Episode 72: Ilya Kaminsky

Rachel Zucker speaks with author, editor, translator and professor, Ilya Kaminsky. Kaminsky and Zucker discuss Kaminsky’s newest collection, Deaf Republic, fabulism, public poetry readings, accessibility, the problematic American obsession with newness and publishing as much as possible, capitalism and the corporatization of academia, Whitman and Dickinson, outsiders versus classicists, discovering Isaac Babel, writing as an ecstatic experience, the benefits and dangers of translation, the way capitalism renders people uncertain, and the poet’s responsibility to awaken the senses.