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Author's Prayer

Dear Readers:

Among the many exciting projects he launched during his tenure as Poet Laureate, John Perrault began this column. Besides handing off his Poet Laureate crown, John has passed the pen for this column to Lesley Gaudreau and me, who will share the space.

                                                         - Harvey Shepard

"How magical it is to live!" says Ilya Kaminsky in one of the poems from his prize-winning book Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004). Ilya was a featured reader at the June Hoot (along with Catherine O'Brien). His book opens with this poem:

Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.
                                         - Ilya Kaminsky

"Praise" is perhaps the most frequently occurring word in Ilya's poetry. Despite the dislocation and losses in his own life, he said to an interviewer: "I do not raise my voice in protest against the inevitable. I praise what we do have. Because we have so much!" "I aspire to catch those blessed moments of being."

In a radically original, playful style full of surprising jumps, varying rhythms, and astonishing images, he reminds us that "In life we do not know what awaits us in the next moment." In the poem "Praise" he writes: "The darkness, a magician, finds quarters/ behind our ears. We don't know what life is,/ who makes it, the reality is thick/ with longing. We put it up to our lips/ and drink."

His aim is to "put life on a page - as much life as I can get there." And he succeeds. "I want to leave my readers laughing in a poem about death and crying in the poem about weddings." His wish is to be "a spiritual poet" and "a storyteller" and he is both.

In "Author's Prayer" he writes of speaking for the dead, and in longer works, which often combine poetry and prose in a remarkable way, he pays homage to many dead poets - Celan, Brodsky, Montale, Tsvetaeva, Babel, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and others - "whose writings have saved me in one way or another." He advises those of us who write to "Read everything."

"May your writing hand be blessed" is how he often closes letters to other writers. We as readers and writers are indeed blessed by his presence in our lives through his amazing poetry.
                                                                      - Harvey Shepard


"Author's Prayer" copyright 2004 by Ilya Kaminsky. For more about Ilya, see www.ilyakaminsky.com/CrankyInterview.html and ilyakaminsky.com and adirondackreview.homestead.com/interviewkaminsky.html

Please note: Poems submitted to this column should not exceed nineteen lines.


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