The death of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko in September 2012 brought immense sadness to his many friends, readers, admirers, and fellow poets, accompanied by a profound sense of wonder at his extensive accomplishments. Few Russian poets, and perhaps few poets globally, have left behind such a rich legacy of collaboration across countries and continents. For weeks following his passing, the Petersburg poet and critic Aleksandr Skidan regularly shared favorite poems by Dragomoshchenko on social media, a poignant way of keeping his spirit alive and his work close in people’s imaginations.
Beyond his poetry, Skidan also frequently posted Dragomoshchenko’s photographs. This continued even after Arkadii’s death, transforming the initial hope of keeping him alive through his work into a different aspiration: the possibility of discovering new creative output from a poet whose vast intellectual and artistic energy had inspired so many. The fantasy was that he would continue to send forth new provocations to thought and creative endeavors, even posthumously.
This provocation to thought remains a defining characteristic of Dragomoshchenko’s “work,” a term that encompasses both his poems and his photographs. Both forms challenge us to reflect on the unfolding of thoughts and register the mind’s activity in remarkably similar ways. The poems and photographs often act as translations from philosophical discourse, which subtly or overtly permeates his creative output. Photography’s fundamental work is making things visible, offering a compelling starting point to analyze his visual sensibility before delving into his poems, including one examined in detail here.
Dragomoshchenko is a familiar name to many poetry enthusiasts, but it’s useful to recall some key biographical details that contextualize his somewhat unusual position in Russian poetry. Born in Potsdam in 1946, he studied in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and, like many who came to the capital for education, remained there throughout his life. He participated in the city’s poetry underground from the late 1960s, yet often maintained a distinct presence. He was an early recipient of the Andrei Belyi Prize in 1978, a significant albeit marginal award created by underground poets, though his prize was for prose. The awarded work, Disposition among Houses and Trees, circulated via typescript as an “addendum” to the underground journal Chasy (Clock), offering a glimpse into the ephemeral nature of underground publication at the time.
Over his career, Dragomoshchenko published nine books of prose and poetry in Russian. His work has been translated into numerous languages, most notably English, often through significant collaborations with American poets like Lyn Hejinian. Their enduring relationship of mutual translation and deep intellectual exchange stands as a fascinating example of American-Russian poetic cooperation in the late twentieth century. His work demonstrates profound affinities with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, reinforced by personal connections with key figures in that movement. Shared characteristics include a rejection of the unified authorial voice, resistance to traditional rhyme and meter (exploring prose poetry instead), and a deep probing of sensory experience and consciousness. The latter is particularly vital: Dragomoshchenko actively tests philosophies of mind and phenomenology, alongside various literary, cultural, and linguistic theories, embodying the spirit of a philosopher poet.
His last book, Tavtologiia (Tautology), and the one preceding it, Opisanie (Description), highlight the role of abstraction and categorical thinking in his poetry, which also extends, arguably, to his photography. In his long poem To Xenia, Dragomoshchenko wrote, “poetry is not a confession of love / to language and the beloved / but an inquiry.” This line distances his work, even poems presented as direct address, from conventional love poetry. It also notably rejects the idea of poetry as primarily a devotion to language itself, a concept that might motivate poets like Joseph Brodsky to see themselves as “working for the dictionary.” For Dragomoshchenko, such a framework doesn’t apply. Poetry as inquiry is, in essence, poetry as philosophy. What kind of inquiry? A compelling hypothesis is that it is an ontological inquiry—an exploration into the nature of self and other, and the self’s place within a world of difference.
When emphasizing the philosophical dimension of his work, I have in mind a specific contemporary philosophical approach, often associated with Stanley Cavell, who sometimes described it as anti-philosophy. This approach aligns with thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, and particularly Wittgenstein, who was significant to Dragomoshchenko. It’s a philosophy often linked to skepticism. Cavell characterized the skeptic as someone “craving the emptiness of language, as ridding himself of the responsibilities of meaning, as being drawn to annihilate externality or otherness.” This “emptiness of language” is, paradoxically, central to Dragomoshchenko’s poetry, often manifesting in abrupt shifts of motif or theme, reflecting a kind of cognitive restlessness. Cavell posits that art offers a way to resist skepticism. Thus, turning to art is inherently a hopeful act, an intonation that pervades Dragomoshchenko’s work and likely fueled his prolific output and extensive correspondence. David Rodowick captured this paradox of hopeful skepticism in an essay on Cavell, suggesting that skepticism “opens the possibility of once again being present to self or acknowledging how we may again become present to ourselves.”
Dragomoshchenko consistently seeks out moments where self-presence feels achievable. While he treats these explorations seriously, he is not a systematic philosopher building rigid systems of truth. Instead, he circles philosophical ideas, entertains them, lives with them long enough to compose a poem, and then moves on, perhaps revising or starting anew. This unfinalizability, this sense of perpetual process, is perhaps more evident in his poetry, but even his photographs often strive for what Neil Hertz termed “figures for the unrepresentable.” How does one render visible the sheer mass of sensation, impression, perception, and memory?
