Tuesday 24 March 2009

Night wraps the sky




Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky (ed. Michael Almereyda) uniquely intersperses Mayakovsky's poetry and other writings (diary entries, excerpts) with others' writings about him, fictional and non-fictional, some fairly recent.

"In 150,000,000, a poem written during the American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the collossal peasant Ivan, who has 150,000,000 heads, an arm as long as the Neva River, and heels as big as the Caspian steppes, wades across the Atlantic to fight a hand-to-hand battle with a Woodrow Wilson resplendent in a top hat as high as the Eiffel Tower."

Why didn't anybody think of that during the Iraq war? Hm...




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