An interview with Olga Mikolaivna
Olga Mikolaivna’s cities as fathers is a punk meditation on place, mortality, memory, and the daily structures, rituals and interactions that make the skeleton of a city. In her debut poetry chapbook, a solitary philosophical and poetic mind wanders several cities’ streets, passes through its artifacts, and ponders language, cityscapes, and being fathered. cities as fathers was the 2022 Editor’s Choice in Tilted House’s 1BR / 3BATH chapbook contest, was published in 2023, and will receive a second print run in autumn this year.
I first met Mikolaivna and was introduced to her work in an MFA writing workshop. Our writerly friendship began when I attended a reading of cities as fathers at Book Catapult, a beloved San Diego bookshop. In a fifteen-minute reading, Mikolaivna showed me what was possible when poetry breathed in the cross-genre. Consequently, I bought and read the full chapbook, and its irreverent yet deeply attached voice kept haunting me. I decided to ask Mikolaivna about her work and what followed was a dialogue about the worth and definition of art, of place, of linguistic selfhood. Mikolaivna keeps exploring her relationship to the cities she visits, inhabits, frequents, keeps returning to. From Kyiv to Olympia to Philadelphia, she is attentive to the inherent insightfulness and sadness of transit and daughterhood.
Below is an edited version of our conversation from January 2024, during which Mikolaivna expressed her insights on nationhood, accessible art, and the quotidian.
Kimaya Kulkarni: Since this chapbook is titled and about ‘cities as fathers,’ can we start with your literary and poetic relationship to the two cities that feature most prominently in this chapbook—Kyiv and Philadelphia? Where do these cities stand in your poetic heart? How do they envelope and influence your relationship to literature?
Olga Mikolaivna: For me there is a sense of longing for Kyiv, even before the war. Having been born there, come of a certain age there, and moved from there when I was 9, the city is a constant backdrop for my life whether I recognize it or not. Like a sheen over every place I go, a film over my interactions with people, with my environment, value systems, tonalities. When I was able to return the last time, it was a city I wasn’t fully able to recognize. I don’t mean that in an outward way, although changes to streets, buildings, and infrastructure are inevitable. The thing with recognition is that once one gets accustomed to something—a change, a new monument—it becomes recognizable. The city has developed in a tonal direction. The undertone remains, yet there is a freshness to the previous misery and desperation—a sense of change, hope, youth. An “out with the old” kind of thing. Philadelphia, for me, has a similar undertone. There is a gruffness in both cities which is often recognized as anger. Anger does exist, yes. It’s more free in these two cities. But beneath the anger is a kindness, helpfulness, camaraderie. Not always. I’m making generalizations, but this is what syncs the two places in my mind.
KK: Where did you grow up? How does that play into your relationship with cities?
OM: I grew up in Olympia, in Washington State. It’s very passive. People don’t seem to want to talk to one another.
KK: And that’s a vibe you like?
OM: No, no. I want to talk to people; I just don’t need the pleasantries.
KK: You mentioned Olympia in cities as fathers once I think, “He was yelling at the sky, cursing the heavens… In Olympia someone is cursing something at all hours of the day.”
I wrote cities in a weird time of my life, a returning to myself, a coming back together. I was living in Philadelphia, which really took me in…. It became a surrogate home, a surrogate father, if you may.
OM: Olympia is at the bottom of the sound. Washington has this inlet in between the peninsula and the rest of the state. Most of the population lives around the sound. Its first name was the Salish Sea. At the bottom of the Salish Sea is Olympia. And it’s where everything kind of gets stuck. I feel like there’s a stuckness there. The mudflats are down there. When the tide goes out, it’s not just normal sand, it’s basically quicksand. You just get stuck in it, you get stuck in this mud. And there’s lots of industry and lots of past. Anyway, that’s a different book. But the point is, I think about Olympia as a place where people go when they are trying to figure something out, and so there’s this constant agitation. So that line comes from this neverending agitation.
I wrote cities in a weird time of my life, a returning to myself, a coming back together. I was living in Philadelphia, which really took me in. The longing I was feeling for a person had similar dimensions to my longing for home. I was also living in Philadelphia when the war in Ukraine started—it became a surrogate home, a surrogate father, if you may. But I don’t believe I have a singular city father. They all play a role.
