Silent Connections: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky

On November 13th, 2019 Ilya Kaminsky—award-winning poet and author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic— visited Oregon State University as part of the Visiting Writers Series. The series, set up within the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, invites authors from around the country to OSU’s campus to share tips and experiences, culminating in a reading open to the Corvallis community. 

But before any of that happened, Kaminsky had gracefully folded himself into the backseat of a small sedan as two poets, Eloise Schultz and Juliette Givhan, ferried him back from the Eugene airport. In that short 50-minute drive, Ilya Kaminsky established himself not only as a brilliant poet, but a generous and good-humored conversationalist. When asked if he had any questions about OSU, Kaminsky responded with a laugh and said, “Give me all the gossip!” 

The following day, right as the same two MFA students were about to launch into a longer interview, Kaminsky began with his own interview question, asking with an animation and humor that would become a staple of his interactions, “What is the purpose of life!” 

While I couldn’t answer that question— and still can’t give a satisfactory answer— I appreciate how Ilya Kaminsky encouraged us to think about not only a life’s purpose, but the way complication can be navigated in a book like Deaf Republic.

—Juliette

INTERVIEW:

Q: Why make the choice in Deaf Republic to have a hybridity of form between poetry and play— having actors, visuals, and acts? Where is this choice coming from, was it a goal from the beginning or something arrived upon later?

A: I might have to give you a little bit of context: I came to the United States in 1993. My first book, Dancing in Odessa, was very much in conversation with Russian poetry tradition. I was trying to make a space for that conversation in English. Looking back, I realized that I wasn’t writing that much in English as much as in a language of images. Why? I didn’t have hearing aids in Ukraine, so the Russian I knew was the language of images. When I was done, it was published, and I had to ask myself— what’s next? Do I keep talking to Russian poets and try to “play” Russian? That wouldn’t feel honest because I had already been living in America for eleven years. I wasn’t the same person anymore. I suppose it’s a question of where is home, what is true? I didn’t have an answer. 

I felt like I had to write about both the United States and where I come from. I moved to San Diego in 2005. A border town. A lot of what you see in the news now has always been happening there, that one thing: violence. I lived ten miles from the border, the school I worked at was nine miles from the border. San Diego calls itself “America’s Happiest City”… that alone shows you a lot of untruth. At the same time the war between Ukraine and Russia started. There was a lot of violence from the Russian speaking part of the Ukraine and while the city where I’m from “only” had terrorist attacks, 60 people were burned alive. But other cities that were also Russian speaking got it much harder. I wasn’t there, but I had to go back to Odessa. It’s a part of your consciousness. 

I was looking for some kind of arc that would somehow make the two supposedly different experiences—to me, they didn’t feel that different, there’s plenty of violence in the United States— but how do you express that? The image of war felt true both for the Ukraine and for the US, and that was the moment in the book when I go, I think I know what I’m doing. I could speak and feel honest about it. 

I don’t think I chose a particular form to write in. To my mind, it all happens organically. But to have the kind of effect I was looking for… how do you speak about America today and about Ukraine today? How can the refugee find a way to speak about both experiences? They are both part of my life, and if I wrote about just one it would be dishonest. 

Q: How do you know when you write something, that it’s honest? Can you talk about arriving at honesty?

A: I think writers don’t necessarily write for information. They write in terms of language. There was a famous quote, someone said: “I have so many ideas, but nothing comes out.” As a poet, you write in the language of poetic devices— the language of metaphors, the language of line breaks, alliteration, assonance. You ask yourself what poetic devices do I love the most? What expresses your obsession the most? Before the 20th century it was called the Muse, then Freud came along and called it obsession. The question is, what kind of poetic devices can bring [Deaf Republic] across so it doesn’t feel ambididactic, but instead creates a world in which you are complicit, in which you are implicated, and are living the life I’m living.

For better or worse. You need to read the work and feel like you are fully alive. That’s the language of poetic devices. Lorca said a poet is a professor of the five senses, so ask yourself, what poetic devices make you smell? Make you touch, feel, so forth? That’s how you know you’re in your poem. Are the periods making you cry? Are all the dashes making you feel funny? How do the poetic devices respond to your emotions? 

Q: Do you consider the signs, the images, in Deaf Republic to be poetic devices? 

