Lecture-Performance/Artist Talk/Poetry Reading
(in English and Russian with projected translations and subtitles)

In this presentation, Roman Sergeevich Osminkin will deliver a lecture—interrupted in the most awkward moments by readings from his poems, demonstrations of his videos, and citations of the work of his friends—about the external objectives of poetry and its evolutionary development beyond the page.

The author’s somewhat paradoxical position is that true poetry always concerns itself with external objectives. As soon as poetry begins to realize its internal conditions perfectly, it immediately ossifies into a style or a genre. It ceases to be a truth-procedure and becomes belles-lettres. After all, the very phenomenon of poetry, as a language game stripped of all external purposiveness, is the historical consequence of the systematic liberation of the poetic lyre from all shamanic rituals, hymns, didacticism, reference, and even narrativity in the end.

And so it would seem that having achieved pure immanence, poetry should finally be able to tend to internal objectives. But in fact it turns out that nothing is particularly poetic there, nothing of a value unto itself, no presuppositional content at all. Having realized this sad state of affairs, poetry began to lament it, and it is still lamenting today. But doesn’t this mean words have achieved self-consciousness? Can’t they now choose for themselves what is internal and external and even return to their practical functions, invade the rough sphere of empiricism and current events without fear of reproach, misunderstanding, or naïve instrumentalization?

The same is true for poetry’s media specificity. For over a hundred years, poetry has been deserting the page for neighboring art forms, prolonging its relevance in our quickly changing world by surrendering its powers to more “resourceful” media—cinema, rock music, video art, performance, etc. Roman Sergeevich proposes that poetry can embrace this tendency without being reduced to the status of a poor relation. The digital age has generated an entirely new media-sphere, in which the many converse with the many, and the process of communication has become more important that any resulting artifact. Society is itself a communicative system in which art and the everyday intersect, as do language and power, politics and technology. But what remains of poetry when it leaves the page behind for the synthetic forms of video-poetry, sound-poetry, poetic performance, and so on? Is it forced to sacrifice attention to the word and its potential for renewing language? What does it gain in exchange? Roman Sergeevich has the answers.