Sisyphus and I Kostovski, Ilja; Hirschman, Jack; Hitchcock, Donald
2020, 2020-05-30
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This collection of rebellious poems are a reflection of Macedonian poet Ilja Kostovski's travels across the United States, as well as his interpretations of God's purpose for man. Written over the ...course of a decade from the late 1970s, this work arose out of Kostovski's immersion in the 1978 San Francisco poetry scene and his experience of living in the Shaw district of Washington, DC during the 1980s.
A Glance into Ilja Kostovski's Selected Poetry
It is a slightly smirking smile that accompanies the voice
calling on Muses in Ilja Kostovski's epic poetry and final book,
Sisiphus and I. In this ...seminal production of the poet's work, an
eager, if slightly sarcastic, voice cries out from the woodpile of
modernity:
Don't tarry You envious God This minute I will go Into the deep
forests And will chop for you Firewood in piles.
As for Kostovski's readers, they are the "connoisseurs of
sorrow," the "suicide…leaning on the railings of bridges," the
"self-despisers," for he is a poet of the lone wolves, the
melancholy wanderer we read about in Blake and imagine among the
happy crowds at Coney Island in the 1920s, or among the tripping
multitudes of Haight Ashbury in the 1960s, or in the city where he
made his last residence, the throngs of the upright and enraged of
Washington, D.C.
Kostovski's verse is prayer to a God who is or is not there, a
nearly desperate, repeating "Come unto me." It is not merely
exhortation to the deity. He invokes, too, the gathering crowds of
the lost and broken-hearted, as though the divine could only be
conjured by those numbers, or as if the dead God of Nietzsche could
be resurrected by a hoard whose suffering is the very thing that
binds them. In that case, instead of a savior, the hero of these
poems is a common wound: "Come unto me those/Who have turned your
roads/Into hazardous games." The language is straight out of the
book of Micah (whose own anaphoric language begins each chapter
with "Hear"), an Old Testament prophet no one believes, but the
language pops with contemporary hideousness: "Come, candidates for
oval offices/ Come, candidates for electric chairs."
In what is perhaps the most powerful poem in the collection,
"Sermon at the Washington Monument," Kostovski the poet recalls his
association with Ferlinghetti, who "Told me once/The Anglo-Saxons
speak the truth/with half-closed mouths..." From a formal angle,
the collection Sisyphus and I is Kostovski's open-mouthed song to a
universe that may or may not be listening. Like the fledgling with
mouth turned upward, Kostovski's poetry is both artistic hallelujah
and hungry yawp, whose overarching tone is a kind of "gallows
praise": "I hear America is not singing anymore/All songs are
dead/And you are the executioner…/Have you ever known Francois
Villion/ Who multiplied his life on the gallows?" The poet calls on
writers to awaken-rather like Micah, standing on his street
corner-if not to save anything, then to attend it as it passes,
flares out, at the height of its beauty.
Kostovski, born in the Macedonian province of Greece, is the
author of Dostoevsky and Goethe: Two Devils, Two Geniuses. Like his
poetry, his scholarship sought out the insight of the outsider, as
he himself carried the burden of his generation through exile
during Communist overthrows, until he settled in Washington, D.C.
The prophetic insight is this: a monument does not memorialize a
country, but rather a misinterpreted ideal. The best remembrances
are those that serve a human purpose. And the best invitation to
the gods, in Kostovski's reckoning at least, is to chop some
firewood, good for burning. This is a poet whose voice at once
harkens back to the Tanakh while it recalls the beatniks of San
Francisco, the homeless, and the insidious white power structures
and silent mausoleums of Washington D.C. We are reminded in these
pages that life is to be sung open-mouthed, if at all.
David Keplinger December, 2017
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