JOSHUA KOTIN ON GENYA TUROVSKAYA’S CALENDAR
Ugly Duckling Presse is inviting artists and writers to respond to their favorite titles for our backlist blog series From the Vaults. Our seventh contributor is Joshua Kotin, with a reading of Genya Turovskaya’s 2002 chapbook, Calendar. Calendar is out of print, but available to read online here.
Calendar is a perfect book. Twelve poems, one for each month. Twelve mobiles, twelve branches in a single mobile. A mobile of effects: surprise, empathy, laughter, anxiety, sadness, bewilderment, wonder, delight. All in balance, distinct and dynamic — tense. Perfect for a book about missed connections, dreams of connection, waiting: “the rhyme at the intersection of no / and no.”
As a book, Calendar is perfect too. Slim and long, it fits in your pocket and is always about to fall out. Each poem, each month, has its own title page, which opens left to right. Twelve doors to twelve worlds. I open each one carefully: “the dream was delicate I kissed / between his shoulder blades.”
I have the third printing of Calendar. The colophon indicates that it was made for a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York on March 14, 2005. I wasn’t there. I was in Chicago, in my second year of graduate school, editing Chicago Review. That month, I read Genya’s translations of three Arkadii Dragomoshchenko poems for the journal, and wrote Matvei Yankelevich at Ugly Duckling to buy a copy of Calendar. He replied that he had one unbound copy left, which he would sew together and send me. I also wrote Genya to ask her to send new poems for the journal. Her translations appeared in the fall. Her “Dear Jenny” poems the following spring.
Earlier this year, I moved to a new house. Unpacking my books, I re-read Calendar and Genya’s recent The Breathing Body of this Thought (Black Square Editions, 2019). I thought about how much Ugly Duckling has meant to me: its books, its poets. In 2003, on a trip to New York, I bought the seventh issue of 6x6. The magazine introduced me to the press and to Jacqueline Waters, one of my favorite poets. I already knew the work of another great poet in the issue, Tomaž Šalamun. I had met him in 2002 at a poetry reading in Montreal. He read with John Ashbery. I was a senior at McGill. On my bookshelf, I have an inscribed copy of Šalamun’s A Ballad for Metka Krašovec (Twisted Spoon Press, 2001), next to his two books from Ugly Duckling, Poker (2003) and On the Tracks of Wild Game (2012).
In my copy of Calendar, “February” is blank. The title page opens to three empty panels, a trifold map to nowhere: “a metropolis under / an anesthesia of snow.” Consulting the first printing of the book online, I discover that my “February” has been misplaced in “December.” The two poems appear as one. “The letters always came late,” Genya writes, anticipating the mistake; “the broken thing mends itself.” The book remains perfect even in its imperfection.
Joshua Kotin is the author of Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2018) and the director of the Shakespeare and Company Project. He teaches in the English department at Princeton University. From 2005 to 2008, he was editor of Chicago Review.
