By Charlotte Higgins
Poetry is fulfilling a very human need – to make sense of the senseless and tell their stories
There 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. It is hardly the first thing that one would expect of a country at war. 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. 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. There is even a Ukrainian government website that encourages members of the public to upload their work. “Every poem, every line, every word is part of Ukrainian history,” the site says. “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.
The rupture of language – inextricable from the violent rupture of “normality” for Ukrainians – has one starting point in war’s euphemisms and lies. When explosions are reported in the Russian media, they are often referred to as “claps”, like the innocuous clapping of hands. But for a slight difference in pronunciation, the Russian word for clap, chlopok, is identical to the Russian word for cotton. 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.
More information:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/09/for-ukrainians-poetry-isnt-a-luxury-its-a-necessity-during-war