Literature is a Dream: a conversation with Ilya Kaminsky on the secrecy of language, collective memory, and departments of the mind

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Los Angeles Times Book Award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky, has penned three poetry collections and served as a co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His most recent collection, Deaf Republic, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry and the National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and other notable accolades. Kaminsky’s poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review, and Adirondack Review and have been translated into more than 20 languages. He currently teaches at Princeton University.

On January 24, 2024, The Interlochen Review editors Kaydance Rice, Bella Rotker, Emily Pickering and Xime Silva had the honor of interviewing Ilya Kaminsky about his poetry collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic. Note to the readers: as this interview was conducted via email, question orders have been shuffled from their original order to better preserve the flow of the interview and reading experience. Light copy edits have been made, but largely the syntactical and linguistic choices have been preserved.

Kaydance Rice: So much of Deaf Republic operates off this idea of cultural memory operating in tandem with a sense of personal memory. Dancing in Odessa also deals with this idea, taking on mythos in a lot of moments as well. In what ways does cultural memory inform your work and how do you approach it in contrast with the personal?

Xime Silva: Loss is portrayed both on a personal and collective level in Deaf Republic. How do you balance these two dimensions in your poetry, and what challenges or opportunities arise when conveying the impact of loss on both an individual and a community?

Ilya Kaminsky: To answer Kaydance’s question on cultural/personal memory and Xime’s question about personal and collective: I am not sure there is a difference between the two. If you are an African American in the USA, certainly the conversation about Slavery or Racism isn’t just a cultural memory for you. But while it impacts the African American community more than others, it impacts all of us, doesn’t it? Once can say the same thing about immigrants/refugees, gender, disabilities and so on. So even in America, where such a division between cultural and personal memory is supposedly made, this division feels artificial—or at least it feels so to me. In where I come from, the world of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Bloc, such division simply doesn’t exist. Every human in my generation had to deal with things like totalitarian regime, censorship, indoctrination, our parents had to deal with things like World War Two, our grandparents had to deal with things like Stalin’s camps in Siberia, those were very personal things, even though they are now talked about in history books. History is personal, it happens to us. It is that simple to me. Even when we talk about literature, even when we talk about classics, such as say Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva (authors I wrote about in Dancing in Odessa, for instance), the very fact that they had to deal with the same regime our parents had to deal with, that their books were not always available to us, and then became very available to us, we began to identify with them, that made it very personal. Akhmatova wasn’t some author in the ivory tower, she was standing in the prison line, her son was in prison the same way my grandmother was in prison, her husband was killed by the government the same way my grandfather was killed by the government, so these poems feel very personal. One doesn’t choose this, it just happens to one, it is not a question of literary ambition and such. It is just the way the world operates in this part of the world. But I am suspicious of saying “this part of the world” or “that part of the world” – I feel if you dig deeper into the authors you love, in to the public events that matter to you, you will soon discover some echoes, perhaps distant, perhaps very close, that are real, that are a part of your personal life.

To go more into Xime’s question about personal/collective: there are larger-than-life characters in Deaf Republic: Sonya, Alfonso, Galya. They do big things they try to raise above the fray. Then, there is a “we” of the town, a complicated character that revolts beautifully at first and then becomes complicit. That is something that often happens in societies, this kind of dynamics, and there is always a pull between individual and collective. At the end of the book I didn’t want to end on negative note, on totally hopeless note, but I knew that if I just end on cheery, positive line, I would be lying, real life is not that, not propaganda. So, I did a gesture towards hope, the children still sign, the language of the revolution is still alive, despite the violence. But it is not overwhelmingly in-your-face propaganda style. And perhaps the strongest statement (for me, metaphysically speaking) in the book happens (on purpose) entirely outside of the book, in the notes (deaf do not believe in silence—silence is a creation of the hearing). That is because silence as concept is such a huge part of western culture – in religion, philosophy, theology, metaphysics. People say amazing things, gorgeous things, such as The Silence of God is God. Amazing. But if you think about the fact that 8 percent of people on the planet who are deaf and hard of hearing do not believe or experience silence, what does it tell us about Western culture, theology, philosophy, etc, its limitations? So much for personal/collective.

XS: How do you think the fluidity of poetry lends itself to explore the often erratic nature of loss?

