This Old Poem #55:
The Poets Laureate Special Edition #8:
Joseph Brodsky 's Törnfallet
Joseph Brodsky is a perfect example of a mediocrity that got acclaim elsewhere who cruised to American renown. His poems in English are utter doggerel, while his Âtranslations of his own Russian poems, while slightly better, show no original thoughts nor experimentation with form, sound, nor idea. In short he is a cardboard cutout of what a poet should be- at least to Academia.
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs working in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground . I realized what I am. That I am bad." He studied with the beloved Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and, after his exile, moved to America, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. | |
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