My Hollywood

By Boris Dralyuk

Paul Dry Books, $16.95

The Unrecovered River

Review By David Mason

The vast metropolitan area we call “Los Angeles” is really many cities, each with its own character, none more mythologized than Hollywood. A place of jaded dreams mixing elegance and tawdriness, Hollywood is both a specific dot on the map and a word as resonant in our era as Troy was to the ancients—a place that reveals character or the absence of it, a setting for stories, many of them lies or tall tales. It is a purely American locale, a destination for people from every background and region, evocative of hard realities and inexpressible desires. One thinks of film noir, of Polanski’s Chinatown and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and especially of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the pseudo-Eden where tainted apples grow, where new identities are manufactured and flung away like dried leaves.

For the Ukrainian-American poet, editor, and translator Boris Dralyuk, Hollywood is “a grand old dame reduced to dishabille, / her glory far too faded to restore.” Dralyuk sees the city from the perspective of immigrants and refugees, as the seat of exile and hope, connected by mythology and money to each of its surrounding communities. His individual poems may at first appear slight in their ambition, but they accumulate a vision and recover a history too few remember. With a verbal facility reminiscent at its best of Byron or Pushkin, Dralyuk writes often in received forms like the Onegin sonnet. He rhymes cleverly: “Pasadena” with “misdemeanors,” “demolished” with “polished,” “aloes” with “gallows.” His subjects are faded landmarks, artists one doesn’t expect to find in LA like Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Arnold Schoenberg, or film stars of a bygone age. He writes with enthusiasm about diminished lives, and the result in this first collection of poems, My Hollywood, is a book of elegant realism, a worthy addition to the poetry of “Los Angeles.”

One thinks of LA as a city of entropic sprawl, yet among its many and diverse poets there has been a surprising number of impressive formalists. Dralyuk’s formal acumen puts me in mind of other Los Angeles writers from Charles Gullans to Timothy Steele, and like Dana Gioia he adds a particular ethnic consciousness—in this case Ukrainian and Jewish rather than Gioia’s Mexican and Italian. If Dralyuk’s poetry offers polished surfaces, it also revels in the run-down, the ruined and forgotten. A villanelle called “Émigré Library” observes,

……………………..Our library is open, but for whom?

……………………..The ranks of the expired far outnumber

……………………..these half-blind holdouts hobbling through the room.

Such formal verse might suggest LA’s more manicured neighborhoods, but one senses too the distances, the gulf between one cultured mind and another, the often-unfree freeways and the sheer energy it takes to cross communities, connecting reader and poem. Soon after the villanelle we find a pantoum, another form of insistent repetition, reminding me of Gioia’s verbal fugues which, echoing Weldon Kees, are rife with the irrational. My Hollywood is, among other things, a book of ghosts. It carries in its witty forms a whiff of the waste land. A poet this talented will surely go further than these subjects allow, exploring the mythic and psychic depths in his material and himself.

He divides his book into four sections, creating a simple and graceful architecture. I love the punning title of his second section, “Absentee Ballet,” as if democracy has created its own haunted dance form. The poem with that title ends, “Each day I scour the papers for reviews, / but find obituaries, crosswords, and old news.” Words cross each other in life as well as death, and that last phrase recalls Ezra Pound’s declaration that poetry is “news that stays news.” Yet is anything ever really new in a newspaper? Is anything really revealed? The yearning for right expression is a poet’s dream and birthright, often dashed on the anvil of reality. I love too the punning sensibility of “Calendars,” where “There’s simply no relief / for these dead-enders at the Château d’If.” That poem bears an epigraph from Henri Coulette, another Los Angeles poet and presiding spirit for the book, also dead. Like Coulette, Dralyuk holds the minor key through much of his work, wry and ironic, but he also comes at his material with the brio of a new generation. He writes a couplet for the great miniaturist of American poetry, Samuel Menashe, and a lovely miniature of his own in “Trans-Atlantic”:

……………………..Journeying home—the wrong side of the road,

……………………..a world away. I am a bead of blood

……………………..that struggles up an artery, against the tide,

……………………..to find the heart that I have left behind.

It’s an eloquent statement of the immigrant’s dilemma.

The book’s third section is devoted to translations of modern émigré poets, none of whom I had read before. Though I cannot read the originals, these poems seem very good to me as they come across in English. The poets include Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovsky (1891-1966), Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky, 1903-1969), Richard Ter-Boghossian (1911-2005), Vladislav Ellis (1913-1975) and Peter Vegin (1939-2007). None of them lived particularly long lives. One pictures smoke-filled rooms and fevered imaginations, but who knows? Take the Magritte-like opening of “Farmers Market” by Vernon Duke: “Plump little clouds, like rolls of bread, / lie on the sky’s blue tablecloth.” The immigrant’s experience is always a surrealist poem. I’m struck as well by Peter Vegin’s “Armenians Unhurriedly”:

……………………..This morning I woke in Hollywood

……………………..to springtime, hummingbirds, magnolias,

……………………..and from my balcony I spotted

……………………..my dear Armenians, unhurried . . . 

……………………..While in the sky above—what’s that?

……………………..The great, the holy Ararat . . . 

The society we were born into with all its tropes and images, odors and mythologies will suffuse everything we see with our new eyes, we immigrants. Here the voice carries its own Transcendentalism, its own way of making symbols and surviving the floods, its own residue of vitality snatched from disaster. There’s an American saying, Todos somos immigrantes, true if you allow for broad interpretation of who came when and how, and I can’t help feeling Boris Dralyuk has made a particularly American book from these alienated lives.

In the final section, only his “Ballade of Hank’s Bar” disappoints me, too indebted to Villon, or perhaps because its refrain—“Sunk are the dives of yesteryear”—lacks a resonance worth repeating. But the book recovers quickly and finishes superbly with such poems as “Dictionary of Omissions” and a perfect little gem called “Lethe”:

……………………..Nothing was ever

……………………..quite the same.

……………………..Every one came

……………………..to be another.

……………………..This is a river

……………………..that goes by the name

……………………..of the river I

……………………..will never recover.

My Hollywood is an unusually fine debut, and poems like “Lethe” indicate new directions Dralyuk might take. He has enumerated his ghosts, declared his antecedents, and might be able now make his own distinctive journey.

David Mason is the former poet laureate of Colorado, author of Ludlow and other books. His new collection of poems, Pacific Light, will appear from Red Hen Press later this year. He now lives in Tasmania, the island state of Australia.

Boris Dralyuk is the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and a translator of the great short story writer Isaac Babel, among others. As Babel so relished the precise turn of phrase, the way two words rubbed together could release a new experience (at least as far as I can tell from translations), Dralyuk too is properly language-drunk, concerned with exacting form and etymology. 

Note from the reviewer: I knew Dralyuk as a sympathetic editor before I read his poems, and My Hollywood wins me with its charm as well as its realism. 

30 March 2022