The Mystery of Systems by Carl Rosenstock, and: The Blue Canoe of Longing by Margot Farrington

Reviewed by: The Mystery of Systems by Carl Rosenstock, and: The Blue Canoe of Longing by Margot Farrington Stephanie Rauschenbusch (bio) the mystery of systems Carl Rosenstock CW Books https://readcwbooks.com/rosenstock.html 102 Pages, $19.00 the blue canoe of longing Margot Farrington Dos Madres Press https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/the-blue-canoe-of-longing-by-margot-farrington/ 100 Pages, $17.00 In Carl Rosenstock's book of poems, The Mystery of Systems, the second half of the book consists of a faux scholarly essay on three invented Russian poets [End Page 128] in exile in Paris after the Russian Revolution. This section is entitled "Translations from the Russian" and should be seen as an inwardly consistent, brilliant, bravura fiction or short story, along the lines of Nabokov's ventriloquistic novels. When I first read it, I almost believed it, so accurate is the professorial tone, the biographer's fussy notations, and the fake poems themselves with titles like "The Alphabet of Winter" and "Blue Wine Mixed with Sorrow." Anyone who has read the poems of Anna Akhmatova would recognize their period and style—Symbolist, imagistic, ironic and full of romantic angst. "The Alphabet of Winter" This night, the windA shallow breath, movesUp the side streets, alongThe boulevard. Winter Provides such definition,The cold forcing me to thinkOnly of the way once the blackSky cut off the snowfields Somewhere long ago. I tear upYour letters from there. It snowsA few days later. I look underneathThe hard snow for shreds that Ask over and over again—do youThink you will ever leave thisPlace you've fled to. The questionCuts through like a wire. The stars locked in thisClarity, even as the colorOf my breathing. It isNo longer easy to forget. Several lines in the first stanza make an oblique reference to a painting by the French Symbolist, Marcel Radoter (1832–1905). The title of that painting, Le [End Page 129] Royaume D'Hiver, refers, in turn, to a work by the fifteenth century Flemish master, Rogier van der Garten. In fact, parts of the second and third stanzas can be construed as references to this latter painting. Lazarev characterized this device of referring to a work that referred to an earlier work as "second generation allusion." In a letter to Izmena, he explained, "the insinuation into the poem of such works-within-works not only enhances the patina, but heightens its emotional validity." This poem is purportedly written by N. N. Lazarev, the first poet to be introduced. The essay on Lazarev ("someone who doesn't exist") begins with a photograph of a group of badly dressed Russian poets in front of a Paris café. The "biographer" or "critic" describing this photo writes, "If I am correct, it is the only known photograph of Lazarev." In the photo, Lazarev makes himself as invisible as possible "so that he might be glanced at and forgotten as one's eye moved across the group. His gaze, averting the camera's lens, is down and to his left, toward the center of the group, drawing the viewer's attention there as well. How perfect they seem, posed as their lives were turning to words." It turns out that the self-described biographer has discovered notebooks recovered after World War Two in which Lazarev's poems, published and unpublished, appear. A biographical sketch of Lazarev follows. Born outside Odessa in 1883, the son of a village schoolmaster, he graduates from university in Moscow and leaves Russia in 1920 to make his living as a "freelance journalist" and writer of "forgettable feuilletons." In 1932 in Paris, he is said to have started writing poems inflected by his affair with a second Russian poet, Nadja Izmena. His style hovers between "Symbolism, Rayonism and Maximalism." Of these movements, Maximalism is fictitious, attributed to "its founder Maxim Trigoriev" (poet #3). Trigoriev seems to be a sort of Mayakovsky whose style, full of ellipses, is partly explained by his inability to use the Russian verb for "to be" in the present tense. More about Lazarev in the biographical notes: "In the photograph, Lazarev...