How long have you been at poetry evenings, literary readings? To refresh my memories, a column by a student of the HSE Philology Department, who happened to be in the Poets’ Workshop.
While looking for an authentic analog photo booth at Winzavod, I found a poster. She reported on the modern «Poets’ Workshop», whose thematic meeting I found in an exquisite local catering establishment. The poster indicated the time, which means that they were waiting for new participants or spectators. The latter (they were in the minority) I ranked myself. They were in no hurry to start on time, although the «workshop» had already occupied the entire smoking half of the hall. The wide and round central table and part of the peripheral ones were gradually filled with poets, their absence — and laptops, their coffee and wine, as before a great poetic work.
The stage was marked with a cream curtain and a pair of microphones. One of them turned out to have a Doctor, and the theme of the 17th century began from the end, the commodity-consumer progress of postmodernism, where wonderful innovations (for example, the rhyme «Microsoft’a / sneakers») formed the background of criminal romance: in the Doctor’s poem, a subordinate, having kidnapped and lynched the boss , «climbed into the van and drove out of town.» He apparently saved himself from the place, but not from the time, which turned out to be especially difficult: “Angels beat in a light bulb, bursting like caviar,” he remarked with special surrealism. “A real surgeon must be an atheist,” Sh.D. with a short-barreled dummy in his hand, although, according to him, after the XNUMXth year, «belief in revolvers is outdated, like eating with your hands from plates.» He announced his alternative, much late for the jazz era, and a freshman mathematician: “Mom, look how I dance!” Restoring the chronology, the party childhood came to the microphone. Wearing a white shirt, red tie and panama, it warned of the «pioneer obscenity» of the upcoming autobiographical episodes, explaining it by the personal and public choice of the «genre of absurd production». «The crisis of the genre, the crisis of faith,» the Designer concluded distantly.
All this time in the hall they talked a lot and a little, they clapped for poets and texts, a tall blond paced, with a thoughtful “cigarette” gesture, moving a toothpick between his hand and mouth. I never heard him, just like the thin poetess, who was, as it should be, in black; Collecting her thoughts and alcohol, she fluttered among the poetic tables, less and less embarrassed by the abrasion on her cheek, acquired, perhaps, in a hurry somewhere. “After all, fast people live fast to stay in a slow memory,” one of the few ladies stated, returning to postmodernity, perhaps following Nikolai Gumilyov, the demiurge of the first “workshop”: “Only snakes shed their skin, So that the soul grows old and grows. We, alas, are not similar to snakes, We change souls, not bodies.
The visiting “guild worker”, talking about the urgent, at the end of one text, internationalistically modestly placed Siddhartha on the floor in front of the door of the communal apartment. But here, it seems, without waiting for much, I went to catch up with the last train in the direction of a distant hostel: what if “Buddha is sleeping on the threshold”?