The First Ghost-Ship

I've never really loved poetry. I know, all you literature lovers out there are probably going to hunt me down and lock me in the English department dungeon for saying that. It's not that I don't enjoy poetry when I read it. Over the past couple of years, I've come to appreciate poetry much more; the way the words flow and spill over each other, the simplicity in its mystery. But I don't know all the major poets, I don't have any poems memorized, and I don't own any tomes of poetry.

But there is a very thin book on my bookshelf that stands apart from the Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Bronte: Dancing In Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky.

Ilya Kaminsky--young, modern, Ukrainian, and deaf--seems like the last person who would be a teenage girl's first favorite poet. In fact, when I first read the book, he wasn't. The poems were just a class assignment, not anything to write home about. But then I got to see him read, and everything changed.


Like I said, Kaminsky is Ukrainian. And extremely hard of hearing. The way he reads English is, needless to say, eccentric and at first, overwhelming. Is it yelling or singing? Whatever it was that night, it was impossible to think about anything else. I was captivated and moved. The words on the page weren't just words anymore. Or maybe they were even more words than they ever had been, the most communicative and magical form of words.

Words that I had simply skimmed over before suddenly had new life:

The city trembled, 
a ghost-ship setting sail. 
At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived. 
We lived, yes, don't say it was a dream. 


Afterward, he signed my book. I was one of the last in line, but he still seemed ecstatic to meet me. When I told him my name, he cried, "You have the name of a poet! Are you?" I stammered that I was just learning, leaving out the part that before the creative writing class I was currently taking, I had never before even attempted to write poetry. He filled up the title page of my copy of his book with his awkward, halting handwriting:

For Emily--
who--I hope!--will become the next Emily the Goddess (Dickinson) of American poetry
--Ilya


I may not be anywhere near becoming the next Emily the Goddess, but I knew then and there that I would be a writer.

Now, after a week of wishing I could come up with a more interesting title for my blog, I am finally remembering the words that so changed my world: The city trembled, a ghost-ship setting sail. As I stare into the wide, stormy face of the digital age, I feel like I'm stepping onto the dock of an unreal, unsteady, otherworldly ghost-ship and setting off for the great unknown. Maybe at 16, hearing the rough lilt of a foreign poet, I was being prepared to sail off into the digital age.