We Call Ourselves Warriors

I was somewhat surprised to find some lines from one of my poems in one of the critical flurries of the present discussion, "Mayakovsky and Contemporary Poetry," the poem which begins: "But it wasn't the innovators who won. But indeed, at one time – my God! – words smoked like craters over the amazed crowd." To be honest, I had partly forgotten these lines. They were written and published fifteen years ago and didn't attract any particular attention or cause any fuss at that time. It's odd that the critics, modifying these or other lines in different ways, somehow thought it possible to avoid paying attention to this fact. As a result, an arbitrary shift of temporal focus occurred: lines taken out of the concrete situation of the atmosphere in which they were written came to be viewed, first of all, as though they had just been written, and, second, as programmatic, a manifesto by the author. Of course, every person – and a writer above all – is responsible for everything he says, regardless of the circum...