sailed and slipped between the pylons.
Never a knee twice, the thrush fills
Wet August evening near the bay
Suspended music, melting it and changing it.
Dragonflies, beach flies, frogs in the hill, two bodies
Realized in an open car among pines,
A fragment of the story. Tenor at the Price Hotel,
In a clown costume, the sadness collected
In frills on the neck and cuffs, trembles in heights,
Like bursts of light on dark water, -
The ending of the aria is changing and melting.
And after the gap of silence, screams and applause,
Audible in the houses on the other side of the river,
Someone in the public cries as if melting
Inside the music. Never a knee. In Berlin -
Daughter of the English lord, in love
In Adolf Hitler, with whom he is familiar. She
Occupies an apartment of a married couple,
Elderly wealthy Jews. After the war
They settle here in Bay. Old lady
Teaches the game on the piano, but the whole world is spinning
And gapes at their feet when a girl and a Nazi bonza
Inspect furniture, glass and paintings,
An exquisite story belonging to them, and now
Partly to her. A few months later the British
They enter the war, and she shoots in the park.
Empty girl, fraighten the elite, her life
Moving into other people's lives or places.
Parting with life - chief and Mrs. W.
They died so as not to part, like local ghosts.
The last thrill of kisses, the trunk of a revolver,
The trembling of the story heard by the child,
Half -sunk into memory, voices in the hill,
Singing in an Ivnyak. On the other side of the river -
Weak bursts of music, the same motive many times
It is wide and grows. On a high new bridge -
The lights of the car road from the house from the races.
Lonely ship puffs under the spans, away
Unnoticed by Ples Bay to the Open Sea.
The people stood here, looking like on the water
The theater was blazing. Fire boats all night
It was stitched with water jets that was a glow.
The black smell of the ashes for weeks, the skeleton already
The river is absorbed. When you die
You are steaming under the ceiling over your own body,
Observing the mourners. A few days later
You pop up over the heads of the former loved ones
And you follow them through the twilight. When it gets dark
You wander and find the way to the river
And you go over. On the other side of the air of the night
Willow, smell of the river, and mass
Sleeping bodies around the coast,
Something like singing from reeds
It leads you deep into the darkness.
You go to bed and hug one of the bodies, and hands,
Zhazhelev from sleep, eagerly brand you,
You love until the soul rises on a flush with the edges,
Grings out, splashes and flows,
Shimmering into another body, and you
Forget the past life and start again
At the same crossroads - like a child, passing
Through the same place. But never a road twice.
Here, in the daylight, the thrush in the Ivnyak,
New cafe with a terrace and a pier,
Frogs in Rogoz, where there was a rotary bridge -
Here, maybe you came out for a ford from there
Where he was a simple presence, in Poisher-Bay.

The "Favorite Poem" project is impressive by its demography. Most, of course, are schoolchildren and students - or rather, schoolgirls and students. In subsequent years, interest in poetry naturally fades, but at the ages of 40 to 60 years, a new statistical surge suddenly gives. The obvious intellectual professions of most participants to list is unnecessary, but here are the representatives of some others who, it would seem, the love of the artistic word is not programmed: a beer seller at the stadium, the performer of the abdomen, the courier of the blood, the master of carat, the dog hairdresser, the ship's pilot, the air gymnast ...

What verses are most in the heart to these people, what is the demography of their beloved poets? In the first place - Robert Frost, and the first, of course, is his poem: "The Unreasonable Road." Frost, whose traditional in form and affordable poetry is already scattered in oral speech to quotes, is quite obvious at the head of the list, but another poet, whose influence on the language has no equal, for some reason, is pushed to the eleventh place - the archaicity of Shakespeare does not favors his oral reproduction. Nevertheless, this is an unexpected confession of a person who makes a living by far from literary work: “I believe that the digger of the trenches reading Shakespeare is still a digger of the trenches. But I received an invaluable lesson: poetry is a universal holiday that exists in everything and in all. It strengthens my self -esteem and helps me not accept anything at the front value.” So writes one of the participants in the project, someone John Docherti from Braintry in Massachusetts.

