Randy Kohan

Award winning author, Randy Kohan’s ancestors emigrated from Galicia to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, he studied History at the University of Regina and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. For two years, he and his wife lived in Southern Mexico supporting Guatemalan refugees, and since 1996, he has been an Employment Counsellor for a non-profit community organization in Edmonton.

With the release of An Image is a Place (2023), Randy has published six collections of poetry with Ekstasis Editions. Previous releases include When Conditions are Right (2020), Hive (2017), Rain of Naughts (2015) and Hammers & Bells (2013).  Between 2014 and 2018, he collaborated with Zaira Makhacheva, Alisa Ganieva, Anastasia Strokina and Asya Dzhabrailova to create a dual-language version of Hammers & Bells (2019).

Randy’s work has appeared in annual editions of Edmonton Stroll of Poets Anthology as well as Russian language newspapers in Alberta. One translated poem from Hammers & Bells – Echo from St Andrew’s - was published in the Moscow daily newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 2015.

Randy lives with his wife and their family in Edmonton, Alberta.

Koleso Interview

KOLESO Interview conducted and translated into Russian by Zaira Makhacheva.
(KOLESO is an Alberta-wide Russian Language Newspaper)

 1.         Randy, please tell us a little bit about yourself.

I was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan.  My father’s side of the family came to Canada from the Ternopil region of Galicia at the beginning of the 20th century; my mother’s mother came from Krakow just after World War I.   My parents both grew up on farms in rural Saskatchewan so we spent a lot of time in the country.  I eventually obtained a degree in History from the University of Regina before moving to Edmonton in 1989 to do graduate studies in Russian History at the University of Alberta.  I continue to live in Edmonton with my wife and our two, teen-age sons.

2.         I know that you are a big fan of Russian literature.  What was a piece that impressed you the most and why?

 I started out in university studying Business with very little motivation.  I remember during a Christmas break walking into a book store with the goal of finding a fat book of classic literature.   I pulled Tolstoy’s War and Peace from the shelf and the book changed my life.   It was like an explosion.  I was suddenly immersed in a world of historical fiction where the big and the very personal questions of life were presented on a spell-binding stage.  The book left me utterly disoriented.  And yet like Pierre, it instilled in me a hunger to find out why I was put on this earth. 

3.         What three things do you like most about Russian literature?

Over the years, I’ve read great literature from other parts of the world - Europe, Latin America, Canada, the United States. But it is with Russian literature, Russian poetry, in all its potency and sacredness, that I somehow respond to at a deep, vibrational level.  Every time I come back to it, I feel like I am home.      

4.         What does the “Russian soul” mean to you?

I’m honoured that you might ask me this question.  From my perspective, it is a felt awareness of life, a felt connectedness to nature, to spiritual roots, to language itself.  Another way to describe it might be to say that the characteristics of the Russian/Slavic soul include a depth of feeling for one’s surroundings, for people, a sense of responsibility for the people in one’s world, and a profound relationship with the written word.  And all of this is a gift, carried around, inside, bursting at the chest.  I shall never forget the first time someone of Russian and Ukrainian descent said to me, unsolicited, that I have a Russian soul. 

5.         Have you been to Russia?  Could you tell us some of the things that amazed you there?

I have been to Russia, or the Soviet Union, on two occasions – in 1986 and again in 1988.  This was at the time of Gobachev, Perestroika and Glasnost.  On my first visit, I was part of a tour with perhaps 14 other Canadians.  We visited Leningrad, Tiblisi, Volgograd, Sochi, Kiev and Moscow.  We went to the Hermitage Museum, Red Square, the war museum at Volgograd.  We also attended a performance of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, heard Tchaikovsky’s music.  We even attended a circus performance.  And while we were drenched in Russian culture, my overriding impression was the palpable, tragic weight of history.  I had never experienced that “heaviness of history” standing in a prairie field in Saskatchewan.

6.         When did you start writing poetry and what inspired you?

What inspired me initially was that first trip to Russia in 1986.  I clearly remember sitting on a park bench next to a statue of Pushkin, feeling the compulsion to pull out a pen and paper and scribble something.  Though I felt ridiculous, I did it.  And on the last day of our trip, just before we were to board a plane in Moscow for Canada, our translator, Katya, gave me a book of Pushkin’s poetry.  I still have that book. 

I only started writing poetry in earnest about ten years ago.  Before that, I had been writing short stories without success.  I suppose pain and anguish are not uncommon sources of inspiration.

7.         Could you describe your writing process?

As to my writing process, in general I write mornings, before I walk to work (I am a community Employment Counsellor).  We are very fortunate to live about 25 minutes from my place of employment.  Therefore, after reading and writing in the early morning, I am in a receptive state.  With the sky above me and the earth beneath my feet, ideas, a phrase, a line will visit.  Sometimes I`ll stop to scribble something down in a small notebook I carry in my pocket.  By the time I get to work, I usually have a few more minutes to spend with the idea. In some ways, the whole process is like carrying on an intermittent conversation.

