Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) is the author of The Many Names for Mother (Wick Poetry Prize, Kent State University Press, 2019), Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, March 2020), and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2021). Her poems appear in Poetry, APR, and The Nation. She edits Construction Magazine.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Your new book, The Many Names for Mother, continually redefines ‘mother’: as an identity, as a practice, as a place. One of the first things a mother must do after having a child is to name; similarly the poet sets out to name what resists definition by other means. Often the naming seems inadequate, and an early poem “Against Naming” begins “Let’s not name her or compare/ flesh to fruit.” Can you speak about the impulse to name? What are the dangers or necessities of naming? How (does) this tension guide our reading of your collection?

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: Naming, particularly in Jewish tradition, is all about ancestry and memory. You are supposed to name a child after a deceased loved one in order to remember their legacy, and never after someone who is still alive, because that would suggest you want to replace the living person. Much in the same way, the whole book is about naming to remember. But even such well-intentioned naming inscribes the child into a particular history, whether they want to belong to it or not, and in the case of my children, inscribes them in generational trauma. This is one of my main preoccupations as both parent and poet, the ancestral trauma I am passing onto my children, writing them into a painful lineage they cannot escape.

The power of naming was something especially felt in Ukraine, when having a Jewish last name brought on more discrimination and even foreclosed certain career and educational opportunities. As I write in the poem “Wikipedia for ‘Name,’” my father actually took my mother’s last name because Kolchinsky sounded less Jewish than Tzukerman, and my parents wanted an easier life for me. Nevertheless, even without a very Jewish sounding name, I still had my share of being picked on, to put it lightly, for being Jewish. I recall the seminal instance of neighborhood boys throwing stones at me until my dad ran over and threatened them, so they never came near me again.

On the book’s cover, the title is made up of the names of all the women I come from, along with those who have influenced my journey of motherhood. I wanted their names to be a part of the material body of book, to acknowledge the influence they’ve had on me. But just as naming can be a way of honoring, it is also a powerful and even dangerous means of objectification. This is what I am referring to in the opening of “Against Naming.” “Let’s not name her” because the body, named pregnant or mother or woman, by someone else, objectifies and restricts the way she can be in the world. “Let’s not compare flesh” comes from the weekly Baby Center emails that describe the size of the in-utero fetus in terms of edible seeds, fruits, and vegetables. While seemingly harmless, this naming is an intrusion into the experience of bearing a child—gendering and infringing on the woman’s agency over what is inside her body. In fact, I recently completed 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2021), a collection written while pregnant with my now five-month old daughter, that interrogates the implication of such naming—each poem takes on a week of pregnancy and is named by the very fruit or vegetable the baby is compared to that week.

I could really talk about naming for pages on end, as you’ve been able to tell from the obsessive quality of this book. But I’ll just conclude by saying that our impulse to name, I think, comes from our desire to make sense of the world, to put language to objects, emotions, people, to things that resist being named or understood. In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi writes that for camp survivors, the word “cold” takes on a whole new meaning that others can never understand. Or put another way, the word “cold” loses its meaning all together. Before his life in the camp, cold might have been the chill of a night in the Italian mountains, but after, cold is the bone-defying pain of Polish winter, barefoot and soaked. It is a cold for which the word “cold” fails to make any meaning at all. A cold that breaks down the power of naming because it is a cold that cannot be named.

Trauma, I think, does this to language. It breaks down the words, the world, we might have thought was stable. That’s why in my poems, I often turn to etymology, to the roots and origins of words. In doing so, I show how language fails. How even when deconstructed to its base components and tracked through various linguistic genealogies, a word cannot encompass the whole of what it means to name. Trauma, like the body itself, resists language even as it demands to be written and named.

CL: And how much language reveals? I’m curious about the idea that etymology shows how language fails because when I have no words and turn to their origins, which I often do—I’m regularly struck at how much the root betrays me—what I didn’t even know I was trying to verbalize surfaces in a latency I didn’t know. I think of your poem “There is No Name for This,” in which the speaker and a young child watch excavation at a construction site and the child delights in the hole-digging and the mother grows ill at this grave making, ending:

…the sound
as far from sharik as this dugout is      from Babi Yar
as he is from the ghosts he doesn’t know
he comes from           as this house is
from the bones on which it sits

This unawareness is the result of a translation challenge, too—how to bridge the gap of generations, tongues, traumas—so I’d love to hear more about how you bridge distances in the re-claiming of language, in the teaching a child to speak? What does it come to look like on the page? And what has this navigation revealed to you?

