Remembering Joseph Brodsky

Poetry rarely penetrates mainstream American culture, so it was astonishing to hear contemporary poetry read on one of television's most popular shows, "Sex and the City."

Dancer/choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who played actress Sarah Jessica Parker's love interest on the show, read poetry as a way of romancing her. In his role as a sophisticated Russian artist, Baryshnikov completely won Parker over. The poem, "Six Years Later," was written by Baryshnikov's dear friend and fellow Russian, poet Joseph Brodsky. This elegant love poem is the title poem in Brodsky's book "A Part of Speech," which Baryshnikov held up in front of the camera as he read out loud to Ms. Parker. I was astounded, but not surprised. These two exiles were dear friends, and were often seen together at various events in New York City. In fact, on numerous occasions, Baryshnikov sat in on Brodsky's Craft of Poetry class, which I took at New York University. He would come, notebook and pen in hand, and act like any other young poet in the Creative Writing Program.

Joseph Brodsky was such a dynamic teacher that all attention was on him, and celebrities visiting class were never a distraction. Brodsky had a fierce energy about him, and he never stopped moving. Even when he taught a two-hour class, he walked around the classroom the entire time he was lecturing. He talked quickly in a kind of rapid fire, as if he couldn't get the ideas out fast enough.

Joseph Brodsky was the most passionate teacher I ever had. He loved history and politics, and he could discuss these subjects as knowledgeably as he discussed poetry. His lectures on his favorite American poets, Robert Frost and W.H. Auden, were virtual love songs filled with fascinating details and lessons on craft and form. He usually had a lit cigarette, and if a student didn't know an answer, he would tap the ashes on his or her head. We had to memorize one poem a week, and Brodsky was relentless about the discipline of memorization. He was always very nice to me, because I had been a student of his friend, poet/historian Peter Viereck, while still an undergraduate. Needless to say, ashes were never flicked on my head.

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940. He began writing poetry at age 18 and soon came to the attention of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who brought credibility and national recognition to his poetry. In 1963, he was arrested and charged a year later with parasitism, a term for someone considered to be a social parasite at the time. His crime was simply being a poet. Brodsky was sent into internal exile to work in a forced labor camp in a remote part of the country just south of the Arctic Circle. He was forcibly expelled from the USSR and stripped of his citizenship in 1972.

Brodsky lived and taught in the United States for the rest of his life. He served as U.S. poet laureate from 1991 to 1992, and was the first foreign-born poet to receive this honor. During his tenure as poet laureate he made an "Immodest Proposal," which called for printing poetry in millions of copies, because poetry, he said, "is the only insurance available against the vulgarity of the human heart. Therefore, it should be available to everyone in this country and at a low cost." Quite an ambitious undertaking.

I heard Brodsky read his poems in Russian on a couple of occasions, and it didn't matter that I didn't understand a word of it. The music and passion were so intense I felt the poems deeply. Here's how poet Seamus Heaney described the experience: "It was as if a hard-grained, thick-stringed and deeply tuned instrument were given release. There was lament and tension, turbulence and coherence. I had never been in the presence of a reader who was so manifestly all poet at the moment of reading."

When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, virtually none of his work was available in his native country, although most of his poems were written in Russian and translated into English. (Eventually he wrote poems and numerous essays in English.) He would have been read by millions of Russians if his poems were available, because poetry is hugely popular in that country. Consider Joseph Brodsky's political exile — it demonstrates the powerful role of a poet in that society.

Brodsky believed literature, and poetry in particular, was critical for the good of one's mind and soul. In his Nobel address he said that if we chose our political leaders "on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on Earth … for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has not read Dickens." His deep faith in the inherent wisdom of literature never abated.

The last time I saw Brodsky was in his famous Morton Street apartment in New York. We were both working on behalf of dissident writers in translation, which was a cause dear to his heart. He was pacing around the apartment, cigarette in hand, and I remember how worried everyone was about his bad heart. His intense passion for life and language, coupled with his lyric genius, made him seem indomitable.

But his numerous books of poetry and essays remain. Brodsky said "a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved." We shall have to take his word on that.

"The poet … is language's means for existence … I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation." — Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 8, 1987.

Marjory Wentworth is South Carolina's poet laureate.