Writing on the Walls at Night by Claudia Serea
Unsolicited Press, 2022
Akram Alkatreb interviews Claudia Serea
1. Your poems feed on pain. Is pain a clear theme in most of your poems?
Human experience is riddled with pain. History is written with pain. It seems as if pain is embedded into our genetic code. Old or new, the pain resonates within us because of its universality. For me as an artist, it’s important to write about the events of recent history, to draw the pain from them and convert it into poetic language. Plus, my immediate family had to suffer immense pain as political prisoners in communist Romania. Although more than 30 years have passed since the fall of the Iron Curtain, there is less and less talk even about the victims of repression in general, and every few years, a new war breaks out, and there is more pain that feeds into our lives. We can’t allow ourselves to forget this much pain, so remembering it is my way of offering a symbolic justice. I have strong reasons to write about these events while memories are still fresh and survivors, like my father, are still able to tell their stories.
But I also write about my daughter, fairy tales, dreams. My latest collection, Writing on the Walls at Night, is a collection of prose poems inspired by childhood memories and my immigration story. Some of the poems are dark, and some of them are funny. I like to think that my collections suggest a dappled light, offering glimmers of hope. There is always the hope that one can escape, as in this poem:
There were no magic beans
There were no magic beans, but everyone had a magic beanstalk made of copper wire. It grew from the radio, curled around the radiator, across the room, up to the ceiling, and through the roof. Each day, I climbed it all the way to Munich and West Berlin.
Ich bin ein Berliner, said the handsome president.
Yeah, we all were, behind the tall walls where his speech never made it.
It’s easy to talk now, but what did you do then?
I climbed the beanstalk and listened to rock music. Illegal stuff, you know, like hot sticky sweet rationed sugar. I envied the polka dot crocodile who somehow managed to smuggle a request to the radio station and dedicated the song to his high school sweetheart, the princess with the heart of broken glass.
At night, I used a dream sharpener. With the dream’s pointed tip, I drew a window in the wall and escaped.
2. Can poetry skip the minefields of politics and their vocabulary?
No, not really, because politics permeate our everyday life and expresses our values. We might not be aware of it, but politics is always in the background. I grew up in a dictatorship. My grandfather, father, and uncle were political prisoners in the late 50s at the height of the Stalinist repression in Romania. I grew up waiting in lines for bread and for toilet paper in the 80s. I was a student when the Romanian Revolution happened in 1989, and I went to Bucharest to guard my university against “terrorists.” That was foolish, of course, but it felt right at the time. I immigrated to the United States, and I speak with an accent—so you see, there’s no getting away from politics for me. And I believe that these events make my poems stronger if I stare them in the face and tell my truths in my poems.
3. You immigrated to America in 1995. Can you tell me more about the circumstances of your immigration?
At the insistence of a close friend, I applied to the visa lottery. It’s a program of the State Department called “Diversity Visa,” through which a certain number of green cards are awarded to a quota of immigrants from different countries. The computer drew my application number. Ironically, my good friend who suggested to emigrate together didn’t get the visa, and later we lost touch, and our friendship ended.
I flew directly to New York in June 1995, by myself, because I knew English and I could potentially get a job. I was 26 and terrified. First time on my own, and in NY, no less. (My husband, who didn’t know a word of English, followed shortly, in July.) Getting used to the new life at the New York pace was one of the hardest things I did. I had no friends, no family, no clue. I knew English, but everyone talked so fast! I couldn’t keep up translating in my head. But I was lucky enough to land a hostess job in a restaurant two weeks after my arrival. My husband was hired as a bus boy, cleaning tables. I seated tons of people and smiled a lot. I went to school at night, studying graphic design and advertising—that was the second hardest thing I ever did! I was so tired. I used to fall asleep in the library before class. The rest, as they say, it’s history.
4. When I first heard you reading your poems in New Jersey, I imagined they were written in some way about Damascus. What cities are you writing about?
I write about Bucharest and about New York City. I write about imaginary cities, though, so I get it why you think you could replace Bucharest with Damascus. Bucharest is the city of my youth, the city I emigrated from, a lost city, just as Damascus is for you. I’m cursed to always travel between past and present cities, between imaginary cities. Here is a poem about that:
I left my home looking for a new city
After years of wandering, I exchanged my old cement city for a new one made of glass; the city of stray dogs for the rats’ city; the beggars’ city for the one of the homeless; the city smelling of urine for the one of piss.
I walk the streets, looking for the girl of my past, light-footed and happy as a bird.
