By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, April 29, 2007; BW11

Sometimes poetry makes things happen. In a large, resonant example, a poem by Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) about Stalin caused the poet's imprisonment in 1934. In the translation of Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin, "The Stalin Epigram" and its story have had great importance for many people:

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can't hear our words.

But whenever there's a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,

the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses

he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels.

He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.

He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Mandelstam's poetry caused his arrest and exile, and eventually his death in a hard labor camp in the winter of 1938. But his poetry continues to make things happen -- effects large though immeasurable.

The Web site of the PEN American Center (pen.org) gives an idea of how many writers today are threatened, penalized, silenced, imprisoned, even murdered. The journalist Olga Politkovskaya, a vigorous opponent of the former Secret Police officer Vladimir Putin and his government, was shot dead last October. PEN's watch ranges from relatively mild freedom of expression issues to extreme ones, worldwide. Its First Amendment award this year went to Sibel Edmonds, a fired FBI translator.

It is impossible to say how many writers and organizations have been inspired directly or indirectly by Mandelstam's struggle and his work. The power of his example seems related to the fact that he is not a polemical or essentially political writer. He is above all a great artist who happens to have acquired political meaning as well. The idea of a Poetry Month shouldn't include turning away from such meaning, toward mere marketing. Though the earth may be "forsworn" and the feeling of sustenance in springtime may be a "mirage," the poet still celebrates, in one of his late poems, written in April of 1937:

I raise this green to my lips,

this muddy promise of leaves,

this forsworn earth,

mother of snowdrops and of every tree.

See how I'm blinded but strengthened,

surrendering to the least of the roots?

Are my eyes not blown out

by the exploding trees?

The little frogs are rolled up in their voices,

drops of mercury, huddled in a ball.

The twigs are turning into branches, and the fallow ground

is a mirage of milk.

Written in circumstances of exile and terror, the poem triumphantly makes a home of the Earth.

(The poems here are from "The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam," translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. New York Review of Books. Translation copyright 1973.)