AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Esther Belin in Conversation with with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows”)

if I cut you
in half, will you be even?

Esther Belin: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m guest editor Esther Belin, coming to you from the four corners of the United States. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Julia emigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. Her scholarly research focuses on contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust, and it pays particular attention to atrocities in the former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, a collection that hovers around intergenerational motherhood and trauma. It also chronicles her travels, while pregnant, to death camp sites in Poland. Her third poetry collection, 40 WEEKS, will be out next year. Julia joins us today from Little Rock, Arkansas. Julia, welcome to the podcast.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Esther Belin: I’m excited about what we’re going to be talking about today. And we are having this conversation during a time of lingering pandemic adjustments and the accompanying grief, and the continuity of war, and threats of war, not only in the Ukraine, but other parts of the world. I think of Taiwan at this time, I think of water use in the southwestern United States. And as far as writing goes, I have been a cistern, just holding content, holding emotions, not doing much writing. No, no, I take that back. I have found that I have been able to write letters. And so I’m curious, like, what does your writing practice look like these days? Has there been a form or a topic that you’re excited about in your writing? Or, maybe just share with us how what you’ve been reading has actually been part of your writing?

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Oh, that’s such a great question. It’s two questions in one.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: So in terms of what I’ve been writing, I’ll start there. I think for me, generating content is my way of coping. It is a therapeutic practice for me, even if what I end up writing is not a great poem. And so I do tend to find a form or some kind of vessel for whatever it is that I need to get out. You know, I’m often asked the question, “Your poems are so heavy, how do you go on?” And I say, “I put it down, I put it down on the page, so that I can go on.” And so letters have been incredibly therapeutic for me through pandemic and motherhood. But another way that, or I find, you know, is very generative, is the sequence form, right?

Esther Belin: Mm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: If I have a structure that I can enter back into, it’s a lot easier than coming to a blank page that doesn’t have anything for me, it’s very intimidating. But if I have a sequence, it’s something I can return to. Or a title. Like in my first book, I had all of these “Other Women Don’t Tell You” poems, because there’s a lot of stuff other women don’t tell you. And it was really easy to jump back in to that title. So I find those very generative and very propulsive, you know, they move me forward.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: And then on the reading side, for me right now, it has been a lot of Ukrainian literature. You know, when Putin invaded six months ago now, it’s absolutely surreal that we just passed the six-month mark on the 24th, which coincided with Ukrainian Independence Day, and the entire country was under air raid sirens. When he invaded, another poet, who is also a translator of Ukrainian literature, and I—and this poet is Olga Livshin—we both didn’t know what to do. We wanted to do something and we didn’t know what to do. And we put together this giant Zoom reading, Voices for Ukraine poetry reading of Ukrainian poets and their translators. And, you know, when we thought of this idea, I didn’t believe we could do it. Not that I didn’t believe it was possible. But I did not think poets in Ukraine under siege, would be able and willing to participate. They were not only willing, but it mattered so much to them that we wanted to do this while they were under threat of bombs. Because they did and still do feel neglected by the rest of the world. You know, regardless of the amount of military aid that’s coming, regardless of the amount of media attention that, you know, ebbs and flows.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: I think also, as, you know, as educators, it’s also a rebuttal to that argument of art not taking action, and art not doing anything, and it just being this thing that we create, and it’s for aesthetics, or just for thought. But no, this is art actually taking action in the world of healing, but also this particular event raised a lot of money.

Esther Belin: Mm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: I’ve now done quite a lot of fundraisers, where poetry was the catalyst for actively raising funds for aid. So it was a really incredible reading. And I have been turning to poems they’ve been writing, like Iya Kiva has been writing since before 2014. Right? Because, even though Putin invaded with a mass scale invasion on February 24 of 2021, the invasion of the Donetsk region has been going on since 2014. And the poet Iya Kiva in particular, and also another young poet, Anna Gruver, they’re both from Donetsk, and they’ve been writing about this invasion for many years. So I’ve really been turning to their work.

Esther Belin: Would you be able to choose a poem for us from the event?

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Yeah, I would love to share a moment from it. So I’m gonna play for you Amelia Glaser, who is the translator of Iya Kiva, a Ukrainian poet in Kyiv.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Amelia Glaser: (SPEAKS IN UKRAINIAN) Ukraine has been a country of poetry for a really long time. In the last eight years, it has especially blossomed with poetry since the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity, and it’s a comfort to be able to read some of it now. Iya lost her home in Donbas in 2014 and moved to Kyiv. And on the 24th of February, along with everyone else there, she was woken up at 4:00 in the morning to the sound of explosions.

