The Divine Narrative: A Comparison of Ilya Kaminsky and Seth Abramson

While a juxtaposition of the two poets Ilya Kaminsky and Seth Abramson may initially seem arbitrary, there are enough links between the two rising stars—in terms of both background and aesthetic—to warrant exploration. Consider some of the surface similarities: born only a year apart, Abramson in Concord, Massachusetts in 1976, and Kaminsky in Odessa, Ukraine in 1977, both began a career in law and received their J.D before entering the creative writing field and winning prestigious awards from Poetry Magazine. Kaminsky won a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2001, while Abramson won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood prize in 2008. And, surprisingly, perhaps, considering the amount of attention and praise both have garnered from poets such as Robert Pinsky, Donald Revell, and Carolyn Forche—each has released only one complete book of poetry. Ilya Kaminsky published Dancing in Odessa in 2004, while Seth Abramson published The Suburban Ecstasies in 2009.

Yet while a span of five years separated the release of their first volume, the planets have aligned for their second. While Abramson continues his schooling at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and blogs like a man who believes his death is imminent, and Kaminsky teaches at San Diego State while releasing an anthology of international poetry as well as a translation of the poetry of Polina Barskova, the next collection from each poet is forthcoming within the next year. Kaminsky is releasing Deaf Republic from Tupelo Press, while Abramson’s Green Rose Prize winning collection Northerners will be published under the auspices of New Issues/Western Michigan University press.

While these areas of overlap are fascinating, and borderline uncanny—have many poets since the days of James Dickey and Wallace Stevens begun careers so removed from poetry?—more important similarities are embedded within the aesthetic of each poet. It’s worth noting that both poets composed their first book not simply as a collage of disparate poems—though the individual poems of each book do, for the most part, work well on their own individual terms—rather, both poets have crafted a book-long narrative complete with reoccurring characters. While this isn’t uncommon, it strikes me as rare for first time authors who have likely been writing a variety of poems over the span of several years and experiences. That is to say, by the time a first book is ready for publication, many poets are backlogged on stand-alone poems they’ve been using to hew their way into literary journals. In contrast, the concentration and focus of Abramson and Kaminsky’s respective books is impressive.

Additionally, Jewish culture, tradition, and mythology are interpolated and intertwined throughout both volumes, though the flavor of Kaminsky’s Russian-Judaism is vastly different than the culture of Abramson’s East Coast American Judaism. And the purpose of Judaism within Abramson’s narrative is different as well. The narrative arc of Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa is crafted more from Kaminsky’s desire to recreate a specific place at a specific time—Odessa in a period of political upheaval—than to tell the story of any character. Odessa itself is the best characterized, through its markets and music, its stories and food, while the people who appear and fade from the pages of the book—the doctors and poets, the speaker’s grandmother and Aunt Rose, Natalia—are the blood throbbing through the city’s veins. In contrast, The Suburban Ecstasies focuses on one specific character, Gideon, who carries the weight of his past wherever he travels, eventually scraping away the magic of his youth against the abrasive surface of the mundane.

This interweaving of the physical and the spiritual is a commonality Kaminsky and Abramson share, and while many other poets aspire to illuminate moments of beauty in the everyday, or, more ambitiously, to transform the mundane through their slanted perspective, Kaminsky and Abramson differ in that their narratives take for granted that the two qualities are inseparable, already fused together. And what may simply be “beauty” transformed by a poet’s sharp eye in other writing is often the residue of divinity for Kaminsky and Abramson. And the manner in which both authors continually incorporate the myths and folklore of their Jewish history with the boredom and drudgery, or worse, the brutality and violence of everyday life, lends each volume an air of magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salvador Plascencia. Take, for example, the poem “Natalia” from Dancing in Odessa:

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, in my Torah
her slippers in each sentence I spoke.
I said: those I love—die grow old, are born.

But I love the stubbornness of her bedclothes!
I bite them, taste bedclothes—
the sweet mechanism of pillows and covers.

A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

the people of a book, broken by a book.

From the very beginning the poem couples the spiritual and the physical; the speaker meets his lover on the night the Rabbi sings and sighs, his arms around the Torah. The sacredness of Yom Kippur is simultaneous with the carnality of the night they lay together. And both planes are suffused with music—the music of the Torah and the music of love and sex, both overlapping and seamlessly creating the world of Odessa, a city populated by images that correspond to emotion rather than intellect.

Abramson’s world comes together in ways that are less organic, perhaps—the seams are visible, but wonderfully sewn—and the narrative is no less satisfying in its evocation of the fused spiritual and physical, or, the suburban and the ecstatic. In the opening poem of the book, “Gideon Gets Central Air,” Abramson summons his reality into manifestation with the words, “This is the scene”, a phrase strongly in the orphic tradition of, “It is as if,” or “I imagine.” And the scene into which the reader is hailed is the infanthood of the character Gideon, a recasting of the story of Moses abandoned in a basket and set adrift down the Nile, which quickly bleeds into the modern world and its representations of Jewish culture:


…the reeds of the basket slip serpentine
off their coils,
upward and through his still-attuning fingers—
which steeple together,
as if to poke out the sun, that spot
where the bulrushes too
are now thrillingly braiding and hewing
themselves…

and continues a few lines later:

What else? Yes,
this too—
a highway—
a berth for all that comes after,
the State Welcome Center
and the Jewish delicatessen with its windows
of Bristol glass;
its roof, bluish tin, all electrical tape
and insulated wiring,
clasping this branch of universe just inches above
the killing floor of the Nile;

The two separate qualities of spiritual and physical are still layered atop one another, but they’re recognizable as two distinct aspects of the poem. The reader can see the joints of what Abramson is fitting together—that is, the mythic and the modern. What begins in memory—Gideon-as-Moses afloat on the Nile—is suddenly transformed into a landscape recognizably American. The highway. The Jewish delicatessen. The State Welcome Center.

