Praise for Words for War

 

PRAISE FOR WORDS FOR WAR

“The poets here do what poets do best: in responding to a traumatic upheaval, they create a language for events that defy words. Their work is creative in the original sense of the word. The variety of the voices in this volume is its greatest strength. It reflects the fact that war affects everybody, and that Ukraine is and remains a bilingual country. … The translation into English by a stellar line-up of translators, several of whom were born in Ukraine, makes these poems available to a world-wide readership on linguistically neutral territory. The anthology is beautifully and professionally executed.”

— Josephine von Zitzewitz, University of Cambridge, Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 62, No. 4

“Both Words for War and The White Chalk of Days, each in its own unique way, aim to provide English-speaking readers with the best examples of contemporary Ukrainian literature, while at the same time promoting it as diverse, inclusive, vibrant, and simply too riveting to be unknown or ignored. ... The poems in Words for War, as gathered by Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky, have the potential to permanently inscribe themselves in the global canon of war poetry. While narrower in thematic scope, this gripping anthology serves as a reminder of what it takes not to lose humanity and dignity in a time of war.”

— Maria G. Rewakowicz, University of Washington, Slavic Review, Vol. 77, No.

“The kind of poetry included ... is the antithesis of propaganda; these poetic dialogues are a valuable reminder that there is nothing immutable about Russian–Ukrainian enmity.”

— Sophie Pinkham, The Times Literary Supplement

"Poems are frequently described as 'powerful,' violence as 'unspeakable' or 'senseless.' We all have heard that the pen is mightier than the sword. Most of the time, however, we cannot fathom the meaning of these turns of phrase. In Words for War, they gain weight and significance, coming from the midst of the conflict that has engulfed Ukraine since 2014. For all the darkness and pain of many of these poems, translated from both Russian and Ukrainian, they attest to an optimism that literature can speak back to violence, can find its sense, that language will prevail over the cynical political interests that have engineered this needless bloodshed. Rendered into English by a superb international team of translators, with moving introductory and concluding essays, this volume is the best account of the war in Ukraine I have read."

— Kevin M. Platt, Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania,

editor and translator of Hit Parade: The ORBITA Group (2015)

"Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine is an urgent, beautiful and astonishing collection of poems. Read this book to remember, as Kateryna Kalytko writes, that 'Loneliness could have a name,' and, as Vasyl Holoborodko writes, that there is an invisible history in every series of footsteps. How may we remember our humanity? 'I’m gathering my footsteps / so that strangers don’t trample them.'"

— Laynie Browne, author of P R A C T I C E

"How much Ukraine has suffered, we cannot count, and so we often forget. A battleground for empires, torn apart from inside and out, as far back as it can remember. War has been waged over and through it and when it tired, hunger, ethnic strife, political repressions, corruption, or stagnation took its place. It has had scarcely a night of peace. So the poets in this anthology don’t sleep; they keep their poems open 24 hours, awake, which is why — as one poet in this anthology writes — 'Poetry witnessed it all.' The poets in this collection — writing in Ukrainian or in Russian, or questioning the place of their own language — move quickly and confidently between straight-faced testimony (a la Charles Reznikoff) and Celan-esque fragmentation; veering and ricocheting between witness and trauma, as if to explode those easy distinctions and catch the blur of history."

— Matvei Yankelevich, author of Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (2015

"We necessarily come to these poems in a time of war, and that war’s grotesque political dimensions and endless violence are painfully felt on these pages. But these are poems that should command our attention even in a time of peace, should it ever come to our troubled planet: these are poems in which the spirit of creative imagination, free expression, emotional clarity, and ethical courage reigns supreme."

— Stephanie Sandler, Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

"'How would you explain the war?' asks one of the poems in this collection, but indeed it is the main question of the whole. War, whether seen from up close or far away, crumples the fabric of life. It enters like a pole exerting a pull on every point of daily experience. War turns out be an autonomous mechanism: its causes and reasons fall away, but it abides and expands, self-caused, self-moving, self-creating. It is a machine of such overwhelming reality that in its presence reason and language can either go silent or turn into poetry, which is, after all, a shape of silence. But then what happens? Do we read this collection to 'learn' about war? Do we read it for its existential authenticity? Do we read it as a model of the poetical becoming political? Do we read it to use it for our own ends? Its poets include soldiers, refugees, inhabitants of regions at peace, émigrés anxiously contemplating the conflict from afar. Some, like Serhiy Zhadan, have achieved international fame, others are more locally known. The skilled translations render originals in Ukrainian and in Russian composed in a variety of styles. The editing gives each poet enough material for us to grasp the individuality of the voice."

