I can’t do anything
let alone free something
in order to clear space
there is no place for me here
or for what I did
and forgot
there’s nothing here
in any sense
that’s how it used to be
how it was when everything left
and there won’t be anything
other than me
but I forgot that, too
this is nothing
what could it be
nothing
it’s all the same
I don’t remember
it’s all the same here
I’m not bound by anything
this place does not have conditions
for movement
nothing will stir
or roar past
no one can fly
this place has so much emptiness
I do not fully grasp it
no one can move
or fly
something is put back up
noiselessly
and noiselessly falls away
no, no one appears
I can’t see
the ones noiselessly flying by
they are not here
this place is soundless
everything is somewhere else
something flies over me
it’s flying away
it’s moving something in the air
there is nothing to breathe here
time goes by slowly
noiselessly
above me something is noisily
being moved
something flies out
and comes to a stop near me
there is no one
next to me
I’m flying
suddenly I vanish
only my noise remains
I emerge from the noise
as if from a cloud
I fly around it
swinging my legs
I’m flying
suddenly I vanish
everything here is taken out
of something else
and outlined in chalk
I don’t know what this means
there’s none of me anywhere
everything is outlined
except for me
suddenly, outlined,
I fly out of some kind of E.
with emptiness inside me
I’m flying
I am filled with noise
I speak to someone
I move E.
I take note of the place
other than this place
there is nothing
something is carried out
but there’s nothing here to be carried
everything here gets pulled up
and put back
it flies
and escapes
nothing can be recalled here
something is brought in
and put in place
they emerge from somewhere
form outlines
cross things out
make noise
they've blocked the exit with something
they stack one thing on top of another
they take things out one at a time
empty space
they put things inside one another
long ones, short ones
they’ve turned the E. upside down
this place has a lot of earth
it gets taken away
then brought back
it crumbles
it makes piles in places
it’s heavy
and abstract
the earth flies in clumps
it turns into something
falls somewhere
the sounds of it falling reveals
secret spaces
empty desires
even such indeterminacy
can create the illusion
of a lived-in space
though there's no one here
but me
and I feel bad here
I carry the E. above my head
I throw it at the mirror
it’s stuck
and juts out from the emptiness
there’s no mirror here
I don’t know what it means
the E. flies over my head
there’s nothing for me to grab hold of
nothing to use for momentum
by the time I take out everything
that can be removed
they’re already far away
there are some fragments here
nothing is whole
this brings on
a fragmentary feeling
a broken feeling
it’s hard to remember anything
or grab hold of anything
objects crumble
no one here needs them
they make noise
they yearn to fall and break
I can’t turn away from them
I shouldn’t cast them aside
there are no sounds here
there’s nothing that would make a sound
I don’t even know how to make sound
other than me
there are no sounds here
I don’t understand what it means
to sound
these sounds cause everything that can rattle
to rattle
but here nothing rattles
here there are neither sounds
nor the rattle
of rattling things
from Nothing Happens
Andrei Monastyrski
translated from the Russian by Brian Droitcour and Yelena Kalinsky
“Nothing Happens” is part of Andrei Monastyrski’s collection Elementary Poetry, translated by Brian Droitcour and Yelena Kalinsky. It is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in December 2019.
Listen to the original read by the poet:
“Nothing Happens” is one of the five sections in Poetic World, originally produced as an artist’s book in 1976 and published in a single volume in 2007. Each part of Poetic World is a kind of philosophical inquiry; three sections involve variations on rigid stanza forms, where hundreds of repetitions of phrases like “in you there is nothing” or “everything was” serve as meditations on essence and impermanence. “Nothing Happens” is unique among the sections in both its free, improvisatory quality and its extensive use of the first-person pronoun, which becomes a means for exploring the challenge of defining a sense of self in the flexible and abstract medium of language. Monastyrski’s speaker undergoes a shifting array of experiences and emotions: noise and silence; euphoria at the absence of actions and impressions and fright from crushing loneliness; a magnificent sensation of lightness and flight and the oppression of motionlessness; dizzying movement and soothing tranquility. The speaker exists inside language, a position from which he observes the emptiness outside of it and its lack of ground. Monastyrski was not actively pursuing an interest in Buddhist thought when he wrote Poetic World, but in conversations with the translators he said he retroactively identified resonance between it and the ideas explored in Poetic World: that emptiness is change, that movement is necessary for the expression of nothingness.
Here the stanzas appear one after the other, but in the samizdat original of Poetic World Monastyrski put only one six-line stanza on each page, leaving a significant amount of white space in the edition. Each of Poetic World’s five volumes had two hundred pages each containing one stanza—a thousand pages of typewritten text in all. By writing through nothingness, Monastyrski built a form that occupies space. For him, the book as a physical phenomenon mattered more than the contents of the text. “I would also like to note,” Monastyrski writes in the afterword to the 2007 edition, “that Poetic World exists not for reading, but for ‘being.’ This text must simply ‘be,’ but it does not necessarily have to ‘be read.’”
Here the stanzas appear one after the other, but in the samizdat original of Poetic World Monastyrski put only one six-line stanza on each page, leaving a significant amount of white space in the edition. Each of Poetic World’s five volumes had two hundred pages each containing one stanza—a thousand pages of typewritten text in all. By writing through nothingness, Monastyrski built a form that occupies space. For him, the book as a physical phenomenon mattered more than the contents of the text. “I would also like to note,” Monastyrski writes in the afterword to the 2007 edition, “that Poetic World exists not for reading, but for ‘being.’ This text must simply ‘be,’ but it does not necessarily have to ‘be read.’”
Andrei Monastyrski (b. 1949) is a poet, author, artist, and art theorist based in Moscow. He is, along with Ilya Kabakov, one of the founders of Conceptualism in Russia. He graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a degree in philology and worked for many years at the Moscow Literature Museum. In 1973, he began to work with serial structures and minimalist sound compositions and in 1975, turned his attention to poetic objects and actions. He is best known as a founding member and chief theoretician of the Collective Actions group, which began to stage outdoor actions on the outskirts of Moscow in 1976. He compiled many of the group’s documentary volumes, Trips Out of the City, and participated in many solo and group exhibitions with his own work. In 2003, Monastyrski was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in literature. He also received the Soratnik Prize in 2008 and the Innovation Prize in 2009. His poetry and theoretical writings have been gathered into several Russian-language volumes by the publisher German Titov for his Library of Moscow Conceptualism series.
Brian Droitcour is an editor at Art in America. From 2002 to 2007 he lived in Moscow, where he covered exhibitions for The Moscow Times and contributed to Artchronika, Artforum, and other publications. In 2012 he won second prize in the Compass Award competition for his rendering of Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1921 long poem, “Upon a Red Steed.” Droitcour is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at New York University, where he is writing a dissertation on Monastyrski’s poetry.
Yelena Kalinsky is an art historian and translator based in East Lansing, Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in 2013 with a dissertation on the Collective Actions group and the Moscow Conceptualist Circle. In 2012, she translated and edited a volume of audience recollections of early Collective Actions performances for Soberscove Press. Previously, she worked as an archivist and Dodge Curatorial Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum, where she curated the exhibition Performing the Archive: Collective Actions in the 1970s and 1980s. Her writing has appeared in ARTMargins, Russian Literature, Nova Galerija Newspapers, and elsewhere. She is assistant professor of art history at Michigan State University and associate director for research and publications at H-Net.