8.         Who is your intended audience and why?

In terms of lyric poetry, I don’t think you write for an intended audience.  You fold in, commune with yourself.  What happens after that, well, there’s a famous quote by Fyodor Tyutchev, “We cannot guess what echo our words will find, and sympathy is given to us like grace.”

 9.         Which Russian poet do you feel the closest connection to and why?

 I feel an affinity for several Russian poets including Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky. They are part of my circle of steadfast spirits.   However, if I were to select one poet, I feel closest to Pasternak.  Like a painter, he applies the turbulent weather of human emotion to nature, to his surroundings.  His images come to me in rich, vibrant colors (his father was an artist).  And despite a lived awareness of the horrors of the twentieth century, there remains in his poetry a child-like wonder and innocence that refuses to relinquish the sparkle of life, and by its very nature has nothing do to with cynicism. My Sister, Life, for example, though written in the year of revolutions, 1917, barely makes mention of politics.  Instead, he is tuned to something more elemental, the emotional charge that is in the air.  For example, Pasternak has a line that says – “There is not a sorrow in all the world that can`t be cured by snow.”  Brodsky called this Pasternak’s sanguine nature. 

10.       What are you trying to achieve with your poetry?

Personal release.  Like a wire tightly strung, like a bow stretched the length of an arrow.  To write something that, when it strikes, pierces, stirs a discovery, a long- lost memory.  That`s one way to describe it.

11.       If you were stranded on an island, which book would you choose to have with you and why?

Dr. Zhivago.  If I were stranded on an island, I would need the poetry and the prose found in that work, the texture, the images, the music, that snowbound landscape. 

12.       Which qualities to do value most in others?

Kindness.  A thoughtful curiosity.  And a sense of humour is always appreciated!

13.       And what qualities do you dislike?

Pretentiousness. 

 14.       If you were offered to leave a message in a time capsule for the next generation, what would it be?

Know thyself and remember thy Creator.

15.       What are your three biggest wishes?

 Oh, on a deeply personal level, it would be to maintain what Pasternak called the `hypnosis of being`.  Second, I have felt for some time that I have a Russian novel in me, but we shall see…And thirdly, it would be, after 30 years, to make a return pilgrimage to Russia.  Together with the generous assistance of Zaira Makhacheva and two Moscow writers, we are working on having my first collection of poetry translated into Russian.  Our goal would be to launch the dual-language book in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and make a trip to Zaira`s homeland, Dagestan.  God willing, this project will come to fruition. 

16.       What Russian composer and what piece of music are you most fond of?

Shostakovich.  From the first time I heard his music.  Unlike my first exposure to Tolstoy, which developed into close relationships with several more Russian writers and poets, no other composer’s music has followed so closely in the wake of my exposure to Dmitri Dmitreyevich.   I receive his music as something very personal, intensely lyrical.  Somehow his music communicates images and stories representative of his time and place in history; when I listen to Shostakovich, it’s as if I am experiencing the emotional intensity and heartrending resistance to the manifestations of death that surrounded him.  His 24 Preludes and Fugues, his 5th and 11th Symphonies, his Second Piano Concerto, his music to Grigori Kozintsev’s film Hamlet, his operas - Lady Macbeth of Mtinsk and The Nose – along with Shostakovich’s reverence for Mussorgsky and his Boris Godunov, all of these are dear to me.  Much later, when I came to read Solomon Volkov’s book of his conversations with Shostakovich, I came to admire and enjoy the personality behind the name.

 17.       Once, I was struck with Shakespeare’s words about having a music inside oneself.  Randy, do you have a music inside yourself?  What kind of music would this be?

What a lovely question!  Please, let me quote a passage from Dr. Zhivago, when Pasternak is trying to explain the experience of writing poetry:

“Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning itself begins to think and speak for man, and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds, but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.  Then, like the current of a mighty river, polishing stones and turning wheels, by its very movement, the flow of speech creates, in passing, by the force of its own laws…”

Each of us has the music of life within us.  But how absorbingly difficult it can be to hear it!  This is why we need each other, to help each other bring it out, set free the inner music each of us carries locked in our hearts, to help us recognize the beauty in Nature that already surrounds us.

18.       Is there any favourite movie you like to watch again and again?

Yes, several.  Ballad of a Soldier, The Cranes are Flying, Tarkovsky’s films including Andrei Rublev, Ivan’s Childhood, Stalker, Alexander Sokurov’s films including Russian Ark and Alexandra, Andrey Zvingatsev’s latest films…recently I appreciated Russian Television’s 2005 production of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.  For pure joy, I could watch The Irony of Fate or Enjoy your Bath! once a year.

19.       What books are you reading right now?

The Brothers Karamazov, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs, the second book, Hope Abandoned, and also Osip Mandelstam’s essay, Conversation on Dante.20.

20. …would you like to say anything to the Russian readers of Koleso?

 Yes, I would like to say thank you, Russian readers, for the treasury that is your language, the treasury that is your culture.  I would like to say thank you, dear Russian readers, for the relationship you have had with the written word; your writers would not be recognized around the world if it weren’t for the reverence and devotion you have given them.  Great writers, like saints, are only created if there is a reciprocity of feeling at work.

The end.