— Eugene Ostashevsky, professor in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, translator of

The Fire Horse: Children’s Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms (2017)

"In this powerful new anthology a number of emerging and established Ukrainian voices chart what it means to be in a state of war, and how it affects the poetics of a country. They represent a flourishing and important poetic identity, and a body of work on war equal to anything in the current global canon of war poetry. However the poems here also have a political urgency. An unacknowledged war has been going on between Russia and Ukraine for several years now, and the level of misinformation and propaganda is now extreme. The poems published in Words for War are not just things of beauty and truth, but essential information in an age of fake news."

— Sasha Dugdale, editor of Modern Poetry in Translation

"Words for War is not your conventional poetry of witness but poetry and collective translation as intervention, complicity, weapon, social media fodder, reflection, deflection, defection, defiance, sentiment, mourning, melancholy, anger, black comedy, patriotism, disgust, activism, iPad wet dream, delirium, nightmare, hope, hopelessness, absurdity, combat. Poetry in the service of poetry. Poetry on the front lines."

— Charles Bernstein, co-editor of Best American Experimental Poetry (2017)

"Poets standing on a small patch of ground between life and death; this is one of the most important anthologies of our time! Many thanks to the poets, editors and translators, bringing urgency to the forefront! These are poets who remind us we are of one world and we need to meet them there!"

— CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

PRAISE FOR WORDS FOR WAR

Lyuba Yakimchuk / How I Killed

 

How I Killed

by Lyuba Yakimchuk

I remain connected to my family over the phone

with all of my family connections wiretapped

they are curious: whom do I love more, mom or dad?

what makes my grandma cry out into the receiver?

intrigued as ever by my sister’s war-fueled drama with her boyfriend

who used to be my boyfriend

all of my phone connections are blood relations

my blood is wiretapped

they must know what percentage is Ukrainian

Polish, Russian, and if there’s any Gypsy

they must know how much of it I gave, and to whom

they must know whether that’s my blood sugar dropping

or the roof collapsing over me

and whether it’s possible to build borders out of membranes

hundreds of graves have been dug between me and my mother

and I don’t know how to leap over them

hundreds of mortar shells fly between me and my father

and I can’t see them as birds

the metal doors of a basement, secured with a shovel

separate me from my sister

a screen of prayers hangs between me and my grandmother

thin silky walls muting out the noise, and I hear nothing

it’s so simple, to stay connected over the phone

to add minutes to my calling cards, restless nights, Xanax

it must feel so intoxicating

to listen to someone else’s blood throbbing in your earphones

as my blood clots into a bullet:

BANG!

!

Translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk

and Max Rosochinsky

Як я Вбила

усі мої родинні зв’язки тепер телефонні

усі мої родинні зв’язки прослуховуються

їм цікаво, кого я більше люблю, маму чи тата

їм цікаво, на що хворіє моя бабуся, яка каже в слухавку: ой, ой-ой

вони заінтриговані, що́ думає моя сестра про свого хлопця

який раніше був моїм

усі мої телефонні зв’язки кровні

уся моя кров прослуховується

їм треба знати, скільки відсотків української

польської, російської і чи є циганська

їм треба знати, чиїм донором я стала

їм треба знати, чи це впав гемоглобін, чи дах наді мною

і чи можна з клітинних мембран побудувати кордони

між мною і моєю мамою вирито сотні могил

і я не знаю, як їх перестрибнути

між мною і моїм батьком літають сотні снарядів

і я не вмію дивитися на них, як на птахів

між мною і сестрою металеві двері погребу

що їх із-середини підпирає лопата

між мною і моєю бабусею параван із молитов –

тонкі шовкові стіни, за якими не чути, зовсім не чути

це дуже просто, підтримувати родинні телефонні зв’язки

це дуже дешево, поповнювати рахунки безсонням та заспокійливим

це так п’янить, слухати чужу кров, одягнувши навушники

особливо, коли моя кров перетворюється на постріл:

нах!

!

