A Pilgrim's Progress

A Pilgrim's Progress, my collection of poetry written over fifteen years of exploration and displacement, marks a crucial phase in my development as a poet and writer. Begun in 2000, when I pursued my dream of finally moving to St. Petersburg, Russia, it documents in verse critical moments of lan vital, and my wanderings, and my perceptions of our kaleidoscopically fragmented civilization. We, my band of brothers and sisters, had hopes of different millennium realizations, but the 21st century is devolving otherwise.The initial poems express hopeful rediscovery and discovery, such as "Pilgrimage" and "Summer's Eve." Gradually, conflict and trials appear in the pilgrim's path. The last poem "Never Mind" marks her resignation to living out vagabond days in surroundings fast becoming alien, owing to a personal situation as much as to societal and political upheaval.Far from the first time in history that "ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves," as Shakespeare noted in the cited epigraph from King Lear, but it appears it could be the last, given our descent into the hell of tyranny, climate change, and now pandemic.I believe that, in part, a poet's job is to document perception, another part, to bear witness, yet another to warn and ward off evil with the spell of language performing these tasks quintessentially and powerfully. We poets are hybrid conductors, historians, magicians. In Anna Akhmatova's monumental elegy Requiem, my constant muse cites an incident when, freezing, standing in a line to deliver a package to her son in prison, the woman behind her whispered: "And can you describe this?"And I said, "I can."Then, something like a smile slid across what had once been her face. *Many of us also follow a tradition of rebelling against oppression. In their own small way, these poems endeavor to fulfill these obligations while creating objects of beauty, while conversing with other artists. Stepping the stones where brilliant poets walked, inhaling their words, incorporating them into my sensibilities, and transforming the whole into an individual necklace of autobiographical, multifaceted gems is the aim of my craft.Form is as important as content, which, with age and practice, has become more formal. In these poems, meter, internal and external rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, simile, metaphor, etc., are used seriously and playfully, often ironically, referentially, though rarely strictly. When absent, they show crisis: the world is falling apart. Grief is too severe to adhere.I do not apologize for refusal to lapse into the simplification and trendy authoritarianism of free verse. Educated in the importance of literary structure, I agree with Stephen Fry in An Ode Less Travelled that Anything Goes is not poetry, but prose... or some other category... like music, but lacking the attributes that make it music. Using traditional forms to write verse with contemporary themes and language now seems to me to be avant-garde.*My translation.- А это вы можете описать?И я сказала - Могу.Тогда что-то вроде улыбки скользнуло по тому, что некогда было ее лицом.