A Handpicked Poem
article by Michael Steffen
ABSENTEE BALLET
by Boris Dralyuk
Today I cast my absentee ballet.
Recast, I mean. It’s in its umpteenth season.
I’ve added parts. I add parts every day.
The house lights dim and the new dancers breeze in—
so like the wispy, skeletal remains
of fallen leaves, those bare and brittle veins.
They take position, pirouette, jeté.
How could I turn a single one away?
And so it grows: a cast of thousands now.
The stage boards creak beneath tiptoeing figures
of memory. I whistle to the riggers:
the curtain drops. Time for a final bow.
Each day I scour the papers for reviews,
but find obituaries, crosswords, and old news.
~
The ear, attuned to the music of the language of the times, is just mis-hearing something from the onset of this poem, in its title, ABSENTEE BALLET, as we go along like good readers of faith, as under Whitman, assuming what the poet has assumed, following the depictions of the graceful if altogether ornamental dance of things in the poet’s meditation of “fallen leaves” in a breeze, envisioned poetically in the terms of ballet movements, “pirouette, jeté.” We are given, and we get, the population of the stage in the performance’s crescendo of “a cast of thousands” as the “stage boards creak beneath tiptoeing figures” to the drop of the curtain, and the “final bow.” And then, importantly, the poet’s, the admirer’s, the viewer’s “scour[ing] the papers for reviews,” a two-in-one part Dralyuk plays himself in the poem as author (choreographer and performer) as well as audience, or reader of what he has set forth. For the poem has also been about writing—or trying to write—the poem, but in a waning faith burdened somewhat by a mechanical sense of having written this one poem of poems, or generic poem, over and over again, in creative fatigue of the sense that the vital personal preoccupation is “in its umpteenth season.” (I’m hearing “ump” and sports “season” there, too.) Readers of poems really do tune into this simultaneity of things being said by single utterances, otherwise somewhat coined as double entendres—hearing two things at once.
It’s crucial to note that Dralyuk’s book of masterly sonnets and translations, My Hollywood and Other Poems, was released (by Paul Dry Books) in April 2022, just a short two months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February of that year. Among so much that made the appearance of this book timely and arresting was its visionary parallel with major world events, which prompted Ilya Kaminsky’s praise of Dralyuk’s poetry for its “wit and daring.” Not every book so happily takes the tiger by the tail. And the sonnet in question above also quietly announces another of the astonishing orbits of those events, the bold denunciation of Putin’s war (with her departure) by the Bolshoi star ballerina Olga Smirnova—“with all the fibers of my soul”—leaving her homeland to join the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, none the least.
What may have been bothering our ear from the title was its deliberate malapropism of a buzz term in recent political currency in America, which came to a critical necessity with its ensuing partisan spat during the Pandemic election year. Sure, I mean absentee ballot. And Dralyuk deftly employs the word “cast” at the opening of the poem, getting double time from that word also, with its various meanings of “throw in” (as in one’s vote) and to assign roles to actors or dancers. The theater aspect of the ballet ties in seamlessly with the author’s book title and its feature place “Hollywood.” That’s a genuine stake in an American iconic place, with perhaps even as wide a social reach in our souls and belief as rock music: Today’s stars aren’t just “stars,” they are “rock stars,” as it was once announced of Billy Collins for a reading not so long ago in the Boston/Cambridge area, a rock star of poetry…
Dralyuk’s feet have been on the streets of his collection’s city, the poems amply attest, as does his climb up into the executive editorship of the Los Angeles Review 2016-2022, on the admirable wings of his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. He is a dual Ukrainian-American citizen, scholar, poet, and editor, who arrived in America “at age 8, when my mind was still spongy and my facial muscles were still pliant,” he confided jokingly to me in Chapman Hall at the University of Tulsa where we sat and chatted one sunny afternoon last October, and I admired his flawless—nuanced beyond “educated”—American speech and kind discretionary manner. TU is the author’s current home, where Dralyuk teaches and stewards as general editor for Nimrod International Journal.
On a formal note, ABSENTEE BALLET is an Onegin stanza, a sonnet: aBaB ccDD eFFe GG, popularized by Pushkin in his novel verse. (Sonnet writers take note.) It is another way the author has to make quiet signatures about the generative and generous nature of his identity, of a home and past with a rich culture of its own worthy to hold onto, under great threat and barbarity now ongoing in its fourth year. That silent upholding of kindness and dignity is reminiscent of the artists and classical musicians, especially the cellists, who maintained the public benefit of their art in street performances during the tragic siege of Sarajevo between 1992-96. It is the noteworthy charm of ordinary humanity, as Kaminsky went on in his praise of My Hollywood, for anyone “who has ever visited the Russian immigrant shops and restaurants of Los Angeles, or stopped in parks where old men play cards and grandmas watch kids while spreading gossip.”
There is an old-world weariness (with its wisdom) to the overriding tone of this sonnet, in its “umpteenth season,” its reiteration of adding parts, “skeletal remains/of fallen leaves,” and helplessness to turn one of the thousands of dancers away. The rigging of the curtain… Sadly, with all our advancements in communications “the old news.” And even that last line, with its short list taken in by a long-jaded browser of newspapers. Yet take “crossword” apart, and here’s another just off-mention to suggest poignantly the character (or lack thereof) of our political discourse today: cross words, used like sticks and stones instead of considerate and persuasive speech to hash out real understanding and solutions. Obituaries, obviously, every day, but overabundant and so sorrowful in this age and our forever wars, evermore economically and politically as well as technologically perpetuated.
In American poetry it’s more of a cited credo than practiced one to Tell all the truth but tell it slant. No book of poems I have read in recent years so abides by Dickinson’s wisdom and reaps the harvest of the silences around language as does My Hollywood and Other Poems. Dralyuk himself a genial, demure and in his own right soft-spoken rock star of the first art, in its patient, attentive theater of a book, oh so missing that Dolby Surround.
My Hollywood and Other Poems
ISBN 978-1-58988-167-9
by Boris Dralyuk
is available from Paul Dry Books, Inc.
Philadelphia, PA
www.pauldrybooks.com
