Whatever history books might have to say about the Nineties, it was a time marked, I felt then and still feel now, by a spirit of unity which prevailed among the youth population of the United States. From the Alternative Revolution in popular music (and attendant spectacles, like Lollapalooza) to a revolution in fashion which favored androgyny and made bisexuality and gayness hip, Nineties kids often led lives joined together by golden threads— shared pastimes and experiences which made their lives workable. Such was my life, too. So, the night in April 1997 when I walked into the Philly Java Company in South Philadelphia and was told that, as was serendipitous for me, a reading was going on in the comfortably furnished back room, a new golden thread sewed together the beginnings of another chapter in my life as a poet.
The reading was, of course, hinged to the Nineties Philadelphia poetry journal Siren’s Silence. More than just a journal which published edgy, avant-garde leaning poetry and visual art (evincing, also, a prescient sense of multi-media), Siren’s Silence embodied a sharply defined ethos— live fast, live hard, and live like you mean it. Of all the characters I chanced to meet from the Siren’s Silence crowd in ’97 and ’98, Vlad(len) Pogorelov was the most memorable. When his first collection appeared in ’97, Derelict, which you have here in your hands, it consolidated for me that Vlad was more than just a poet of note; he was the first poet in my age group (slightly older) to manifest and sustain a compelling voice for the length of a book. “At the Train Station” was, and remains, my personal favorite— a poem convincingly personal, convincingly sensual, provocative, but also (as is important) not afraid to take the English language and make it sing, man. Because Vlad hailed from another country, he might not have realized what I knew then, and remember now— the entire twentieth century had passed, both in the United States and Europe, in which all the spark, all the musicality had been drained out of English-language poetry and poetic language, and been replaced with something very cold, very flat. Dull. Vlad sang with passion, at the top of his lungs, and instinctively employed, both in “Train Station” and elsewhere, all the seductive tricks of lyricism, as American poetry had buried— rhyme, near-rhyme, off-rhyme, assonance. Such music even Whitman never knew.
I was reminded, also, of Charles Bukowski by Derelict, with its gritty realism and emphasis on subterranean urban life— dirty whores, drunkenness, poverty. The protagonist of Derelict and the protagonist of Bukowski’s poetry share many complexes, impulses, neuroses, and tastes, from a love of classical music to a distaste for the mainstream of human life in general. In fact, it wasn’t always easy to ascertain then, during the Derelict era of the late Nineties, and as an aspiring poet myself, to what extent Mr. Pogorelov wanted to remain in the margins. By late ’98, he had packed up all his things and moved to the West Coast, leaving Philadelphia without making too full of an impression, as I moved to Manhattan from State College and then hop-scotched back to Philly. Was the warm, cozy ending of “No. 103” really indicative— is this a literary protagonist who could master his demons? And where did Mr. Pogorelov separate from the protagonist in his best poems, like “103” (an issue which reaches past Bukowski, down centuries, to Byron and out)? In those days, I thought I would never know; yet now I do, as Vlad reappears to reclaim what’s his. The ultimate demon, as we read in Derelict, is time itself— wearing us down, taking our epiphanies and making them both feel and appear worthless. Now that the time has come for Derelict to emerge again, a flagship Nineties literary talisman reborn, we see exactly who Vladlen Pogorelov is— not only a good, strong, solid, authentic poet, but a poet who means it, man. And there are never many of those around.
