Note from the Editors:
White Rabbit Poetry Society is excited to introduce Daniil Frolov as our Featured Monday Poet this week! Daniil has an amazing style that is part cheerful, part strange and wonderfully lovely! He describes his writing as, “I write strange, absurd little stories, and strange absurd little poems. I say strange, absurd little things, and mingle with strange absurd little people.” Please take a moment to visit Daniil Frolov subscribe and read his work!
Daniil on Poetry
I’ve always written. Always read. I believe the two go hand in hand. Reading and writing.
Robert Bolaño wrote that “Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers.”
And I suppose, I was a wildflower, aspiring to be a lake. I read and I read. My mother bought me Lord of the Rings when I was twelve, and Gormenghast, and Crime and Punishment when I was eighteen. Both books blew my mind. Both books sent me on a journey into classic literature, that I’m still on. Except now, the books I read are quite selective. Because I’ve read so much I have to read something quite exceptional, in order to enjoy it.
Poetry is different. Words fly from the page. I read all sorts. I’m still finding my way. Still lost in beauty. I’ve read a lot of the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud), and I enjoy the Russians of a certain period (Marina Tsvetaeva, Aleksandr Blok, Anna Akhmatova etc). I also enjoy the Romantics, of course (Wordsworth, Tennyson, etc) Substack has brought me into contemporary poetry, which is what I love about it. What people are writing NOW. Which I find very exciting.
My poetry seems to be progressing nicely. I like experimenting with form, and structure. I think I favor extremes. Although I plan to write all sorts. Sparse three letters poems, or densely impenetrable word plays, are interesting to me. As are character poems. I wrote about Franz Kafka, which I quite enjoyed. I plan to write a long intertextual poem; something ambitious. Hopefully, that will work out.
If I had to name a poem that’s inspired me. It’s probably T.S. Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’ The structure; the rhyme. The ambition. I read it when I was young, and I think it had a lasting effect on me.
“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.”
poetry
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Feb 14
The Identity Knot-(All Chapters So Far).
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Feb 9
A novel about what makes us… us.
Note from the Editors:
Thank you Daniil for giving us some of your time and a look into your insight, process and influences on your poetry. You are truly inspiring! Please take a moment to visit Daniil Frolov subscribe and read his wonderful work!
We are so grateful that you are here. Please leave a message if you are inspired. We would love to see what you write. The White Rabbit Poetry Society is a place to find some inspiration and even some friends. Don’t be shy—add links to your poetry!
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