Prize Fight

In 1964, when Joseph Brodsky was 24, he was brought to trial for “social parasitism.” In the view of the state, the young poet was a freeloader. His employment history was spotty at best: he was out of work for six months after losing his first factory job, and then for another four months after returning from a geological expedition. (Being a writer didn’t count as a job, and certainly not if you’d hardly published anything.) In response to the charge, Brodsky leveled a straightforward defense: he’d been thinking about stuff, and writing. But there was a new order to build, and if you weren’t actively contributing to society you were screwing it up.--RW

For as long as I can remember my own creative life has been a skirmish between switching off and turning on, not in the Tim Leary sense, but in the sense that political thought will occasionally put you down for the count. By that I mean politics is out of the hands of the ordinary man, but art can give him succor, even save him.


TS