Ilya Kaminsky

Spirituality is catching. It’s exciting. It’s diverse in its manifestations and expressions. It can be elusive; it can be inescapable. It’s engaging, even demanding; it’s also rewarding. It’s comforting. It’s discomforting. It’s enlightening: in little moments of insight (epiphanies, if you will) and in vast visions, recurrent and all-embracing (apocalypses, maybe). Spirituality enriches one’s life.

Poetry is catching. It’s exciting. It’s diverse in its manifestations and show more expressions. It can be elusive; it can be inescapable. It’s engaging, even demanding; it’s also rewarding. It’s comforting. It’s discomforting. It’s enlightening: in little moments of insight (epiphanies, if you will) and in vast visions, recurrent and all-embracing (apocalypses, maybe). Poetry enriches one’s life.

So what a pleasure it is to hear poets actually talk, personally and candidly, about their spiritual lives. One is tempted to begin (as I did) with poets one knows and admires; e.g., Jane Hirschfield, Li-Young Lee, Alicia Ostriker, Joy Harjo, Gregory Orr. One is intrigued by some of the titles (probably assigned by the editors): “Infinite Obligation to the Other”; “The Devotion of a Mourner”; “Incantation”; “Not a Butler to the Soul”; “Nimble Believing.” One is curious about poets whose names one knows but whose poetry one does not know (like Julius Lester, whom I thought of as a story-teller, not a poet) or poets whose works one has not found particularly inviting (Gerald Stern’s reputation is stellar, but I’ve so far not found an entrance into this poetry that has kept me engaged).

One is surprised (and pleased) that some ideas recur again and again, in different words, sometimes overt and thematic, sometimes subtle and understated: the sense of Presence (Infinite, Eternal, Spirit), immanent or transcendent or both; the relevance and irrelevance of religious institutions; the sense of responsibility, or moral sensibility; the joy of life, joie de vivre, even a life of conflict, of suffering, of uncertainty.

If you are interested in spirituality, I recommend this book. If you are interested in poetry, you might want to sample this book. But if you are interested in both spirituality and poetry, I promise you will find this book delightful, enlightening, even inspiring, genuinely inspiring (in the original, base meaning of that word).

Each of the nineteen poets is represented by a brief biography, an interview presented as an essay, unbroken by the interviewers’ questions that provoked the poet’s comments, and one poem. Now, in a review as positive as this one, about a book that I’ve found as satisfying as this one, I should merely mention quibbles I have. But in case the editors (or publishers) are considering another similar volume, as I hope they are, these are suggestions I would like to have them consider.

First, and most important: The interviews are, indeed, more readable in an essay format; one does not have to be interrupted by insertion of the questions being addressed. However, sometimes the results seem scattered, sketchy, unfocused. And always you wonder to what extent the interviewers controlled the direction the poets took in their comments. Were the poets speaking openly and freely? Were they being led on, their themes being shaped by the questioners? Just how rigorous has the editing been – minimal or dominant? I think editors’ headnotes, describing each interview briefly, listing the most effective questions with this poet, and indicating the extent and nature of the editing, including decisions about inclusion/exclusion of material and its organizational pattern. Interviews are NOT essays and should not be disguised as such.

Second, the biographies are very, very disappointing – simply a list of publications, awards, and some teaching positions. Like in some weighty, impersonal, scholarly treatise. In such a personal and candid volume as this one, biographies should be much more individualistic and candid. List bibliographies and awards in fine print in an appendix, if they are considered important, but let the biographies tell us (briefly, yes; but with specific detail) where the poets came from, how they’ve spent their lives, and where they’re headed now. Please let us get to know these poets, not just as voices but as people.

Third, indicate who chose the poem that accompanies the interview, and if the poet made the decision, why.

And, of course, a good black and white photograph would be a bonus one would appreciate – in an informal pose, perhaps at the time/place of the interview, perhaps supplied by the poet from the recent past.

To prospective readers: don’t let my quibbles discourage you. As a matter of fact, they indicate how much the book has meant to me, and how I hope it launches a series of such books.

