Poets on Street Corners does not pretend in any way to

be a definitive anthology of contemporary Soviet poetry.

It is no more than a personal effort, dictated by my own

preferences in an immensely rich field. Naturally these

preferences reflect to some degree those of my family. It

is from them, and especially from my father, the Russian

poet Vadim Andreyev, that I have acquired my love and

my knowledge of Russian poetry. (It is well known that

poets may be prejudiced in their literary tastes and that

Russian families are given to passionate likes and dis-

likes. )

Deliberately, I have chosen to stress one particular as-

pect of contemporary Russian poetry--the poets in-

volvement with the flow of everyday life as it is symbol-

ized by the street, whether it is Mayakovsky s Square,

where Yevtushenko read his "Babi Yar" publicly for the

first time, or Yesenin s murderous "bent streets of Mos-

cow," the scene of his private wanderings. (Thus, for

example, there are no patriotic poems in this book, al-

though many very good ones were written in the period

it encompasses.)