Mayakovsky

A place that shall not be named, okay "Socialist" "Worker", has a brief appraisal of the life and times of Vladimir Mayakovsky. As such brief introductions go it goes. But what's this. "On 9 April 1930 he read his poem “At the Top of My Voice” to students who shouted him down for being obscure." Maybe so, but the source for that is fairly obscure (i.e. I can't find it). The reports of Mayakovsky's readings of At The Top Of My Voice I've read all say the piece was greeted by applause.

My words

   are not used

       to caressing ears;

nor titillate

    with semi-obscenities

maiden ears

   hidden in hair so innocent

. . .

. . .

We opened

   Marx and Engels

              every tome,

as in our home

   we open wide the shutters,

but without reading

    we understand alone,

whose side we're on

   and in which camp we're fighters.

And not from Hegel

   did we learn

             our dialectics.

That burst

    through interclashing conflict

                             into verse,

when under fire

  the bourgeois

              ran from our attacks,

as we

    once also ran from theirs.

. . .

. . .

above the band

    of skin-flint grafters

                          in rhymes,

I'll lift up high,

      like a Bolshevik party-card,

all the hundred books

                   of my

                       ComParty poems!

What's obscure about that?

(extracted from Mayakovsky and His Poetry, comp, ed, trans Herbert Marshall. Bombay: Pilot Press, 1955).