Miroslav Nemirov. All about Poetry 41

All about Poetry 41
Miroslav Nemirov

Publication date: May 17, 2001

"Poor Art"

Same as minimalism. The desire to make do with as little artistic means as possible. The main driving force of avant-garde art throughout its existence. For more details, see "Black Square" .

- "Poor Art" in Max Fry 's ABC ;

- “Poor art” in the Big Encyclopedic Dictionary :

- “POOR ART” (Italian arte povera) is a term used by Italian criticism in the 1960s. designated a direction close to conceptual art and minimalism (its most famous representatives in Italy are J. Kounellis and M. Merz). Deliberately meager, “poor” objects and symbols only hint at the artistic idea, giving it a mysterious understatement. Installations in the spirit of “poor art” are often likened to ruins, which brings it closer to archaeology.

- definition of minimalism in Cyril and Methodius :

- MINIMALISM (minimal art), a direction that emerged in Western art in the 1960s; set as its goal the creation of only the “simplest structures”, which are the fundamental basis of creativity. Formed primarily in sculpture. The masters of minimalism (for example, American artists C. Andre, D. Judd, S. Lewit, R. Morris, D. Flayvin), moving closer to the methods of geometric abstraction, exhibited “naked” and ascetic, not artistically processed (usually simply commissioned from factories) frames, tubes, tiles, cubes, etc., inviting the viewer to “start over”, with the universal laws of form and composition.

Poverty

Oh, how I want to be rich!
How nice is it, brothers?
Oh, how I want, well, for example, a lambada
Be able to dance depravedly,

Champagne to all present
Treat left and right, -
But I'm supposed to be a civilian.
At the same time, suffer from a severe hangover.

Oh how I wish they would try
To be even more beautiful, and especially so that I will like it;
You know, they dressed up in these dresses,
Sometimes the hemlines suddenly lift up;

But I'm supposed to be boring.
You're supposed to be moody.
Think your fucking mind
Think your fucking thoughts, -

Because I am a poet!
it’s the way it’s supposed to be for a poet, that’s the way people want it.
Otherwise, people won’t understand me, guys!
And oh, he won’t love my poetry.

Summer 1990 Nadym.

In fact, the author was trying to parody the current romantic ideas about the poetic lifestyle. But the truth of life is also present in this poem, because, in general, this is approximately how it really is.

2. You should also write about the fact that for writing prose, which I have been doing for the last six years, and even more so the kind of prose that I am busy with, poverty is precisely an extreme hindrance and brake; and so I’m thinking gloomily this morning: maybe she should go to the bathhouse?

Maybe I can finally recognize the existing realities of existence, namely those that I am in no way able to write prose works, much less such large ones, due to the lack of stability in life, minimal income, etc.; and now, given the obvious inability for me to acquire all this in the foreseeable time, maybe I should just throw away all these forty stacks of papers I’ve written and collected pictures, and again take up the life and work of an exclusively person who is a poet of the romantic movement? And write a lot of poems and tell them with expression to everyone you meet, after drinking vodka; and visit all sorts of public gathering places, shocking and charming everyone who comes to hand; and look after young ladies; and in general represent a bird of God, which knows neither care nor labor, does not sow or plow, but only whistles like a nightingale?

What is very typical and familiar to me - one, and why is the poverty in which I constantly find myself not only not a hindrance, but only one help or two?

Yes, if you take into account that this will not be blatant charlatanism, which is the activity of smart-ass people like Letov, Kulik , Brener and the like, who are trying to earn extra money by posing as violent, but this will be the real truth, realized in writing truly wonderful poems that I have It seems like now things are starting to work out again sometimes?

3. Yes, that's it. And the city of Tyumen, by the way, is one of the very few cities in Russia that benefited from all these transformations of the 1990s, and which blossomed like God knows what in the course of them - just like Moscow: offices, banks, all other nonsense - the most natural golden rain poured onto the Tyumen land.

And among my other hopes that I relied on when I undertook to compile the notorious “Tyumen Encyclopedia” was that these same Tyumen rich people would eventually give me money for its publication and for further research in this direction: in the end, Christmas trees so over the head, I’m describing their fucking city! And in general, I am the first and only writer of the all-Union, so to speak, level, in the entire history of this city! In any case, the central, so to speak, press organs have never published a single Tyumen author before. Even the well-known Lagunov did not advance further than the Sverdlovsk magazine "Ural" . They must have patriotism, excel and vice versa! - I thought, and was even sure that he existed. Because even I have it, but what am I? I have lived in Tyumen for a total of no more than 6 years out of the 39 years of my life!

That's how it is.

Ha-ha-ha - yes and only.

4. Ohanyan kept telling me about this throughout the 1990s: come on, you said, writing is free! - about the Tyumen fools, you’ll die in hunger and cold, and your Tyumen fools, by the way, won’t give you a glass of hangover, and they’ll even wrinkle your nose - ugh, drunk! For they love you only while and as long as you are a famous Moscow author; and you die under the fence - so you think, they’ll start tearing out the hair on your ass and all that stuff? Where there! - said Ohanyan, - all they will say is that Nemirov was promoted; there was no point in getting out; and they will tell their children: raise up, children, meek, raise up neat, don’t get kicked out under any circumstances, otherwise there was one such Nemirov, he thought a lot about himself, got kicked out in every possible way - that’s how he got out, that’s just and it will be, Ohanyan assured me.

