Interview by H.L Hix
H. L. Hix: Is art a letting go? Your book’s first poem, “Ars Poetica with Spider and Peaches,” placed separately, before the sections composed of other poems, poses that question. How would you speak about the importance of letting go? (Its importance to you in writing these poems, its connection to the life experience on which this collection draws, your sense of what lettings-go this book might invite from readers…?) I’m cheating a little here, thinking forward to one of the first poems in the first section, which riffs on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about “the art of losing,” wondering how you experience the art of letting go in relation to the art of losing.
Natalya Sukhonos: I love that you started your interview with the prefatory poem. For me, letting go is partially about relinquishing control over your creation as an artist. It’s actually really difficult, as having control and being in control are very much a part of my character. But as an artist, it’s important to step aside at times during the process of creation so as to invite chance encounters, snippets of dreams, and other whimsical, aleatory happenings into your work. These are the bits of “sunlight” trapped in the resin of memory. Also, I just started practicing aerial yoga and when you are upside down suspended in the air on silk ropes, you are in this interesting space where you’re flying and you’re free and it’s very exhilarating, but it’s also kind of dangerous and you have to trust yourself and your materials not to fall. Similarly, as an artist, you are poised between freedom and trust — you’re giving readers the freedom to experience your work in myriad ways, but you also trust them to follow the lead of the metaphors and images you’ve constructed. I want reading my work to be a very embodied experience, so ideally my poems are inviting the readers to experience this “letting go” in an almost visceral way. Finally, as someone interested in Zen, I would say that only in emptiness can fullness really emerge. And this has to do with the art of losing — it’s only after you’ve lost a person, a country, etc that you can really fully come to terms with who you are.
Hix: This is part of what I feel when I read the book: how complex the interrelationship is between letting go and holding on, the art of losing and the arts of keeping. Surely memory has a special gravity for any immigrant, and its presence is very strong in your book: I’m thinking of the beautiful list in an early poem of things remembered, starting with “the tiny crawfish wrapped in newspaper.” And the arts of keeping continue throughout the collection, culminating for me in the amber necklace in the later poem from which the book’s title comes. Are those same interests and practices (aerial yoga, Zen, and so on) contributors for you to the keeping in art, as well as the letting go?
Sukhonos: Absolutely. When I was a child in Odesa, I used to collect found objects that were evocative or unusual: a glittering marble, a white shell with a groove, a fluff of cotton. I would then pierce these objects with a pin to make the skirts of a miniature princess and then lay out my creations in the hollow of an empty box of chocolate candies. These collections were fragile and had the faint aroma of chocolate. This is how I think of the work of memory: it helps preserve what is fragile and evanescent about our lives. It helps put moments on display, as it were. At the same time, though, you can’t keep these collections (of objects or memories) forever. Part of their beauty is that they are so ephemeral. Zen and aerial yoga remind me of the balance between holding on to objects, people, experiences (in my memory or in language) and then letting them go.
Hix: Your construing of fragility and evanescence here in terms of balance beckons me to a pair of poems later in your book, “Tunnel Vision” and “Odesa Suburbs, Solnechnaya Train Station, 1990,” in which the Lincoln Tunnel and the Solnechnaya Station connect the generations from your grandmother through your daughter, and evoke fragile evanescences (“green flashes of light from fireflies” and a dragonfly’s head that “screams emerald”). The poems do so, though, not (or not only) with a balance of holding on and letting go, but (also) in a vortex of past, present, and future. How does that vortex play out?
Sukhonos: In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot said, “Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.” So for me, poetic flashes that emerge from the work of memory are special ways of seeing that situate the present and what is to come in a particular image from the past. The exotic dragonfly in the “Odesa Suburbs, Solnechnaya Train Station, 1990” poem really did fly into our little commuter train station, but it was also a premonition of our future, of immigration and displacement.
Hix: So Sunlight Trapped in Stone is populated with premonitions of your immigration and displacement. What about correlatives? I’m thinking, for example, of “1939, Lights Twinkling on the Water. Margaret Crossing the Atlantic,” your poem “inspired,” as a footnote reports, “by the story of Margaret Smolensky, a child evacuee from Great Britain to Winnipeg, Canada in 1939.” What is the importance for you of connecting your own experience with others’ experience?
