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 "suicideleaning 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
Industry Reviews
"The poems of Ilja Kostovski bring to bear --on a particular American moment--a voice that is both eternal and mythic in its scope. This body of work is at once caustic and holy, presenting readers with the incongruity and discomfort of a prophet who speaks to our own noisy, vulgar, and confusing political time. Alongside Ginsberg and Whitman, Kostovski joins a group of poets who have addressed America with tenderness, but also with the tense attention of a warning for what it is we might become." --Mark Wunderlich, American poet, Lambda Literary Award winner; director, Bennington Writing Seminars
"What a marvelous soul was Ilja Kostovski, a poet possesed by all the gods and nature, he had a poetic enthusiasm that was irresistible and I am pleased to be part of his translation team. He was at home with the gods like a narodnik, and yet he lived his life as a true contempary of the Soviet years." --Jack Hirschman, American poet, author of All That's Left Emeritus Poet Laureate of San Francisco
"The poems of Ilja Kostovski, so Macedonian, and so American at the same time, are the meta-physical mirror of our own lives. His words reflect true post-religious, political poetry for a post-God, political time, showing us in an honest and powerful way that only love can save the world and all of us losers in it." --Lidija Dimkovska, Macedonian Poet, author of A Spare Life .Winner of the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature
"Ilja Kostovski is an angry man. He rages at God and religion, at poverty and injustice, at the sort of poets whose faces "resemble lobsters and steaks." He venerates Abraham Lincoln, the toothless and the drunk, those who break windows and throw stones. Like Jack Gilbert, he's conversant in mythic landscapes and Greek gods. Befriended by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Hirschman (who's also one of his translators), Kostovski creates the world in his own image, singing of himself like Whitman and Mayakovsky. Multilingual bard, teacher, philosopher, wanderer, medieval rat catcher, stuntman: Ilja Kostovski is a force of nature. This collection is stunning in every sense of the word. -- Katherine E. Yonng, American poet, author of Day of the Border Guards, Inagural Poet Laureate of Arlington, Va
"Why was man created? One ponders this question while reading the poetry of Ilja Kostovski. His voice echoes those of prophets crying in the wilderness. Faith is often tested by the weight of the cross. How do we live without pain? The words of Kostovski breathe magic back into our air. His voice at times sounds like Whitman. In Sisyphus and I - I hear a poet's soul singing. Is it possible for Sisyphus to survive the heavy blues?" --E. Ethelbert Miller, American poet, literary activist, editor of Poet Lore magazine; author of Fathering Words
"Sisyphus and I reads at once like ancient songs and intimate conversations. This writing overflows with the passions of a poet who saw much and felt deeply...Kostovski cries to heaven and to you and me like a modern psalmist--singing songs of worry and joy about a baffling, disjointed world." --Elijah Burrell, American poet, author of Troubler and The Skin of the River