In his photography, Dragomoshchenko frequently explored texture, as seen in the image of a safety pin piercing netting used for the cover of Tavtologiia. This gently draped, slightly askew piece of netting transforms the potential suggestion of a grid into a pattern of tiny square demarcations that never quite straighten out.
A safety pin pierces draped netting, with a small tear nearby.
The image is particularly marked by its small tear, an inverted v-shape echoed by the open, yet securely hanging, safety pin. The pin could symbolize repair, the act of rejoining torn fabric. Yet, it remains open, suggesting a refusal of this gesture of repair. This detail can be read as Dragomoshchenko’s way of including, even valuing, the element of flaw or “error,” a concept he explores in his poetry. In the poem “Accidia,” for instance, he states that “everything begins in an error of vision.” This capacity to appreciate deviations and mistakes resonates with the Formalist idea of poetic language as ‘deformed’ language, and this photograph visually supports such an argument. The eye is drawn down to the pin, and then further to two horizontal white stripes that seem to anchor the image, stabilizing its thin, flimsy material nature.
The airiness and insubstantiality of the netting are particularly striking when contrasted with another image known as “dry snow.”
Detailed close-up of debris and leaves scattered on a textured, possibly snowy or foamy surface.
To my eye, the most mysterious and beautiful aspect of this photograph is its indeterminate solidity. The debris and leaves appear not so much embedded in hardened snow as delicately paused on a surface that resembles foam. This spongy texture invites consideration for its potential analogy to the workings of the mind – fluid, porous, ephemeral.
Elaine Scarry compellingly writes about how verbal instruction can evoke mental images, highlighting flowers as having the ideal texture and thinness for easy representation. Dragomoshchenko, however, seems interested in textures more resistant to immediate mental picturing. When he does present filmy surfaces, as in the next image, he often complicates their reception by introducing something slightly incongruous. Both this insistence on unexpected elements and the exploration of textures reappear in his poems, suggesting his photographs can train us to become more attuned readers of such dissonances.
A crumpled black tissue or fabric overlaid on a surface, with a dim circle resembling a watch face visible underneath.
In this striking image of black tissue overlay, the allegory less concerns the mind’s work and more an aesthetic principle: the idea of stopped time in photography. The image simultaneously obscures and duplicates the captured moment. The faint circle of a watch face at the bottom hints at time’s echoing reverberations, if not its outright repetitions. Here, time interacts with textile, crumpled like the surface of the filmy blackness. The varied shapes and designs of light caught at odd angles suggest process and movement rather than any arrest of chronology.
A similar effect, using a different method, is achieved in the filmy and reflective surfaces of the next image. This photograph separates textile from glass, offering two distinct surfaces—one rippling, one smooth. Both allow us to “see through” to the world beyond.
A flowing, light-colored dress or fabric hangs in front of a window with reflections and streaks of water, with buildings visible outside.
Like the “dry snow” photograph, this image prompts reflection on the uncertain nature of surfaces. Here, they are layered: soft against hard, flowing against flat. Similar to the safety pin image, the dress picture appears grounded by the horizontal line of buildings below and the wires above. The telephone wires are subtly echoed by the lines of the wire hanger, a visual metonymy likely appreciated by the poet. However, the water streaks on the window glass draw closer attention, especially towards the bottom of the picture. Likewise, the window’s crossbar, which should provide stability, is blurred at the center, softening its anchoring effect. The dress itself, like the tissue over the watch, barely conceals what lies behind it, yet we are looking at something far less abstract. The dress suggests not merely fabric but a human presence. It is held up to the light, a translucent form meant to envelop a body. The dress seems to measure the light against the absent person it would clothe, highlighting the potential for a simple object to evoke profound human connection. This interaction between object, light, and absence is a recurring theme in the work of a photographer poem creator like Dragomoshchenko.
Again, we encounter the work of imagination, much like in Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book, which describes language’s power to make us visualize textures, folds, and depths. Dragomoshchenko’s photography, at least in these examples, doesn’t primarily display the impulse to use the camera to capture something that is, as Roland Barthes defines in Camera Lucida. Instead, his photographs function as a kind of second-order representation—they are the idea of the thing, a representation of our mind’s engagement with it. Each photograph becomes an assertion of the mind’s own reality, projecting a world of imagination, a play of surfaces and textures that engages haptic as much as visual senses. For this poet, photography undertakes ontological work, affirming the pleasures and spaces of being, suggesting a unique approach to creating a photographer poem not just by a photographer, but as a photographer.
We are still far from fully understanding the depth and nature of place in Dragomoshchenko’s poetic world. It’s clearly more than mere geography, as evidenced by the title of his 2005 book, On the Shores of Unfounded River. Let’s look at one poem from that collection. It begins by asserting the impossibility of escaping one’s current location. This place is the page and the camera – meaning, there’s no escaping oneself, a man who makes things hunched over a page, who “pecks” at letters to write poems, who possesses “all sorts of photo cameras.” Tellingly, the actual physical location of these poems and cameras is left undefined. While landscape descriptions appear elsewhere in his work, in this poem, they are reduced to “shadows” and a “green leaf.”
