My Poetry Corner January 2024 features the poem “In a Time of Peace” from the poetry collection Deaf Republic (USA, 2019) by Ilya Kaminsky, an award-winning poet who was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2023. Such literary recognition earned him a position at the Lewis Center for the Art’s Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he now lives with his wife.

Born in 1977 in Odessa—in what was then the Soviet Union, now Ukraine—he was sixteen years old when his family was granted political asylum in the United States, settling in Rochester, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and a Juris Doctor law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of Law (now UC Law San Francisco). After a career as a law clerk in San Francisco, the success of his debut poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa (2004), brought new opportunities of teaching creative writing and poetry in both undergraduate and MFA programs.

Kaminsky’s award-winning poetry collection Deaf Republic is structured as a two-act play set in the military occupied fictional town of Vasenka. The narrative begins with the tragic opening scene in “Gunshot.” While breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills Petya, a young deaf boy enjoying a puppet show in the town’s square. The gunshot renders the entire town deaf (p. 11): The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.

In “Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins” (p. 14), the boy’s dead body still lies in the square. Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers. / In the name of Petya, we refuse…. / By eleven a.m., arrests begin. / Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens…. // In the ears of the town, snow falls.

The genesis of Deaf Republic has its origin in Kaminsky’s experience as a hearing-impaired individual. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold. In his 2019 interview with Garth Greenwell for the Poets & Writers Magazine, he explained how the idea of a country suddenly going deaf came to him:

“I did not have hearing aids until I was sixteen: As a deaf child I experienced my country as a nation without sound. I heard the USSR fall apart with my eyes…. But what if the whole country was deaf like me? So that whenever a policeman’s commands were uttered no one could hear? I liked to imagine that. Silence, that last neighborhood, untouched, as ever, by the wisdom of the government.

Those childhood imaginings feel quite relevant for me in America today. When Trump performs his press conferences, wouldn’t it be brilliant if his words landed on the deaf ears of a whole nation? What if we simply refused to hear the hatred of his pronouncements?

I want the reader to see the deaf not in terms of their medical condition, but as a political minority, which empowers them. Throughout Deaf Republic, the townspeople teach one another sign language (illustrated in the book) as a way to coordinate their revolution while remaining unintelligible to the government.”

The political message is clear in the book’s opening poem, “We Lived Happily during the War,” a prelude to the two-act narrative (p. 3):

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house—
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.

As the violence of occupation unfolds for the “Dramatis Personae” in the fictional Vazenka, Kaminsky calls us to join him in owning our own falling as individuals and as a nation. We are forced to question the townspeople’s choice of silence over speaking and deafness over hearing.

In Act One, the narrator and puppeteer Alfonso runs for his life in “4 a.m. Bombardment” (p. 25): My body runs in Arlemovsk Street, my clothes in a pillowcase / … It has begun: neighbors climb the trolleys / at the fish market, breaking all / their moments in half. Trolleys burst like intestines in the sun // … I, a body, adult male, awaits to / explode like a hand grenade….

Before Alfonso, too, is arrested, he volunteers to kill a drunk soldier for a box of oranges, as described in the poem “Above Blue Tin Roofs, Deafness” (p. 39). As the townspeople cheer the killing in the following poem “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck,” they must reckon with their silent complicity in the violence (p. 40):

At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?

The tragic uncertainty about the townspeople deaf/silent strategy for survival comes to the fore in Act Two, narrated by Momma Galya, the 53-year-old former puppet theater owner turned brothel keeper. The scene is bleak in “A Bundle of Laundry” (p. 53): In the Central Square, an army checkpoint. Above the army checkpoint, Alfonso’s body still / hangs from a rope like a puppet of wind. In “What Are Days,” she must also come to terms with the relentless passing of time since the winter military invasion (p. 54):

Like middle-aged men,
the days of May
walk to prisons.
Like young men they walk to prisons,
overcoats
thrown over their pajamas.

As the second act comes to an end, Kaminsky notes in closing (p. 72): We are sitting in the audience, still. Silence, like the bullet that’s missed us, spins—

The featured and final poem of the collection, “In a Time of Peace” (p. 75), acts as a bookend-sequel to the prelude “We Lived Happily During the War.” We must now question our silent complicity in our ongoing wars worldwide:

Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open
their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man's driver's license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.

It is a peaceful country.

We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
To pick up the kids from school,
to buy shampoo
and basil.

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of Ukrainian American Poet Ilya Kaminsky, go to my Poetry Corner January 2024.