Gregory Djanikian, author of Nostalgia for the Future • Interviews

Interview by Arthur Kayzakian
**A CONVERSATION WITH GREGORY DJANIKIAN, AUTHOR OF NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE (Green Writers Press)**

Gregory Djanikian’s Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems (1984–2023) is a collection that presents both continuity and formal metamorphosis across four decades of work. Djanikian’s poems have long engaged the inheritances of displacement, linguistic duality, and historical trauma—especially in relation to the Armenian Genocide and its intergenerational transmission.

In earlier collections, such as So I Will Till the Ground, the lyric “I” functioned as an intimate witness, navigating family history, memory, and the burden of survival. In the most recent poems, that same “I” has undergone a notable shift, becoming less autobiographical, more dispersed, operating as an aperture through which other presences—material, imagined, communal—move. The voice, while still recognizable, seems increasingly occupied with thresholds, miscommunications, and moments of dissolution. In poems such as “What I Meant Was” and “Instructions for a Disappearance,” the speaker does not simply recount experience but becomes a porous figure attuned to ambient interruption and collective resonance.

In conversation with poet Arthur Kayzakian, Djanikian considers the evolution of his lyric stance, the pressure of historical recurrence in the face of geopolitical indifference, and the formal consequences of writing a poetry that moves between intimacy and dispersion, identity and disappearance.

Arthur Kayzakian: I’d like to start with the title of your new collection, Nostalgia For The Future. I’ve heard you describe this as the future entering the soul of the body and transforming the body for whatever possibilities tomorrow may bring. The words “nostalgia” and “future” bring so much tension to this title. Do you believe we are bound to the past, and our future dictates the way we’ve lived? Or does your title suggest a hope that we can change as individuals, a nation, a country?

Gregory Djanikian: I can’t speak persuasively about the collective consciousness of a nation and how it might gradually change to alter the national sociopolitical landscape. That may be a job for historians and political philosophers. What I can speak experientially about is how I see the future as a great open field of possibility, where the constraints of the past—what has already been written—might fall away to reveal a pathway to a new self, a new becoming. The past is what I have been. The present is what is, but that notion of “present” seems so ephemeral to me that, unless I can transcend the temporal by some paranormal or magical act, I can’t hold onto it, disappearing as it does instantaneously into history. But the future remains always available to us until death. It is our great act of imagination which gives us the opportunity to pursue what we long for. It gives us infinite chances toward freedom, a vast tabula rasa where anything might be written.

Arthur: I genuinely appreciate your positive outlook towards the future. I think we can all use hope, especially in these challenging times. In your poem “Without Us,” I read a message of hope, yet it is a beautiful earth without us in it. Could you speak more about this poem and how it relates to a future that remains available to us?

Gregory: Well, I think the future is available to us only if we don’t muck it up with our negligence toward the earth. I’m not convinced that Homo sapiens is all that wise sometimes, especially when we, in our arrogance, continue to think we’ll exist as a species for as long as the sun shines, no matter what we do, how much we spoil the house we live in. “Without Us” is hopeful because it praises the life force that perseveres, replenishes, even in the darkest of times. But that’s not to say that we’re guaranteed a place in this replenishment, no matter how many times we’ve smudged ourselves against the things of this world. An abundance of life might exist even more heartily without us. So even if we try to annihilate ourselves, as we seem to be doing now, life itself will go on.

Arthur: What a beautiful thought—even in the terror of human extinction—that the earth will go on. I think you make your astonishment of our planet clear in your poem “In the Midst of It,” when you say: “Isn’t it lovely that the natural world / can be so companionable, / keeping me frazzled and deeply alert?” But you also close with a wonderful tercet: “from those long expansive afternoons / when I was young / and the wind was a feather in my hair.”

Since your new collection spans eight remarkable books, it illustrates a notable arc in your thinking. How has experience, or, as you say, “weathering away” from a young poet to now, shaped your perception of living and writing about what you live for?