JKD: It’s so apt that you say betrays, because I think that is even more cutting to how language works, at least when it comes to our “grown-up” perception of it. In one of the “Other women don’t tell you” poems, I trace the etymology of the word “Mother” coming from Middle Dutch modder “filth and dregs,” Polish mul “slime,” the Sanskrit mutra– “urine,” which on the one hand, seems far from the lifegiving, caretaking, and “clean” role of mother. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s not a betrayal after all, considering that birth is full of all those slime and dreg elements, and childhood is all filth and dirt and joy in the “unclean.” That’s why I say “grown-up” perception because the innocent, albeit often misguided, way a child sees the world is so beautifully different. The way my son sees nothing but wonder at the bulldozer raking dirt and the way I must struggle to not see death in this moment.

More than teaching him to speak and see, I think he teaches me. Everything is new and magical and worth paying such careful attention to, the way it should be when we write. The best poems, I think, are really the ones that help us see the world the way a child does, taking something familiar and making it new and marvelous again. So perhaps this is a kind of generational translation, going back to the childhood revelry we once perceived with our five senses in a jaded present moment when those same glorious senses have been dulled and tainted with sights, sounds, tastes, feels, and smells of decay that have wormed their way into our adult sensibilities. Maybe going back to the root, though fleeting and betraying, is also a way to go back to joy, to cope with its all too often absence from the present moment.

CL: Yes, I see quite a bit of that wonder and magic in these poems; immediately I think of “Why do giraffes climb trees?” in which we learn acacia is sweetest at the top and that the giraffe heart pumps 60 gallons of blood a minute, or “Take An X-Ray of the Sun, You’ll Find” “a Rainier cherry / at its yellow heart, fire / skinned and ripe // with reaching.” These pieces look at the world newly and sensuously. I also think of how many times the moon appears in this collection—as the wet outline of drool on a blouse, in crescent baby hairs, in butt-cheeks—as a gateway for some new discovery or admission. In light of the going back to go forward, can you speak some about nostalgia, and how that drives your pieces? What does it make possible in your poems, and also what dangers might it pose?

JKD: In defining “Nostalgia,” Svetlana Boym writes, “The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos (‘return home’) and ἄλγος, álgos (‘longing’). I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own phantasy.” There is no way I could say it better, as this is precisely the relationship I have with nostalgia. The “magic” you are hearing in my poems connects to Boym’s notion of “phantasy.” What I mean is, I’m not really writing back to a known or remembered childhood per se, but the kind of childhood I imagine, a misremembered and reimagined one. And this very duality of memory and imagination is rich with possibility and danger all at once, as you anticipated. It makes it possible for me to reinhabit a space that no longer exists, but also to create a space that perhaps never was. Like my early memory of watching the Dnepr river rise up onto the land and walking atop the fountains of a primarily Russian speaking Dnepropetrovsk, a city then a part of the Soviet Union, where I remember being safely lifted by my parents, safe from any flood or fear that they continue to carry. This city I return to is gone now, in its place is the city of Dnipro in Ukraine, a city and country I’ve never been to, lost homes I do not know. But through my poems, I am always writing towards them, towards what I think I remember, what no longer is, and even what might never have been.

I am anxious about how I cast the past, the “worded half-light,” as I call it in my poem, “The Question,” written in the voice of my mother. The way my naive misrememberings might also be misrepresenting experiences that were much darker and felt very differently by my parents and grandparents. But at the same time, even if the elements of narrative are imagined, my own feelings about the memories, the lyric impulse behind them, the song, is always true. So while I am acutely aware of the dangers of nostalgic recollection, I think the emotional truth of my experience is always there. And these magical leaps within the poems are reminders that we are in a blurred space of nostalgia in which I am self-aware of the creative licenses I’m taking. Or, to look at nostalgia another way, specifically from the perspective of motherhood, it is as if seeing my son take imaginative leaps inside of his own childhood gives me permission to do the same with the way I remember and write mine.

