Hence all rhymes – A tribute to Joseph Brodsky
Edited by Specimen
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Hence all rhymes
Edited by Specimen
A tribute to Joseph Brodsky on the day of his birth
Today, May 24th, the day of his birth, and thirty years after his death, Specimen publishes a gathering of poems by close friends of Joseph Brodsky which conjure his essential identity as poet, as well as his abiding presence in the lives of those who loved and cherished him.
Brodsky lived by and through his two languages (Russian and English) with intensity. In addition to being one of the master poets of his time, as well as an essayist of wide range and insight, he was a brilliant aphorist and phrase maker, with an uncannily knowing ear for informal language, ordinary speech.
“Poetry is a school of uncertainty,” he said. “Poetry isn’t an art, it’s an anthropological necessity.”
For Brodsky, poetry is a profound means of inquiry into what it is to be human, a lone spirit confronting history and the infinite without certainties. But something essential can remain of that quest for understanding: “…What gets left of a man amounts/ to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.”
Published May 19, 2026
© Specimen
Few poets lived by language in such a thorough and relentless way as Joseph Brodsky. Almost fanatically, frantically so. Ethically, insofar as ethics itself is mothered by aesthetics. Insofar as “language that is intolerant, and indifferent in a week to a beautiful physique, worships language and forgives anyone by whom it lives” Brodsky is still present, physically and linguistically so, thirty years after he disappeared in the dead of winter, on January 28th 1996, for all those who met him, textually or in person. Talking, standing next to a fridge or walking fast through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Hence, few poets are so alive in other poets’ verse, are addressed so often as if present, because of their presence, in other poets’ poems. On the day of his birth, May 24th, Specimen publishes and translates some of these, conjuring Joseph’s presence through the verse, and the absence, of this most unique family of good poets, good friends, Seamus, Derek, Adam and Mark among them.
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