KK: Speaking of cities, it’s interesting that you viscerally link your self or your poetic self to cities as opposed to nations. I was wondering about how you identify and do you ever think of yourself as an American or a Russian American, because I’m guessing that you prefer to tie your selfhood to cities instead of nations.
OM: I actually am afraid of nation-states and nations. I think that nations and nationalism are very dangerous and harmful. Especially after the war, there has been a surge in Ukrainian nationalism and patriotism, which makes a lot of sense, to the point where Russian is no longer spoken because it’s the language of invasion, and people switch to Ukrainian. Not everyone, but that is the trend at the moment. Culturally, there have been so many overlaps for so many years, even before the Soviet Union, before the lines of the nations have been developed in the post-collapse. In the book, Kyivan Rus—Kyiv—was the center of Russia orthodoxy and so if we really think about it, technically what Putin is doing right now is trying to give back to the origins of some sort. But I’m not interested in the origins because we can’t go backwards, and that’s where the danger exists of thinking about mythology and purity of what was first. What I am interested in is how the overlaps continue. I think of myself as post-Soviet because of the way in which I experience the world, being from what is now Ukraine, which at some point was Kyivan Rus, which is technically Ukrainian Russia—you know what I mean? Which was also Byzantine at some point. So again, I’m not interested in the origins. I’m post-Soviet, because the echoes of the past surge through and the war is post-Soviet, too, in some sense, and in this way there’s not a nation that I align myself to. Post-Soviet, because it’s like a historical state of being.
And I come from those artifacts. I guess I am an artifact of what the Soviet Union once was and tried to be.
KK: The last page of your chapbook is about history. “History as horror story,” in Bolaño’s words. Where did that ending come from?
OM: I didn’t write this during the [Russia-Ukraine] war. I wrote this before the full-scale war. But I’m thinking history with a capital H, and I’m thinking what drives this history with a capital H? It’s progress. History with a capital H is all about progression. We start at the A and then we move to B and then to C and then there’s nothing around it. Not only is it progress-oriented, but it’s very arrow-oriented. There’s nothing surrounding it. There’s no context almost, at a certain point. And I was thinking about immigration or how I even got here. Bolaño writes of Latin American exile, because he was exiled from Chile and he spent a lot of his adulthood in Mexico and died in Spain. He writes about the Chilean dictatorship. I’m thinking about history as what moves people and why people move. And I don’t think it’s a negative thing. Movement is important and necessary. But what are the stakes of this movement? Because often it’s not that someone wants to move, it’s that they’re forced.
KK: Another entity and creature and phantasm that’s being alluded to in this chapbook is language. On page 9, you explicitly mention language: “But I carry a Slavic name, speak the Russian language…the contouring of language.” Then you connect it to place and geography. Your work is sprinkled with Russian words. There’s an understanding of the inherent connection between place, language, memory. As a poet you’re not just rooted in the languages that you know and write poetry in but you’re also connected to the heteroglossic poetic language that is specific to your poetry. How do you see your relationship to language manifest in your poetry?
OM: In my poetics there lies an incessant, unquelled longing and melancholy. A search for something, a never ending movement. Again and again and again. In this sense, all cities have something in common—similar smells, sounds, dreams. I search for this in literature, in poetics. I search for a search.
The idea of language that is tied to a nation as a singular language, monolingual nation, is fairly new. So I guess, before nation-states we had city-states. People spoke multiple languages. It was expected that people speak multiple languages because of, and I’m making generalizations, the different people who they wanted to interact with. The idea of this monolingual state is very contemporary. For me, language is tied to place because that is where I lived and spoke it. Living in Kyiv, most people grow up speaking both Ukrainian and Russian. Of course, there’s the supremacy of Russian. Often, Ukrainian is looked down upon as a dialect or something even though it’s not. It’s its own language. Oftentimes within my memory, I’ll be thinking of a place and then I think about the language that I spoke when I was in that place, and that could be whichever one, but for me home means Russian. And Ukrainian, which I had forgotten, was the complement, close second, but it’s not the one that I grew up speaking, but it’s part of this memorial framework.