Iya Kiva:

(READS POEM IN UKRAINIAN)

Amelia Glaser:

(READS POEM IN ENGLISH)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: Wow, I got chills when you were talking about, you know, some of the responses to things that are happening in our everyday life. And I think the chills are really just from this idea that as writers we can always do something. And, and I think a vein also about translation really struck me. You know, I often thought of myself as a translator, even though I’m using English language, but really translating, you know, space and voice for a lot of Indigenous speakers.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: Right? My parents spoke Navajo at home. And that was the, the rhythm and the musicality that I was raised with. And so it’s so familiar to me, you know, although the comprehension is not quite there. Like, I might not have the literal translation, but I know the context. I know the emotion of the language. I know the musicality of the language. And I know the power of it.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: So, and as far as, you know, you and your history, I mean, you know, I know you came to the US from Ukraine, shortly after Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, 1991, which, you know, leads me to believe that those intergenerational effects of war are remembered somewhere on your body. You know, because you lived with relatives, with parents who witnessed those tragedies firsthand. And that’s, you know, kind of similar to me and my experience with, you know, my parents were the first generation to experience boarding school, and, you know, displacement from their homelands. And so I’m curious how the journey of place, you know, from the Ukraine to the United States, and the connecting emotions tether you to place, especially through the use of language, and how that shapes your writing.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm. Well, you know, first I want to go back to something you said about writing in English, but hearing all the Navajo cadences and the music, because I very much feel this right alongside you. Even though I write in English, I grew up on Russian language poetry. You know, speaking Russian in the home, it being read. So when I write, I do feel like, there is an element of very Slavic cadence in the way that I approach English language poetry. So there is a way in which multilingualism kind of sings through my work, you know, whether I intended it or not, I can’t help it.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: It’s, it’s an intergenerational song, inadvertently so, you know, always. But in terms of specifically the immigrant experience, and its connection to war, I think that I, you know, grew up in the residue of trauma, with it hovering in the house, always hovering in the house. My great grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. I mean, as is my grandmother, as was my grandfather, even though they would never name themselves that. They were children. They survived an evacuation in the Ural Mountains, you know, south of Siberia. And so they would never consider themselves survivors. And also, the war and the way that the Holocaust was perpetrated in the Soviet territories, is very different from the model of extermination in the West, and the concentration camps. It’s not one that’s very much studied in schools.

Esther Belin: Hm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: In the United States, especially. And it’s one that, in Soviet history, was often denied, right, there was no acceptance, that Jews were targeted. And so when we emigrated here, it was a big change in the narrative, and in what they could claim as their story.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: And so when I started to write this story, and to understand this story, it was my way of trying to understand how to write about a trauma that I did not experience directly, how to write about this intergenerational trauma, without, you know, appropriating it, with clearly demarcating my distance from it. But at the same time, understanding the way that I have been imprinted by it as well.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Yeah. And when Putin invaded, just to bring it full circle, my mother and grandmother were in complete, complete disbelief. My mother said, “I cannot believe he would do this while there are still those alive who remember hiding in those same subway metro stations during World War II.” That’s what was so unbelievable is that there are still people alive who remember the trauma of World War II, because this is such a national trauma, you know, according to this Soviet ideology that he is horrifically trying to bring back. So it was unbelievable to them, that he would re-traumatize a people who are still traumatized, both in Ukraine and who are in emigration abroad.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm. You know, that really kind of connects to a lot of the work and the writing that I do within the Native American community, especially around cultural memory. You know, with the boarding school, and kind of just like what you were saying, this idea that it’s not necessarily denied in the United States, but there’s never been a formal apology. It’s just really glossed over, very oversimplified. This was just, you know, a date from here to here, this is what happened.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: And, you know, it does something. And there was something that you said about that idea of surviving, right, like that they don’t see themselves as victims really, or even consider themselves survivors. This was like something that we just did. And I see that a lot in my community as well. It’s like, this is something we just do. It was interesting, because as I was working on my own, you know, kind of healing through the intergenerational trauma, historic trauma in this country, I found that really looking not only at the people, but also at the land. The journey of place, and how language is connected. And history. It’s almost like, you know, the aftermath of a bomb, right? There’s just shards and fragments, you know, you really have to go through cleaning that debris, to piece together things. And then, it’s interesting, I think, when you do the work enough, then you realize how you actually have some shrapnel on you that you’ve been carrying. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things poetry can do. I felt that a little especially in the poem, “I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son, but somehow his body knows.” I mean, the title just drew me in. There’s this looming emotion because there’s so many things unsaid but it’s on the body. It’s present, like the evidence is there.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: And, you know, this is, I think, a really good time for some poetry. Would you read that poem we’re talking about and share that with us?

