12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Moysaenko

Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in Chicago Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Poetry Review. He practices law and lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I felt like I could breathe. It made me feel less delusional about my long commitment to and sacrifices for poetry. This more recent work is, for the first time, project-bound: being about the war in Ukraine. So it is more thematically cohesive as well as more direct and contextualized than my previous work, which not only arose from questions and silences but continued to dwell there, rather than moving onto higher ground.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I recited poems every week in Ukrainian school, which I attended from kindergarten through junior year of high school. And I read more poetry than anything else as a child. My brain more naturally gravitates toward the poetic line and its practice of attention, as opposed to plot or character development. The music, I think, first drew me into the poem, deeper and deeper until I found myself in a tunnel unlike the world created by fiction or non-fiction. Though I still read plenty of it, fiction was less of an interest—as a writer of things—compared to poetry when young, and that mostly stuck.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My work often originates as a collection of flotsam and jetsam, but goes through multiple forms, requiring months of accumulation, erasure, revision, and editing. I write discrete lines, or full stanzas with no anchor. Then I mull it all over, add to the existing lines or combine them. Or I write a long, sloppy ramble, which does not work at all, and I later slice it up. Occasionally, if lucky, a poem comes out whole without much effort and without needing much revision at all. Funnily, those turn out to be my favorites (though not always others’ favorites). So my writing is both quick and slow. Writing projects are going on at all times, at various stages of development, in the same way I have multiple books open for reading at once.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem usually begins with an image for me. I tend to write short pieces that either stand alone or sidle up against other short pieces to become stanzas or sections of a serial poem. Over the years, I have noticed that having the concept of a “book” helps direct me, so that I am not casting around aimlessly for months or even years producing poems whose only relationship is that my ever-mutable mind wrote them.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Orality is extremely important to the process. The poems’ sound is largely—twinned with image—my entry. If it doesn’t sound right, it’s gone. Public readings are a community-sustaining way of showing this to others. Though they take a lot out of me, I do enjoy giving readings, enacting the work and guiding readers’ through the way I hear the book.

6 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think it would be prudent if the role of the writer in the U.S. were cultural bellwether, counsel, attaché.

7 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I do not find working with an editor to be difficult, having spent more than a decade being workshopped and taking advice from editors. I really value them. Outside suggestions or queries are useful as quick correctives for a problem I had missed, or as opportunities to rethink a decision and either reapproach that crux or reaffirm my underlying reasoning. All of that, I think, strengthens the work.

8 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has been a natural state for me to move among poetry, translation, critical work, and fiction. I may spend months or years focused on one or two, toggling between them, and then find myself drained. Other genres rush in to fill the space left and reinvigorate me. Translation, especially, recharges the mind for my own poems. There, you are both creating and kneeling at the mercy of existing language, balancing between fidelity and estrangement, mimicry and imagination, domestication and foreignization, to mold a poem in English that does to an English speaker what the original did to readers of that language. Switching modes feels like stepping out of an airport in the tropics and taking off your parka. So I never have writers’ block per se. There’s always some other kind of writing I could be doing if one type is coming up dry. And the genres necessarily challenge one another. Is this really a narrative poem or a story that hasn’t been completed? What form best serves this idea? What can this form do that the others cannot?

9 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

With a “9-5” job, I write when I can: a snippet in the early morning, something after dinner, a few hours on the weekend. The trick for me has been to keep the mind engaged with the literary, with the way a poet attends to the world, at least for a few dedicated moments every day; that may not be actual writing, but it keeps the writer in my mind alive.

10 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to international writers to pull me out of the milieu and habits of U.S. literature.

11 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Geranium, river clay, lilac, pipe tobacco.

12 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Many forms influence my poems: nature’s patterns and morality, visual art’s clarity and invention, architecture’s stories, the way music moves structurally and emotionally.

13 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Here is an incomplete list of poets: George Oppen, Etel Adnan, Paul Celan, Tomas Tranströmer, W.S. Merwin, Alejandra Pizarnik, Amelia Rosselli, Wallace Stevens, Serhiy Zhadan, Wisława Szymborska, Franz Wright, Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine, Mark Strand, Yannis Ritsos, Rosmarie Waldrop, Chika Sagawa, Anne Carson, Nathaniel Mackey, John Ashbery, James Tate, Louise Glück, Cole Swensen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Susan Howe.

14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to learn how to grow grapes and make wine. I’d like to learn a few more languages. I’d like to build a cabin. I’d like to write a book that requires me to change my life in some manner in order to write it.

15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I might have stuck with music and pushed past the, at times, frustrating drudgery of going over a bar again and again. Or I may have more seriously pursued astrophysics or psychology, when professors in college offered opportunities to work in their labs and I chose poetry instead—which seemed to encompass every discipline plus the intangible.

16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I just found myself writing (as transcription, transfiguration, exorcism, reclamation). It was the one thing I compulsively did that would make an entire day go by, quickly, with joy, absorbed in the practice.

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I am late to these, but nevertheless: Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald; Casting Deep Shade, C.D. Wright. 

18 - What are you currently working on?

I am revising a novel I began in late 2014, set in New England, which I workshopped with Noy Holland. And I am developing a second novel that charts a Ukrainian family’s journey from World War I through the Cold War. Also, I am polishing a third poetry collection largely written during the pandemic about what it means to tend, to take care of the earth, loved ones, yourself, and those who do not want the help you are able to give.

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