Baruch College’s Sidney Harman Writer-In-Residence Program hosted a reading and conversation with the current writer-in-residence, Oksana Maksymchuk, on Nov. 20.
The Ukrainian-American poet, philosopher and translator recently released her debut English poetry collection, “Still City: Diary of an Invasion,” about the war in Ukraine.
“One aspect of the poetry that I was after was that it not be so one-dimensional as to only show the horror of war, but also show that during war, life goes on,” she said. Maksymchuk, who lived in Lviv, Ukraine when the war began, wanted to show the reality of what living in a war zone does to people.
In the collection, she sought to show that life goes on, even with constant air raids, heartbreak and death looming in people’s lives.
But not all Ukrainian poets believe in the same philosophy, she said.
“A lot of Ukrainian poets have been talking about how they resist embellishment, how they resist rhythm, how they resist beautiful patterns,” she said. “There is a kind of resentment of the poets who indulge in these things. And I indulge in these things.”
The different perspectives of people during the war also show the changing reality for those closer to the front line. In Maksymchuk’s poem, “Orphic Euphemisms,” she opens the first stanza with: “We say she died but really, she got killed.”
Throughout the collection, graphic depictions are seen through different perspectives, which is why she recommends readers to read the collection in “micro doses.” Many of her poems are viewed through the eyes of people farther from the front line. Maksymchuk explained that it was written this way because most women do not go to the front lines due to the possibility of sexual torture if captured by the Russians.
In her work, she wanted to “expand in this conception of what it means to be a world away to include people who experienced war as directly.”
Maksymchuk said that people were “looking at the social media, and the news, so they are still potentially affected by the war, but they are not witnessing the lot of battles.”
Next semester’s Writer-In-Residence will be playwright and novelist writer Lauren Yee.
