Lamont Poet Ilya Kaminsy Teaches with Fables

By Lina Huang, Aanya Shahdadpuri, Jacqueline Subkhanberdina and Hansi Zhu

Lamont Poet Ilya Kaminsky entranced with the cadence of his voice and the power of his stories as he spoke to the Academy last Wednesday and Thursday. At times whispering, at times almost shouting—but always looking directly at the camera—Kaminsky spoke about a country plunged into deafness and a people torn by grief.

Born and raised in Odessa, Ukraine, formerly a part of the Soviet Union, Kaminsky arrived in the United States in 1995, when he was 16 years old. Five years later, Kaminsky became the youngest writer ever to receive the Academy’s George Bennett Fellowship. At Exeter, he completed his first chapbook, after which he completed his studies at Georgetown. The author thoroughly enjoyed his time at the Academy, praising Exeter as having “a great intellectual environment.”

Lamont Poet Committee member and English Instructor Todd Hearon remembered that, when Kaminsky was a Bennett Fellow, he was stopped by security while jogging around campus in the early morning hours. “Security said, ‘Who are you and what are you doing,’” Hearon recalled, “and Ilya held up his hands and simply said, ‘I am a poet!’”

Now, Kaminsky is the author of several award-winning books, including Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic. Deaf Republic, published last year, deals with townspeople of Vasenka and the hand-sign language they invent in a rebellion of deafness. 

At a question and answer session last Thursday, Kaminsky defined poetry as a medium to “wake up the senses” through the use of imagery. “How can you find language to express the daily joy of making tea for your loved one? How can you as a poet express the injustice happening in the street right now, and yet you’re making tea for your loved one?” he asked.

English Instructor Mathew Miller appreciated Kaminsky’s unique writing style. “What impresses me a lot is his work is once new and old at the same time,” Miller said. “It’s like hearing a song that’s new, but you feel like you’ve heard it a hundred times before. It’s beautiful because it has a deep resonance with tradition and a sort of timelessness.”

This quality of Kaminsky’s work may stem from his belief in poetry as a form of connection through time. “[Poetry is] a window in which you can open up a door you can open and walk, so I’m connected to not just you but [also] the first time human beings began to speak and use language,” he said.

As a refugee from Ukraine, Kaminsky noted that poetry—and art itself—must be tied to human need. “What is the relationship between the human in us, who says that must be said, and the artist in us, who wants to say things in a way that it’s memorable?”

Kaminsky’s ability to weave together the human and artistic aspects into a work of art was clear to Hearon. “To Kaminsky, poetry and poems have an urgency about them; they speak into and against a particular time,” he said. “They are implicitly and sometimes explicitly acts of protest, because an act of creation is an act of protest.”

During the session on Thursday, Kaminsky was asked about the process of becoming a writer. “I think it takes a bookshelf to make a writer. Go read a little bit,” he said, the shelf behind him overflowing with books.

Kaminsky’s advice on reading centered emotions and the expression of these emotions. “When you don’t feel like having feelings, go read a book,” he said. “You want to recognize on what page, in what paragraph, in what sentence, in what word, your heart is broken.”

In the poetry reading on Wednesday, Kaminsky fully brought out such emotions through his expressive reading, informed by his belief in reading the poem as if still writing it. “Many types of poetry came to us not written down, but [instead] spoken as spells, spoken as love songs,” he said. “If you can come back through the writing process, if the poem can be written again by the voice, then it is interesting.”

English Instructor Sue Repko felt a strong distinction between hearing Kaminsky live and reading his work on paper. “There’s very much a physical presence that I think is already on the page, but it just kind of explodes when he’s reading his own work.” Repko said.

“He kind of read in the same cadence for most of his poems; he had this very strong rising and falling with his voice that I thought was like a desperate wail,” upper Anika Tsai said. “It linked his poems together and gave the expression of kind of desperation, a sense of wanting to do something but not being able to.”

