Philip Nikolayev

Philip Nikolayev (born 1966) is an American/Russian poet, translator, editor, reviewer and essayist. He was born in Moscow and spent his childhood in Russia and Moldavia. He grew up speaking both English and Russian and is also fluent in Urdu, Hindi and French. He started writing poetry when he was seven years old, as he revealed to poet and novelist Jeet Thayil in an interview in the 'Journal of Postcolonial Writing'.. He immigrated to the United States in 1990 and currently lives in Cambridge, Mass. where he earned a BA and an MA at Harvard University and completed his PhD on Samuel Beckett's poetry (the first complete and annotated edition of his poetry) at Boston University under the supervision of Christopher Ricks. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Verse, Grand Street, Stand, Salt, Jacket, Overland and others. He is married to poet Katia Kapovich and they have a daughter, Sophia. Together they founded, and served as editors of Fulcrum, a annual on poetry and aesthetics. He has published 4 volumes of poetry, the most recent being, 'Letters from Aldenderry', in 2006, with Salt Publishing.

Nikolayev is also a prolific translator. As well as Samuel Beckett's French poems into English, his focus has largely been on Russian poems into English, encompassing 'classic', established poets such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov and Mandelstam and more recent poets like Denis Novikov, Oleg Dozmorov and Sergey Gandlevsky. He is also involved with the Indian poetry scene and has written a foreword for Uttaran Das Gupta’s collection 'Visceral Metropolis' . His translations have been published in journals, such as the Battersea Review, featured in anthologies, critical studies and cited and discussed by various scholars

Work

His published collections of poetry are 'Dusk Raga' (1998), 'Monkey Time' (2001) and 'Letters from Aldenderry' (2006). In 2001, he was awarded the Verse Prize for his collection 'Monkey Time'.

During an interview with Jack Alun for The Argotist Online, Nikolayev revealed that “writing is largely spontaneous for me and improvisation and self-surprise are important parts of it. ... I write in hopes that what moves or interests or surprises me may also cause a similar response in someone else—the providential reader, in Mandelstam’s phrase, if you will. Often I don’t know exactly where a poem—a certain kind of poem—leads me until the very end, where with some luck everything just happens to click sharply into focus.” Further on he stated that "for me poetry presupposes a kind of love, which has its fragile ways of dealing with the absurd. Love turns pain and laughter into music."

Nikolayev is known for his invention of the 'immured sonnet', a sonnet enclosed on the right margin by another, usually more prosaic text.

Critical reception and Influence

Reviewing Nikolayev's first chapbook, Artery Lumen, in the Harvard Review, Pulitzer Prize Winning poet Louis Simpson wrote "we know what to expect of American poets these days - they are nothing if not original. They have nothing to say. Nikolayev's experiments are different: they are made with feeling and with language. To write out of your feelings, to express love and other emotions, to be a lyric poet in the dead, academic atmosphere of American verse at the present time, and to have, as Nikolayev does, the language to express a range of thought and feeling, is certainly new. I look forward to what the poet of Artery Lumen may write in the future."

Ben Mazer, in his review of 'Monkey Time', writes of Nikolayev's "sense of faith in the multi-directional pull ‘reality’ has upon language. Nikolayev has in sight all that is unknowable, all that experience shows us again and again is unknowable. He allows us to eavesdrop our way into a more intimate engagement with the very limits of cognition. Nikolayev’s language constantly points to the vastness of expressible truth — truth not just as thing (object) but as nature — in its way, in its manner. Again, it is the poetic state, it is a very wide compass. There is nothing obscurant or unclear about this kind of writing. There may be an occasional sly deception, a test of the reader’s abilities, an honest refusal to say things less accurately — but the onus is there". And Larissa Shmailo, reviewing Letters from Aldenderry in Jacket Magazine,' states that the "worldview of Nikolayev’s poems, as may be inferred from the above, is not sanguine. The opening lines of the poem “Earth” asks

But what to make of the dimished lot, of what man could have got and yet has not?

Solace is found in the sensory world of nature, of birdsong and the tapping of a typing poet. Solace is found in love for other people, grandmothers, lovers, friends. But ultimately:

The land has willows, something needs to weep.

The poet, not content to descend into world-weariness or sentiment, offers his compassion in these brilliant, insightful, and erudite ramblings between the sky of perfect eagles and the terrain of Earth. The imperfect personae who inhabit this sphere and its new and old hells love passionately and strive mightily, eschewing “vanilla poetics” every step of the way. For its masterful art and sheer beauty, and for its unique voice, the hedgehog ably acting the fox, this is a collection which should be read and returned to often."

In a cover blurb for 'Letters from Aldenderry', John Kinsella characterizes Nikolayev's stance as being "in 'cahoots' with a self-created idiomatic Russian-American English that, like Nabokov's adds to the possibilities of the word, of the line, of the overall form of expression in the text." For the same collection, critic James Wood wrote "There are splendid poems here, as rich and robust and lyrical as anything being written in America today.’

In an interview in the Kathmandu Tribune, poet and novelist Jeet Thayil cited Nikolayev, along with the likes of Baudelaire, Dante, Dom Moraes and John Berryman, as one of the poets who has influenced him. Nikolayev also features as a character in Thayil's novel 'The Book of Chocolate Saints'.

Massachusetts poet and editor John Hennessy, has written an 'immured sonnet'.

Bibliography

Collections

· Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Modern Poets), Salt Publishing, Paperback – November 23, 2006.

· Monkey Time. Verse Press, paperback, 2003.

· Dusk Raga. The Writers Workshop, redbird book: Calcutta, 1998.

· Artery Lumen, Barbara Matteau Editions, Paperback – October 1, 1996.

Athologies

· Capitals: A Poetry Anthology. Ed. Abhay K. Bloomsbury, 2017.

· Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology, Evgeny Bunimovich (Editor), Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. As translator.

· 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, Billy Collins, Random House, 2005.

· Stand, Volume 3, Issue 3, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

External links

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-nikolayev

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Nikolayev%20interview.htm

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449850600973359?journalCode=rjpw20

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