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The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.
At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. But I really like him.
All Change at Zima Junction
For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer
And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what you are doing back here
And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
“I went, and I am still going.”1
1Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962
2 comments:
This is such a great poem.
Thank you!
I wish I could read Yevtushenko, Dostoyevsky, Tsvetaeva, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and all my other friends in Russian. How dull to be monolingual!
Yevtushenko was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but now, as with Leonard Cohen and Rod McKuen (a better songwriter than poet), dismissed after death. But, hey, a new generation will discover them.
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