How Language Resists War: On Oksana Maksymchuk’s “Still City”

Oksana Maksymchuk | Still City | University of Pittsburgh Press | November 2024 | 136 pages

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If words could bring a case against war, Oksana Maksymchuk would be a prime witness to call, and Still City—the first lyric collection Maksymchuk has penned in English—the testimony. An elegant chronicle of the full-scale invasion waged in Ukraine by Russia since February 24, 2022, it stands among other evidence: Maksymchuk’s two preceding poetry collections, both in Ukrainian; her Ukrainian-to-English co-translations with Max Rosochinsky; and her English-language anthology, Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (2017), co-edited with Rosochinsky. 

In the introduction to Words for War, Ilya Kaminsky crystallizes the language polemics of Ukrainian poetics by example of Boris Khersonsky, a Ukrainian Russophone poet who in 2014 ceased to speak Russian in “solidarity with the Ukrainian state.” Kaminsky demands of the reader: “What does it mean for a poet to refuse to speak his own language? Is language a place you can leave? Is language a wall you can cross? What is on the other side of that wall? … In broader terms: what happens to language in wartime?”

Maksymchuk migrated from Ukraine to the USA in the 1990s—like Kaminsky—but returned to Ukraine shortly before 2022. She has never published in Russian, but has now pivoted from Ukrainian towards English. How could a twist of Kaminsky’s questions illumine Still City? What does war do to Still City’s language—especially when we think of language not (only) as a system of communication, but a wall that impedes articulations of war?

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The poems of Still City unfold in free verse, mostly tercets and quatrains, and they rarely exceed a single page. Maksymchuk opens with: 

I bought a hat

of faux mink fur

to wear in the war.

The [w] alliteration strings “war” to “wear” then tugs us down into the bomb shelter, where the speaker figures as a slighted lover to whom the “enemy” grotesquely sends “supplications, doctored / screenshots, explicit photos.”  

Maksymchuk began writing Still City in 2021, an impetus she later described as a “mnemonic strategy” against the “blur” of the impending invasion. “Line by line, stanza by stanza, I was trying to pinch myself, to wake up into a world that would make sense again.” She continued writing Still City through the war. In light of that knowledge, the collection’s opening reads like a nightmare that conjures war’s lived experience before its arrival, the better to “make sense” of it: “No collapse, just a gradual shrinking / of the present…” 

But of course the war had already arrived in Donbas and Crimea in 2014, its form and tenor already known: “… in Donbas / all the newness is over / … Just the beginning for us.” And when the war seems finally to alight in the thirteenth poem of Still City——it floods the narrative with an incantatory rush of denial:

We say it couldn’t be

War wouldn’t dare come

…

there’ll be no war

there’ll be no war

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In its other life with Carcanet Press in the UK, Still City carries the apposite subtitle Diary of an Invasion. As a form, the diary signals its speaker’s subjective totality and the linear chronology of its entries: we presume that the diary moves forward into Maksymchuk’s “shrinking present,” a narrative of survival that comprises Still City’s chronological backbone.

As a diary, Still City stores its emotional core in the lyric “I” that enounces its verses: Maksymchuk’s lines display concision without rush, truth without compression, despite the duress of life during wartime that they chart and that compels them. “When a shell strikes a person / there’s a scattering / resembling a flock of birds / taking off.” Or: “In the dictionary of victims / there’s no space / for a hair to fall.” 

But—unlike a diary—the lyrics go undated. Without attachment to date, month, or year, barring signals like “New Year’s Eve” and contextual signs from the pre-invasion, they lift off from the diary’s generic constraints towards a wider awareness of history, to an almost a-temporality. In ‘The Muse of History,’ Maksymchuk writes of its craft: “History, too, is an art / with a history, date of birth, a geolocation….” 

Even so, the speaker’s experience departs from the rhythm of generational inheritance—"the script I’d inherited from my grandmother / and her grandmother before her…”—to express a more detached, impersonal marker of time: “In the brief intermission between / world wars…” Which world wars: the most known ones, from 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945? The Cold War? This current war? The historical construct of “the brief intermission” dissolves into doubt, and Maksymchuk’s voice spirals out from its origins in this particular war to resonate with the violence of wars across time. 

But in ‘Kingdom of Ends,’ Maksymchuk wields this temporal ambiguity

to weave a language

out of the things we felt

mattered

for our future

as an impermanent species

Here, Maksymchuk’s “language” speaks of “roots and surfaces,” “fungi” and “spores,” an almost-posthumanist naturality that ejects her speaker’s experience to a world out of history. The organic “plane of existence” she erects is as “distant” from historical time as it is from her shrewd comparison between this “language” and the death-proclaiming technology of “smart / self-navigating missiles,” 

propagating a form of rebirth

that would touch us all

impartially, indiscriminately

With her preternaturally deft blend of earnestness and archness, Maksymchuk’s language transcends the immediacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sublimating the particular conditions of her speaker’s experiences, Maksymchuk’s holistic “I” invites us to try to conceive the plural subjectivities of war. In ‘The Orders of Priority,’ she affirms: “Being is before time— / so ontology precedes / temporality.” In the besieged streets of the still city, we flit through Maksymchuk’s words towards the collection’s expanding “I”: “close, yet not / an exact match, like a rhyme in a poem / you compose posthaste, lines / blurred by terror.”