Again, though Abramson’s world isn’t as naturally constructed as Kaminsky’s, it’s no less appealing or powerful in its evocation. If anything, the way Abramson represents a place that feels familiar, and then suddenly recasts it as a landscape of mystery and wonder may strike some readers as delightfully appealing. What’s more inspiring than seeing the divine pressed against the everyday, especially through the eyes of a speaker who refuses to shed the lens of history and culture through which they view the modern world? Especially if it’s only through that speaker’s eyes that we’ll ever have the chance of seeing our world transformed in the same manner?

As far as the mechanics of transferring the emotion and distinctiveness of culture onto the pages of their distinctly American poetry, both authors delight in—and often take advantage of—the well-wrought list. Both recreate slivers of culture and the past by following poems down discursive trails of cultural specifics, which may strike readers as enchantingly foreign and unfamiliar. Some may note the debt both poets owe Charles Simic, a master of the list poem who often wrote about his Yugoslavian past such as in his famous poem “Prodigy,” where he writes that:

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

This style of writing bears more similarity to Kaminsky’s in its minimalistic approach, especially in comparison with Abramson’s lush diction and crowded collage of dropped lines rarely broken even by stanzas. Still, both authors utilize Simic’s habit of listing facts or descriptions while ignoring the lyric impulse to follow through with intense, metaphorical descriptions. Kaminsky’s lists often follow suit with Simic’s in that they’re composed of narrative details strung loosely together without much in the way of follow through, evoking a scene rather than rationalizing it such as in the title poem, “Dancing in Odessa,” the second stanza of which begins:

My grandmother threw tomatoes
from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother’s face. She understood
loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.

The night undressed us (I counted
its pulse), my mother danced, she filled the past
with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter touched
my eye-lid...

And on it goes, a surreal list of narrative fragments designed to leave the reader with an emotional impression of the Odessa of Kaminsky’s past, an Odessa which no longer exists because the past has irretrievably slipped away. In poems such as this, the question of "what does it mean" should be left outside the reality of the poem, and the reader should instead be prepared to enter a world one step off from ours, where the music of the past is still thrumming through the speaker, and the senses are more reliable guides through the narrative than logic.

While Abramson also frequently employs the list poem, his are typically tangential outpourings of specifics which fit into the larger frame of the narrative. They provide concrete images, while allowing Abramson the freedom to indulge in wordplay that might not fit cleanly into his narrative, which is much tighter and more cohesive than Kaminsky’s. Abramson’s lists, however, in deviating from a logical starting point, often become discursive to the point of irrelevance in regards to the overall scheme. They’re part of the narrative arc only under the thinnest of guises, which again, isn’t a weakness or flaw so much as a curiosity. Take, for example, this section from the poem “A Dream (Gideon Asleep by the River)”:

Instead of him being taught
how to clean and load a pistol,
to fire with accuracy and discharge
twelve times per minute
to man a barricade
to file papers with the Communists,
to salvage property from a rental
being burned to cinders by Papists,
to gravitate with the urgency of light
towards men whose least warps
bend the plane of history further yet
in the direction of equity,
who study not just the mechanics
but the politics of a skirmish, a siege,
an ambuscade, a cannonade, trench
wars, the charge, the banner, the fife…

And again—onward it marches, to the point that I forget from where we’ve embarked or where we’re going. Granted, the rhythm is enchanting, but by the end of the above segment, the reader is working through the third list-within-a-list, and if they’re following the narrative and wondering how everything fits together, well—it’s all part of Gideon’s dream. All that to say, the skeleton, muscles, and blood of this poem are one long list, and it’s about as discursive as they come. Still, it serves its purpose of liberating Abramson from his own constraints, and some of the sound play is really quite pleasurable, though at times it becomes too self-conscious for my taste. But, this is poetry, and even with a narrative as neatly formed as The Suburban Ecstasies, cohesion is always going to take a backseat to lyric power and spontaneity. The departure is just more obvious than in Dancing in Odessa, where Kaminsky never truly establishes a narrative foundation to begin with. The only law is that each phrase pulse with the music of a mythical Odessa, whereas the character of Gideon, as he moves through the world, is listening for the same music as the reader.

I’ve always found it interesting to look at the poets born close together. How did John Ashbery and W.S. Merwin, both born in 1927, influence one another? Okay, not much. But what about Merwin and Galway Kinnell? And how did they influence the generations to come? I wonder, because I believe that with Ilya Kaminsky and Seth Abramson, we have the opportunity to watch two important poets begin their careers. And perhaps, consciously or not, they’re helping shape one another. Either way, their writing will undoubtedly shape the generation of poets reading their work, and for that reason alone, the next book of poetry from Kaminsky and Abramson is an event that demands attention.