She’s gone. The streets take me to the same squares, the same houses with the same closed doors. There is no new city. It’s the same one, the one I carried inside all along.When I see the Black Sea again, the sea will also see me. She’ll open her green eyes and greet me with white horses and hammers. She’ll recite my poems. She’ll welcome me in her cold bosom, smile with thousands of salt teeth, and carry my name from wave to wave, for I’m her lover Ovid, the exiled.
5. Are you still obsessed with Romania and your father, looking in poems like in opposite mirrors? Are your poems distant and heavy with dreams?
The short answer is, yes. For about 10 years after I moved to the United States, I struggled with the idea of belonging. I can’t just live someplace—I need to belong there. I wanted to belong to America, to fit in. At the same time, I spoke with an accent and wrote about Romania. It took me a while to realize I can’t get Romania out of me, because it’s who I am. So I had to embrace it in my writing. As for my father, he shows up in my poems almost like a character, or my alter ego. He is my connection with history, so I write a lot about him.
Regarding your second question, my poems sometimes reflect the 5,000 miles distance between Romania and the U.S. Other times, I use surreal images picked up from dreams. Sometimes dreams show us the truth, or reveal mysteries, in a way very similar to metaphors. The challenge is to capture them in poems in a credible way.
6. Why is poetry important?
Poetry cannot change the world, but it can change lives. Poetry is important because it expresses what cannot be expressed by everyday speech. Poetry is present everywhere all the time, but we’re not aware of its power, and we don’t turn to it until something dramatic happens: a catastrophe, or love, or death, or life being born. That’s when we turn to poetry, in those moments when regular words fail us.
7. As young writers, we come to the capital adolescents and live a life close to homelessness, sometimes without shelter or in a house without a clear address. When we start writing, it seems that we don’t care where we may end up. Writing is magic, it’s like a dream; we’re attracted to it, but we don’t know why. Do you know why?
Ah, now you’re talking about youth and all the crazy things we’ve done. Writing poetry is drinking from the fountain of youth. I think I am more deliberate now, though, not as instinctive as I used to be. But I still get lost in the strange cities in my poems, or in dreams. There’s no escaping that. Here is a poem about saving oneself through writing:
A boat made from a half-walnut shell
A boat made from a half-walnut shell floats on the dark waters. Inside it, the mouse scribbles something. The words flow like string from the tip of her pen which knits them into a small, triangular sail. The mouse raises the poem at the mast. Her heart is a compass pointing West. She knows nothing about what waits ahead: new land, new life, new dangers. Huge waves crash into the boat, but she knows it will keep sailing if she keeps writing.
8. How do you find time to write? You also host poetry evenings and host translation events during National Translation Month, which you co-founded. How do you find time for everything?
I always carry a notebook and jot down fragments of poems, sometimes long, sometimes very short. Every few days, I can string a poem from these fragments, usually on Sunday afternoons. I think about poems while I’m doing housework or gardening. I type up a draft on Sundays that I revise on Monday night for the workshop on Tuesday every week. I forgot to tell you I go to The Red Wheelbarrow Poets workshop where we share and critique our poems. It forces me to come up with a new poem, good or bad. In time, I gather enough work to create a collection.
In 2013, I co-founded National Translation Month together with my friend, poet and journalist Loren Kleinman. Modeled after the awareness months in the United States, we celebrate and promote the work of translators and authors in translation each year during the month of September. We work the entire year to schedule posts and events for the entire month, then September is a marathon of translations, readings, and lectures. It’s hard work, but we love it. And this year we’re celebrating our 10th anniversary! I hope you’ll join us in September for that.
9. From Angels & Beasts to Nothing Important Happened Today to Writing on the Walls at Night, is there is a single thread connecting your books? Like writing about small things, the vocabulary of isolation and of abandoned balconies, and of the cities in your dreams?
I try to make my books different from each other, to surprise my readers. I don’t like the style of some poets who write a never-ending poem, the same one, throughout their books, all their life. But of course, I repeat my themes: Romania, history, Bucharest and New York City, childhood, my parents, my brother, they all show up in all my poems. I guess the single thread connecting my books is my life. You can open each book and find my footsteps and hear my voice. I hope you do.
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Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have been published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Puritan, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Writing on the Walls at Night (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Serea’s poems have been translated in French, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Farsi and featured on The Writer’s Almanac. She is a founding editor of National Translation Month, serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets, and co-hosts The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Readings.
Akram Alkatreb was born and raised in Salamiah, Syria, a city renowned for its poets. He attended the University of Damascus, graduating with a degree in law. Alkatreb has worked as an art critic and journalist since1996, contributing to many major Arabic publications. He has published seven poetry collections in Arabic, English, and Spanish, and he has participated in many poetry festivals in the U.S. and around the world. He lives in the United States since 2001.