Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize and published by Kent State University Press. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in March 2020. Look out for her newest collection, 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in the fall of 2021. 

Four Way Review:  Throughout The Many Names for Mother, there is a recognition and fracturing of identities (mother, child, immigrant, woman)– where does poet fit? On this note, how do you guard your time for writing?

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: I’m going to start with the second half of your question, as I sit at my favorite writing café, having just nursed Remy for the umpteenth time, now rocking the stroller with one foot as I type the answer to this question and watch her drift in and out of sleep mid-cry. So, guard? I’m certainly not there yet with the 2-month-old (as I’m now down to typing this with one hand, holding her with the other). Truer to my experience is that I make my writing a part of my mothering and mothering a part of my writing. 

Since becoming a mother, I think I’ve become a keener observer of the world around me, learning from the way my son takes it in. Everything he sees is new and marvelous. Everything is a kind of epiphany. Everything I thought I knew all too well is transformed to a revelation. And this is what poetry strives for also, to make our shared human experience feel at once familiar and novel. 

This is also the case for language. Watching my son learn how to make sound and then meaning has shown me that children are born poets. Metaphor comes as naturally to them as speech. It’s the way they make sense of the world, through magical comparison. I first noticed this when my son became fascinated with the moon. He would find it in the sky at first, and then, he began seeing it everywhere. Each circle or light became “Yuuuuooona,” his way of saying the Russian word “Luna,” meaning moon. And this is metaphor. Seeing the likeness in two unlike things, comparing the celestial body of glowing rock to the dark ring of my belly button to the puddle outside to the wet outline his tiny mouth leaves on my shirt. This is an image chain. This is my child making poetry, and me stealing it from him for many poems in the book, but especially the poem, “In Everything, He Finds the Moon.” 

In Everything, He Finds the Moon

Yuuuuooona, he calls, pointing up and drawing 
out the ooo, the Russian “L,” still 
too hard to form “Luna.” 
We understand, make meaning 
out of what its left us: Yuuuuooona, 
on the shoulder of my shirt 
where his sleeping mouth’s wet outline 
left imperfect waning, Yuuuuooona, 
in the fabric covering my belly, where 
his finger found a hole through which 
skin shone like moonlight, Yuuuuooona, 
on the wings of every moth or butterfly, 
Yuuuuooona, more Yuuuuooona, our cats’ eyes
twinkling in darkness, spinning spheres 
he is still too slow to catch, My Yuuuuooona, 
in the daylight’s glare, he names the sun 
as his, asks it to come closer, and opens wide 
to hug, to swallow, to hold 
its unfathomable glow, and in the water too, 
in any water, Yuuuuooona, Yuuuuooona,
bath, puddle, lake, sea, ocean, rain, 
our faces and the light, a river, and
in the window, any window, especially 
a stranger’s, Yuuuuooona, this December,
morning, through smoking sky 
and a cobweb of trees, he finds it there, 
even as it fades, and in my pocket, 
I find it too, Yuuuuooona, an envelope 
of his first-trimmed crescent hairs, 
so many fallen moons.

Originally appeared in 32 Poems 

I thought that having children would turn my gaze away from the ancestral past I’d been obsessed with throughout my poetry career, and towards a future unburdened by it. On the contrary, having my son has made me think all the more about the lineage he comes from, the traumas of the Holocaust, WWII, and immigration into which his own story is unwillingly written. In fact, I’d been trying to publish a poetry collection about immigration and ancestry for four years, but it wasn’t until being pregnant with my son and writing, “Against Naming,” the opening poem of this collection, that this book and the real story I had been trying to tell, finally took shape. 

Becoming a mother has not only changed my relationship to poetry, but more critically, to the past, which is now inexorably tied to the fleeting present. Motherhood feels like a uniquely lyric experience, relishing in an instant as it swells to include temporalities that came before and the potential of all the ones to follow. It’s also an intergenerational experience, connecting me to all the mothers I come from, while helping me find a home in my own body as it exists in the present moment. 