KK: Where is the ‘Americanness’ or ‘America’ of it all within the scheme of being post-Soviet? Because America, as a country, has a fraught relationship with Soviet Russia, to say the least, and continues to with present-day Russia. How do you reconcile that?
OM: I wonder if the two places could exist—the Soviet Union could only exist as the Soviet Union in relationship to the United States—only because the two depended on one another for their own ideologies, and their own life force. I have no idea how it would have turned out, but the Soviet Union would not be what it has been and my growing up in the 90s would not have been what it was without the United States. So much of Americanness as an undercurrent has to do with living on the fall of other people and other places. The war in Ukraine right now only exists because of American intervention. To be American is to be included in the globalized war whether one wants to or not. I think to me, to be American is also to not recognize one’s own place in the globalized scheme of things and just happily live…that’s where returning to history is so important as a type of resistance to that Americanness and placing oneself into a context.
KK: Your writing style is kind of irreverent in that things, places, memories, and people in your poetry remain relatively uncontextualized and unexplained, unjuxtaposed by images or verses that will shed light on why a specific line exists in the way that it does. What drives and influences this approach?
OM: Whether I like it or not, Calvino’s Invisible Cities has had a profound effect on my work.
In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, all cities resemble one another. There is a repetition of images, feelings, architectures. I never think about Calvino when writing, but in answering this question it occurred to me that there’s a thread of life or familiarity in places which simply does not contextualize. I think that’s an unconscious choice of mine while writing. While on a conscious level, when writing, when really in the zone, or the trance of poetics, there is the connective thread of the dailiness that’s aroused. One city led me to another.
It was after reading Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives that I decided to go to Mexico City. It was always a city, a place I knew of, but it was only after the literary connection that I was moved to visit. I’m interested in how dailiness and interactions live outside of logic. For example, why do I pick up this book at this time, and decide to turn that corner at that moment? Some people call this synchronicity or flow. Poet, playwright, and translator Ariana Rieines calls this “rhyme.” I’m not sure I have a name for it. My writing practice came out of memory, and memory has no reason. It’s blurry, shifting, deceptive. Who cares who Bob is? Who cares for the context of Bob? Bob was there, that’s what matters.
KK: What do you mean when you say dailiness?
OM: The quotidian. The going through the motion, the survival. I’m walking around, I see a person doing something and something about their gesture. Czech writer Milan Kundera writes about this gesture—his narrator is taken by this elderly woman who came out of the pool in her swimming suit, and she waved and it was a wave that held so much. But it was just this daily thing. She just came out, she was swimming, and the wave held…not the world, but it just held so much information. It transformed her back to being a child, and all this memory. The dailiness is that going-through and passing-through and writing on the transit.
KK: Writing on transit as in writing about transit or writing while commuting?
OM: I write about transit, but when I’m on it I’m just writing as a writer. On certain days, just being around other people and watching people interact and go through their day really gets me and imbues whatever it is that I do, writing-wise. That’s the dailiness. The experience of going about the day and having these really quiet interactions, silent interactions.
KK: When did you first start thinking about poetry as something that doesn’t give much away?
OM: Probably when I came into academia. And I came into it interested in the abstract, the Avant Garde, or the hybrid that’s often based on theory, and interested in writers who fuck with theory a lot. Writers that bring theory into their poetics, and confuse you—you have no idea who “S” is, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s not about us. I was seeing a lot of people writing in narrative form, and narrative poetry. That reading then was projected onto my work and I felt my work needed to be more narrativized. And that’s when I was like, “Wait, but aren’t you supposed to try harder?”
KK: Try harder at what?
OM: At reading.
KK: You’re so right. I feel like even in the way you talk about how the text exists outside of the reader, that it should always be acknowledged that the text is not about the reader’s projection. It can be about the reader’s projection but the projections cannot be about the work’s potentiality.
OM: Exactly!
KK: You are one of the few people in our writing workshop who is very clear about not wanting any prescriptive feedback. What has the journey toward this stance been like? How did you come to form a creative practice that is so sure of itself?