Not everyone will agree with the democratic selection of poets. Nevertheless, along with the names that will be eagerly by silence, I found in the list of the first fifty Emily Dikinson, William Batler Yates, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stephens and John Kitsa. The letters addressed to the project mention Katull and Anna Akhmatova, Charles Baudler and Lee Bo, Rumi and Pablo Nerud.

Russian, or rather, the Soviet poet, who described his craft as something more than it really is, did not take into account that the poet occupied the territory of other professions in Russia, prohibited and semi-recruited-not least the rock-roll or psychoanalyst stars. Now that the greenhouse conditions are destroyed, he has to work in the field, and arrogance in relation to American colleagues should decrease. Robert Pinski Triumph is that he did not impose his exalted ideas with an American, but listened to their own voices. And these voices inspire hope.

Robert Pinski gathered these voices in a collection, which, according to his thoughts, should become a kind of sound monument to the late millennium. These are the regional accents of the Americans, their clothes in the videos - from a butterfly to the overalls, their profession and inspiration. The main principle of selecting participants is their own attitude to the chosen text, the uniqueness of their love. In my opinion, this is much the best message to the upcoming generations than a capsule walled up in the wall with acts of laying a steel plant. Steel rusts and crumbles, and poetry remains - contrary to the market and insurance business.

Studying someone else's choice, you involuntarily think about your own. Of course, I love not only American poetry, but in this case I will refrain from nominating the candidacy of Katull or Baudelaire. The fact is that my choice in the Robert Pinski project is already present, made for me - this is a wonderful poem by Wallace Stevens, the very insurance agent, under the provoking name "The idea of order in Ki -Ust." The choice belongs to a person named John Westling from Boston, and the poem itself is about a woman who walks and sings on the shore, about the blind power of nature and about the boundless power of human imagination.

Wallace Stevens

The idea of order in Ki-Ust

She was sung brighter than the genius of the seas.
The water is not strong in the voice or thought
Did not gain body, trembling
Empty sleeve - her movements
They gave birth to a scream, led a non -humorous cry,
Which was not ours, but intelligible to us,
To part the elements, deeper than comprehension.

The sea has no pretense. It is not at all in it.
Water and singing did not laugh,
At least we only heard that she
I composed word for word, and full
It seemed, the sum of these phrases
Wheezing of waves and air everywhere,
But we listened to her, not the water.

She did the sung herself.
The dumb sea in the makeup of the ancient dramas
She was a place where to walk and sing.
Whose spirit is this? We asked, knowing,
That this is a spirit that is descended by us, knowing,
What should I ask while sings.

If it was only a dark voice of water
Sea, albeit in the coloring of many waves;
If it was only the external voice of heaven
And clouds, or corals in the water jelly,
Whatever it is clear, this is just ether,
Heavy exclamation of air, the sound of summer,
Resumed in the summer endlessly,
And only the sound. But it was more
Than the voice - both her and ours, between
Brainless zeal of wind and water,
Two -dimensional crustaceans, bronze shadows
Above the horizon, mountain atmosphere
Heaven and Sea.

This is a singing voice
So at the end the sky exacerbated.
She believed the rhythm with a desert
She was an omnipotent architect of the world
Where she sang. And as the sea is a sea,
Whatever was transformed into
What she was a singer. And we
Following, looking, they understood
That there will be no peace for her, except
The fact that she is sleeping and created.

Tell me, Ramon Fernandez, if you know,
Why, when a song fell silent, and we
They turned to the city - why the lights,
Glass lights of fishing schooners
With the advent of the night, darkness was produced,
Having rocked the night, and the sea was cut,
All in the zones of dreams and fiery poles,
Checking, pesturing, enchanting night?

Oh, rage, the passion of the Creator to create, Ramon,
Passion to streamline the words of the seas,
Words of fragrant star gate
And we and our coming to the world -
In night outlines, in a sensitive sound.