(Talia Lavin, ‘The Intelligencer’, 15th March 2022: ‘The War Never Left. A conversation with Ilya Kaminsky about memory, viral poetry, and the tragedy of Ukraine.)
Which poets in Russian and Ukrainian, contemporary and past, should we be reading to understand this moment?
We don’t read the poets to understand the moment. We read poets to understand ourselves. What do we know about ourselves in this moment other than the plain old fact that we are afraid? That we try to numb our fear with dailiness of shopping, flipping the phone, etc.
But if I must put it in terms of this moment: The purpose of the state is to numb the senses. The purpose of a lyric poet is to wake them up.
(From ‘Intelligencer’)