Alina Pleskova released her first full-length book of poems, Toska, in June of this year with Deep Vellum Press. I read the collection with excitement in just one afternoon. Then, we wrote back and forth together in the interview below in which we discussed the nature of Pleskova’s writing process as a collective, the concept of engaging with the Internet as a friend, and the hopefulness that poems offer solace in just figuring out an existence.
Caroline Shurtleff: To start, tell me about releasing your debut full-length poetry collection. As a Dallas native, I was excited to see you publish with Deep Vellum. What drew you to Deep Vellum as a press?
Alina Plesoka: Honestly, it’s a dream pairing for me. Deep Vellum’s whole publishing ethos, the beautiful books they make, and the fact that they care so deeply about literature in translation (they’re the biggest publisher of work in translation in the U.S., in fact!) make me really proud to publish with them. This may sound silly, but I was super stoked when I learned that Will Evans (the publisher) came up in punk and hardcore scenes. That was a formative part of my teens and twenties, and shaped a lot of my views and sensibilities about supporting and sustaining a scene, community care, counterculture, politics—so many things. That and DV’s love of Eastern European literature? I was like, wow, the fates have it all figured out here. Also, big shout out to Sebastian Paramo, my editor, for setting this whole process in motion. I feel very fortunate all around.
CS: I love that combination of shared influences as grounds for your excitement. The structured chaos of hardcore and Eastern European lit really marry the ideal of spontaneity and desire in Toska. And what was your writing process like—in the context of writing for a full collection?
AP: A couple of poems in Toska are revisions of ones that were in my 2017 chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us. The rest happened through the only process that has ever ‘worked’ for me (scare quotes because I’m not sure it’s effective, so much as the only way I seem to be able to do it): jotting down lines/images here and there as I went about daily life, and eventually accumulating enough detritus that poems began to take shape from it. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Eventually (like, five years later), I felt that I had the makings of a book. I brought all of it to a manuscript development workshop run by the poet Ted Rees. That was where I felt definitively nudged toward considering my pile of poems to be on its way to being a book. I definitely start to lose sight of what’s working in a project if I sit with it by myself for long enough. The poets in that workshop were so sharp, and I really trusted their insights.
CS: This collection—as much of your work does—hinges upon ideas of yearning and desire. I feel these themes are inherent to the concept of writing poetry itself, in that poetry is an expressed desire for connection. What is your relationship to processing through writing? Do you write in the moment, years later, or does it change with each poem?
AP: Yes! That’s a big part of why I write poems at all—the desire to connect, disclose, relay. It’s like, “Here is my experience of being alive—isn’t this so wild?”—coming as close as you can to that through language and how you arrange it.
Immediacy tends to be part of my deal. It works out better that way, too, because my memory is pretty glitchy. When a line floats into my mind, or an image stays with me, or overheard language catches my ear, I make sure to capture it. Less important is what it’s for—noticing myself noticing it is enough.
CS: I agree. Poetry as practice, or conversation with yourself, even the action of being empathetic toward a moment is essential in personally derived meaning. Can you give an example of that process for a Toska poem?
AP: My poems are almost-always vernacular first person (the voice is always some version of my speaking voice), and as I said, happen through living. It’s rare that I think, “I need to write a poem about X” and set about writing it. I’m very influenced by generations of New York School poets, who considered every part of our quotidian existence—from conversations with friends, to what you eat for lunch, to the art and music and pop cultural detritus you take in—to be poem-‘worthy’. And anything else can go into that sauce: daily worries, sex, money, memories, dreams, your lived environment, the drudgeries and joys of a given day or a life.
So for example, “Sacred Bath Bomb” spun off from thinking about my nonbelief in the concept of a career, precarity, and who gets to worry less, paradoxically feeling grounded by thinking about the astral realm, what I cherish and what helps me stave off despair. The seasonings for that poem-sauce were a text from my dear friend Jack, frivolous enjoyments tinged with unease (glitter is shit for the environment, Airbnb is unethical and harmful), dancing with Sun Ra Arkestra in a cemetery atrium (truly a highlight of my life), stuff pulled from recent news headlines. Poems often come together in this way for me—compiling things my mind latched on to, arranging them around a feeling or vibe or concern or idea, doing some associative threading. Life is so bizarre, confounding, and variable—everything I need to make a poem is here (picture me tapping the hood of my subjectivity) somewhere.
CS: I’m so interested in the non-linear and anti–traditionalist ideas of your “nonbelief in the concept of a career” in conversation with the capitalist treats we buy to delight ourselves and are searching for the same desire to enjoy ourselves but through the lens of anxiety. In the collection, “Blood Moon,” is my favorite poem, because it highlights your observations of poetic interactions with technology and collected dialogs from friends. I think you have such delicate reflections on friendship, and a friend-like relationship with the Internet. How do you think we reconcile the reality of having intimate interactions through technology while knowing it is constructed as a sort of anti-reality?
AP: Thank you! That’s another signature NY School thing that I love and reproduce—friends are just as ‘worthy’ of appearing in a poem as any traditionally exalted theme or heady idea or identifiable reference. Some might say that doing this alienates the reader because they likely have no idea who these people are, but I think it doesn’t occlude any entry into the poem’s meaning. As opposed to, I don’t know, a poem that riffs on an ancient Greek myth, where outside knowledge is required to really get it. Here it’s more about capturing a mood or moment and acknowledging that there are others in the frame. Specificity as a loving gesture.
