Almost ten years ago UDP published Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, a representative selection of Lev Rubinstein’s “note-card poems,” a seminal body of work from one of the major figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. These texts form what Rubinstein called a “hybrid genre”: “at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” As American scholar Gerald Janecek has noted, the texts are made up of “language ready-mades (commonplace expressions, overheard statements, sentence fragments)” and organized “in such a way that we seem to be observing the creation of a poem from raw material.”
This new edition collects for the first time all of Rubinstein “note-card poems” and includes a preface by American poet Catherine Wagner, an introduction by translator Philip Metres, and a short essay by the author.
Some of these texts have previously been translated into German, French, Swedish, and Polish; now Rubinstein’s complete card-catalog of “comedic novelties” has been re-opened—in a precise and sensitive translation—to the English reader.
One of Rubinstein’s note-card poems is now available as a broadside here.
Almost ten years ago UDP published Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, a representative selection of Lev Rubinstein’s “note-card poems,” a seminal body of work from one of the major figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. These texts form what Rubinstein called a “hybrid genre”: “at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” As American scholar Gerald Janecek has noted, the texts are made up of “language ready-mades (commonplace expressions, overheard statements, sentence fragments)” and organized “in such a way that we seem to be observing the creation of a poem from raw material.”
This new edition collects for the first time all of Rubinstein “note-card poems” and includes a preface by American poet Catherine Wagner, an introduction by translator Philip Metres, and a short essay by the author.
Some of these texts have previously been translated into German, French, Swedish, and Polish; now Rubinstein’s complete card-catalog of “comedic novelties” has been re-opened—in a precise and sensitive translation—to the English reader.
One of Rubinstein’s note-card poems is now available as a broadside here.