Gregory: This is an interesting question. I think experience changes what subject matter we pursue and, in so doing, changes the tonalities of our language. It’s a matter, I think, of learning to find the appropriate voice for each of our different preoccupations. My earlier work was very autobiographical because that was what intrigued me: to mine the past and explore how it affected the present. I wrote about my life in Egypt and then my immigration to the U.S. and how that movement changed my life. But as I grew older, I felt that I needed to move beyond my own experiences and look into ways that touched on human experience more generally. My fourth book, Years Later, is about romantic love in its many guises, and I didn’t have the language to write adequately about that subject in my earlier years when “I was young / and the wind was a feather in my hair” and I wasn’t married or had children. Well, things got a little weightier than feathers as I grew older, but that was fine, I relished the idea of speaking about certain austere experiences because they now attracted my attention. And that desire to feel the gravity of situations led me to write about the Armenian genocide in my fifth book, So I Will Till the Ground, for which, being fully aware of my mortality, I finally found the language to draw upon. I think an arc in my career has been to move away from an “I”-centric poem to one that seems more contemplative, less autobiographical. And even in poems that include an “I” now, that pronoun seems less singularly me and, more and more, includes a gathering of others.

Arthur: This is a very intriguing thought: how experiences change our subject matter as poets. In So I Will Till the Ground, you confronted the Armenian Genocide and mortality with an “I” that felt intimate yet expansive—never solipsistic. In fact, in your poem “The Aestheticians of Genocide,” you face what many Armenians think but do not say:

The trick is to avoid excesses
of horror so as not to scorch the mind
and strike it dumb, though grief may yowl
in the dirt and villages burn.

Since then, you’ve said your work has moved toward a less autobiographical self, an “I” that holds multitudes.

In a world where Armenia is largely invisible—culturally, territorially, spiritually—and where global response to violence feels muted or performative, how does a poet navigate this shift? How do you continue writing from a widened “I” in a time when the impulse might be to scream from the center?

Gregory: Well, I don’t mean to claim that I contain multitudes; I don’t have that barbaric yawp that Whitman so effectively put to good use. The most I can feel inside me are several poet friends whose voices I’ve learned from; my alter self that visits me now and then, whom I aspire to be; and certainly a human spirit that compels me to write about human experience. You mention my poem “The Aestheticians of Genocide,” which is a deeply ironic poem. It implies that to write about catastrophe using metaphor and euphemism is to couch the severity of the violence so as not to turn the reader away from the work. When I write, “In Kharpert, everyone knew the boys / with good heads on their shoulders,” I’m implying that the “aestheticians” are using an inoffensive observation to avoid saying that the boys lost their heads to the knife. Is the art of implication more effective than outright declaration? It is an aesthetic question about poetic strategy, but all I can say is the rest of the genocide poems in the book do not shy away from declaration; they are connected to the violence that happened. I note your mentioning that the 1915 Armenian Genocide and its aftermath are mostly unknown by the general public, especially here in the U.S. Yes, I believe that, so when I wrote about the genocide, I had to write a poem called “History Test” only to apprise readers that a genocide did take place whose occurrence, ironically, was covered at the time by the New York Times in about 142 articles. But who remembers them? In one of my genocide poems, I use an epigraph by the poet Bruce Murphy: “Memory is useless if none of us remembers the same things.” Memory, history, both are very important, which of course, adjusts our relationship to the future, but not to take possibility away, not to prevent us from seeing ourselves as people better than we are.

Arthur: That “barbaric yawp that Whitman so effectively put to good use” is such a great line and sums up Whitman. I think “History Test” was a fantastic idea and sadly, a poem we need for our non-Armenian readers. In “Kharpert, Turkey, 1915,” you don’t just write about atrocity—you let silence and stark imagery do the speaking:

If all the windows shattered
who would hear it now?

If the ground trembled
under boot heels and hooves,

who would pay attention or cry out against it?