Sukhonos: Given that the book deals so much with personal memory, as well as the historical memory of my country, connecting my experience to the lives of others is key to finding meaning. In “Parachute,” for instance, we see that the narrator’s life in the US would never come to be if her grandfather hadn’t made all of those 94 parachute jumps in war-ravaged Ukraine decades ago. I also feel very strongly about the poems that came from my work in the oral archive Я пишу з війни/ Writings from the War (https://uawitness.com/about-us-2/). Transforming the testimony of ordinary Ukrainians into poetry made their wartime experience embodied and personal. It made me feel a visceral connection to a woman returning to a ravaged home in Bucha, or to a grandfather whose outrageous kindness during the Leningrad blockade was met with sheer indifference. My poems about Mara and Veles also created a more abstract, mythological connection to present-day Ukraine.
Hix: It feels to me as though in this conversation you’ve been concisely and elegantly articulating “superpowers” of poetry: its aid in letting go, its preservation of the fragile and evanescent, its susceptibility to being premonitory, and so on. Now I hear you identifying another: poetry’s capacity to connect personal experience with historical experience. Would you speak further about how in Sunlight Trapped in Stone you draw on that capacity of poetry?
Sukhonos: In Russian, Ukrainian, as well as Spanish and other Romance languages, the word for “story” and the word for “history” are one and the same. And in ancient Greek, poesis, which shares the root with “poetry,” means “to construct” or “to make.” So I think of poetry as a kind of scaffolding of history and its myriad stories. By paying attention to the particulars of human fate, poetry helps us pay attention — and connect to — to the gravitas of a particular historical moment. In this way, “Over the Border and then Nowhere” pauses on the tragedy of illegal border crossings and vile US immigration policies by memorializing what the deceased had left behind — a simple green ribbon, a baseball, a grain of rice inscribed with two names.
Hix: Attention to particulars of human fate, and to particulars of nature: rain water in the grooves in cedar bark, for instance, in your “Storm Sestina.” But those particulars populate a structure, visible for instance in the way Sunlight Trapped in Stone begins and ends with threads: in the very first stanza in the book, “the ballooning spider / who sends a long silken thread / into the molten core” of Mount St. Helens, and in the very last stanza of the book, rain “like a spool of silver thread / from the mouth of a giant catfish.” Is there a way you would speak about the relationship between the particulars collected in your book and the structure in which they are contained?
Sukhonos: Even though I mostly write free verse, I’ve always been fascinated with poetic form. In this collection, I try to match the meaning to the structure I’m working in, such that the poem about my great aunt’s dementia has dangling lines and chaotic placement on the page to signal a mind that’s increasingly disoriented. And “Golden Shovel for Nadia —After Mark Strand, ‘Keeping Things Whole’” uses Terrance Hayes’s invented form to pay homage to Strand’s lines, “We all have reasons for moving/ I move to keep things whole.” The sections of the book, too, divide the poems into Fossilized Sunlight, roughly corresponding to memory, Border Crossings, which is about thresholds and journeys, and Limpid Stone, which speaks to moments of epiphany and joy.
Hix: “Epiphany and joy” would be very satisfying concluding words for this conversation, but at the risk of importunity let me sneak in one last question, about the context of Sunlight Trapped in Stone, the context to which it belongs and the context it helps create. What is its “place” in your world, in your life, in your work? Did the writing of it feel inevitable and necessary? Where has it led you, in terms of who you are and what you are working on now?
Sukhonos: This collection makes me think a lot about the interplay between routine and what takes you outside of routine. As a parent and someone with a day job, I find routine both comforting and tedious. It’s what gives us structure and what imprisons us in said structure(s). Sunlight Trapped in Stone is asking the reader to imagine her place in the world, and then what happens when there are real and imaginary ruptures to that place. These are journeys real and imagined, journeys of (im)migration or memory or whimsy. But these are also journeys in and through language. The collection both situates me as a poet in a very particular time and place — Upstate New York, US, 2026 after having arrived in NYC from Ukraine in the 1990s with a very particular family history. But it also gives me the freedom to move away from these particulars. Without sunlight, a stone can seem dark or dull. But without a stone to land on, sunlight is insubstantial. I think you need both: the confines of language, identity and context, as well as the ability to overcome these, to transfer meaning beyond any given borders, as is the promise of metaphor. And that’s where I am today.
To preorder Sunlight Trapped in Stone visit: https://bookshop.org/a/13094/9798998517037
About the interviewer: H. L. Hix is an author of books of poetry, criticism and essays and has been awarded a fellowship from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). In 2006 he was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is a professor and former director of the creative writing MFA program at the University of Wyoming.