серпень 2014

LYUBA YAKIMCHUK

Lyuba Yakimchuk was born in Pervomaisk, Luhansk oblast, in 1985. She is a Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and journalist. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Like FASHION and Apricots of Donbas, and the film script for The Building of the Word. Yakimchuk’s awards include the International Slavic Poetic Award and the international “Coronation of the Word” literary contest. Her writing has appeared in magazines in Ukraine, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Israel. She performs in a musical and poetic duet with the Ukrainian double-bass player Mark Tokar; their projects include Apricots of Donbas and Women, Smoke, and Dangerous Things. Her poetry has been performed by Mariana Sadovska (Cologne) and improvised by vocalist Olesya Zdorovetska (Dublin). Yakimchuk also works as a cultural manager. In 2012, she organized the “Semenko Year” project dedicated to the Ukrainian futurists, and she curated the 2015 literary program Cultural Forum “Donkult” (2015). She was a scholar in the “Gaude Polonia” program of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Poland). In 2015, Kyiv’s New Time magazine listed Yakimchuk among the one hundred most influential cultural figures in Ukraine.

WORDSFORWAR

‘Poems are my salvation alone’ … John Wieners. Photograph: Allen Ginsberg

‘We exist upon the fringe of the world’: the queer American poets who battled madness and obscurity

Jack Spicer and John Wieners both wrote about their homosexuality – and in 50s America, that made them a threat. Forgotten for decades, finally their strange, anguished work has been unearthed

Ralf Webb

Monday 3 July 2023

In mid-century America, avant garde and alternative poetry was considered subversive, dangerous and hostile. To write and publish poems about drugs and sexuality, or poems with anti-nationalist, anti-war sentiment, was to attract suspicion from the authorities. It may have even landed you in prison: Amiri Baraka and Diane Di Prima were among many poets arrested on obscenity charges. Predictably, such subversive writing was often rejected by mainstream publishers – the result being that a lot of great poets and their work fell into obscurity.

Pilot Press, an imprint founded to “retrieve a philosophy of publishing lost to Aids and capitalism”, is attempting to remedy this with two publications: A Book of Music by Jack Spicer and Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera of John Wieners. Spicer and Wieners were mid-century American poets and their work appeared in the groundbreaking The New American Poetry anthology, published in 1960. This collection defined a post-second world war generation of avant garde poets, from John Ashbery to Jack Kerouac, who were linked by a shared disillusionment with the hierarchies of the literary establishment. Spicer belonged to the Beat-adjacent San Francisco Renaissance, where he presided over an experimental reading group named The Dharma Committee, which, fuelled by narcotics, attracted the attention of the FBI. Wieners was part of an emergent set of peripatetic poets who vagabonded between different artistic spheres, as comfortable among Spicer’s north California coterie as he was alongside the New York School’s “artworld cocktail ballet scene”, as Allen Ginsberg described it.

Spicer and Wieners were queer men who wrote about queerness during the US’s Lavender Scare, a cultural moral panic which made “homosexuality” metonymic with “national security threat”. To be queer was to be mentally ill, deviant, perverted: to be queer was to be a literal and figurative outlaw. In this sense, Spicer and Wieners lived lives of precarity and nonconformity, their day-to-day tinctured by a psychic terrorism surely impossible to imagine. “We exist upon the fringe of the world,” Wieners wrote in Prose Poem, “small bright fragments that somehow burn away the fire’s edge.” It is tempting, though reductive, to see their fates as resulting solely from this marginality: Wieners, after years of drug misuse, spent the 60s in and out of mental institutions, where he was subjected to the hell of electroconvulsive therapy; Spicer died in the poverty ward at San Francisco General hospital, in 1965.

A fierce critic … Jack Spicer. Photograph: The Estate of Jack Spicer

Solitary Pleasure is a selected collection of Wieners’ poems, appended with letters and journal entries. An introduction, written by contemporary poet Nat Raha, makes a powerful case for reading Wieners’ work as art born from “the heart of struggle”. The poems themselves are offhand and diaristic. Sometimes, they deploy childlike rhymes that purposely steer close to nonsense, successfully generating a sense of wonder (“If I had a canoe / I’d fill it with you / Then what would you do”). The Wieners of Solitary Pleasure is a poet eager to vocalise queer desire. “The beauty of men never disappears,” he writes, later portraying desire as something that must be “choked” out of him. Occupying nearly a third of Solitary Pleasure are his “Asylum Poems”, which Wieners wrote in 1969 – the summer of the Stonewall riots – while in a psychiatric institution. These poems spotlight the connection between art and affliction, but challenge us to consider creative expression as a very real mode of survival and salvation, and not merely, as current wellness discourses suggest, a potential curative or preventive to mental ill-health.

