Conference | The Bad, the Bad, and the Ugly: Russophone B-Verse Throughout the Ages

In his canny examination of the life and oeuvre of Count Khvostov, Ilya Vinitsky suggests that “if good poetry hides an author’s complexes, then bad poetry unveils them.” This observation draws our attention to a typically unexamined assumption of literary scholarship: that our objects of study must, necessarily, be “good.” Verse scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries has made great strides in deconstructing cumbersome notions of universal artistic quality and heroic genius. It has made room in the field of poetics for literary verse that challenges long-held notions of “the good,” “the true,” and “the beautiful”—and, at long last, has given even the unabashedly ugly its due consideration.

This conference embraces the notion that abject artistic failure, too, can be fertile ground for intellectual inquiry. Indeed, works of poor quality play an integral role in the formation of the canon of Russophone verse. Bad poetry defines the limits of literariness at a given historical moment, heightens the contradictions inherent in the process by which literary form coheres and “is made,” and lays the foundation for future verbal experimentation and development. In so doing, it offers us a particularly effective means of investigating relations between individual actors and literary institutions. Svetlana Boym suggests as much in her study of “commonplace writing,” positing that it becomes “a public threat,” dramatizing “the tension between writing and publishing, between writing and the presentation of the self.”

For two days, investigate and celebrate “B-verse”: poetry that is hackneyed, poorly crafted, transparently self-indulgent, or otherwise artistically ineffective. The papers presented will survey “bad” verse production in a grand variety of manifestations, and from a wide range of time periods.

In addition to the more traditional scholarly component, this conference will also include a workshop dedicated to translating “B-verse,” in the effort to locate “badness” in tangible literary form, and to answer broader questions about the heuristics of stylistic quality and appraisal in and out of Russian-language poetry.