Poetry of Survival
Typically for me, April, which is National Poetry month, means traveling to poetry readings and social gatherings with fellow poets, celebrating the art form we dedicate our lives to. But this year is different. As the Russian war against Ukraine rages on, April is indeed the cruelest month. A Ukrainian friend writes about spending whole nights in Kyiv subway stations—which are being used as bomb shelters—reciting poems to herself and those around her to keep sane. When she grows tired, she starts translating those poems into other languages, just as a way of keeping going.
Critics in the West often ask whether poetry matters. I now realize that the only valid response to this question is: Do such critics matter? If a person sheltering deep underground as her city is bombed recites poems as a survival tool—to soothe herself and others—that is all the evidence I need that poetry matters. But we humans always knew that.
Letters of the alphabet go to war/
clinging to one another standing up forming words no one wants to shout/
sentences that are blown by the mines in the avenues, stories/
shelled by multiple rocket launches.
So writes Ukrainian poet Lesyk Panaisuk, who lost his home in Bucha. Russian soldiers occupied his house, Lesyk tells me; he says the same young soldiers invaded Chernobyl before coming to Bucha, having no idea of the disaster that unfolded there more than 35 years ago. No one told them what they were heading into, Lesyk tells me. Because the young soldiers brought very high levels of radiation with them from Chernobyl into the Lesyk’s Bucha house, it is no longer habitable.
It is surreal, this situation. In the middle of the ransacked city of Bucha stands a house whose owners cannot return to it because of radiation—an invisible war that still lives in those rooms, long after the soldiers are gone.
How can poetry describe something like this? How can any language speak of a country that’s bombarded while the rest of the world looks on?
A Ukrainian word
Is ambushed: through the broken window of
a letter д other countries watch how a letter і
loses its head how the roof of a letter м
falls through.
The language in a time of war
can’t be understood inside this sentence
is a hole - no one wants to die - no one
speaks. By the hospital bed of letter й
lies a prosthesis it’s too shy to use.
You can see the light through the clumsily sewn up holes
Of letter ф - the soft sign has its tongue torn out
due to disagreements regarding
etymology of torture. There is too much alphabet
in the hospital rooms of my country, too much, too
Much alphabet, no place to stick an apostrophe, paint falls off
The walls, showering us with words incomprehensible
Like men who, in wartime, refuse to speak
So continues Lesyk’s poem. As I am translating it, I can’t help but email him to see if he’s okay. Trying to help in some way, I offer him money, which he refuses. I don’t need your money, he says. Translate my poem, publish it in the world.
As I read his response, another email pops up. It is from the Kharkiv poet Anastasia Afanasieva, who I have known for over a decade. I translated her poems, she translated mine. Then she took a long break from poetry and decided to make fish-hooks. Yes. Fish-hooks. She built a successful business, which is now gone. Here’s what she has to say about the bombs that destroyed it:
“What’s most terrifying? The planes. Kharkiv’s near border, so the authorities can’t warn us if plane’s coming. It takes 3 minutes for the plane to rise in Russia & bomb Kharkiv. I had a friend in a border village, send a warning: ‘Plane.’ That meant: 1 minute to fall on the floor, shut our ears.”
She writes: “Since the war started, I feel it’s like one long day: I still don’t know what day of the week it is or what date.” Yes, she is writing poems again, since the war started. This award-winning Russian language poet from Kharkiv now writes about abandoning the Russian language; the second half of her poem is in Ukrainian. Her letter itself is poetry without trying to be poetic: She describes the world with precision and urgent clarity, finding poetry in everything her eyes see:
“The past was cancelled in one minute. Imagine a magic eraser, which erases all the text in one moment from the paper—and paper becomes white as a new snow. Personal past is no more. No former goals, no former job, no former habits, no former stores we used to visit for groceries every day, no former walking routes, no former landscapes, no home, no former dreams—pure nothing. You’re born again at the age of 40—having only a book of memories with you, a book, which you read till the end and there are no new chapters. And you, like a newborn, try to learn to walk and speak again.”
T.S. Eliot was right. April is the cruelest month. And poetry now is as necessary as ever. Not because it is pretty or fancy. But because it helps us to articulate the most impossible moments: It gives us a gasp, a scrap of air in our lungs. When we have nothing else, we can still hold a handful of words in our memory, a tune, and that might be all we have got now to survive—we don’t know yet. But if we are lucky, it is there. Keep it safe, this verbal music. Memorize new line poems if you can. You might need them one day, war planes or not. When facing the blank wall that is crisis, everyone needs a bit of music, a tune, a balm.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in former Odessa, former USSR, now Ukraine. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press). Kaminsky lives in Atlanta.
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