FWR: While reflecting on your grandmother and her memory of her past, along with your relatives’ memories of your grandmother, you write that “memory’s a wild and fragile thing” in “Learning Yiddish”. Many of the poems in The Many Names for Mother carry the weight of generational memory that either you have been given or that you seek to pass down to your son. I’m struck by your clarity and boldness, entwined with your respect for the experiences of your ancestors. To me, this speaks of a desire to recognize the past but not to be cowed by it. Could you speak on the poet’s relationship to a shared past? What is her duty, if any, to move beyond memory?  

JKD: In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg writes that “memory’s anachronistic quality…is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the material of old ones.” I think this is a really apt description for what I try to do with the stories and fragments of the past that have been passed down through my grandparents, to see them not as static and set-in-stone, but as dynamic and wild, as the building blocks for poetry. I’m not trying to retell a linear story, because this is near impossible when it comes to the past, and especially a traumatic one. Rather, I think the poet’s “duty” then, is to stay true to the emotion of the experience and not necessarily be bound by its narrative—staying true to the music, the affect, the lyric impulse I mentioned in response to your first question. 

When it comes to the particularities of the atrocity in the Soviet Union, moving beyond memory and record is essential because so much was forbidden, withheld, or destroyed. I am constantly working to recover or uncover pieces of my family’s past, like the circumstances surrounding my great-grandfather’s death, which remain unknown. Because so much of this is irrecoverable and not a part of anyone’s memory, poetry is left to fill the gaps, to reconciling the known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, past generations past and present ones, as well as the shared and individual past. 

FWR: Your poem “The Moon is Showing” is a force, carding together threads on cleanliness, the body and poetry, breaking apart the idea that “poetry / is clean & shining & not/ about the body.” How do we open poetry to a bit more filth? Are there poets doing this who we can turn to as guides?

JKD: What a great question! Motherhood is the catalyst for my fascination with filth, what Julie Kristeva refers to as the “abject.” Not to get too theoretical, but Kristeva traces that humans have socially dealt with excrement—bodily fluids like blood, piss, puke, spit, shit, saliva, puss, etc. —as a way of separating ourselves from the animal, the primitive, a way of repressing that carnal side of us, what she calls “primal repression.” The abject is also the moment of separation between the child and the mother, between the self and the world around. I’ve gotten too Lacanian and psychosexual and theoretical, the plight of a poet getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature. 

But back to my experience, pregnancy, birth, and then caring for a constantly excrement- producing little person surrounded me in filth, in the grotesque beauty and love of it. It reminded me how animal the human truly is. In “Genesis,” the poem where the book gets its title, I write, “How animal / to fit inside / another / and human / to tear our way /back out.” I think facing our animalistic, dirty qualities, can conversely make us more empathetic because we realize just how gorgeously flawed, sexual, and abject we all are. How we all share the beastly experience of being born into this world and navigating through its/our filth together. Even in tracing the etymology of the world “Mother” in one of my “Other women don’t tell you” poems, I discovered that it comes from Middle Dutch modder “filth and dregs,” Polish mul “slime,” the Sanskrit mutra– “urine,” and more abject relations. So, I guess what I’m saying is that the experience of motherhood at its core is one of filth and that filth is beautiful and full of love and that filth is what unites us all. And there is no shame in it, or there shouldn’t be. A child’s joy at going to the bathroom or playing in a disgusting puddle or being covered in remnants of sticky foods or even their own vomit, reminds us that filth is a natural part of our bodies in which we should take pride and even find joy.

