Jenna Weber
Oct 2, 2024
I will remember most how he performed.
Ilya Kaminky stood before me on a makeshift stage last Thursday night. Class credit was my excuse but, really, I would have gone to watch him regardless.
I love listening to writers read their own words. Especially poets--when they present their collections, they drag every s sound, find the cadence they buried in stanzas, break their lines dramatically, let their voices cry or drop for emphasis. Poets read each syllable as they intended it to be read. Perhaps poetry is a perfectionist’s profession.
Even then, Kaminsky reads unlike any poet–let alone any writer– I’ve heard. He reads like he’s singing. For some words he whispers and, for others, he shouts. His eyebrows curve like U’s and the corners of his mouth try to reach his neck--as though he is pleading. Kaminsky’s expression matches his urgent, grand tone as he repeats twice what he wrote only once; particularly with titles or final lines, speaking first with the volume at which one might have a conversation, and then softer a second time.
I find his reading style as unusual as I find his work itself. Deaf Republic, the collection I read in advance of this presentation, features a town that refuses to hear their ruthless soldiers after one kills a young deaf boy. The book deals with silence as a concept invented by the hearing. The content challenged my understanding of poetry as a form intertwined with nonfiction. Although I did not see Kaminsky’s sense of humor until the audience was allowed to ask questions, throughout his performance and afterward, I noticed his intelligence. Most crucially, when he was asked about his creative process, I saw his love of writing.
Kaminsky said, no matter how mysteriously they answer this question, all writers approach their craft in one of two ways: they either write a lot and cut down, or write a little and glue together. This was the first time I had heard this angle in writing. And, through exploring careers, I have spoken to more writers than any other type of professional. While their styles and paths have differed, they have each offered me the same advice: if I can be anything other than a writer, be that other thing. I was given this advice for the first time a few years ago by a writer on the show Black-ish. I was surprised. I loved to write and, naturally, thought we had this in common.
“Excuse me?” I asked, “Aren’t you a…”
“Yep,” he said.
Not until receiving this advice a second time did I believe that there might be some truth to it. In a Zoom interview with a filmmaker, I listened to him describe his need to write as an impulse. He said that there was nothing else he could stand to do. I wondered how someone as skilled with words could manage to confuse me so much--why choose this job if it was such a burden?
But then I understood: admitting that writing is difficult work is not the same as hating it.
William Zinnser describes this phenomenon in the introduction to his book On Writing Well. He tells of speaking on a panel next to a doctor who describes writing as relaxing and cathartic. Zinsser used words much closer to ‘painstaking.’ From my own experience writing, I understand this: anybody can write when they feel like it…the challenge arises when one has to write, but does not want to. This act of discipline, beyond craft, makes a fine writer.
I mentioned these (disjointed) ideas to my boyfriend, Gabriel, as I tried to connect them. Although I could see how each element made sense–that loving something does not mean it’s easy, and that struggling with something does mean hating it–together they did not align with the logic of a fulfilling career to which I had become attached. I have spent my life listening to my father tell me that, if I love what I do, I will never work a day in my life. Yet even artists who have dedicated themselves to words find writing laborious.
Kaminsky produces poetry slowly and self-describes as a writer who composes little and glues pieces together. And, still, in the unusual fictional poems of Deaf Republic and the way he acts out his own narrative when he reads, I see that it is Kaminsky’s love of writing that leads him to such originality.
Gabriel–who spends at least 9 hours daily in the library of his medical school–offered a new interpretation of my father’s framing. And his perspective aligns with what I witnessed at Kaminsky’s reading. Gabriel told me that if I do what I love I will, in fact, work. I will work every day, and that it will feel exactly like work. But, if I do something I love I will work harder, more creatively, and with more heart than I believed myself able to give to anything at all.
I am reminded of a poem by Robert Wallace called “Giacometti's Dog” about a sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art. The poem describes a bony figure--the art depicting a dog so sickly that people “wouldn’t care for real dogs/ less raggy” than this one. The speaker ultimately concludes that “it’s not this starved hound,/but Giacometti seeing/ him we see./ We’ll stand in line all day/ to see one man/ love anything enough.” This passion is what I see when I read poets like Kaminsky. And I think it is the passion that allows one’s love to become innovation in their career--for writers, doctors, architects, janitors, journalists, gym teachers. They infuse their craft with love so contagious that we will stand in line all day just to see their performance, just to be a part of it.