IK: Xime’s question on fluidity of poetry/exploration of loss—well, the lyric is something that is the art of conveying things without always spelling it out. That helps. And, curiously, you answer this question in your own next question!

XS: Loss is a prevalent theme in your poetry, and your poems often convey it through what is absent or unsaid. How do you approach the exploration of loss through gaps, silences, or the absence of certain details in your poetry?

IK: Xime’s question about unsaid: What we don’t say is also a language. Think of it this way: what is music without silences in it? It is just noise, continuous noise. We need silences inside music to give it rhythm, flow, surprise. Same in poetry: we need different registers of language, changes in tonalities, variation between images, line-breaks, syntax, etc. and we need to be able to imply things, to suggest them, without spelling it out, so that the reader is implicated, the reader becomes a co-author, so to speak.

KR: A lot of your work seems to be reconciling with being a poet or the act of writing poetry itself, like for example “Author’s Prayer” or the “Musica Humana” section in Dancing in Odessa. Could you speak to your relationship with ars poetica and how it operates in your work?

IK: Kaydance’s question on ars poetica: well, I was quite young when I wrote Dancing in Odessa—when got taken by Tupelo in 2002 I was 25 and most of those poems were written between 17 and 22 years of age, so I don’t know if I can speak now at 46 about that kid’s ars poetica. Looking back on that kid: he was lonely, his father, who taught him poetry just died, he began to write in a new language, in a new country, but these poems many of them dedicated to East European writers were a kind of a way to keep the conversation with his dead father about books about writers—to keep that conversation going. The kid studied Political Science in college so there wasn’t an MFA and a big cohort of writers he talked to—he was mostly talking to writers he read in books, trying to figure out what they were doing and what his path was. That is how I see that now. Who knows if I am right, looking from the same body, but from a different moment in time? I can say it wasn’t nostalgic and I didn’t necessarily feel that everything was about loss at all, actually. See, even literature of apocalypse is optimistic anyway—one writes TOWARDS someone, one has hope for the listener/reader on the other side of the book/time. So, there is hope in the act of writing itself. There is a delight of language, language isn’t just a weapon, it is also an instrument of joy, it is both an ocean we swim in and stone we make sculptures from, and it is a friend we talk to, and the voice that makes us as we make it. It is ongoingness.

KR + XS: So much of your work centers certain—oftentimes named—characters, for example many of the community members in Deaf Republic as well as people like Aunt Rose in Dancing in Odessa. In what ways does the concept of poetic character influence your work and how do you approach constructing these characters?

IK: Kaydance and Xime—question regarding characters—well, we all write out of our deepest obsessions. The author of these poems grew up as a deaf kid, without hearing aids, someone who was always reaching towards others. He didn’t always know/hear what they said, so there was always the desire to reach out towards others and an imaginary element trying to understand what they said by body language, reading lips, etc. The knowing and not knowing coming together, at once. And, now looking back, I can easily and simply say: I love people. So it is no wonder they are in all of my poems, real or imaginary. Some write about trees and animals. Others write about science and its mysteries. Some write about people. People are mysterious. What is a human being is a question we all are still trying to answer. But whatever is our subject/interest the end of this story is that we all have things that inspire us. I am sure you do, too.

KR: I’m interested in the way you structure each of your collections, with Dancing in Odessa being separated into smaller books within itself and Deaf Republic taking on the act structure—how do you think about structuring your collections and what effect do these structures have on their individual projects?

IK: Kaydance’s question about book structure: I think it was Frost who said that if the book has 37 poems the book itself should be the poem number 38. I find that appealing—I mean, why not? I find Shakespeare’s plays more appealing than his sonnets for that reason, too. I think that Dickinson’s poetry is far more of a larger project than people give her credit for (look at her Master Letters! Or, look at the scholarship that says that she actually composed chapbooks and put them together based on the story of Stations of the Cross). Look at Derek Walcott’s majestic works such as Schooner Flight or Anne Carson’s such as “The Glass Essay.” Look at Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” poem—it is an epic in four pages, with so many different registers of language. But then, every poem, if you look at it, teaches you how to write that poem, and every book, therefore, should teach you how to write that kind of book.

