We Lived Happily During the War

Kaminsky’s poem is written in the lyric mode. His invocation of Bishop in Line 11 further shows that Kaminsky chose to honor both American and Soviet literary lineages. Further, the poem was published one year after the Iraq war and the shooting of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, challenging poets to reflect on their role during a time of crisis. During this era, Kaminsky was involved in a number of translation and editing projects including Words Without Borders, and Poetry International and the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

Many poets choose to confront the reality of the Iraq war in their poetry. Notably, in the early 2000s, American poet and Iraq veteran Brian Turner wrote a series of books examining the brutalities of war and trauma. The idea that poetry must also speak to times of crisis finds roots in Kaminsky’s own early literary influences: the poets Mandelstam, Brodsky, and Tsvetaeva, all poets for whom political persecution is inseparable from their written experience. As a fellow USSR-born poet, Brodsky is especially celebrated in Kaminsky’s first collection, Dancing in Odessa.

Detisch, writing in Blackbird, draws attention to the way Kaminsky both honors and transcends his literary predecessors:

One can feel the pressure of the “Great Ones” bending the poems into lines and music not yet totally fulfilled.