A: Very much so! It’s not even like a shape, it’s like another person. It’s like in theology, you can have a negative theology. You can deny the existence of God, but the more you deny, the more you know it is there. The silence in the book has more than one job, and I hesitate to pick one over the other. My job is to create that world for you, let you live in it. You will make your own decisions, and that’s how you’re either complicit or not. But all the books I love can do that. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, is about Vietnam vets coming from the war with serious PTSD and creating a ceremony in order to move on, to live a life. The book itself becomes a ceremony. Or a great classic like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. At the end of the book you have the image of a monument to Beloved, and you close the book and realize the whole thing is a monument to Beloved. All great poems do that. 

Q: Reading Deaf Republic, we were fascinated by the variety in line length. Can you talk to us about where you found your voice wanting to elongate lines or keep them clipped?

A: Deaf Republic is a book of pretty strong emotions. You see history and its private life. I’m going to challenge you to close your eyes. Think about every single epic you have ever read. Just think about language, not content. How long are the lines? Very long. Poems like that have super long lines. But now love poems, from the beginning of time: how long are the lines? Short. 

That is the mystery of form. When you write a book talking about history and public life, but also private life, some poems like “Lullaby” came out with short lines while some poems like “Bombardment” have much longer lines. Some poems have both, because they’re trying to ask what does it mean to be a private person in a time of crisis.

When you spend years writing a book it’ll happen organically, you realize the most successful lines are doing that, but sometimes you combine three poems into one poem. You start to make observations: “Oh, that’s why it happened.” and so you learn from the process. The process is not you telling the poem what to be, but discovering what it is. 

Q: When you were writing Deaf Republic were there poems that came up that you knew didn’t fit with what was being written?

A: Boxes and boxes, and that is fine. I’m not in the business of making productions for publication every few years. If I can publish four or five books in my lifetime, I’m perfectly fine with that. I don’t need to have 55 books. I’m not saying it’s better or worse than what others might do but it is what fits my temperament. Truly, you live your life according to your temperament. You don’t want to live your life according to other people’s temperament. That would be tragedy, that’s what Shakespeare writes about. 

Q: Has the book been received differently in different places? 

A: People have been very kind. They have different readings of it, which is perfectly fine. Some people focus on some parts more, others less. As far as I’m concerned, it’s like an obsession — you carry it and then it’s out, and you have other obsessions. It’s like a spell, it belongs to the world not to you. I do have to do readings from it, and you can get a little bored, so I try to change things as I go along. The only way to make it interesting is to pretend that I’m still writing it, and be writing it with your voice. Otherwise it’s a broken record. But if you’re still writing it, it’s creative. 

Q: I’m interested in the idea you spoke of earlier, of the poem becoming something else—a ceremony or an item of remembrance. Can you talk more about how Deaf Republic is both a play, a poem, and in a way a puppet show? With these elements, what does Deaf Republic become?

A: I was interested in the idea of the puppet show for personal reasons. My grandmother was Russian, to entertain themselves, people had finger puppets. When the person died, they would put their puppets up. Your grandmother tells you that, and you remember it. Then you start searching: what do puppets do? You find out that around the world it’s the most democratic art. When you’re under oppression, you can still do a puppet show, and then put them in your pocket. Puppet shows were continually forbidden under most dictatorships for that reason. Even in Seattle, they made puppet shows during Bush’s presidency. 

I wanted to expose that a little bit, then to explore what it means when we say silence.

I asked deaf writers, do you even believe in silence? Every single answer was no…eight percent of the population is deaf or hard of hearing. Silence is very important— for our metaphysics, for our philosophy, our theology and literature— a lot of it is based on the idea of silence.

Modern theology would say, “silence of god is god” a very moving thing to say but what does that mean if some of the population says that silence doesn’t exist? So, at silence, we need to poke. There are many, many, ways of talking about silence, it can become a way to connect to others. 

Q: Speaking of connection, our last question for you is: What does it mean to you to be a poet able to come to universities, travel, and interact with students?

A: One, it’s grateful—that the book has a life, and that the people are interested. It’s very kind, it’s a generosity, so the answer is gratitude. This is my second book so by this point I know that it’s like a train. You get on at one station and go for a bit and then get out and go home. In America, people talk excitedly about one book for a year, and then another year comes and they talk about another book. So I wouldn’t take it too much in the head. You’re grateful for the chance to have the conversation, but at the end of the day, you have to close the doors. I don’t think you want it any other way.