Emily Pickering: Much of your writing involves the senses as a way of incorporating emotional tension within your work—how do you use the natural world as an expression of the self in your poetry?

IK: Emily’s question about senses: I heard Lorca’s question that “poet is a professor of five senses” pretty early on and it stuck. I am a very visual person, images are the main poetic device in my practice, partly because of other things I describe in this conversation—not surprisingly for someone who grew up lip-reading, images are a way of expressing self in poetry.

Bella Rotker: As a fabulist poet, how do you think about the connection between language and narrative, especially in terms of the defined realities and inventions of the world within Deaf Republic?

IK: Bella’s question about fabulism, language and narrative: you know, in the end of the day, literature is a dream, and dream, however confusing or straightforward, is always a fusion of lyricism and narrative arc. To me, that seems pretty logical, and real, and you can find this statement embodied in all of my work, whether it is poetry or essays or translation. I do believe that literature is a dream, whether or not it is a dream of one person or a dream of civilization. Now that doesn’t mean that it has no structure, the whole day/life goes into distillation of emotions/chemistry that makes your dreams happen, and literature on dreams is vast going from anatomy to psychology to esoterics.

BR: Can you speak to your use of refrain/repeated phrases such as “(forgive us/me)" and “the nakedness of a whole nation” in Deaf Republic? How did you approach the transformation of these lines across a series of poems in a way that felt genuine and natural?

IK: Bella’s question about refrains: I think that repetition only works if the second/third/tenth time we repeat something we change something, too. So, in the context your question puts it, the repetition gotta contribute to the narrative/emotional arc. But it can work in other ways, too, for example in terms of texture, what texture does repetition find itself, how does it change? Basically, repetition is a poetic device. The way any poetic device be it repetition or syntax or image etc works best if it is with tension with something else. In the examples you site: forgive us/me, or “nakedness of nation” something changes when things are repeated. But something also echoes.

BR: You’ve said that you focus on musicality when you’re writing, and your work focuses strongly on soundplay and internal rhyme. How does your experience working across different languages––Russian, English, and Sign––affect the way you think about sound and music and how those operate in a poem?

BR: Can you talk about the use of perspective shift in Deaf Republic between “I,” “We,” and “You” pronouns and how you saw that as interacting with the narrative and emotional arc of the townspeople? What’s interesting to you about narrating a project like this from a plural voice or multiplicity of perspectives?

IK: Bella’s question about sound-play—sound is a pattern, of course. When I wrote in Russian my work was very rhyme based, very meter based, as most poems are in contemporary Russian. In English it is more inner-rhyme, more assonance and at times alliteration focused (eg poems like lullaby or poems like Six words/ Lord// Please/ease // of song/my tongue”), but mostly it is refrain repetition based for me in English. In ASL/Sign, this is pattern, too, while no sound is involved, the repetition/echoing is doing a lot of work. And even the few signs in the book – you can see how they are repeated, first with subtitles, then without, so something changes and the reader learns from that change. Attentive reader will read the signs first, learn what they mean and by the end of the book will know what is the meaning of the phrase at the end of the book. So, basically, the reader, just as a community of “we” of the town, has learned some signs, through the time spent with the book. The reader becomes part of that “we” and is implicated in that “we” – a “we” which does beautiful and terrible things.

This above also speaks to Bella’s next question about “I” “you” “we” of the book. As I say in response to other questions, Galya, Sonya, Alfonso are heroic (to me) characters, they do things larger than life. But “we” is more complex in some ways, it protests joyfully at the start and then protest turns complicit by the end, though of course there is a glimmer of hope of the kids of the “we” at the very end as they keep the language of protest alive and of course the last page of the town’s story is told in that language that’s kept alive, and the reader, if they read attentively knows what that phrase says now, the reader has become part of the “we” of the town, with all its beauty and love and horror and complicity. And of course there is the first and last poems, that aren’t the imaginary republic’s poems, but very real America’s poems, and of course there is repeated language (forgive) between these two poems and also between one of them and the rest of the book (nakedness of a nation), and the attentive reader will have to draw their conclusions from that.

XS: Loss is a prevalent theme in your poetry, and your poems often convey it through what is absent or unsaid. How do you approach the exploration of loss through gaps, silences, or the absence of certain details in your poetry?