And, finally, if you read only one section, by all means read Gregory Orr’s “The Given.” I knew his life story, and had been influenced by his advice on the writing of poetry, but I was amazed at the turn his story took revealed in the interview. I must say: I will return to this one again and again. My life will never be the same. A bold statement, but a true one. My life will never be the same. You’ll have to read it to understand. It’s published as the last of the nineteen interviews (understandably so), and it will have more impact of you read at least a few others of the nineteen before you read his. But read it. Be prepared to suffer with him. One must face the depth of despair as he did. Be prepared to understand that poetry can shape a life, even a fairly skeptical, distant, detached life. Then be prepared to be amazed. Looking back on his life, after a soul-charging event, he admits, “I can think back on my life, when such a grim statement as ‘life is meaningless’ was true for me. I can see that I had to create meaning, and love, and secure environments for myself, and that the most exciting form of meaning if could create was poetry.” You must read this interview to experience and understand the change, the real change, he undergoes. show less

from Eulogy

'You must speak not only of great devastation --

we heard that not from a philosopher
but from our neighbor, Alfonso --

his eyes closed, he climbed other people's porches and recited
to his child our National Anthem:

You must speak not only of great devastation --
when his child cried he

made her a newspaper hat and squeezed his silence
like two pleats of an accordion:

We must speak not only of great devastation --
and he played that accordion out of tune in a country

where the only musical show more instrument is the door.'
--IK

One of the most powerful collections I've read recently and 'Eulogy' is an example of how bleakness and a determination to hold onto hope both fit in the palm of the same hand. Kaminsky has written a modern parable that shows by the end, the work before us - fighting back but remembering that joy exists, the reason for fighting back. show less

Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a visceral exploration of quieted dissent in the face of unspeakable brutality. In the besieged town of Vasenka, where military forces commit an inexcusable atrocity, silence is weaponized as the townspeople deafen themselves in retaliation for the murder of a deaf boy named Petya. Here, language is expertly wielded by means of wordlessness and the acts of war cease to be heard. Instead, the destruction is felt in the reverberations through the earth and show more through one another:

It has begun: I see the blue canary of my country
pick breadcrumbs from each citizen’s eyes—
pick breadcrumbs from my neighbors’ hair—
the snow leaves the earth and falls straight up as it
should—
to have a country, so important—
to run into walls, into streetlights, into loved ones, as
one should—
The blue canary of my country
runs into walls, into streetlights, into loved ones—
The blue canary of my country
watches their legs as they run and fall.

The citizens become like puppets in a theatrical production, standing discreetly on the “stage” of their country, speaking with hands, touch, and an abundance of feeling—a language that their tormentors do not understand. Sensing abandonment by the world and God, the townspeople take matters into their own hands, finding their fire “from a match [God] never lit”. In the epicenter of the collection, expectant newlyweds Sonya and Alfonso attempt to reconcile the lives they led before the war with their new normal, eventually becoming casualties as they join the opposition:

He who loves roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to
her and to her forgetting, let them borrow the light
from the blind.
There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will
open, will open.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

A town now torn, the events that unfold in Vasenka stand as a microcosm for not only America’s involvement in wars abroad but also the paranoia and polarization caused by its militarized police force. It is in these hushed acts of violence where “the nakedness of a whole nation” is held in the mouths of its discarded. Dehumanized, alienated, and stripped bare by “a peaceful country”, the collection comes full circle as an indirect admonishment for the lack of concern:

Today
I have to screw on the expression of a person

though I am at most an animal
and the animal I am spirals

from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come,
God, I have come running to you—
in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole

without a flag.

Deaf Republic delivers a captivating and timeless yet urgently necessary message on the power small rebellions have in a country that oftentimes chooses willful (and prideful) ignorance over ethical self-reflection. Through Kaminsky’s haunting verse, silence reveals itself to be tripartite: the silence of the devoted, the silence of the departed, and the silence of the defiant whose actions speak louder than words. show less

Ilya Kaminsky, a Russian emigre, a native of Odessa, now a US citizen, has written a haunting yet charming collection of poetry entitled Deaf Republic.

A town is taken over by a foreign army. A deaf boy becomes an early victim and the town's people resist by developing a sign language to express their opposition to the brutality thrust upon them. A puppet show serves as a front for the resistance. The women of Vesenka, heroines, entice enemy soldiers, ensnaring them to their own show more demise.

Kaminsky juxtaposes the range of experience: from the safety of the American suburbs where citizens take out their phones to record police brutality, to the war-torn streets of Ukraine where activism takes on a more elusive and creative force.

The world has gone nuts and Kaminsky gives voice to hope. He listens, like a witness, to the horrors that need to be exposed. show less