I like hyperlocal references, too—a name of a favorite dive bar, street names. And including pretty ephemeral stuff like slang and niche media that likely no one will think about in a few years. I don’t believe poems need to have a timeless quality. I don’t even know what that means, actually—timeless according to whom? The poems in Toska are five years old or less, and there are places mentioned in this book that, already, don’t exist anymore. You can imagine what this sets off in my mind, as a child of a culture/country that no longer exists.
CS: Yes, that way poetry functions in a historical archive of personal reflections about bygone businesses and places.
AP: Totally. But yes, anyway! I love your observation about the friend-like relationship with the internet. Even though Being Online is so corrosive, for so many reasons, I came of age in the time of personal blogs (shout out to Livejournal) and janky message boards and a quainter version of online communities than the data-scraping, ad-riddled, doom scroll-eliciting, balls-of-yarn-for-billionaires-to-bat-around situations that are at the fore now. So even though Online is such a simulacrum, existing on the internet as some version of my offline self doesn’t feel super artificial or forced. Making genuine friendships and connections online was a big part of my teen years; I didn’t have a lot of people around in ‘real life’ who cared about what I cared about, or who could get me into formative and life-altering media and art, or who understood me, really. My life is blessedly different now, but I still have new friendships and meaningful connections that begin online. It has gotten me opportunities as a writer, and not in a gross and network-y way. Just by existing here and finding people with shared affinities. I think that sort of intimacy, however tenuous it can initially feel when it begins online, is possible.
CS: You said in a previous Cheburashka Collective interview that becoming a poet was “a part of [your] cultural lineage” about your various identities as queer, Post-Soviet, and Jewish. Do you view your work as inherited or how do you define your art in an ancestral context?
AP: I mean it in a few ways, really. My identity/heritage is connected to some version of Russian culture (it’s difficult to conceive of what that is these days, and I’m also wildly generalizing), in which poetry historically had broader cultural relevance/resonance and importance. As an art form, but also politically and as a way of witnessing. Poetry as denunciation, as truth-telling, as rejection of propaganda. I think of Anna Akhmatova memorizing her poems and making close friends memorize them too, then immediately burning them before Stalin’s secret police could get to them. The practice of samizdat (an underground system of self-publishing dissident writing in the late Soviet era) began with poems. I could go on and on. And fast forward to today: poets writing against the homophobic and heterosexist state, poets writing against war and authoritarianism.
But in terms of my actual childhood and upbringing: before I knew all that, I just knew that I’d never not been around poetry. As I mention in the poem “Place”, the city where I was born, Moscow, has statues of poets everywhere. My family members, even those with limited formal education, could recite long poems from memory (which is perhaps also a function of USSR schooling being so into rote memorization…) My mom says she read poems to me constantly when I was in the womb! Maybe that’s all confirmation bias, but I feel like it has something to do with me being sort of destined to be into poetry.
CS: The image of your mom reading to you when she was pregnant is so sweetly rendered. Such a lucky origin for poetry to have always been a part of your life experience.
AP: And the stuff about intergenerational trauma, mysticism, folklore, and superstition that comes up in my poems—all of that is related to thinking about identity, as an immigrant from the FSU who came here at a very young age. Where and what is my culture, even? What does it mean to have nostalgia for a place that my family fled, for something that doesn’t even exist anymore? What parts of myself do I, at turns, reveal and suppress and fragment? What histories, what stories are ‘mine’ to discuss? What traditions and symbols and rituals do I carry forward? What’s my relationship to Jewish heritage as a ‘cultural’ Jew, who dropped out of Hebrew school? And more nebulously—my way of looking at things, my constant sense of displacement, my mannerisms, my soul all feel tethered somehow to my lineage, too. Which is maybe a very Russian thing to say.
CS: Again, it sounds like you are using poetry as an archivist would, to remember how you forgot. On the theme of wanting to remember, you recently tweeted: “I bring a certain ‘friend who will offer you cut fruit from a Ziploc bag’ energy to the car ride,” and the image of sliced and peeled fruit is so central to the idea of poetry to me. Immediately, I recall Wendy Cope’s “The Orange.” Something about sharing something earthy and sweet with a friend is why we care to write in the first place. What does it mean to you to engage with poetry as a shared act in publishing your poems?
AP: We’ve come full circle! In that tweet, I was lightly referencing diaspora kid memes (not tied to any specific culture or ethnicity) about cut fruit as a love language. That Wendy Cope poem is so tender—and I love that she refers to her friends by name. Another love language, like I was just saying. But to actually answer your question: I think that poetry should always be a conversation, and one that I want to have with anyone who comes across my work. The kind of poems I tend to write and read are the kind that say something like, “This is my experience of being in the world” rather than an omniscient, declarative, platitudinal sort of vibe. We’re all figuring existence out as we go. We’ll never figure it out, actually. So we may as well make art about it.
ALINA PLESKOVA is a poet, editor, and Moscow-born immigrant turned proud Philadelphian. She co-edits bedfellows magazine and is a 2020 and 2022 Leeway Foundation grant awardee. Her chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, was published in 2017, and her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Thrush, Peach Mag, the tiny, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection, Toska was published by Deep Vellum in June 2023. @ahleena on instagram, @nahhhlina on twitter