Andrey Gritsman: An Interview

by

Daniel M. Jaffe

Andrey Gritsman is a bilingual poet, essayist, and literary editor who immigrated to the U.S. in 1981 from Moscow, Russia. Four of his Russian poetry volumes have been published in New York, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and his English poetry collection, In Transit, was published in 2004 in Bucharest, Romania, with Romanian translations. His first bilingual collection of poems and essays, View From the Bridge, was published in 1999 (WORD, New York), and a second such collection, Long Fall, was published in 2004 (Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York).

How did Andrey come to writing poetry? “I would have to divide my answer into two parts," he notes. "I started writing Russian poetry in my youth, and felt that it was not good enough by the standards of the poets whom I had read, or that my father read to me. I began to write more seriously in my late twenties and produced some decent work. But after my immigration to the United States in my early thirties I fell silent. There was a flood of new language, culture. Plus, I was studying to become an American physician and these things drained my energy at the time. Then, when I was forty and moved to New York and fell in love. Something happened in me, and I started writing different types of poems in Russian and at a different level. It has been nearly twenty years that I have been writing in Russian in my current period of creativity. I started writing in English about 15-18 years ago incidentally. I never planned to do it though I was interested in American poetry, always felt it and had read some. I discovered I could express myself better in American English than in Russian when I touch upon certain subjects, events and emotional strings related to my everyday life in America. As I said this was not a conscious decision, it just occurred. I liked that ‘incident’ because this is exactly how poems happen.”

Themes of isolation and loneliness permeate Andrey’s poetry. Does he consciously set out to explore these issues when he writes? Andrey explains, “I agree that themes of isolation and loneliness are important to me. I think one has to be true to himself and to his writing and it is best to write about what you feel. I certainly don’t sit at the table or a computer and then decide that today I will write about loneliness or about something else. These things just happen. They may start from a certain image, sound, fleeting thought or memory. Having said that, however, I would point out that certain ideas or feelings may stream through your mind or soul at certain times. They may change with time. So you are put in your own stream of consciousness and then you work that field. Therefore, there could be moments when you particularly feel lonely or in love or excited by something and this will forward a few poems in one direction or another.  In other words, there is no conscious decision about what to write, but there is some emotional and sometimes almost a philosophical background that sets the mode of writing for a certain period of time.”

Have the themes in Andrey’s poetry have shifted over time? “It is  certainly not well defined, and I never plan that, but it just happens in both my Russian poetry and English language poetry. Years ago I was focused on issues of adaptation to a new culture, some feeling of alienation, but also curiosity of recognition, the joy of giving names, my own new poetic names to things and events that surround me. They included the pleasure of being an outsider and at the same time an insider, a very curious onlooker, watching American culture, new world streaming around me. I might notice some things that may not be that obvious to people who grew up here—for instance the surrealism of suburban American culture and many other things like that. When I got settled here and my phase of adjustment had passed, I started to probe deeper inside myself.