And it’s not like I can run off somewhere. First,
I’m poring over the page this is written on.
Second, all sorts of photo cameras, silver spoons, shadows.
Letters that are pecked out among shadows, various …
reflections even, just in case. Also I see
a window. And I have a headache. And I have more of a headache.
“Not like I can run off somewhere” becomes
a kind of opera singing. Why should I even need to
run off somewhere. Better my head split “in two.”
To sing — better, without seeing anybody — something like “farewell”
then, it’s faster and easier that way. And occasionally some wine
and a green leaf. To feel it in my hands,
and then light up a cigarette.Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
This poem invokes photography not through ekphrasis—describing a photograph or instructing us to imagine one—but by directly referencing “all sorts of photo cameras.” Drawing attention to the machines of picture-making brings forward a key aesthetic debate about photography: whether it qualifies as art since it relies on mechanical processes rather than solely the artist’s will. However, Dragomoshchenko steers the question of agency elsewhere. These cameras no more negate his will than the implied keyboard he uses to “peck out” words. Neither can be escaped; both compel the poet toward creation. The “silver spoons” and “shadows” revive the possibility of ekphrasis, prompting us to envision elements of a potential photograph that would gleam and darken. The tools that facilitate poems also suggest photographs: reflective surfaces, more shadows, a window. The window hints at an external world, but the poet blocks any escape, enclosed within the confines of his own head, a head he perceives primarily through pain.
When words from the opening line—”Not like I can run off somewhere”—are repeated in quotation marks, almost like a refrain, it reveals the poet engaged in internal dialogue. The image of his head splitting in two visualizes this conversation, echoing the extensive conversations and letter-writing that characterized much of Dragomoshchenko’s broader work. Yet here, the chatter is solitary, a wish to bid “farewell” to an unseen other. The desired speech act is elevated to song, specifically “opera singing.” While it could be any aria, it evokes the famous Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin, which prominently features the word “farewell” (“proshchai”). For Dragomoshchenko, the specific source is less critical than the phenomenology of the act itself. Stanley Cavell’s account of singing, particularly the aria, is relevant here, as it conveys “the sense of being pressed or stretched between worlds.” The poet fantasizes singing the perfect operatic “farewell” into darkness and nothingness, performing an act of valediction. We should avoid reading this poem, published years before any known illness, as a premonition of his death or our mourning. Pain and mortality are present, but as they always are when contemplating questions of being. Perhaps a similar feeling is captured in the reflective exploration of journeys, as in a trip poem.
The sung word serves as more than a mere distraction from a throbbing head; its immediate effect is to return the poet to himself, but to a self viewed as if from a distance. As Cavell’s argument about skepticism might suggest, the poet is quickly and easily—as his own adverbs describe it—brought back to an immediate apprehension of his own existence. He turns his attention to his hands, to his familiar companions of wine and cigarettes, which his hands seem almost to reach for. This is not Keats’s “living hand” reaching out to readers, asserting the word’s immortal power, but rather the poet’s self-reminder of his own capacity for touch, the very sensation that his photographs often explore. This connection between the internal state, physical sensations, and the visual/tactile world captured by photography is central to understanding Dragomoshchenko as a poet who photographs and a photographer who writes poems.
Other poems offer similar pathways of exploration, informed by the visual sensibility present in his photography. In “Dreams Photographers Appear To,” the poet foregrounds paradoxes of place, echoing the evasions seen in “And it’s not like I can run off somewhere.” The poem is set in a transient space—a “Casablanca” that exists both in film and in the mind. The prose poem “Agora” presents another paradox: it represents a public, cultural space for conversation and the exchange of ideas, reaching back to the ancient world where philosophy originated. In this poem, the found photograph serves as a powerful emblem of second-order representation, doubly distanced from its subject, lines of poetry. Nowhere is the interplay between the verbal and the visual more evident than here. Like his photographs, these poems often use metaphors for translation – between art and philosophy, between cultural eras, between tangible realities and imagined myths.
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s unique approach, blending the philosophical inquiry of his poetry with the textural and surface-level exploration of his photography, offers a rich field for understanding the concept of a photographer poem. His work challenges traditional boundaries between visual and verbal art forms, proposing that the act of seeing, capturing, and representing the world through a lens is intricately linked to the process of constructing meaning and questioning reality through language. His poems are not merely accompanied by photographs, nor are his photographs simple illustrations of his verse. Rather, both are parallel, intersecting lines of inquiry into perception, consciousness, and the elusive nature of being, filtered through the distinct yet complementary sensibilities of a poet and a photographer. This deep engagement with both mediums elevates his contribution, making his body of work a compelling case study for how the photographer’s eye can profoundly shape poetic expression.