On Rhyme

Fascinated by Kutik's use of metaphor-which seems tome just as unfamiliar as, for example, the metaphors in the self-translated Zulu poet Mazisi Kunene, or those of Mahmoud Darwish, and therefore exciting to ponder-I asked him directly what he was doing. He told me that for many modern and contemporary Russian poets, metaphor is inescapably intertwined with rhyme-especially for him and his fellow "meta-realists."

In looking back to create their own tradition, Kutik said, the meta-realists saw certain earlier Russian poetry that revealed alternative worlds of the imagination. The meta-realists began as anti-Romantics and remain so, in the sense that they disliked poems in which the poet's focus privileges his or her own experience or inner life. And they regard metaphor as inadequate if it is only a vivid way of presenting or describing what is real and visible. No, they say: a poet is like everyone else, but at certain moments, he or she sort of swells-like the ceiling in the Akhmatova epigraph to "Hunchback," or like the hump itself as the man matures -with a capacity to see metaphorically what is of the world but hidden until words are found for it.

In this poem, Kutik's metaphor for the poetic gift is a kind of lucky deformity that begins to attract to itself image-rhymes which, without the hunchback, would not or could not be seen as "humps." In fact, the poem is not about representing visible reality, but about attending to a "meta-reality." In another context, Kutik wrote to me that metarealism "brings the thing over as such, as a whole, an invisible thing that the poet makes visible, convex, palpable-out of the blue (or rather, from the darkness of something that we don't penetrate)."

Metaphor itself goes through metamorphosis, Kutik told me. I remembered Mandelshtam's remark that Dante launches a metaphor like an airplane, and then another metaphor from that first one, as if an airplane could launch another airplane, and that one a third. (But . . . now we have seen space shuttles launched from rockets, so perhaps the meta-reality is occasionally only a consummate prescience, a futuristic intuitivenessor, as a Russian poet might say: prophecy.)

Kutik says that anti-Romantic Russian poetry leapt from the Baroque to the twentieth century without passing through the personal inner explorations that still define so much of American poetry. Perhaps this is only to say that Romantic poetry in Russian is different from Romantic poetry in English. After all, while Kutik's hunchback might be seen, in our context, as an unsurprising poetic descendent of the leech gatherer, beggar, and other figures that Wordsworth first brought into poetry in English, what the Russian meta-realists turned away from, according to Kutik, is the Romantic practice of making "their own lives (not only inner but also factual) the only subject worthy of being described." So Kutik's hunchback is not the object of attention of a poet who wants to claim unusual powers of feeling and sympathy for others, but rather a figure for the extraordinary powers of transformation temporarily enjoyed by the poet and his language. The hunchback is an image of poetic imagination-no winged horse, no selfexalted hero of feeling, but a prophetic, human aberration whose deformed presence in the poem evokes startling metaphors for what can be seen not with real eyes but only with imagination.