And it is likely that he is right.

However, Ohanyan himself eventually succeeded - and the general reaction to his misadventures turned out to be exactly what he predicted.

See the Opposition Bulletin about this .

Alcohol-free lifestyle

Fuck you, I really want water for free.
However, I agree with my own, but where do I get my own from?
Standing on a stool, I scream telepathically through the window,
Calling on all the brothers: brothers! oh-oh-oh, brothers!

F*ck the brothers will hear there. Brothers
For a million two hundred thousand rubles from here,
Who is not in the grave; besides, they are fools -
At least three quarters of them have been protected.

It would be easier, Letov, I’m a f*ck.
It would be clear who is to blame for what is happening around.
It would be clear: the bastard Yeltsin is to blame for everything.
It would be clear: tukdyk, bitch, tsuryuk.

It's your own fault: it's no good having thirty-six
Years old, not twenty-seven.
And if you have already looked around so much, and there is,
One thing remains: to endure, and more, and completely.

June 4, 1997, Moscow

“Standing on a stool” - this is how we have to smoke in our house these days: through the window.

“Two hundred thousand to fly” - that’s how much, in the author’s opinion, it cost in the prices of that time, in the summer of 1997, an air ticket to Tyumen, where his main brothers live. Now - probably 1,200, that is, for that money - more than a lemon!

" Letov " is a hero of underground punk rock, during perestroika he was an ardent anti-communist and a crazy denouncer of the CPSU, now he is an ardent communofascist, denouncer of E.B.N. and a speaker at Anpilov rallies with a song about Lenin, so young.

“Pozhzashity” - in the sense, they switched to a completely alcohol-free lifestyle. By the summer of 1997 - Ter-Oganyan A.S., Belozor M. , Bogomyakov V. , Kurenko M., Fedotov E. , etc., etc.

In general, this is a good poem, true.

I really wanted to get really fucking crazy, I really had no money at all, and so rushing around the 4.5 meter kitchen of my sister Elena at night, smoking through the window while standing on a stool, I accidentally composed this poem. (And a few others: “Bitches,” for example, and so on.) Before that, I hadn’t written poetry—serious, and not just for laughs—for five years, I thought this thing had already died out altogether.

And then it was just about five and a penny in the morning, and I ran to the metro, which opened at half past five, got into it by deception (by putting your hands forward, when you walk, you need to quickly press your palms over the eyes of the photocells), and went to Ohanyan’s Baumanskaya , the only one who - - -, and pushed him, who had just gone to bed (with which he was extremely dissatisfied), read all this to him and demanded vodka.

Ohanyan, woken up at dawn, and by that time already a vodka-hater of many years, was extremely unhappy, but realized the importance of the moment, got out of bed, got dressed, scratched his bottom, found the rest of the money and took me to buy me vodka: he didn’t let me go of one thing: Our area is questionable, the cops are fierce, and you look like a complete madman.

And I bought vodka.

And even - two vodkas came out! He went to buy vodka in one department, and sent me with thirty to another for a snack, and I, of course, don’t be a fool, bought, of course, not a snack, but - - -

And then he sat with me while I drank these two bottles (not a drop myself), and listened to my drunken nonsense, and then put me to bed, and hid some more for me to recover from my hangover.

This is the kind of person Avdey Stepanovich Ter-Oganyan is!

(Well, it’s true, there were cases of the opposite kind, when he kicked me out of the house in the middle of the night because I allegedly took a shit in the communal corridor under his door (“Well, not you, so that means your woman! And who else? Not Anya Brazhkina!), but again, he didn’t just kick me out, but gave me a hundred and fifty rubles for a taxi, realizing that where and how, I was drunk as hell, I’d go in the middle of the night.

That's the kind of person he is.

(And, as it turned out, Max Belozor took a shit. That night something suddenly struck him, and he took a shit in many places, somewhere around four.)

_______________

As for “more secure” - the number is growing! By this summer 2001 - also Yu. Shapovalov , and D. "Jake" Pashkin, Dm. Vrubel , and again M. Belozor, who seemed to be disenchanted, and even the author of these lines himself! Which, although not sewn up, is forced to switch to a completely alcohol-free lifestyle - for good! - under pain of immediate divorce.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

_______________

Here someone says - well, don’t drink, that’s a big problem!

I explain to him: not drinking is, my friends, actually difficult, boring, tedious, tiring and exhausting. This is someone who, even if they didn’t drink, it seems, well, don’t drink - so what? And the one who has been drinking all his life discovers: not drinking at all is the same as not living! But just drag out a dull existence: melancholy, boredom, lethargy, the monotonous course of continuous dull everyday life, which - - -

Every day it's the same
It's just completely hopeless.

The description of the state of a person who used to drink, but was now forced to stop, is well described in the second part of M. Ivanov’s book “Banana” , to which I refer - as well as to my review of it .

_______________

Here readers ask me if I have tried replacing vodka with drugs. Not heroin, of course, but marijuana, or mushrooms, or acid? I answer: no, I haven’t tried it. Afraid! Trading alcoholism for drug addiction in old age - no, this is too much.

talks about this Kuritsyn in “Watercolors for Matador” well . There, Yeltsin reasoned with himself: “Still, there is something mean, nasty in these drugs. Snorting, injecting... Are you a man? So drink, you understand, a glass of vodka!”