OM: I find that prescriptive feedback centers the reader and the reader’s expectation over the piece itself. Prescriptive feedback does not take into account the life of the work, where it wants to go, where the currents are taking it. Recently I told the undergraduates I’m working with that in their workshop I hope they stray away from sentences such as, “I would have liked to see.” Because you know, we all want a lot of things, and reading isn’t an egg order at the diner, nor is it like choosing your own adventure. Even a choose-your-own-adventure story has limitations. This compulsive sidelining with the reader’s experience and their desires is incredibly harmful to literature. We might as well all stop reading and writing if we continue on this path, because at some point all works will become uniform, and in some ways MFA work has already become uniform and standardized in its formulas. So, what’s the point of creativity? I think it’s absolutely vital for readers in workshop and outside of workshop to be able to distinguish the work itself outside of themselves. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t be able to say, “I connected to this because of a, b, c” or “I couldn’t find myself relating.” That’s the other important side of reading and literature for me, which is to get lost in a familiarity or dissonance, but at the end of the day, the text itself has absolutely nothing to do with me as the reader.
KK: When we talk about publishing, the reader is always talked about. It’s the market—the reader is the consumer and the buyer and patron of your work. And this responsibility that you should be giving the reader what they want, but also, that’s not art and that’s not what the reader wants. The reader does want a committed artist who will not pander to them.
OM: That’s what I want!
KK: I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and it was heartbreaking. I was shattered. I respect Miyazaki so much because he believes in his own method of making art and he is committed to that method. And he will never disrespect or undermine me, because he’s being true to what his art is. And therefore I will always respect whatever he makes.
OM: Because he doesn’t change and meander, and it’s not based on popularity. I trusts that whoever watches my “movie” will get whatever it is. There’s this line in an interview with Stephanie Cawley, a Philly-based poet who went to the University of Pittsburgh. Their advisor was Dawn Lundy Martin, who once crossed out one line in a poem of theirs and said, “I don’t need this, trust your reader.” And Stephanie talked about how this blew their mind and changed their whole poetics. I really vibe with that.
KK: When you qualify something as art or not, it always begs the question: Who gets to decide what is art? And the answer to that is always rooted in power hierarchies. What gets called “art” is always political and power-based.
OM: A hill I’m willing to die on is this idea of accessibility where people are like, “Well this theorist is writing accessible theory—not like Derrida.” People really love to hate Derrida because they think he’s just spewing out nonsense. I think anyone is capable of reading and listening and seeing whatever it is no matter the difficulty level. It’s just a matter of time and a matter of effort. If we all were given the time to sit and struggle through Derrida, we would understand it. I believe that this idea of making things accessible actually creates a barrier of thinking.
KK: It’s kind of an easy way to dismiss a theorist. I would rather someone dismiss Derrida because of a fallacy in his arguments than just the fact that the language is not accessible. It’s not a very strong argument against him.
OM: Theory is the ultimate poetry in my opinion. In terms of nothing being given away. You read Derrida, you read Kristeva, and you’re like, “What the fuck is being said?” You have to read it over and over again. I’m reading Glissant right now, the Poetics of Relation, and what I thought I understood five years ago, I did, but not at all. I just got a glimpse of it. Now I’m rereading it and I’m still not sure I get the whole thing. Maybe I’ll never understand the whole thing. But that’s the whole point—you reread it and you reread it and then you’re like, “Oh yeah. That relates to me now because of a, b and c. But also, I’m in a different place now and I’m able to accept it.”
When I came to this country, I didn’t speak English at all. I knew ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ and ‘hi’ and ‘bye’. And I was given these children’s books to learn how to read in English that were like, “The bird sings chirp, chirp, chirp,” and I wasn’t very into it, to say the least. I used to read actual literature in Russian, so I definitely wasn’t going to read that! Instead, I read Harry Potter, which, at the time, was way too difficult. I understood half of it, but something seeped in and something got in there, and then I reread it and I was like, “Oh I get it more now.” So there’s also this necessity to be able to understand. I think people need to be uncomfortable and need to be like, “Listen I’m not going to get all of it.”
