“My mother is watching some doodah of ballistics firing on her iPad,” writes Eugene Ostashevsky: “I am not sure what war she is participating vicariously in.”
Dead bodies cradle imaginary guns. The unit of measurement for death is the ratio of other deaths. And the only form of eloquence that remains is the disgust emoji.
As Eugene points out in Episode 13 of Multi-Verse, the tragic and the ridiculous can—and should—be taken together. War is not only accompanied by stupidity but predicated on it; in acknowledging this, we can undercut authority and the holding pattern of revenge.
The five sonnets Eugene shares in this episode find rebellion in puns, translation, and plosives. A unlikely “support network” appears in the language of Dylan Thomas, Boris Lurie, Isaiah. And violence makes even the sun—that symbol of glory in victory—disgusting, “a red brown stain on sweatpants.”
Eugene Ostashevsky's latest poetry collection is The Feeling Sonnets (New York Review Books, 2022).
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Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear more poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe for free on Substack, Soundcloud, Apple, Spotify, or the Multi-Verse website.
Episode 13: Eugene Ostashevsky on the holding pattern of revenge