The sound of boots approaching, and yet, the world is silent. On many occasions, I have heard Armenians say, “Let’s move on from this subject.” But as an Armenian, I often feel conflicted. On one hand, there’s pressure to ‘move on,’ to not be reduced to trauma or accused of playing the victim. On the other hand, silencing that history feels like participating in the gaslighting of our collective memory.

As a poet who’s written through and beyond the Armenian Genocide, how do you navigate the tension between resisting victimhood and honoring grief? How do you write from a place that neither justifies nor erases the inheritance of suffering?

Gregory: I think the first thing one must do is not write as a victim but as a mourner. I hope my writing about the Armenian Genocide has been a way of giving those who have died without ceremony and recognition a place to abide in. The poet and critic Allen Grossman has said that poetry for him has been a way of preserving and perpetuating the image of the person, a way, also, of preserving our human culture. I think when we write about those who have disappeared entirely, who have no histories to be remembered by, we do honor to the lives they lived and imprint them on our collective memory.

Arthur: “Not as a victim, but as a mourner” is beautifully said and permits me to write without judgment about those we’ve lost. So thank you for that. Also, your writing about the Armenian Genocide, for me, has given recognition to those who have died without ceremony.

In your newest poems—from “Instructions for a Disappearance” to “What I Meant Was”—the “I” feels porous, even evaporative. It holds memory, humor, bewilderment, and grief, but it’s less anchored to a singular self and more attuned to atmosphere, objects, and other people.

You’ve spoken about moving away from an autobiographical “I” toward a more collective, contemplative one; how consciously are you reshaping the speaker in your late work? And is this shift a form of self-erasure, expansion, or something else entirely? Is this the “I” of solitude, or the “I” that carries the breath of others inside it toward the future?

Gregory: A beautifully put question, Arthur. You’re right in saying that over the years I’ve moved away from a strictly autobiographical “I.” I think most poets, even at the beginning of their writing life, allow other personalities to seep into that imperious pronoun. But the more one writes, I think, and it’s especially true for me, the more one tends to move away from autobiographical narrative toward something more expansive, an abiding interest in the world at large, not as a self-contained and reflexive voice but as a human being trying to make sense of the world we are both cursed and blessed to live in. That interests me more now—to say something in a voice that might belong to any one of us, whose experiences are shared and communal, whose terrors and joys have no boundaries.

Arthur: This translucent, diaphanous “I” that could be any of us astonishes me.

Okay, I have a craft question. In your poem “What I Meant Was,” the speaker stumbles through language, misfires in conversations, and ultimately dissolves into something almost elemental, “like dandelion puffs into the air.” The “I” here doesn’t confess so much as unravel. In your new poems, there’s a remarkable shift in how the self speaks: it’s less declarative, more diffused—more witness than center. How does this transformation of the “I” shape your craft choices now: syntax, voice, lineation? Do you find yourself editing toward ambiguity, or is the porousness of identity something that arises organically in the process?

Gregory: I like ambiguity; it makes a mystery of one’s life. I think it was Kenneth Burke who said that a clear idea is another name for a little idea. That is, a clear idea narrows the field of vision and thinking into something comprehensible but also makes it smaller. I don’t think one can answer the larger questions that we pose to ourselves with a legibility that implies, “I have declared all I need to; I am satisfied.” Big ideas seem inherently ambiguous if they are to say something valuable about the nature of the world. As for craft, I think my later style might be an outgrowth of my desire to keep an openness in the poem for both myself and the reader, allowing both of us to be intrigued by what the poem has said and, more importantly, by what it has been unable to say. And so we go on, writing and reading poem after poem to approach what we can never reach fully—making a life out of the journey.

Gregory Djanikian was for many years the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 2018. He has published 7 collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon, and his new and selected poems, Nostalgia for the Future, appeared from Green Writers Press in April, 2025. His poems have been published in numerous journals, and in many anthologies including Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House).

Arthur Kayzakian is the finalist for the 2024 Kate Tufts Award, and the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings. He is also a recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a founding member and serves as the Poetry Chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA).