Two Performances by Lev Rubinstein

Since Ugly Duckling Presse will be coming out with a new box/book of Lev Rubinstein later this fall, I thought I'd share these two performances captured online, to demonstrate something of his method.  Rubinstein, a former librarian at the Lenin Library, began his note card poems sometime in the early 1970s, constructing a serial poetics that was both marvelously playful and seriously obsessed; he rapidly became one of the classics of Russian postmodernism.  Though he mostly composes literary essays these days, occasionally he'll produce some new poetic series--it's as if there's a mystical saturation point, and his ear begins raining into his mouth.