On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed, god’s lips on his brow, Torah in his arms. —I unfastened her stockings, worried that I have stopped worrying. She slept in my bed–I slept on a chair, she slept on a chair–I slept in the kitchen, she left her slippers in my shower, […]
(from the Natalia sequence) “You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa” — a fortune teller, 1992 What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts, the birds force themselves into my lines— the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats. I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa and bless each passenger, his bones, his […]
In a city made of seaweed we danced on a rooftop, my hands under her breasts. Subtracting day from day, I add this woman’s ankles to my days of atonement, her lower lip, the formal bones of her face. We were making love all evening— I told her stories, their rituals of rain: happiness is […]
[an elegy for Osip Mandelstam] [A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in case they were found by Furies with a search warrant.] While there is still some light […]
Ilya Kaminsky auther of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine, talks about the need for clarity in poetry.
Ilya Kaminsky author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine, talks about the formal strategy of the series of poems that make up Dancing in Odessa.
Ilya Kaminsky author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine, talks about the the forms his poems take.
Ilya Kaminsky author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine, talks about the pleasure and pain of writing.