Spicer’s A Book of Music – a 14-poem pamphlet – is reissued without commentary or contextualising ephemera. The poems are weird songs which trouble the connection between sound and sense, suggesting that poetic utterance is a music – “a tree growing just behind my throat” – that can rearrange our relationship to reality and the objects in it. This mysterious pamphlet makes for a fitting introduction to Spicer, who dabbled in bibliomancy and tarot and considered the poet a “radio” capable of receiving missives from another realm. For Spicer, poetry could also be a “collage of the real” – as though the form could trap life and foil decay. In this context, Spicer’s assessment of Wieners – or “Hotdog”, as he sometimes referred to him – seems a high compliment: “Bright coloured bits of reality stick to him,” Spicer wrote after seeing Wieners’ perform in 1959.

Rarely was Spicer so generous. A fierce regionalist, he reviled the notoriety achieved by his contemporaries, believing that fame is anathema to artistry, that success defangs a poet’s truth. Therefore, Ginsberg’s Howl – “the best-publicised poem in the world”, according to Spicer – was “crap”. Frank O’Hara he dismissed as a “third-hand Rimbaud”. Spicer was also a misogynist – not especially surprising in a poetic demimonde formed almost exclusively of men – and a venomous racist and antisemite. The latter found expression in a paranoid, sometimes wholesale rejection of New York, where he thought Jewish people ran the poetry and “homosexual” networks.

To recover poets from the past, poets whose unimaginable nonconformity contributed to their contemporary obscurity, is a necessary task. How we read those poets – particularly if we hope their work might help us navigate our own precarious present – is more complex. Perhaps the challenge is to do so with care and without sentimentality. Or should we defer to the poets themselves? “Poems,” wrote Wieners, several months before he was first institutionalised, “are my salvation alone. The reader can do with them what he likes.”

THE GUARDIAN

Dear Bird by Howard Altmann

 

Poem of the week: Dear Bird by Howard Altmann

A dead bird stumbled upon during a walk leads the poet on an inward journey confronting historical and biological cycles and the act of writing itself

Carol Rummers
Monday 3 July 2023

Dear Bird

A dead bird in the snow is not how I wish
to begin this walk, yet there it is, feathers
all bloodied and frozen to the ground,
giving flight to cause and effect, the mind
trampled by where it has gone before,
an image faithfully lodged, falling along
sandy shores and leafy trails, in the chaos
of a lonely night, dear bird might you share
your name, must I nurse you till the end,
patch you with experience, pitch storylines
to your wound, killed by man killed by animal,
the reflection of a tree, well, you seem to be
thriving, as metaphor as travelling companion,
and whom to blame whom to assign fault,
an egress offering sanctuary I kneel and gently
raise you from your bed, hold you in my hand,
my body temperature meeting yours, a trickle
of blood beginning to line my palm, your death
now in slow motion, dear bird who hasn’t lost
their way, forsaken the known upended by
the unknown, determined predetermined
no need to go there, to the sky we look for
what is coming, the two birds in endless loop
voracious hunger, a language not ours
and ours to run with.

THE GUARDIAN

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Amelina set aside most of her writing to document war crimes.
Photograph: Daniel Mordzinski

Poem About a Crow: a work by the killed Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina

Amelina has died, aged 37, from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike in Kramatorsk

Monday 3 July 2023

Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, poet and public intellectual. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of her country in 2022, she set aside most of her writing to document and research war crimes.

Amelina understood the risks she ran with this work, both as a citizen who chose to stay in her country during war, and as a writer facing an invading army bent on destroying Ukrainian national identity.

She moved her son to safety in Poland, but kept returning herself. When Kyiv came under bombardment in early summer she watched the explosions from her apartment and wrote: “The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbours who died instead of you a couple of miles away. Still, I want to not forget to learn the names.”

She died on 1 July, aged 37, from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in the eastern town of Kramatorsk.

Two weeks before she died, she wrote about a painter, Polina Rayko, whose work had been largely obliterated in the floods unleashed by the collapse of the Kakhovka dam: “Art lives as long as the world sees it.”

Below is Poem About a Crow, inspired by her work interviewing women who lived through Russian occupation. Translated by Uilleam Blacker.

Poem About a Crow

In a barren springtime field

Stands a woman dressed in black

Crying her sisters’ names

Like a bird in the empty sky

She’ll cry them all out of herself

The one that flew away too soon

The one that had begged to die

The one that couldn’t stop death

The one that has not stopped waiting

The one that has not stopped believing

The one that still grieves in silence

She’ll cry them all into the ground

As though sowing the field with pain

And from pain and the names of women

Her new sisters will grow from the earth

And again will sing joyfully of life

But what about her, the crow?

She will stay in this field forever

Because only this cry of hers

Holds all those swallows in the air

Do you hear how she calls

Each one by her name?

THE GUARDIAN