After a bit of a delay our Why Do You Write? series is back with Timothy Kercher. This one was well worth the wait, a reminder of how important literature is in difficult times and across borders.


After a year in which my life has radically changed by moving to a new country and my wife Allison giving birth to our twin girls, Ani and Ketevan, our first children, a year where my time to write and think has been reduced significantly, I have realized with renewed zeal how important the act of writing is. Before, if you would have asked me why I write, I would quote Robert Frost’s observation that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” an idea I still find important, that poetry and writing begin in a playful place. Many of my poems fell into the category of being experimental, which, in my mind, means I was just playing around and trying to be clever.

There was always another element, though, and this element was something I had a harder time putting into words (another function of poetry). I became a poet more or less because it was the only mode of expression I could find to help me make sense out of my reentry into the United States after spending nearly a year as a relief worker in Bosnia in 1996/97. Before this, I considered myself a writer, but certainly not a poet. I spent about six months in 1999 writing some of the worst war poetry in the history of war poetry, but it was during this time that I realized that the writing of poetry was something that came natural to me—and it was somehow helping me make sense of the world.

Since then, two things my poet friends have said to me have guided my writing: my friend, the poet Martin Balgach, says that my poetry comes from “a stuttery place of existential restlessness,” which maybe explains why I wrote so much poetry to figure out my time in Bosnia. One of the Georgian poets I translate, my friend Zviad Ratiani, perhaps, put it best when he said, “I write to force myself to understand my life.”

In the past week, I’ve driven from Kyiv, Ukraine to the Carpathian Mountains and back. This after not driving since August, and already a school year in my pocket where I did not drive at all. This doesn’t sound so bad, but driving is intimately connected with my writing.

For a little over a year, my wife Allison, our two girls, and I have lived in Kyiv, but, because of our girls being so young, have not had the opportunity to get out of the city. We live across the street from the school we work and don’t own a car. What I’ve noticed this week is that I have a great deal more time to think when driving, and that this thinking is so crucial to writing—this time to let the life’s big questions bounce around in my head, where I confront life’s absurdities and inconsistencies, where I celebrate love, beauty, and passion, where I try to enjoy each moment by weighing it always against my own mortality. This thinking is essential to my feelings of wellbeing.

In the Republic of Georgia, the last country we lived in, we owned a Lada Niva, which is a small four-cylinder Russian four-wheel drive. It didn’t go fast, but it went anywhere, and we took it anywhere and everywhere in the beautiful Caucasus Mountains, including Armenia and Eastern Turkey. So many of the poems I wrote in that four year period we lived there were either written from experiences that the Niva either was part of, or at least, took us to. In fact, many of those poems included the Niva as a character. But the main thing is that it was in the act of driving that I was able to think about the world, to fill my mind up with imagery that I could imaginatively blend into my poetry.

And in the last week, in the landscape of Ukraine, seen from the vantage point of our rental car’s driver’s seat, my imagination has come alive, inspiring me to write. This could somehow be a modern equivalent to Wordsworth as the “walking poet,” and I have long felt some kinship to him—there is something of the Romantic impulse in this, being from Colorado and missing the mountains, just seeing the natural beauty of the Carpathian Mountains in Autumn is inspiring. But it is more than this.

There is a sense of culture here—the old mountain culture of the Hutsuls, the folk art manifested in houses and churches, the pressed-metal art, the tiles on walls, the intricate patterns and bright colors of the wooden houses, the horse-drawn carts clopping along, full of wheat, hay, cabbage, or whatever else you can imagine. And this in a landscape where the leaves are changing, a landscape exploding into Autumnal colors.

There is also a sense history here. The Soviet era buildings—many in ruin, the old cars and bicycles, and the monuments of heroes from World War II. And hidden behind all this is Hitler and Stalin. First, the great famine of 1932/33, a result of Stalin’s collectivization policy. And then, of course, Hitler’s Nazis march and subjugation of Ukraine, and subsequent murder of the Jewish and other populations. The layers of history, of suffering, of human cruelty is incomparable to anything else in Europe in the 20th Century. And this brings me back to Bosnia—everything does this eventually. But it was in Bosnia where I started questioning the world, what is my place in it, and where I began to try to understand why we humans act like we do. I haven’t found an answer, but for eleven hours yesterday, it was these questions staring me in the face even as we drove through the beautiful landscape of Ukraine with my two beautiful twin daughters in the back seat.

Writing to me is the process of making sense of life. And I can’t claim to have made a lot of sense of it beyond achieving little pieces of “wisdom,” as Frost explains. The act of writing poetry is no more or less than the act of understanding how wonderful and how cruel this existence can be at any given moment. Because I write, I’m saying I want this question to walk—or ride shotgun—beside me. I want to celebrate beauty. I want to condemn the moments when humanity turns ugly. I want to figure out where I belong amid all this. I want to seek out what is best and makes the most sense in life. My writing life is the struggle to do this.



Originally from Colorado, Timothy Kercher now lives in Kyiv, Ukraine after living in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years, where he has been editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in
a number of recent literary publications, including Crazyhorse, upstreet, Versal, The Minnesota Review, Atlanta Review, The Dirty Goat, Poetry International Journal, Los Angeles Review, and others.