Kathleen Chalfant on Poets and Heroes

The New York Festival of Song's concert Blok and Akhmatova: Poets Without Heroes on Wednesday may well be described as a series of mirrors set up to reflect each other. Officially, the evening is, as Kathleen Chalfant describes it, "a concert with poetry": music by famed composers Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev and others about poetry by their friends Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova. But the evening is, upon closer inspection, much more: an inter-connected web of art celebrating art itself.

"These particular poets and musicians are people who began working just before the Russian Revolution, and in the case of Akhmatova and Prokofiev, went on during the period of the Soviet Union," Chalfant, who serves as the evening's narrator, explains. Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova belonged to a circle of artists not unlike the Algonquin Round Table or the Bloomsbury Group. "All these people knew each other and wrote about each other," Chalfant says eagerly. "Blok was a mentor of Akhmatova, and she wrote poems about him, and also [about] Prokofiev, [who] set a lot of her poems... to music."

Kathleen Chalfant's involvment in this impressive event seems almost fated. As an actress, Chalfant has encountered Anna Akhmatova's work in several projects, most memorably twenty years ago, in Romulus Linney's Three Poets, an evening of one-act plays. Chalfant's part of the evening dealt with Akhmatova. "It was a play about the writing of her most famous poem, Requiem," Chalfant recalls. The origin of the poem is full of enough drama to create a full evening of theatre: "Her son was imprisoned to put political pressure on her after the second World War, and she went to stand outside the prison with lots and lots of other mothers, and she was recognized because she was a very famous person. A woman came up to her and said, 'Can you describe this?' And she said, 'Yes, I can,' and wrote a poem that she never wrote down. She just told parts of it to her friends." Twenty years later, the poem was compiled from the many parts, and published in the West. "It was not published in the Soviet Union until the late '80's," Chalfant says. Akhmatova had other troubles with the Communist government of the USSR, and by 1921, could not find a publisher for her poems. Instead, she found work as a journalist and translator. Other artists, including those whose work will be presented in Poets Without Heroes, encountered similar difficulties. "They all had a complicated time during the [years of the] Soviet Union," Chalfant says.

But despite the artists' problems with politics, "very little of [the evening] is political," Chalfant is quick to add, and points out that Blok and Akhmatova "weren't, for the most part, political poets. They were artists, and in a way, their lives were made difficult because they were artists, and they were difficult to control. They didn't always say what they were supposed to say." The concert, however, is a celebration of art and artists, and focuses on the inter-connected nature of creation rather than the struggles of the subjects.

Kathleen Chalfant sees little difference in performing as a reciter of poetry, or as a character in a scripted play. Poems, she says, are not unlike dramatic soliloquies. Ultimately, regardless of the presentation, the goal is "to make the people hearing the words understand what the writer meant. [The performer is] a go-between between the writer and the audience." There are some differences, of course, and challenges inherent to each style of presenting text to an audience. "Poetry is a lot more elliptical than most dramatic writing, so you have to be even more careful to honor the text, never to interpolate other words, to be careful about the punctuation, and to be sure that you know what is meant so that both the words and the idea of the meaning can help in the communication."

"It'll really be quite an evening," Chalfant says eagerly of Wednesday's show. The poetry will be new to many Westerners, and audiences can discover not only the art that was created by these brilliant minds, but will be able to see how each artist influenced the others. "It will be surprising," Chalfant says.

Blok and Akhmatova: Poets Without Heroes will be presented at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, January 19^th, at Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center, 129 West 67^th St., between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Single ticket prices are $45 and $35 for seniors and $ 22.50 for students one half-hour before show time. Tickets are available by phone at 212-501-3330 or at the Merkin Concert Hall Box Office.