March 12, 2008 by Stephanie L. Grant

“If God was a photographer
Where would he look for beauty?” – E. Ethelbert Miller

If God was a photographer, God would look to the poets and the words they inscribe on the hearts of others for beauty, specifically E. Ethelbert Miller and Ilya Kaminsky, two poets I had the pleasure of spending my evening with at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The more famous of the two, E. Ethelbert Miller, has been a long time DC resident and, according to The Washington Post: “arguably the most influential person in Washington's vast and vibrant African American arts community. And perhaps its most unappreciated. Ethelbert is: generous, loving, youthful, soft-spoken, outspoken, curious, uplifting and ever-changing.” On the other hand, Ilya Kaminsky is a political refugee from Odessa (in the former Soviet Union) who did his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University and currently lives and teaches in San Diego. Both poets are exceptional – the veteran Miller and the newcomer to the poetry scene, Kaminsky.

I am a Lannan Fellow, of the Lannan Poetry program, at Georgetown University and as such, am privileged to see such greats speak and read their poetry such as John Ashbery, Ammiel Alcalay, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kay Ryan, and Pierre Joris. The poetry of these men and women is some of the best of the latter half of the 20th century and also the 21st century.

The topic for the evening was “ancestors” and “ancestry,” and the evening was spent asking questions such as “can one find ancestors?” or “can one reject their ancestors?” or “what constitutes an ancestor?” Kaminsky’s answer to this topic of ancestry was that “We take existing poems and change them. By changing them we change ourselves.” Kaminsky was especially interested in taking old forms of poetry and viewing them as new material. E. Ethelbert Miller had a different view of ancestors; his take on ancestry was a historical-political one that referenced the late 1960s and the Black Power period, the unspoken link to the spiritual world, but he also brought the view of ancestry in closer and spoke of the loss of parents, siblings, as an important form of ancestry. He said, “Memory is what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. The Vietnam Memorial, from above, is supposed to look like a scar in the Earth, a wound.”

The readings at the end of the night were very good – some of the best of the series. I’m going to excerpt some lines from their poems and I encourage you to Google them or check them out at the library. They are very much worth a read.

Ilya Kaminsky:
Dancing in Odessa (2004)

“In Praise of Laughter” – “…and my grandmother raped/by the public prosecutor, who stuck his pen in her vagina…”

“Maestro” – “he is breathing himself to sleep, the city sleeps/ there is no such city”

“Musica Humana” – “Once or twice in his life, a man/is peeled like apples”
                                    “A boy laying/syllables with his tongue/onto a woman’s skin: those are lines/sewn entirely of                                                silence.”
                                    “…weaving days into knots”

E. Ethelbert Miller

“Science” – “all the jazz you hear cannot keep you from exploding like a star"

“Those Winter Days Before Cell Phones” – “if you were lonely you could call the operator”

“There are Oceans Left to Kill” – “We are trapped between Iraq and a hard place”  
                                                            “The blood all flows together”
                                                            “There’s just a hole the size of life/a hole the size of death”