Anniversary with a distant relative is a good person who has lived a quiet retirement life for a long time. Family, friends, neighbors, former colleagues gather for a festive dinner. Among them stands out a very intelligent, noisy, active old woman with the etiquette of the union leader, who is now already in charge at the table, now raising a glass. And then it turns out that he is a poet. I have prepared congratulations to the birthday man in verse.
Then comes the reading of a badly rhymed and very banal text. He reads with emotion for a long time and is clearly proud of his talent. A relative smiles with a sense of duty, thanks, hugs a colleague, everyone drinks and praises.
Then he secretly reports that in the kitchen, where we all help the hero of the day with cleaning and dishes, he has long been writing poetry for all occasions – holidays, anniversaries, funerals. He loves the composing process and will eventually publish the poems in a book, but for now he uploads them to a private website. And he asks me to find this site like his work, and even better – write a review, it will help progress – the site has a million subscribers.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with the desire to write poetry, you never know whose hobby he has: someone sews, someone knits, someone embroiders according to the pattern, the other makes pies or jams according to a special recipe. But for some reason the quality of these fritters or ikebana doesn’t bother me. On the other hand, if a skirt sewn into a bag sits, a hat is crooked, and pies are on fire, people do not brag about their talent. And they do not give their loved ones unsuccessful needlepoint or inedible pies. But it is not customary to think about the quality of domestic poets. He writes poetry – well done already.
Anyone who has read the novel “Twelve Chairs” by Ilf and Petrov at once will probably remember Lyapis-Trubetskoy’s famous “Gavril served as a baker …”, but the reason for the unfortunate poet is understandable – he wrote for the sake of money. But if a woman designer who has built bridges throughout her life can’t distinguish a bad poem from a good one, that is, she clearly doesn’t like poetry, why does she start making up words and choosing rhymes? Doesn’t he feel?
It’s a mystery.
I looked at the site. And a few more likes. Pretentious or unpretentious, amateur poets, flamboyant or rustic, have one thing in common: they are all written by people without the slightest inclination for poetic creativity.
In our village once lived a quiet drunkard who, at the slightest sign of a feast, would appear at the door and offer the audience to read his poems. It poured out with one request – not to read poetry. He drank and retired peacefully, hoping they would promise him next time. But his poems, although primitive, were not bad at all. There was sincerity in them, pure naivety, unexpected tenderness.
But when I read verses of such quality about my hometown on the site “Dear Motherland”:
“Conquer by the famous,
The astronomer FA Bredikhin lived,
He praised the expanses of the region,
At the observatory, main
He served in Moscow, –
I don’t understand at all why the author should bother with poetry and not, for example, write a note about an astronomer in a local newspaper.
There is a game called “graphomania”. They play like this: the driver, when they publish not authors, but members of the Writers’ Union, takes a collection of poems, preferably from the Soviet era, chooses the most ridiculous poem in his opinion and reads the first two lines. . The rest should complete the originally stylized quatrain. Then the host collects and reads the poetry sheets, and the participants try to guess which of the passages is true. The winner is the person who guesses the original and the majority will get the original. It’s a fascinating game where pinpointing the original is just as difficult as creating a sequel that isn’t too outspoken but still pretty fanciful. Usually the new verses are better than the old ones in order of magnitude.
Here is the site “Dear Motherland” (created to popularize modern literature about the Motherland and indigenous places, this is where the organizers chose, as they say, heartfelt and kind works about the homeland in open sources “), – in my opinion, it is suitable only as a source of works for grafomania But there is, like thousands of poetry sites like this one. Does anyone need it? To whom and why?
I can’t imagine a person without a musical ear and voice going out to guests with an offer to say something. Perhaps he likes to sing and sings in the morning in the closet, like the heroine of Yuri Olesha, but many times the whole truth has been told to him, both about the wrong reason and about the goat timbre. That is, the ability to play musical instruments and sing still passes through a kind of professional filter. But it’s not poetry. Any group of words that the author calls poetry is suitable here. And I cannot explain this phenomenon. Why write poetry if you do not feel their essence?
In the mid-19th century, the writer and critic Apollon Grigoriev wrote: “Poets are the voices of the masses, nationalities, localities, the heralds of great truths and great secrets of life, the bearers of words that serve as keys to the understanding of life. ages – organisms in time, and humans – organisms in space. So he argued with fans of the then-popular “art for art’s sake” theory, who believed that the main thing for a work of art was not its plot, but its formal organization. Aesthetic theory formed the basis of the principle of the autonomy of modern art. Grigoriev, on the other hand, defended the sensual “folk” art in vivid paintings representing the features of national consciousness: “Art embodies the consciousness of the masses in images, ideals.”
And so the masses began to embody their consciousness, bypassing the intermediaries. Judging by the contents of numerous poetic sites, this consciousness turned out to be quite banal. The country where these poets live looks like this: the steppe is absolutely boundless, the water is icy, the springs are clean, the soil is native, birch, mulberry, mushroom, field daisy, wrinkled rye …
And everywhere there are corners or nooks, and there is a nightingale who casts a talisman, and cranes that rhyme well with nightingales … The city in poetry is usually small, the faces of happy people passing by shine, the domes shine, the bells are ringing, there are two-story houses, covered with white snow, all around us. surrounding beautiful schools, squares and palaces. The world of these writers is bright and fertile, everything is sweet in it, and there is no future, nothing happens except grace, everything is in the past.
It is impossible to understand why thousands of such verses were written, because they were already written, printed, published, sung, read, apparently well assimilated. But no – they are composed over and over like a spell. Yes, the magic seems to be them – sleep, Russia, sleep, Motherland, just do not open your eyes!
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.