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ANNOTATIONS OF COMPOSITION OF SEVENTY-THREE BY ANDREI MONASTYRSKI by Katherine Beaman

  1. first thought: implication of a climb and moment of ease
  2. occupation and tools of labor → work
  3. smallness
  4. separated halves like images from prior work, isolated body parts
  5. whimsical, tender view of life
  6. possessive without object, occupation or hybrid human-object
  7. “box” and “rowboat” are shapes to return to
  8. play on variations of meanings derived from a root word (“dressy, dresses, dresses”), sexual 
  9. shelter, tools of labor, resting place
  10. use of verbs which may also be plural nouns (does this happen in Russian?), actually forms something of a coherent sentence, wordplay of “doers”
  11. brings up coherent imagery of stormy waters
  12. girlish
  13. rhythmic, still coherent groupings of objects
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  15. seems to tell something of a narrative of a sea journey, “pony” stands out as an outlier word or a stand-in
  16. death and war
  17. playful, seemingly with the idea of death
  18. wreckage, something toddler-like
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  20. very disruptive from flow like a rest in sheet music, says as much as a melody does
  21. detritus
  22. boiled-down landscape painting of seascape
  23. creates a rhythm from invented words
  24. mythological–possible allusion here
  25. is the poem moving through the seasons? 
  26. land-oriented, agrarian, seasonal professions
  27. gritty and sinister killing professions
  28. inversion of playfulness of death with the darkness of infancy and birth
  29. (29-1) number system begins to deconstruct; word inventions using root words that have previously been introduced; each “word” is a complete idea in and of itself–this breaks down our notion of the role of words within sentences as fragments of meaning; (29-2) harsh break from preceding cluttered words; nouns made of superlatives; word inventions from combination of previous words; words lose meaning the more they are altered and built-upon; single “word” broken into parts made of actual altered versions of words; (29-3) landscape description becoming increasingly fleshed-out and revised; (29-4) dedication to A. Rabinovich is specific — who was this person? why dedicate only a portion of the poem? de-constructing into seeming nonsense, but we know nothing is truly nonsense for to deem something as nonsense is to find some sort of meaning in it, if only that it is nonsense; unpronounceable, placeholder letter combinations–first Monastyrski deconstructs the word, then the letters within the words; creation of self-contradictory “words”; (29-5) here I give up on annotating and read the words aloud with Hayes and Spencer on the Joe’s Coffee patio
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  73. culmination in exaltation!