CL: I think of a line in that same poem where the mother says directly “I lived that thing you like to reimagine”; in simply voicing this, you both acknowledge the gap and simultaneously ask “did I get it right?” Often I have my business communications students practice paraphrasing what others have said or written, and then give them the opportunity to clarify, as an exercise in active listening. It seems that this re-imagining allows us to re-member, or put together something new, to better hear across generations. And yet your poems come from a place of real trauma, one with nothing figurative about it and where there is a definite need to get some things right. My dad subsists on nonfiction and so we often debate the relative veracities of it and fiction and poetry. It seems to come down to why one approaches the text. And so my question is twofold: first, I wonder how you see the formal structures of your poems as negotiating those magical leaps and crucial truths? And second, for what do you come to (either as reader or writer) poetry?

JKD: Your first question is the work of one of my dissertation chapters, where I look at Jehanne Dubrow’s writing about the Holocaust and suggest that using fixed or traditional forms is a way of calling attention to the craftedness of the poetic space and rather than feeling restricted by the structure, formal constraints let us write more freely within them. What I mean is, by using form to write about trauma, yes, real trauma, as you say, but at times trauma I myself did not experience, the form of the poem itself acknowledges the gaps, doubts, and imaginative possibilities within the crafted space and allows me to then take imaginative liberties while bearing witness in a way that feels genuine. The power of formal constraints is also, I think, to do something more radical in contemporary poetry, because free verse, while once radical, has now become the norm. So I find that traditional forms—sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, etc.—force me to address past atrocities in new ways, tell what might seem like the same story in a way that is wholly other, just as no two formal poems, while having the same structure, are at all the same. I feel like every poem I write is part of an attempt to tell the same story, to maybe get at your second question a bit. With form, I’m reclaiming constraints in a way that paradoxically breaks them, challenging our comfort with both the historical subject at hand and the forms we use to write about it.

I am primarily a free-verse poet though, so the counterpoint to employing these formal constraints are the numerous poems where all constraints are abandoned and the lines spread wide across the page. In these poems, “Camp means field” or “Names of Svet,” the expansiveness of the line and the associative movements try to get at the difficulty, the vast inability, and my own failure to bear witness, to “get it right.” Because when it comes to the extermination of the Jews in the Soviet Union, to the unresolved loss of my great-grandfather and countless others, there is no getting it right. There is heavy, hovering absence. The white space in these poems is my way of making that absence palpable, silence felt within song.

This is really what I come to poetry for, to fill or make felt unknowable absence, to witness the unwitnessable, to write a history that often goes unwritten and unnoticed, and to figure out my place, and that of my children, within it. As Milosz wrote in his poem “Dedication,” “What is poetry that does not save / Nations or people?” I come to poetry hoping that it can save, even if only in the smallest way, even if only one person, even if that one person is the poet herself. I come to poetry, to writing and reading it, believing it can engender revelation and change, believing it can save, “from the root *sol-,” make us more “whole.”

CL: That’s the goal, right? If you met someone who had never read a poem before, or had a fairly limited experience with poems, what one would you share with him or her?

JKD: We are talking magical sharing abilities right? With such an amazing question full of possibilities, I’ll just open it even wider. I think I would first transport them in time to hear Anna Akhmatova read, for the selfish reason that I would love to have heard her recite her poems. When it comes to poetry, I don’t think sharing a page with someone is enough, I’d want them to feel the music leap off the page. And since magic isn’t always readily available, I’d introduce this person to Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry, and again, make sure that they get to experience him read so they could feel the way lyric pierces the skin. I recently got to attend a reading by Natasha Trethewey, whose work I’d long admired and learned from, but the reading made me adore it even more, transported me to the traumatic pasts she weaves together in such a way that we can touch, can taste, can feel them reaching out for us in our present.

I could keep naming poets I’d want them to experience, but I would also say that even though this person might think they have limited experience with poetry, they probably have more than they realize. Poetry is everywhere. It’s in the music they listen to. In the struggling speech of children. In an intimate encounter with a loved one. In secrets whispered between friends. Even in texts or social media posts, there are aspects of poetry. I wish I could say this to everyone who thinks they can’t understand poetry or just aren’t “into it,” like Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” which begins, “I too, dislike it.” I wish I could show them just how much of the day is full of poems they don’t realize are poems. Like just last night, my husband told me sea otters hold hands in their sleep to keep from drifting apart, and that, I thought, what a poem! What a way to describe closeness, love, and family. How many moments are like that in a single day? How many small gems we don’t necessarily name “poem.” To me, poetry is language making music and sense, or nonsense, making story and song, releasing or sealing in emotion, and connecting us in ways that resist even the language of poetry itself.

CL: The gems we name “poem” and so many we don’t, including this conversation! Thank you, Julia.