UKRAINIAN POETRY DURING RUSSIA'S FULL-SCALE INVASION: REPRESENTATION OF THE CONCEPT OF THE BODY I & II
I
When we speak of wartime poetry, the question arises – what kind of poetry do we mean? Might we be falling into a certain trap, where the obvious or familiar – what we have long called poetry – no longer holds true? In other words, does the extreme, boundary-defining situation of war, which is precisely what it is, erase all prior definitions and convictions? Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a substantial body of Ukrainian poetic texts has emerged. Soldiers and civilians alike offer their own poetic lens on the tectonic shifts revealed by war. Maksym Kryvtsov, Yuliya Musakovska, Yaryna Chornohuz, Dmytro Lazutkin, Serhiy Zhadan, Pavlo Korobchuk, Valeriy Puzik, Kateryna Kalytko, and many others – their poetic experiences of war are at once similar and distinct. They show that even in a catastrophic situation, writing does not cease and voices continue to speak. The body, touching, sexual relation – once familiar poetic themes – are transformed. They lose something, gain something else, and continue to form poetry: they take shape in verse and pose new questions. But are all voices heard? Is everything that is written actually poetry, or, for instance, is it defined as women’s writing? The texts of LGBTQ+ individuals remain barely visible – if they are present at all. There are bodies that are named and bodies that are defaced. A new poetics, a new language of writing, is only just beginning to emerge.
Poetry is an enunciation that seeks to express the inexpressible: the experience of war, disaster, horror – when one’s personal world collapses and will never be restored. If, in such a context, poetry is treated merely as an operation of emotional substitution or distraction, it becomes just another tool – one among many – easily accessible, requiring no particular effort to wield. Poetry becomes versifying. Versifying gradually drowns out poetry, to the point where poetry itself risks vanishing. Poetry, in itself, is a risk, an event from which no one emerges unscathed. It is loss and the consciousness of loss. That is, it is not rehabilitation, not something that enhances self-esteem, overcomes trauma, or even patches a wound. It is the idiom, a sustained tension – a violation of words, meanings, symbols; a breach of convention and a rediscovery of language.
Poetry does not describe – because description banalizes. Poetry is not a document, for documentum (from Latin) means a lesson, an example – that is, a template, a model to be followed. Instruction by (one’s own) example imposes a kind of dependence upon those it addresses, establishing a relation of attachment. «Documentum» may also be understood as evidence, but evidence combined with instruction becomes liable to cataloguing and templating. Poetry does not conform to models, teachings, or testimony, does not arise from nothing – but is exscribed out of voids, lacunae, hollows. Poetry ruptures the awareness of death. Longing, mourning, and grief become excessive – transformed into the symbolic residue of mere versifying.
Poetry is exscribed «greyer» language – «It does not transfigure or render “poetical”» (Celan 2003a, 16). It is a «as if» enunciation, in a «as if» language – a paradoxical tension between poetry and language, between poetry and the body. A body that, in war, is not known but exposed; a body that, in war, is lost, violated, dismembered into organs; a body that is imprisoned, missing in action, rests in mass graves, or is scattered to ash; a body that loves, caresses, makes love, and lives.
In his text The Meridian, Paul Celan writes: «Perhaps we can say that every poem is marked by its own “20th of January”?» (Celan 2003b, 47). Poetry gravitates around particular dates, topos, events, and bodies. February 24 marks a new zero point – a resetting of language, the inception of a new poetics. The contemporary poem is embedded within cultural industries, within the machinery of cultural production. Uniqueness has all but dissipated – replaced by simulations, stylistic imitation, the use of generic imagery, market-oriented formulas, and outright graphomania, etc. Most contemporary war poetry conveys a general message, describes a situation, and traps language in the topos of the timely, the therapeutic, the normative. The poem has been cleansed, schematized, multiplied, and sold. Poetry, by contrast, is singular. It shocks and disqualifies the signifier, displaces metaphors and metonymies: «the metaphors shriveled and crumbled // without ever blooming»[1] (Мусаковська 2024, 58).
February 24 is a leap, a falling-into poetry – into a «greyer» language that does not romanticize, does not aestheticize, does not exalt, does not heal... it touches. It is an ellipsis, an interval, ultimately, an in-between – where the «as if» language, the «greyer» language, becomes a pause oriented toward silence. February 24 risks becoming an official symbol, a ritualized date of commemoration, an erased signature repeated into abstraction.