Other women don’t tell you

mother is born from “a thick substance 
concreting in liquors,” like the whiskey 
they tell you to rub on new gums or the red wine 
my mother told me would help his forming heart
grow stronger, Look how resilient you turned out, she says,
not knowing she too comes from “lees” or “scum” or “waste 
of skin,” probably from Middle Dutch modder 
“filth and dregs,” what’s left of us after 
we’ve been named, but also see mud, found in many 
words denoting “wet” or “dirty” or “damp” or “moist” 
and other women tell you how they hate 
the sound of it, without explaining why, that word 
between the thighs, how they would rather come 
from Old Irish muad for “cloud,” would rather look up 
in wonder, counting cows or crows or clowns, imagining 
their bodies too can change back just as easily, can shift 
from solid into air then back to water, without coming
from the Polish mul “slime,” the Sanskrit mutra– “urine”
other women don’t tell you is okay to talk about and be and let
release without becoming “excrement,” without relief being
related to the German Schmutz “dirt,” but your son’s hands 
are full of it, the scum and dregs and filth, the earth he shovels 
in his mouth, devouring the world both of you come from, 
moving from mud to mouth to you so easily, you realize 
that being named for the “lowest or worst of anything,” 
in his hands, is as close as you can get to flying.

Originally appeared in American Poetry Review 

There are many poets currently writing on this topic, but I’ll just point you to a few poems. Chen Chen’s “Winter” is all about the love found in embracing another’s excrement, a love we could all learn from. Maxine Kumin’s “The Excrement Poem” reminds me of the adult version of the wonderful kids’ book, Everybody Poops. I love sam sax’s ode, “Butthole Butthole Butthole Butthole.” Bridgit Pegeen Kelly has a way of finding reverence the filth of death, particularly in “Dead Doe,” one of my favorites of hers. I’ve also learned a lot from incredible women who for decades, haven’t shied away from filth, from looking at the parts of the body that we’ve been wrongly taught to hide; these voices include Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, and Ellen Bass, among many others.   

FWR: Fear threads through these poems, whether a fear of the past, as in “Afraid Ancestral” ( “Mom is afraid/ the sky will fall / because it’s fallen / before” ), or the fear for one’s child, as in “While everything falls apart, imagine how you’ll teach your son about guns.” There is also a resistance to fear, in search of joy or faith or connection. Can you speak to this investigation and resistance in poetry?

JKD: In a way, part of poetry’s job to be unafraid. To admit that which is most terrifying—to say the name of a monster to make him disappear. To work through fear by expressing it in language and come out on the other side. Or, to share the fear with others, and in turn, find a community that makes us feel we are not alone in our worry. I guess poetry, in a Freudian way, is about working through fear, a “talking cure” for an emotion that cannot be wholly remedied. 

On a more generational note, I feel like I am constantly writing away from the fears of my mother and her mother. Fears, that while justifiably grounded in their traumatic experience of the past, beg to be overcome—though in today’s threatening America, these fears become more real by the minute. So, while I am writing away from fear of the past, I am also inadvertently writing towards what is terrifying in our present and future, worrying for the prejudices and violence my children have been born into. Still, in my poems, I am always trying to find a way out of this fear, even when it feels impossible. The will to keep writing, to keep resisting being overcome by terror, is how poetry, for me, stands unafraid.  

FWR: Is there a poem (or poet) (and feel free to respond in the plural!) you love to teach or share?

JKD: There are so, so, so many. This is always one of the toughest questions to answer because there are centuries of incredible writing that came before us and so much goodness being written now. When it comes to teaching, given the Anglo-centric nature of the workshop and the field of poetry in the US more generally, I particularly love exposing students to foreign voices, especially ones of the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. Since I am able to read aloud in Russian—my mother tongue—students can hear how lyric makes music in another language, something I think we need much more of. Other favorite global poets to teach in translation include Czesław Miłosz, Miklós Radnóti, and Paul Celan—because I am glutton for elegy and deeply invested in poetry about the Holocaust. Studying with Garrett Hongo at the University of Oregon instilled in me a commitment to teaching poetry entrenched in history. Rather than provide a long list poems or poets, I’ll say that whether earlier voices or those of my contemporaries, I try to teach poetry that sings its way into making the past ghostly present.