![]() ![]() By liberating the poem from actual words which, standing alone, were perhaps less relevant to the socio-political upheavals of the time, the Futurists embarked on a radical poetics that complemented the events of the day. Zaum, also known as transrational poetry, was meant to go beyond express intelligibility without devolving into nonsense – it was intelligible in an implied, innate way, because it relied on the roots of words and their sounds to suggest meaning in the poem. Kruchenykh was, with Khlebnikov, the leading practicioner of “zaum” poetry, that is, poetry comprised of made-up words – an idea believed to have been suggested to him by the painter David Burliuk in late 1912. A contemporary and Futurist colleague of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh was hailed by Pasternak as “standing on the edge – a living fragment of art’s imaginable frontier.” Revered as a great experimenter and provocateur in his day, Kruchenykh trail-blazed the early 20th century literary frontier like some kind of Russian Magellan, charting a course into the poetry of sound. Affectionately called the “bogeyman of Russian literature,” Alexei Kruchenykh (pronounced Crew-chon-ik) didn’t so much open the door of modern poetry as kick it off its hinges and toss it to the side. ![]() POET AND TRANSLATOR JACK HIRSCHMAN brings us the first single-volume poetry collection in English of one of the central figures of Russian Futurism. First published as Let’s Bellyache! A book review in the San Francisco Call, May 24, 2002 ![]()
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