2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Valzhyna Mort

Music for the Dead and Resurrected, Valzhyna Mort
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
2021 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist 

The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 23, 2021.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body. Her work has been honoured with the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. She is a recipient of the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation projects. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian.

Your author biography mentions that you write in both English and Belarusian. How do the two sides of your language interact with each other? Do you approach your English writing different than your Belarusian writing? Are there subjects or projects you reserve for one language but not the other?

When I write, I reinvent English for myself and I also reinvent Belarusian for myself. Language of my poetry is intentional, articulated slowly, grotesquely. Neither English nor Belarusian is my first language. I’ve chosen both in order to reinvent myself because no literature in any language was expecting my arrival. In both languages, what I’m after is music. Language, for me, is a place of fluidity, exile, reinvention, humor, animal sounds, and the music of plain words.

Was there anything that writing through grief revealed that you weren’t expecting? Are the poems in Music for the Dead and Resurrected part of a longer, ongoing process?

I don’t think that in my book I was writing through grief. I write towards. Towards music, towards astonishment. A day of writing for me is a day of ardor, of exuberance, of love to every sound and thing. About unexpected things being revealed: Czelaw Milosz wrote that poetry is something quite indecent because it reveals a thing we didn’t know we had in us. A good day of writing is always a day of indecent revelations.

What is the process of putting together a manuscript? At what point in the process of writing the poems that became Music for the Dead and Resurrected did the shape of the larger manuscript begin to reveal itself?

It’s essential for a poet to have a sense of form. I think of a book as a form that can be likened to a short story (a long one!) or a musical piece in several parts. My process is, as with everything else, my intuition, my gut, my taste in music, in arrangement of space, my intuitive understanding of when to slow down and when to accelerate, when to tell a story and when to cast a spell, how to balance small and large, when to make a turn and when to return. And my favorite one: when to blow up all of these structures by turning on a blender during a concert; when to transform by starting to speak in moo and bah-bah-bah instead of words.

You mention that your process is intuitive. Does form emerge intuitively as well, or have you a sense, as you begin to work on a particular poem, of where you might wish to end up? Or is it a combination of both?

The poet emerges out of listening, inquiring, submitting to language and being carried away by it, out of attention. There's an emotion – a feeling of being human – and the depth of this feeling is defined precisely by how it resists the possibility of language. This feeling cannot be captured by language, but what about setting it free with language? A poet tries to set both free, language and emotion. As for ending up somewhere, I only wish to end up at the completion of the poem. What the poem searches for, from its first word, is the poem's end, its last words.

There is very much a sense of music and rhythm in your work. How did this emerge? Were you a musical child, or has this emerged through other means, whether learning an instrument, or catching the music of the lyric itself?

I have no ear for music but, since early childhood, I was tied to an accordion as to an anker or a sinker. I played accordion daily and also sang (in truth: silently opened mouth) in the Opera House in Minsk. My book explores how music was inherited by me from the history of violence and loss, both familial and national. How music became a vessel for my family's trauma. Music for me is the other side of everything that is real and tangible in my past: Liszt's La Campanella is my mother's home dress.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Music for the Dead and Resurrected was completed? What have you been working on since?

I've been writing but since I have no sense of where I would end up, I'd rather not give you any details.