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Sure. I would love to read it.

(READS POEM)

I do not mention the war in my birthplace to my six-year-old son but somehow his body knows

My face in his hands
before bed, he asks, if I cut you
in half, will you be even?
I am silent. Expecting
mothers in Mariupol are cut
by invisible hands. Children
cut off from water. Because you have
two eyes + two ears + two cheeks
+ so much hair + your mouth
can have two halves
so you would be even, right?
He wants simple math.
Breath that outlasts
violence. You ÷ 2 =
2 even yous. He isn’t asking
anymore. He is making me
monument. You would still be
if I cut you in half. Small hands
demand a splitting. If you
cut me in half, I tell him,
I’d be dead.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: When I became a mother, I thought I would finally stop writing about the past, Oh, finally! It would be a relief, I could let go of all of this trauma that I’ve been carrying right in my body. And I realized, in fact, that I would write about it even more, and that it is this cycle that is unbreakable in a way. And in Jewish culture, we name after a deceased loved one. So my son is named after my great grandmother. Ingrained in our culture, there is this intergenerational passing down and inscribing into our history.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: So he is already, whether he wants to or not, inscribed into, you know, a dark history, a beautiful one, but a dark one, on his body, through naming.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: That’s what I felt with writing this poem is that it’s unavoidable. Whether it’s a Holocaust history, or what’s happening now which ghostly feels to me, very, very reminiscent to a past that is not so distant, unfortunately.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: You know, connecting to language, I mentioned, you know, I grew up in a Russian speaking household, which is very common for those who lived in big cities in Ukraine, before 1993, where Ukrainian became the national language. Until then, Russian was the main language spoken. And so I don’t speak Ukrainian. And so both of my children are fluent in Russian, because for me, it was important to pass down that language, which is what I speak, you know, to my parents as well. And about a month after the invasion, I was on the playground with my son speaking in Russian, and some older kids came. And they said to him, “Oh, what language are you speaking?” And he said, “Russian.” And they said, “Oh, you’re Russians.” And he said, “No, my mom’s from Ukraine.” And they said to him, “Good thing she got out before the Russians killed her.” And he said, “No, she came long before that.” And they said, “Well, you know, there’s a war there. They’re bombing and shooting and killing everyone.” And he said, “Yeah, I know, she was just on a video call with them about poetry and stuff.” So that was his interaction. You know, for him it’s, this is a part of his life. He’s also on the spectrum. So he takes things a bit differently. I don’t think this wouldn’t have necessarily been as level an interaction for a neurotypical child. But for him, this is absolutely a part of him. Right? Both the trauma, and the poetry are somehow a part of him and a part of his body in a way that they might not be for others.

Esther Belin: You know, just listening to share that story about your son, you know, makes me think of my own children as well. And my own words that, you know, I remember my mom telling me when I, you know, went into public school and kindergarten. You know, just awareness of skin color, and race and language. And not that we did things so differently, but that, you know, if sort of, I just did things the way we did at home, you know, people might question like, “Why are you like, not everyone does that” or like, “Why do you call that that?” And, you know, just the small things. And how I had that conversation with my children. And I don’t share this story often, but I remember just, you know, weeping and having some grief when my kids went to school, where other people were so excited. “Oh, I am so glad they’re going to school because, you know, they’re not going to be home or they’re at a preschool,” and I was just like, it was actually very sorrowful because I knew that everything that we learned at home, our culture would be, you know, erased or diminished or devalued. And it would affect who they are. And they would constantly now just, as little people, start having to have those battles. And, you know, it was really, you know, special reading this poem about your son, which I think, you know, reminded me of that. You know, it can be a little like, stark and direct, but it’s like, well, no, that’s, that’s unfortunately, you know, some of the conversations we need to have. And in a way, they’re protective conversations, because we want to make sure our children are able to build resilience and to be able to eventually be their own person. You know, I would love to, for you to talk a little bit more about how that poem came about.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: I can only say that it’s my son giving me poetry. I mean, truly, it’s me, you know, from the mouths of babes, it’s me taking words from his mouth and building them into a poem. It came from him asking the question, “If I cut you in half, will you be even?” And it was after such a hard day. It was after a day of listening to the news. I would spend every morning in my car after dropping the children off, just being inundated with all the reports from CNN. And it became just such a masochistic practice, I had to stop, because it was, it was just shutting me down for the rest of the day. I just couldn’t do it anymore. So it was after this day that I had to stop doing it. I think maybe after I wrote this poem, it showed me just what a toll listening to so much news was taking on me.