To write not about poetry, not about the body, but to exscribed the poetry of the body itself. The preposition «about» creates distance – it removes poetry and the body, as if the body were something external, alien. What is called the distance between myself, poetry, and the body is a caesura, a gap, a rift – and it is this edge I touch. That is why: «Everything you write about death will turn out to be about eros […] Everything you write about love will turn out to be // about escape» (Калитко 2022, 40). Eros, thanatos, desire, pleasure. Sexual relations between bodies seem to yearn for maximal touch, reducing language to exclamation. Poetry is exscribed-exclaimed – by bodies: female, male, trans, any. This exclamation, exscription, caressing of poetry by the body is cultivated in what Jean-Luc Nancy called «touching upon extremity» (Nancy 2008, 9). The contemporary poem is mostly about bodihood – about what is signified, poetized, encoded, made into image. The body is touched. The body touches. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote in Corpus: «touching upon the body, touching the body, touching – happens in writing all the time [...] along the border, at the limit, the tip, the furthest edge of writing nothing but that happens» (Nancy 2008, 11).
Thus, at the border, at the limit, the tip, at the furthest edge of writing, writing itself does not signify – it touches the body. Accordingly, poetry touches the body. In Valeriy Puzik’s piece «how many times have you died…», we read:
how many times
did you touch the muzzle to your chin
how many times did you tell yourself
this is the last time
there is a way out
you know it
there’s only one way out – pull the trigger
and then what? (Пузік 2023, 104–105)
This is experience in the most literal sense proposed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: from Latin ex-periri – a «crossing through danger» (Lacoue-Labarthe 1999, 18). It is the kind of experience that may prove fatal – an ultimate experience, after which only muteness or silence remains. When poetry touches, it becomes a danger of that final experience – body-to-body, or through the contact of body-on-body, the relation of penetration: body-into-body. But... but perhaps it is the other way around – «touch and voice overcome the darkness» (Коробчук 2023, 79), as Pavlo Korobchuk writes?
In Dmytro Lazutkin’s poem Pirates, Ukrainian soldiers are compared – or rather, equated – with corsairs: «we also enjoy the state of war // this wild adrenaline rush // this uncontrollable sense of danger» (Лазуткін 2024, 33). The elementality and elemental force of war – its unruliness and command – touches like a border and with a border, like an electric shock that forces the heart to beat again after a brief arrest. But then:
i didn’t know what to say
when my friend wrote about
how after covering his unit’s retreat
he walked through the tree line
and found the leg of a fallen comrade
with his balls still hanging from a strip of scorched skin (Лазуткін 2024, 33)
These words by Dmytro Lazutkin are neither image nor sign nor pure symbol. They intervene in the textual fabric, pausing within the enunciation. They do not displace emphasis from a strong position to a weak one. These are displacement or excision, the splitting and dissemination. According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, «poetry is the spasm or syncope of language» (Lacoue-Labarthe 1999, 49). It is a form of exscription that not only provokes a spasm – it is a spasm. It is a mark, rendered visible through writing, through poetry, through the body – in the register of the Real. This mark, this spasm deconstructing phallogocentrism – and even what Jacques Derrida calls «phallo-paterno-filio-fraterno-ipsocentric» (Derrida 2003, 38). This «discovery» seems to rupture the established concept of war: the excision and dissection of the body with organs turns into organs-without-body. Unidentified, defaced organs-without-body – flesh, remains… They were supposed to stay silent, but they speak. They exscribe the Other’s ultimate experience.
Poetry is «as if» about something – always foreign, always one’s own, near and distant at once. It is a «as if» statement, in a «as if» language. «Аs if» because war maims, inflicts injuries incompatible with life. Language becomes a howl, a scream, a crater where the explosion struck. Poetry is a kind of being-in-between, in a rising interval – where the uncanny surges. The «as if» language, here-and-now, is tested by the question: can versifying make possible the emergence of a deconstructed poetry – the emergence of poetry itself?
[1] The excerpts from Ukrainian poems quoted here and below have been translated into English by Vadym Miroshnychenko.
II
Does one’s own body become knowable to those who write poetry? What does it mean to «write poetry»? Such knowledge – like the act of writing itself – is never complete. It is fragments, shards, stains, organs – «tropisms». It is defragmentation and fragmentation, deconstruction, the bio-prosthetics of language, an implantation into the material of something external, foreign, which becomes «mine» only conditionally. War inflicts wounds on language – wounds incompatible with life, yet compatible with death. It is both an affirmation and a refusal of catastrophe – whether it spreads slowly or erupts in an instant. And poetry is forced, with its clumsy, misshapen language, to cling to catastrophe, to live off it, to feed on it. Catastrophe, manifested through horror, trauma, mutilation, a frozen scream, turns such poetry into mere versifying, as if rescuing it from the tipical and protecting the event itself from one-dimensionality.
