Every day, Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky shares piercing, heart-wrenching dispatches from poets and others in his homeland. In a stream of social media posts, a video shows mothers with their newborns crowded together in a hospital bomb shelter. Other horrifying images show people burying neighbors in front of their apartment buildings.
“This war feels like something out of a movie or a poem — but it is real,” Kaminsky said in an e-mail.
Imagine yourself in their shoes:
— Ilya Kaminsky (@ilya_poet) March 18, 2022
“People are now burying their neighbors in front of their apartment building and are turning post offices into morgues.” https://t.co/hsCc6Rz87r
At the same time, the Twitter account of Kaminsky, a professor at Georgia Tech, shows sparks of light in the darkness, extraordinary acts of kindness, humor, love.
Kaminsky, an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collection, “Deaf Republic,” believes being a true witness of the invasion isn’t only about violence and war. To only notice those things, he says, “is to witness only a part of our existence. But there is also wonder.”
On March 8, International Women’s Day in Odesa, a city on the verge of being attacked, where people were gripped with fear and food prices soared, men hurried everywhere on streets and buses, handing out long-stemmed red roses to women. A video captures the delight and surprise of women. He shares other photos showing women in Kyiv planting flower beds.
That was last week, but I guess it's never too late to re- post a good thing.
— Ilya Kaminsky (@ilya_poet) March 21, 2022
Yes, it is Russia/Ukraine War. Odesa. International Women's Day: https://t.co/nesYGl3PEX
“Which is to say: even on the most unnerving days, there are very tender moments. We have a duty to report them, too,” said Kaminsky, who is 44.
In 1977, Kaminsky was born in Odesa when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Deaf since the age of 4, when a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a common cold, Kaminsky learned as a child to closely observe the world around him.
He didn’t get hearing aids until he was 16. He says he heard the USSR fall apart with his eyes.
“Walking through the city, I watched the people; their ears were open all the time, they had no lids. I was interested in what sounds might be like. The whooshing. The hissing. The whistle. The sound of keys turning in the lock, or water moving through the pipes two floors above us. I could easily notice how the people around me spoke to one another with their eyes without realizing it,” he said.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
His book “Deaf Republic” opens when a deaf boy is shot by a soldier from an invading army in a public square. The gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear — they all go deaf as a protest.
“Many poems in Deaf Republic have to do with civic strife. But the story circles around the life of two newlyweds, the moments of small joys in a young marriage,” said Kaminsky, who is Jewish. “I am a love poet, or a poet in love with the world. It is just who I am. If the world is falling apart, I have to say the truth. But I don’t stop being in love with that world.”
In 1993, when Kaminsky was 16, the family received refugee status and came to America, eventually settling in Rochester, New York. At first, Kaminsky wrote in Russian, but when his father died a year after the family’s arrival, he switched to the language of his new home.
Kaminsky, who directs the Poetry@Tech program, says his childhood memories seem as vivid and relevant today as they ever did.
This is certainly the case for Kaminsky’s poetry, which includes “We Lived Happily During the War” which has gone semi-viral during the invasion.
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. . .
These days, Kaminsky who describes his state, as “deeply worried,” is in constant contact with friends and poets in Ukraine. He shares daily slices of life of Ukraine under siege.
Russia is unleashing a wave of destruction against Ukraine, hitting multiple cities and bases with air raids or shelling, and attacking by land and sea. The war in Ukraine has displaced millions of people in only a matter of weeks. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers are also believed to have been killed.
In constant communication with his friends and many poets in Ukraine, he is urgently trying to help get people out, get them money, sharing poetry and stories. His publisher, Tupelo Press recently announced all profits from Kaminsky’s “Dancing in Odessa” are being donated to the Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund. (Note: Odesa, also spelled Odessa, is generally the preferred spelling of this seaport town and is line with the Ukrainian government’s preferred name and transliteration).
His friends, he says, tell him about seeing fighter aircraft, helicopters and Russian paratroopers from their windows, about families separated, with mothers and children fleeing the country, while the men stay behind to fight.
Another friend, he said, must make a “Sophie’s choice” with her pets, two dogs and one cat. She eventually crosses the border with one dog.
“It’s unbearable, she tells me,” says Kaminsky.
During recent days, posts included one from Vitya Brevis, writing from Odesa: “I taped my windows, criss-cross, like they do in movies. If something exploded, the blast wouldn’t leave my apartment covered in glass. I moved a dresser in front of the window for better protection. As days went by, we got used to being afraid.”
Another one shows globe-like snow flakes in Kyiv.
“In the midst of so much devastation and tragedy, a certain photographer’s lens still catches a lyric moment,” Kaminksy writes.
In the midst of so much devastation and tragedy, a certain photographer's lens still catches a lyric moment. This is snowfall in Kyev, as seen by M. Palinchak. Thanks to @BohdanaNeborak for sharing this photographer's work with me. pic.twitter.com/MbkTbkyhAP
— Ilya Kaminsky (@ilya_poet) March 21, 2022
He also shares poems some from many years ago, some more recent, and yet they all seem to resonate today.
“A stranger lives my life and wears my body [...] a speck of hell, the Universe’s scream — laconic and intense, devoid of exits” - Vasyl Stus, Tr. from Ukrainian by Alan Zhukovs
To love in a war-time is (in spite of everything) to wear earrings, so that holes don’t disappear holes you went to pierce w/ your grandmother in a barbershop “Why isn’t she crying?” - this war time barber asks my grandmother “She no longer cries.” -Kateryna Kalytko
For the past 15 years, Kaminsky has returned to Odesa about every other summer. Odesa loves art, he said, and “it loves to party. In the summer, huge cages of watermelons sit on every corner. You break them on the sidewalk and eat them with friends.”
Ukrainian singer/song writer Vokarchuk is giving a performance at refugee center in Lviv: pic.twitter.com/syL5Av54zt
— Ilya Kaminsky (@ilya_poet) March 15, 2022
The city, he said, also has a special affinity for literature. “There are more monuments to writers than in any other city I have ever visited. When they ran out of writers, they began putting up monuments for fictional characters.”
And now, nearing the first days of April, another one of Kaminsky’s poems — “Dancing in Odessa” — is being read around the world, including at a public reading at Trafalgar Square in London. The poem embodies heartache, loss, and love, often at the same time. It’s timeless, and yet so timely now.
Dancing In Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky We lived north of the future, days opened letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky. My grandmother threw tomatoes from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket over my head. I painted my mother’s face. She understood loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans. The night undressed us (I counted its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter touched my eyelid—I kissed the back of her knee. The city trembled, a ghost-ship setting sail. And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew. He was an angel, he had no name, we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled, a ghost-ship setting sail. At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived. We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream. At the local factory, my father took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth. The sun began a routine narration, whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving as the darkness spoke behind them. It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April. I retell the story the light etches into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me. Note: The poem, “Dancing in Odessa” appears in the collection “Dancing in Odessa,” published by Tupelo Press. Copyright © Ilya Kaminsky 2004. Used by permission of Tupelo Press. www.tupelopress.org
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