Esther Belin: Uh-huh.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: So it was after he asked me this question, we went on a kind of tangent together, about what happens if you split a body. And for him, in his non-neurotypical mind, he was very logical. He’s like, “You have two eyes. That’s what happens. I don’t understand why this isn’t where we go next.” And I, at the end, I really was very firm with him. And I told him, “No, this is what happens to a body.” And that is where it ended. And then, for me, I had to then leave the room, have a very emotional crying session. And then I had to write this poem, where this conversation with my son, you know, completely conflated and bridged, in a way, with what’s going on across the water, what’s going on in a completely different place, right, where Ukraine and Arkansas overlapped in a kind of palimpsest. Where I just felt like it was as though he was wrestling with this same violence in his own way. But he just didn’t have the language for it.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: He’s fascinated with death, and the scientific aspect. And I was getting a lot of emails from his teacher that I need to make him stop talking about death. “This is inappropriate for a kindergartener.” And I fought back against it and said, “Absolutely not. He is not doing anything wrong. He’s just fascinated with it.” What I wanted to say is, “I’m from Ukraine, and this is absolutely everywhere. And I think that he is intuitive. And he asks me, ‘Mama, why are you crying? Is it about Ukraine?’ And I say ‘Yes.’” But I didn’t. Maybe I should have been, I should have been more brave. But I just think this poem is also wrestling with the fact that kids are very intuitive, and that there is a lot that they learn from the world and that they can learn from poetry, and that they know a lot more than, you know, we give them credit for.

Esther Belin: And, you know, for the Navajo worldview, I think a lot of things are on a continuum, right? So it’s not just this obsession with death, but it’s also, the flip side is life and rebirth.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: Right? That, you know, things do stop and things do die. And sometimes you think they die, but they don’t. I mean, so there’s all these things that are about that. You know, and I do know a lot of cultures have taboos around that. And I think the way I’ve sort of maneuvered through those conversations are saying, “Yeah, but you know, part, when you flip it over, it’s also the new life,” right?

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: You talk about kind of moving from there when something closes or stops and something else kind of fills in.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach:

(EXCERPT REPLAYS)

He wants simple math.
Breath that outlasts
violence. You ÷ 2 =
2 even yous. He isn’t asking
anymore. He is making me
monument. You would still be
if I cut you in half. Small hands
demand a splitting.

(FADES OUT)

Esther Belin: I know that a lot of your work impacts or is tangent with healing from trauma and trauma spaces and how that affects us as writers. And yeah, and I think something about the dialectics there, right? There’s multiple truths. There’s like this truth from this child perspective. And then, you know, the truth of the place and the time. And then you, as the poet, giving us these line breaks and these great hinges to kind of move through.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Absolutely, I love that notion, too. Because a lot of what I try to do in my work is, you know, question, the idea of one, you know, kind of historical truth with a capital H, because of, because of, you know, atrocity like the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. When we rely on the archive to give us the body, we cannot find it. I have been scouring the archives to find my great grandfather’s name, but it doesn’t exist. You know, he stayed back in Kyiv, as a partisan fighter, and was likely murdered at Babi Yar, which is the biggest two-day massacre of Jews during the Holocaust, you know, 33,000 murdered during the two-day span. But his name is nowhere in the archive. And I’m sure, you know, I know for a fact the same is true of the Native American genocide. There are so many countless names, right?

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: That go completely unnamed, unmarked, unremembered. Our soil, American soil, soil of Europe is a mass grave that goes unmarked and unremembered. And so when we latch on to these, like you said, dialectical truths, there’s a lot that goes unrecorded. And poetry and art give us a way of recording an emotional truth that makes these gaps evident, right. It can’t fill them in. But it can make us aware that there are these gaps and that we have to pay attention to them.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: A big thanks to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach. Julia’s third poetry collection. 40 WEEKS will be out from Yes, Yes Books in 2023. You can read two poems by Julia in the September 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online. If you’re not yet a subscriber to Poetry magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 11 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetry magazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)