The event and its corresponding verse expression, packed into temporalized mourning, create a certain false distance – written by the author, read by the reader, heard by the listener. Poetry fends off insistent, seductive, clichéd metaphors, metonymies, analogies, comparisons, epithets, allegories, rhymes and rhythms (and treats images with suspicion) – all of them infected with imitation. Yaryna Chornohuz writes: «And this is no invention, no metaphor, // this is what I will live with for the rest of my days. // The language of these poems is so un-veiled, so direct…» (Чорногуз 2025, 28). and elsewhere: «someone else will one day finally abandon // the war metaphors instead of me but not I // and not now» (Чорногуз 2025, 41). At first, the funeral melody of the fallen Violinist – the poem’s protagonist and the addressee of its dedication – is taken outside the bounds of trope, stylistic device, and aesthetic dimension. Death, quite evidently, does not fit into figurative meaning. And yet the author does not renounce the trope as such, does not abandon the «war metaphors», leaving that as a perspective for the future – a future whose very potentiality is undermined. Versifying takes place during war, and its inscription is hindered by many factors; such oscillation thus appears to be, to some degree, inevitable. Still, stylistic devices and artistic images remain: «language loses the hermetic seal of images // words once again lose their necessity // when I look at three ellipsized dots» (Чорногуз 2023, 49). Language does not lose the image itself, marked by the words. In Dmytro Shandra, metaphor openly falters before reality: «We tame // fire, and fire tames us. It unfolds on // the iron tip of a burner not as the threadbare metaphor of a flower, // It unfolds as something intimate and companionable when we // extend toward it our shriveled, frozen fingers» (Шандра 2024, 17).
Poetry is lived through grief – through that indelible rupture of reality, that breach within it which time cannot dull. This is why language, as Celan writes, «has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts “beauty”. It tries to be truthful» (Celan 2003a, 15). Poetry with a high density between letters and words. In it, punctuation marks drown; it fills its voids carefully, delicately, paradoxically – in an attempt to pin memory in place. Yet the very purpose of this is fraught: a void cannot be filled, and any filling always risks becoming distorted, exposed, stolen. The fixation of what resists being fixed is a loss, a sacrifice, and, ultimately, a concession. A concession to comprehensibility, to articulation, to others. Such a concession turns poetry into a poem that finds itself defenseless in a hostile space, surrounded by those who wish to appropriate it, to understand it; those who want to empathize, to mourn, to rejoice, to laugh, to discern something shared, to analyze, dissect, remember, and forget.
With all the cautions one must take when speaking of Celan, there is nevertheless something in his words that touches upon the «greyer» language of wartime Ukraine. We are speaking about language in wartime, not in its aftermath, for the «after» is not yet guaranteed; that is, language here-and-now undergoes its trial… «How do we now interpret the language of war?// Where do we find equivalents?» (Пузік 2025, 162). And yet, this contiguity of experience – the thickening of language and the poetry that clings to remnants and wastes, refusing to be appropriated or to take the shape of what is usually called a poem – provokes one to recall Derrida’s words: «No doubt this melancholy stems, as always with friendship, at least this is how I experience it each time, from a sad and invasive certainty: one day death will necessarily separate us. A fatal and inflexible law: one of two friends will always see the other die» (Derrida 2005, 139). It is not impossible that this very thought lies at the core of poetry – that at its center is placed the «fatal and inflexible law», a vision of the day when one will not see the other, will not make the visit, will not touch, speak, feel, or hear. Poetry unblocks the clarity of the Other’s death. In poetry, the death of the Other is unblocked: it is always the final meeting and the final touch – or rather, the touch itself, and the touch of memory, in memory. This is the catastrophe of the world, the end of the world, when poetry no longer holds the body, no longer holds to the body.
The «fatal and inflexible law» is the ruin of one’s personal world and, through it, of the world as such. It is solitude: for the non-contemporary poem is solitary, and poetry is solitary – not about solitude, not its description nor its message, but a touch, a remembering of the last touch. The one that becomes the last on the first day, on the first morning of February 24 – at once last and first.
