Matvei Yankelevich appears in the historical poetry archive with three poems preserved from the tenth installment: The whole world is all there is all, Head Aches, and an untitled poem marked with three asterisks. The group moves through memory, sculpture, erasure, visual concentration, and the strange persistence of ordinary objects. Yankelevich’s language is spare, recursive, and alert to the way perception can be narrowed by framing.
Memory and sequence
The whole world is all there is all begins from the limits of recollection. The speaker remembers a signpost, an iron wall, a telephone booth without a telephone, and a yellow school bus passing between two other yellow school buses. The poem builds its scene through a short inventory whose details remain concrete and visually distinct.
The repetition of “yellow school bus” gives the closing image a measured, almost cinematic rhythm. One moving object is framed by two others, and memory becomes an arrangement of positions. This compact handling of recollection places the poem within strands of modern poetry that use image sequence as a primary compositional force.
Heads, frames, and erasure
Head Aches, marked “after Giacometti,” turns toward sculpture and drawing. Heads appear severed within frames, maintained as living forms, and described through bronze, plaster, paint, pencil, and erasure. The poem repeatedly returns to the head as object, image, and problem of representation.
Its syntax circles around beginning, line, erasure, and repetition. A pencilled head can be drawn, effaced, redrawn, and kept alive through the work of hands. This recursive structure gives the poem a strong relation to experimental poetry concerned with process, revision, and the material conditions of making.
Repetition as form
Yankelevich often makes recurrence visible on the page. In Head Aches, words such as “head,” “alive,” “line,” and “maintained” return with small changes in context. The repetition produces a sculptural effect: the same verbal object is viewed again from another angle. The poem’s movement depends on accumulation and reorientation.
Readers interested in poetic forms can see how this recurrence replaces conventional stanzaic symmetry with a looser architecture of echoes. The poem advances by revisiting its central terms and allowing each return to alter the field around them.
The final image
The third poem is extremely brief. Snow fills the visual field, and the speaker identifies several pieces of dog excrement as the focal point. The effect depends on disproportion: a broad white environment is reduced to one blunt, lowly detail. The poem’s economy gives that detail immediate visual dominance.
This short work shows Yankelevich’s willingness to compress perception into a single frame. Its dryness and precision create a distinct tonal shift from the preceding poem while preserving the group’s concern with focus and visual arrangement. Within the archive of contemporary poets, the three-poem set demonstrates a consistent interest in framing, repetition, and the instability of what receives attention.
Yankelevich in the archive
The preserved texts provide a substantial basis for reading Yankelevich’s use of memory, visual art, recurrence, erasure, and concentrated observation. Their appearance in the tenth installment anchors the group within the publication chronology. Readers exploring the archive’s wider poetry can encounter these works as compact studies in how language frames an image and how repeated forms continue to change under attention.