The Ukrainians have started facetiously using their own word for cotton, bavovna, for such explosions at the same time, a cloud of fluffy cotton fibre might remind you of smoke from a missile strike. But for a slight difference in pronunciation, the Russian word for clap, chlopok, is identical to the Russian word for cotton. When explosions are reported in the Russian media, they are often referred to as “claps”, like the innocuous clapping of hands. According to Vladimir Putin, for example, the invasion is not really an invasion, but a “special military operation”. The rupture of language – inextricable from the violent rupture of “normality” for Ukrainians – has one starting point in war’s euphemisms and lies. “As if shells hit language/ the debris from language/ may look like poems/ But they are not/ This is no poetry too/ Poetry is in Kharkiv/ volunteering for the army.” Titled No Poetry, it expresses anxiety about its own status as literature, when there are more urgent tasks at hand than writing poems. The novelist Victoria Amelina has turned for the moment from fiction to poems because the time is not right for novels, yet as she writes in one poem, the new “war reality” is “devouring plot coherence”. In the Hospital Rooms of My Country refers to “sentences that are blown by the mines in the avenues, stories/ shelled by multiple rocket launches”. One poet, Lesyk Panasiuk, has produced a poem ( translated into English by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris) that embodies the idea of the rupture of language through the physical collapse of signs and lettering on buildings hit by missiles. If war involves a fracturing of language, it is poetry that will eventually creep in to fill the gaps. I set aside metaphors to speak about the war in clear words.” It interests me that she uses metaphor to describe this process at the same time as apparently eschewing it: in the end, metaphor will out. Photograph: Sergey Bobok/AFP/Getty Imagesĭaryna Gladun, a poet based in Bucha before the invasion, has written that the work she is producing at the moment “sits at the boundary between literature and journalism. Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan performs in a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, in April 2022. “It’s the condensation, the density of it, the way that you can arrange words so that they carry a lot,” explains Max Rosochinsky who, with Maksymchuk, is co-editor of an anthology of Ukrainian poems, Words for War, born from the conflict that began in 2014 with Russian annexations in the Donbas and Crimea. But in surprising numbers, Ukrainians are also turning to poetry, while setting aside for the time being that time-greedy literary form, the novel. Many Ukrainians started to keep diaries, the “first responder”, perhaps, among literary genres, able to gather experience and emotion in its rawest form. But as the conflict has continued, the power of writing to record, to testify and to witness has seemed more and more important. It is true that when Russia’s full-scale invasion started on 24 February, literature was the last thing on people’s minds – “you could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems”, as the writer Oleksandr Mykhed put it. “We know for sure that wars end, but poetry does not.” At the time of writing, more than 24,000 poems had been added to the site. “Every poem, every line, every word is part of Ukrainian history,” the site says. There is even a Ukrainian government website that encourages members of the public to upload their work. Often these poems are posted by their authors on social media the literary journal Chytomo has been gathering up and publishing examples, some by established poets, many by those new to the form, including soldiers. But poetry’s ability to, as she says, “crystallise a particular moment in time, or an emotion that is fleeting”, has led to an outpouring of poems – not so much emotion recollected in tranquillity, as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is hardly the first thing that one would expect of a country at war. “T here is so much poetry coming out of Ukraine now that I’m barely keeping up with it,” the Ukrainian translator and scholar Oksana Maksymchuk tells me.
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