STILL DANCING

FIRST met Ilya Kaminsky more than two decades ago, when we were both undergraduates. Even before the publication of his first very beautiful book, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), Ilya’s brilliance was unmistakable. He was different from anyone I had ever met, in the breadth of his knowledge of the poetic canon across time and languages, in the intensity of his commitment to poetry as something more than an art, as a kind of unifying principle of existence. Shortly after Ilya published Dancing in Odessa, he began circulating among his friends a new manuscript, a kind of parable-in-poems about a country whose inhabitants suddenly go deaf, refusing to hear the authorities. Ilya produced version after version of this project, eventually titled Deaf Republic, over more than a decade, while editing anthologies and publishing translations, until it acquired a nearly legendary status among his fellow poets. Graywolf will publish it in early March.

Ilya was born in Odessa, in what was then the Soviet Union, in 1977. Substantially deaf from the age of four, he spoke no English when he immigrated to the United States with his family at sixteen. He studied at the University of Rochester and Georgetown University and has a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. His honors include a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, a Lannan Fellowship, magazine’s Levinson Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His anthology of twentieth-century poetry in translation, , was published in 2010. He is also the editor in chief of the literary journal . After several years teaching in the graduate creative writing program at San Diego State University, Ilya now holds the Bourne Poetry Chair at Georgia Tech. The following exchange was conducted via e-mail this past November and December; it also draws on conversations, many of them on long evening walks, from the month Ilya and I spent together in Marfa, Texas, in late 2016, as Ilya