How do we live together? How do we live apart? How does one live with a body-without-organs, and how does one see organs-without-a-body? Questions whose answers get stuck in the signs themselves – in doubt, in astonishment, in the gaps along the margins, on blank paper speckled with dots. Perhaps poetry is what does not reveal itself, remaining white upon white, untouched by ink, in consciousness and in the unconscious? In asemic writing the hand traces lines, labyrinths, calligraphing a moment in free fall…
The answer is like the conditionality of a split figure, the function of law, duty, upbringing, morality, and, finally, of intonation, sound, or emotion, without words, without voice or language. And without a name, when the need for it is displaced by the closeness of bodies, by tactile experience, by the experience of trauma, of war, of social distance and mourning, of permanent grief and sorrow. Do we remember the name (as a fiction – a personal and generalized image, a callsign), or the body? Both-and, either-or? A name without a specific designation is not depersonalization in its negative sense, but rather a neutrality in its personal pronouns. It makes impossible the predominance – ethical, political, social, linguistic – of one figure over another, one body over another, memory over forgetting. It resists authoritarianism and the precision of definitions and characteristics that point to «someone» while bypassing «someone else». Thus, «When I am asked // what war is // I will answer without hesitation: // names» (Кривцов 2023, 27)… names given at birth, received in war; the bodies of brothers-in-arms and sisters-in-arms, of parents, children, lovers – divided by sex, united in collective burial under one slab, missing, captured, in the rear, on the zero line.
Bunkers, trenches, burrows, pillboxes, observation posts form proxemic spaces – micro-spaces «affectively» arranged by figures, bodies, and consciousnesses. Proxemics establishes different types of relations between the figure and the Other. These are phantasmatic relations that unfold perversely, alogically, at the highest tension, within phantom memory and recollection… «I remember shards of ice with bloody // berries that began to fall onto the parapet // five minutes before the shelling, when the sun warmed // the branches that cover the position» (Шандра 2024, 15).
The real of war intervenes in proxemics permanently, attempting to seize it, subordinate it, impose control. The figure, within the phantasmatic proxemic space, strives to resist – setting safeguards, growing into item, shaking the doxological discourse of verse. War makes possible a splitting of proxemic space: on one side – a structured place, fragile confidence, protection, warmth; on the other – relocation, the temporariness of shelter, threat, and the necessity of solitude. From fixed, proxemics becomes floating, dynamic; the process of mastering space is maximized, while the distance, the gap, the interval between the figure and the Other is minimized. The weapon becomes an extension of the body, a proxemics without fissures; it preserves and takes life, lends confidence and multiplies phantasms… Does the question mark not resemble, in its shape, a gun after the shot…?
When will
a rocket kill me?
When will
the Grad finally burn me? (Кривцов 2023, 164)
It is a splitting of the text, a splitting by the text – by an articulation that does-not-wish-to-be-articulated. It is the point, the aim, the sightline, imploded by writing, by poetry, suddenly interrupting the discourse of the one who writes, and the one who reads, and the one who listens. So how does one experience the distance between «me» and «others» without alienation – how to be in solitude and in community at once?.. In poetry or in silence?..
References
Celan, Paul. 2003a. Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958. In CollectedProse, 15-16. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Celan, Paul. 2003b. The Meridian. InCollected Prose, 37-55. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2003. La raison du plus fort. In Voyous, 19-161. Paris: Galilée.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rams. Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem. In Sovereignties in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York: Fordham University Press.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1999. Poetry as Experience. Stanford California: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press.
Калитко, Катерина. 2022. Люди з дієсловами. Чернівці: Meridian Czernowitz.
Коробчук, Павло. 2023. Навій. Київ: Віхола.
Кривцов, Максим. 2023. Вірші з бійниці. Київ: Наш Формат.
Лазуткін, Дмитро. 2024. Будемо жити вічно. Львів: Видавництво Старого Лева.
Мусаковська, Юлія. 2024. Каміння і цвяхи. Львів: Видавництво Старого Лева.
Пузік, Валерій. 2025. До Чорного моря. Харків: Фоліо.
Пузік, Валерій. 2023. Три медалі в шухляді. Харків: АССА.
Чорногуз, Ярина. 2023. dasein: оборона присутності.Київ: Віхола.
Чорногуз, Ярина. 2025. Нічийний шафран. Чернівці: Meridian Czernowitz.
Шандра, Дмитро. 2024. щільнийчорний. Київ: Видавництво Руслана Халікова.