Kaminsky, who is hard-of-hearing, often uses images to provide meaning to a scene, such as when “snow” stands for silence in Deaf Republic. “Those are moments when I can make the reader start, when the reader can participate in the shared language such as snow which appears over the novel in different contexts in the book,” he said. “The reader learns something new about the world they think they already know.” When Kaminsky forces a reader to pause, he creates a moment of silence. To him, silence is an invention of the hearing, which can make the hearing reflect on what they have just received.

“Kaminsky manages to evade the sense of sound completely, where we don’t hear all this violence, we just know that it’s there,” upper Shantelle Subkhanberdina said. “That sense has fostered a greater appreciation for the material for me because you could tell it was just very, cleverly and beautifully crafted, for sure.”

Miller added that Kaminsky breaks past the traditional confines of writing, “He just makes these odd associations in his work, which are brilliant. It makes the language fresh again, new again,” Miller said. “And I think that’s sometimes what happens when English is not a writer’s first language. They are more open to seeing it in new ways, to break away from the rules that have been drilled into them.” 

Through his poetry collection Deaf Republic, Kaminsky poignantly manages to narrate the aftermath of a young boy’s murder. Subkhanberdina described her views on the way Kaminsky chose to structure his story. “He definitely has a very distinctive voice because a lot of his poems read like short stories or mini-narratives. You get the impact and open-ended ideas that a poem offers while also getting a rich story at the same time.” she said. 

Repko highlighted her appreciation of Kaminsky’s ordering. “There is a poem... called Lullaby. In the midst of this war, this insurgency, there is this arrival of this child. And I love the way this is placed in this text, where I think it’s just really powerful and grounding, but then soon enough you get back to everything that’s going wrong,” Repko said.

Tsai felt Deaf Republic’s use of the implicit was powerful in describing the death of the boy, Petya. “Kaminsky only mentions the silence from the gunshot, but he doesn’t explicitly state, ‘The boy got killed,’” she said. “Just by describing what’s going on in that square, he provides so much emotion that he doesn’t even have to say it outright.”

“[Kaminsky’s writing] throws the reader into his world, which contrasts to those authors that explain their world to you. For him, it’s almost like, ‘If you get it, you get it,’” upper Dilan Cordoba said. “One thing I’ll take away from the book is how unapologetic and convinced he is.”

Kaminsky invites readers to interact with the events of Deaf Republic through the “townspeople,” described as “‘we’ who tell the story.”

“It strengthens for the reader the conscious knowledge of looking at the story through a townsperson’s eye instead of your usual removed and uninvolved narrator,” upper Emma Chen said. “It almost makes the responsibility for the reader heavier, and the reader feels the weight of inaction.”

Lower Ale Murat acutely felt the empathy-inspiring writing of Deaf Republic. “When I’m reading about Sonia and Alfonso, I’m with them, living through those moments, and I’m feeling the suffering that they’re suffering.” Murat said. 

Miller highlighted Kaminsky’s impact on the world of poetry. “He’s such a, again, a generous soul. And then to come out with this book that is also so generous, with its leanness of lines and its spareness, and yet it’s so full at the same time, is one of the most impressive things.” Miller said.

“There’s an aura of mystery around any work of art and at the heart of every work of art,” Hearon added. “There is an enigma, something you’ll never be able to untie. And that’s part of its beauty; it’s like the horizon–every time you step toward it, it steps away from you.”

Like the last poem of Deaf Republic, Kaminsky ended the Thursday session by asking Exonians to consider the relationship of his fable of Vasenka to the current world. “It’s a fairy tale; it’s a dream,” he said, describing the political unrest of his poetry collection. “I hope the dream does not become reality. It’s up to us to find out if it will become reality.”

here’s an aura of mystery around any work of art and at the heart of every work of art,” Hearon added. “There is an enigma, something you’ll never be able to untie. And that’s part of its beauty; it’s like the horizon–every time you step toward it, it steps away from you.”

Like the last poem of Deaf Republic, Kaminsky ended the Thursday session by asking Exonians to consider the relationship of his fable of Vasenka to the current world. “It’s a fairy tale; it’s a dream,” he said, describing the political unrest of his poetry collection. “I hope the dream does not become reality. It’s up to us to find out if it will become reality.”