KK: We are candidates in an MFA program that specifically focuses on cross-genre work. In workshop, you have often shown resistance to divulging the genre of your work when you’re asked to do that. And that’s fair. Although cities as fathers is qualified as a poetry chapbook, it’s also full of blank spaces and wide distances between lines, sudden prosaic paragraphs that are bandied together one after another and finally a line just splinters off to more blank space. So how would you define or describe the empty spaces within this work? Are they really empty? Are they silence? Are they a pause? How do you view them?
OM: I don’t know what I conceive that white space as. But for me, it is space. It is a pause. The words on page 11 can’t possibly live on the same page as the words on page 10. Just because they simply need to be apart. And it’s not like an infection. It’s not about purity. Maybe it’s part of the meandering and maybe it’s part of the memoryscape that kind of flashes in and out. My writing is a little snapshotty—one memory, one scene. My first practice was black and white photography. There’s a stillness to black and white photography, and apartness. There’s negative and positive space. It renders more spatial thinking.
KK: This chapbook is full of graves and funerals. Those images are very present. The first person in this book feels very lonely. It’s a melancholic, lonely, ponderance on things.
OM: I have a few writing voices. I have one writing voice that’s a little bit irreverent, who’s me in my mid-twenties or early twenties. Maybe so much of my writing voice is my self from my twenties, and then my two different moods of irreverence come from being a punk, and the melancholy and the loneliness also comes from not being able to understand or distinguish or even separate myself from my feelings. So everything kind of took a hue or a tone of grayness and melancholy. I guess there’s something in this writer’s voice, perhaps dealing with the feelings that I experienced in my twenties after I visited Kyiv and went to this funeral. We visited the cemeteries to visit the graves of my grandparents who died in kind of melodramatic, tragic ways and so there’s a reconciliation that’s happening. Right now, I don’t feel that loneliness, but this speaks very true to the time I was living in Philadelphia and trying to figure some shit out.
KK: I sense the thematic presence of daughterhood in this work, given that the book is about cities as exercising a fatherhood over the writer.
OM: I haven’t ever considered daughterhood as a theme, or even myself as a daughter in writing. Although, even in its lack, daughterhood is being orbited. Daughterhood is an amputated limb. I have a fine relationship with my mother, but the lack of a father figure, I suppose, keeps on returning. I don’t even want it, and the memory is forged in some way, since I don’t consider the lack, don’t notice it, but at times maybe there is something to grasp for, and oops, it isn’t there. I think a lack of a parental figure, whether mortal or not, is a type of death, a need arises to reckon with the absence. To note it. Grieve it. Ross Gay writes so beautifully about grief in his book of essays Inciting Joy. He calls it a metabolization. Learning to metabolize. In childhood, metabolization is unnoticed, or not as consciously perceived. So maybe I’m consciously metabolizing it now, retrospectively. There have been physical deaths of people I care about in my life—I don’t feel as moved to write about it. I think it’s an undertone, again.
KK: If not daughterhood, then fatherhood? Gendering cities not as a feminine presence but as a masculine, looming presence.
OM: Fathers do a lot of things. But there are two parts to how I view fatherhood. One, they nurture, they are to be guides on love, maybe something like coaches. But also, there’s an inherent violence and inherent sexualization of one’s daughter whether or not it is present in the everyday. So when I was thinking about living in cities, yes they nurture you and they push you but they also fuck you up. I was thinking about the dichotomy of love and harm that fathers can produce. And, of course, mothers have the same ability to create the conditions of love and harm. But, there is something about the way men tend to walk away from families more often than women, mostly because there is more freedom to do so, and less repercussions. What I mean by that is the traditional image of the mother is of a pure, present, and self-sacrificing woman, and anything less than that is demonized. Fatherhood has less stakes socially, and more freedom to be fallible. I think of cities as having that freedom for fallibility.
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Olga Mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Other works can be found in the Tiny Mag, LitHub, Metatron Press, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia.
Kimaya Kulkarni is a fiction writer from Pune. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Writing at the University of California San Diego where peaceful student protestors continue to stand in solidarity with Palestine against Israel’s genocide. She also helps edit Bilori Journal and Alchemy. Her fiction can be found in Liminal Transit Review, Lily Poetry Review, ROM Mag, Honey and Lime Lit and Four Palaces Publishing.
