Recognize, if nothing else, the seeing
That is stitching together the book’s cover,
Leaping in lilacs like a swing
Into here-world—and there-.
While a few poems in this early corpus are programmatic at some level, “A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki” from On Twins touches on a theme that runs through Stepanova’s work (poetry and prose) including her novel In Memory of Memory: that of a bond with one’s kin—ancestry as predicating and informing her poetic gift. A grotesque image of ancestors that “crash, like multi-stories, on the saucer,” fighting over the poet, is juxtaposed with a contest of a different order, in which the poet’s fitness for her task is perpetually evaluated:
Our Lyubka, led to market, gets stripped down:
There, sizing up her muscles, gropes the muse,
Assessing us, deciding which to ride.
And every single birthday is a duel.
The grotesque here becomes a voice for the sublime, and it is a variation on a pattern that has been one of the hallmarks of Stepanova’s poetic diction: a mismatch between the tone, the image, and the actual subject, allowing the reader to contemplate the peculiar effect of a simultaneity of transpositions into various keys that such poems produce.
A semantic shift in the transposition of a borrowed image in a poem may work similarly, both emphasizing and blurring the line between two distinct meanings that collide in the reader’s imagination. Such is the use of Horace’s “swan” ode (II, 20) in the poem “The morning sun arises in the morning” from Happiness. In Horace, the motifs of the poet’s transformation into a swan and his flight above the earth are emblematic of poetic might. In Stepanova’s poem, a female speaker, addressing herself with an ironic grace, appropriates these motifs to express her erotic aspirations:
Whatcha want, my dovey little swan?
Turn back around, take off the last rag,
Feast your eyes on the golden mirror,
Moving this and that part forward.
And hey! I hear a muffled beating.
Your sides feel warm and neck’s stretched longer.
The legs don’t please you, but your white feathers
Are the envy of many girlfriends.4
The flight of Stepanova’s swan culminates in a declaration of immortality (“—Immortal, forever immortal am I, / The Styx itself will not arrest my flight!”) that paraphrases Horace’s (“Nor will I […] die or be / confined by the waters of Styx”5). The erotic emotion, with an air of naïve nonchalance, transcribes itself as a creative act, giving an inaugural tune to a book of love lyrics.
In the poetic construction of Happiness, emulation of the tradition of Russian twentieth-century translations of ancient Greek and Roman lyric poetry becomes central. Stepanova uses metric and strophic forms and unrhymed verse, characteristic of Russian renditions of classical verse. Allusions to and images from Sappho and Catullus, Horace and Ovid are intertwined here with modern realia, lending a sense of temporal limbo to the poems. The classical disguise of the voice meanwhile both shields and amplifies personal emotion. Toward the end of the book, the verse departs from borrowed metrical forms, retaining just the aura of imitation. This loosening of formal restrictions anticipates the finale: at the closure of the last poem, “(half an hour on foot),” the speaker’s voice, having reached the peak of its tense meditation, abruptly merges with the tune of a popular Russian song from the earlier part of the twentieth century, an ad hoc placeholder for the unspoken, whose simple-minded playfulness reads here as an incantation.
Physiology and Private History showcases Stepanova’s work in a form that is novel for her poetic practice—that of a longer poem, often consisting of two or three parts, which can also be interpreted as a short cycle. Engagement with poetic tradition and contemporary context and history, along with renegotiation of the boundaries between public and private as poetic subjects, are intermittently present and sometimes tightly intertwined here; morphological and syntactic irregularities, stylistic shifts, and lexical inventions make for a distinct poetic idiolect; verses largely retain regular metric organization and are predominantly rhymed. For her epigraphs to the book, Stepanova took an old encyclopedia entry for physiology and a line from Viktor Shklovsky’s preface to his novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923): “It is a common device in erotic things: they deny the real plane and affirm the metaphoric one.” However, Stepanova’s poems included in this book often pointedly depart from Shklovsky’s dictum: instead of denying the real (physiological) plane, they affirm it, while developing other planes now as metaphoric extensions of the physiological, now as its discordant counterparts. “The Desire to Be a Rib” is a good illustration of the former: as if undoing the creation of a woman from a man’s rib, the female speaker imagines herself penetrating the male body in the guise of a rib searching for its place—an image that simultaneously conveys the sublime idea of the “oneness” of two and radically reassigns the roles in an erotic encounter. In other poems, however, particularly those that engage with historical subjects, physiology and history often form contrapuntal relationships. Thus, in the first poem of the diptych “Sarah on the Barricades,” set in 1905, the year of the first Russian revolution, the physiological plane offers a relatable, ahistorical background for the imminent historical catastrophes of the twentieth century. New lives “Come spilling from grandfathers’ loins, / And peer into the eyes of needles, / That lead far into unknown wombs,” yet for the speaker’s retrospective gaze this feast of physiology is but a brief prelude to historical calamities:
I know (it would be better not to know)
That these universal birthing pains,
Rhythmic as a cannonade, are
The coming of a whole new strain.
That into sleepless bassinets
Yawn these gaping hatches.
That this demo-graphic tide
Boils and bubbles with every type.
Despite “private history” appearing in the title of the book, it is “history writ large,” with which Stepanova often engages, viewed through the lens of family history. The core tension of “Sarah on the Barricades” emerges precisely from the dual perspective available to the speaker: one that engages both with the grand scheme of twentieth-century Russian and European history and with a family member’s position at one of its early critical junctures. Over a decade later, her great-grandmother Sarah Ginzburg, the title character of this poem, becomes one of the protagonists in the novel In Memory of Memory. In the poem as well as later in the novel, the figure of her great-grandmother foregrounds Stepanova’s sense of the feminine as the backbone of her “private,” that is, family history: “This feminist firmament—its swallow, its stormcloud. / The Noah of a female ark.”
The same prominence is given to the feminine in recounting history in “The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness.” The opening sketch of a locker room in a modern gym gradually morphs into a vision of a catastrophe that would forever “classify” some as perpetrators (marching in raids on Kristallnacht) and others as victims:
This pillar of water might turn to ice,
Reason to a poison, air to gas,
Sweetie-pies will march and stride
In closed ranks through shops and shacks.
And the door that led out to the swimming cube