Ask the Poet: Marina Kraiskaya

An interview with Jen Knox

Marina Kraiskaya is a Ukrainian-American writer and editor of Bicoastal Review. She recently won the Markham Prize for Poetry and has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets. Find her poetry and nonfiction in Poetry International, Southeast Review, Mississippi Review, L.A. Review, Zone 3, The Shore, EcoTheo, Deep Wild, Leavings, and other journals. She lives by the sea with her two cats. Visit mkraiskaya.com to get in touch.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Marina! We were thrilled to share your poetry with our writers (see our issue from March 16, 2024). Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer?

Marina Kraiskaya (MK): Hi! Thank you so much for this opportunity! I’ve been enjoying the variety and ambition of Unleash Lit since discovering you last year.

Poetry came very strangely into my life when I was already an adult. I was studying international relations and Russian at UC Davis, absolutely determined to become an analyst or diplomat. I took some English classes for fun, and poetry workshops became a refuge for me from the cold brutality of war history and statistics, and from the many relationships in my life in which I felt I wasn’t “allowed” to be emotional, dramatic, metaphorical, illogical, devotional. I had never realized that I needed to be, and was, all of those things. I had been conditioned to privilege thought and bury emotion. 

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.” – Audre Lorde

My MFA was also invaluable, widening my perspective on everything from subject to style, and literary history. I was impressed by the cleverness of poets, the double and triple meanings of their astonishing lines, and the magic of a clear image. My old instinct for slicing up and paring down sentences, and for mimicking Russian or French syntax in English, also just let me have my own kind of fun with language. Of course, I made all of the terrible first mistakes of sounding high-minded and syrupy, and I still struggle with my idiosyncrasies. But poetry, like music, opened up new dimensions of thought for me and will always be a major vocation and saving grace of my life, as well as a way to leave something behind. 

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

MK: Well, program director and professor Sandra Alcosser tells her students (especially the women) “no apologia” before their poems and in their essays, so I hear that in my head pretty often, whenever I feel too introverted or have some self-limiting thought. 

Poet and professor Katie Peterson, who I continue to be in awe of, would tell us to “end when the poem can go no further” and that much of negation means that you cannot tell the reader that something is not present in the poem without it being, in fact, present. Similarly, professor Blas Falconer’s refrain was to “use the availably stock of reality” to ground a poem and/or come back to something tangible for the reader to sink their teeth into. He would point out how often poets write and rewrite poems on the same topics, often to our own detriment. That we may need to cut, sometimes, 90% of a poem to get to that one line that is both authentic and original to the reader as well as writer, and begin again from there. (Pound did something like that for Eliot – it is a treasure to have good readers you can trust.) 

Writers like me – lovers of the aesthetic and the lush – learn from piling on too much, satisfying that need, and then chiseling down to “simplify, simplify” as Thoreau said. I think anyone’s ego can get stuck in that first “final” draft – especially if you publish it, so of course you are immediately validated for something that could have been better, and you start keeping score…. all a mistake, I think. 

I’m not sure who I am to give advice, but still, I would tell anyone, anywhere: Write alone for months, years. Let it be ecstatic and new, let it be terrible and cliche. Then, bring in a few trusted readers for your best work. Do not think of the public sphere or of your name. Trying to impress is, to me, failure. And, read every book (not Pinterest poetry) you can get your hands on. If you don’t, you’re guaranteed to be a bad writer.  

JK: I love how you pay homage to such wonderful mentors. Please share with us a few lines from a work you admire, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

MK: I’ll just take this opportunity to share how Allen Ginsberg punched me in the face with

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

Ginsberg showed me that you could still be smart and tell it straight. He gave me the permission to go a little bit insane and to simultaneously hold both polarities of my immigrant love and thankfulness for America and my immense disappointment and hope for the improvement of our great failures. I wasn’t conscious, until later, of the body, the breath, of Whitman’s ghost, of the way that truths come once you have full control over the line. But the onslaught of politics and music I could easily drink. I don’t write very much like him, but that poem is number one for me. 

JK: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?

MK: My first minor little publications in journals and an anthology were some thrill, but at the time I wasn’t hanging my hat on anything to do with that world. I think that is a strength, as I’ve said – not getting the ego too mixed up in art, but rather letting it be an outlet and a personal practice akin to meditation. 

I do remember that around the last year of my MFA, I began to send poems out, and I felt like I could finally call myself a poet without imposter syndrome. Winning the Markham Prize was a happy moment; to have the effort I put into that poem be appreciated by the judge was lovely. To not be following many of the current trends but still be published makes me feel seen in a way that a workshop can’t. 

My recent efforts in the poetry community have taken me out of the classroom into the real world, so to speak – and all of THAT mutual, reverberating love for the poetic craft in subcultures across the U.S. and the world – is what I dreamed it would be.

JK: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?

MK: I am currently accepting poetry and nonfiction submissions for the upcoming issue of the journal Bicoastal Review. I will also have a book or two of poetry out at some point, but I am not in a rush. Please find my publication history and some of my poems at mkraiskaya.com. I am also a professional editor (since 2015) who works with books, manuscripts, marketing content, blogs, and everything else.

Thank you, Marina! Readers, if you missed it, please check out Marina’s poems here.