IK: Xime’s question at the end of the document, about loss being prevalent theme in my poetry—it seems like this question is repeated twice, as I feel I have answered it earlier. So here I would just say that to my mind the poems aren’t at all about loss, but about survival: how we survive by love, by memory, by utterance. But to each their own.

BR: You open the poem “I Ask That I Do Not Die” with “I am an American poet and therefore open / for business /Owls peck the windows of the 21st century / as if looking for / the board members / of Exxon Mobil / who who who who who / Listen / my beloved nothings / your seriousness / will kill you!” How do you approach humor in poetry and how do you see that interacting with more serious and political themes across your work?

IK: Bella’s question about “I Ask that I do not die”: great question. I don’t divide my life into department of humor and department of seriousness. I am sure you don’t divide your life into those departments either. Our lives aren’t aisles in Walmart where shoes go here and electric drills go there. You might be sitting in Chemistry or Political Science or Shakespeare lecture, listening to a professor’s very SERIOUS talk, but something they say might remind you of something funny, and so you are laughing on the inside. It doesn’t mean that their lecture is any less serious. It means that you are a human capable of doing more than one thing at the same time. Most of us do. In fact, in our days, those are the moments we remember most. If you had ever been to a funeral, you might remember being surprised how people try to make awkward jokes at funerals, to help oneself to get through that ordeal, or if you had been at weddings surely you have seen people be overcome with emotions and cry at weddings. That is what we do, as humans, and so why not do it in our poems as well?

EP: Deaf Republic came out fifteen years after your first book, Dancing in Odessa. During that time, what other projects did you work on that inspired or informed Deaf Republic? How did the shifting political climate of the world during this time affect Deaf Republic?

IK: Emily’s question about other activities (translation, the world around us) that took place during the fifteen years of writing of Deaf Republic: well, of course, one lives a life and life influences one’s writing. I edited books on Celan (homage to Paul Celan), on (non)relation of American poets to God (God in the House), contemporary world poetry (Ecco Anthology of International Poetry), Tsvetaeva (Elderberry Branch) and so on. Of course, living in/with those poets language influenced my own—what we read tattoos our brains. Of course, living 9 miles from USA border with Mexico also influenced me as a person (all the violence we see on TV on the subject of US borders didn’t just show up, it’s always been there, many of my students had to deal with violence of ICE on the boarder, some of my students had come from the families of so called “illegal” immigrants, even though their families had lived in the area for generations: they didn’t cross the border, the border crossed through them). Similarly, the war in Ukraine didn’t start two years ago, it started a decade ago, and before that there were several revolutions during the period of 15 years that we are discussing. I have visited the country regularly as I have family and friends there, so of course the images one sees as the eye travels enter the eye.

EP: Your readings are often expressive and utilize a variety of different inflections and tones. How is the experience of reading your work to an audience different from creating it? Would you consider reading to be part of the creative process?

IK: Emily’s question about public readings: I don’t think reading should be different from a writing process, actually. When we write we (or I do) read/mumble/whisper etc, to ourselves. It is full of ups and downs, the writing process. So, at best, for me, reading aloud is revising the poem (with voice) and so still a writing process.

EP: You’ve mentioned previously that you began writing poems in English because no one you were familiar with spoke the language—how has using a “private” language allowed you to express yourself within your work? Has that experience changed over time?

IK: Emily’s question about using English as “private” language: yes, it began when my father passed away, in 1994. I was writing poems in Russian at the time. We lived in a tiny apartment and it felt weird to have my poems about his passing lying around on tables and chairs (I am a messy writer!) about the place, felt light. It might be strange for my mother, too. I was seventeen years old. What did I know? But that’s how I turned to English, which my mother and brother didn’t speak. I didn’t really speak it either, since we were in the USA only for a year at that time. It felt like a kind of private language. Your question asks if that is still so. In some ways no because, of course, on the surface, I am surrounded by my English, and I do speak it now. If one digs a bit deeper though, writers write out of childhood relation to speech (Louise Gluck: “What does one expect of a lyric poet? /We look at the world, once / In childhood, the rest is memory.”) so in this regard, English as language one finds in adulthood is still a bit stranger. I realized that while writing Deaf Republic: I saw I never heard lullabies in English, so I wrote one and put it in that book. And so on.