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Those of us with no personal experience of the war in Ukraine—or any war—rely on witnesses and chroniclers like Maksymchuk to try to rhyme, even slantwise, with its terror:

Here, beloved—

taste my eyeball

rinsed in a special cocktail

only I can craft

in my mortal body

 Still City’s most astounding poems, like this one, ‘Several Circles,’ use language’s starkest tools—frank syntax and unadorned vocabulary—to stun us with the atrocity of its images. ‘Rocket in the Room’ combines “the rocket” and “the room full of children” into “an unsorted matter / a puzzle / awaiting a solution”; its simple verbal equivalencies ironically educe the mass murders of Ukrainian children by Russian soldiers since 2022. Maksymchuk utilizes the same neutral language of defamiliarization to describe a young woman walking her pug—“Something bit her / in the back, and she fell / and lay there”—or parody an advertisement for tourniquets: “His inhuman grip / will keep your blood in / even as you’re uncorked / like a bottle of wine / flipped upside down.” 

Coined in 1917 by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, the literary concept of defamiliarization—in the original Russian, to “make strange”—creates a cognitive dissonance between language and image to heighten their artistry, to prolong “the process of perception” as “its own end in art… Art is the means to live through the making of a thing.”

When war constitutes the means to nothingness through the making of death, how does defamiliarization cohere with the cognitive dissonance between art and war visited upon Ukraine by Russia? How does defamiliarization cross the wall from Russian to Ukrainian?

Maksymchuk never aims to “make strange” to serve her “own end in art.” The absurdity that unfurls throughout Still City is not alienation for art’s sake, but an imprint of Russia’s murderous, liquidating violence. “Somebody’s liver / smeared over the asphalt / like melted ghee / Somebody’s daughter / sandwiched between the slabs / of concrete.” Maksymchuk doesn’t need to “make” anything strange; Russia has done it already. 

But defamiliarization is also a principle of perspective, cleaving those within the war and outside of it. Conditioned by the social media feed, safe and unscathed, far from Ukraine, what some readers might find ‘defamiliarizing’ is all too real to those impacted by war. The social media feed conditions what we see and know of the war. “I don’t know if the images of / bombings are what you yearn for / in your feed,” Maksymchuk writes in ‘Algorithmic Meltdown.’ So when Maksymchuk fashions another poem, ‘Timeline Scroll,’ whose successive couplets mimic the form and content of posts on a timeline—

A handsome poet, her photographs

shot by another less famous poet

An ad for learning a foreign language

—and interrupts the regular scroll with this digression, spinning out from “an ad for pizza delivery”—

A friend whose account’s in a coma—

she fell in a coma

last week while trying to order pizza

last words on her mind, probably

“cheese, pepperoni, olives”

Not “war,” not “rocket”

—Maksymchuk magnetizes the language of defamiliarization, torquing the confused compass of our understanding by suddenly negating “war” and “rocket.” We ask: how did the speaker’s friend fall into a coma? The presence of the absence of “war” and “rocket” hints at a cause, and by undoing our affective distance from the war, Maksymchuk’s use of the timeline scrambles the gap between the war, and how we distant readers perceive it.

“Sight, the philosopher said, is first / of the senses, it reigns supreme / making sense of things,” Maksymchuk writes, the beat falling on “sight” and “reigns.” Scrolling down my own Instagram timeline, I came across this image by the Ukrainian photographer Igor Efimov, which he captioned “the photograph I least wanted to take” on March 28, 2024:

In the black-and-white square photograph, two figures lie side by side on an enormous white sheet draped over a parquet floor. On the right, a black dress sheathes a woman’s body to her neck, wrists, and ankles. On the left, parallel to the woman, someone has laid out a three-piece checkered suit and a pair of leather derbies. But suit and shoes are devoid of a body, the archetypal image of a couple now defamiliarized by death.

The visual language of Efimov’s photograph lights Maksymchuk’s poem, ‘Reversal,’ from beneath:

A shirt turned inside out retains the shape

of a torso, matching it in form

. . .

A body turned inside out is a spectacle

resembling a bag spilling its private content

Created independently of each other, the poem’s lexicon resonates with the photograph’s monochrome: a simple rigidity of form, a brutal viscera of substance. The shirt in Efimov’s photograph “retains the shape / of a torso”; Maksymchuk’s verse “match[es]” this anguished absence “in form,” translated into a daily language of death and fear as though “spilling its private content,” juxtaposing mundanity and atrocity. 

The poems in Still City are perhaps the poems Maksymchuk least wanted to write, but  Maksymchuk’s poetics of alienation and estrangement do not defamiliarize to attain an aesthetic of its own. They magnify the textures and dimensions of war, the now-familiar grain of its terror. In (de)familiarization, Maksymchuk stokes our empathetic response to terror and horror. Her art, too, reifies “the means to live through the making of a thing.” And so we learn to undo for ourselves the Orphic euphemisms of war. 

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In Western receptions of Greek mythology, Orpheus is most known for his failure to recuperate his beloved Eurydice’s soul from the underworld. Later, he suffers a violent death; though ancient sources differ on his murderers and their motives for killing him, in all accounts he was torn apart, limbs strewn, his body ripped to shreds. Despite this pain, he dies singing, immortalized in myths. He also initiated or inspired the practice of a set of religious rites called Orphism. The Orphist believes that by enacting the Orphic rites, one relives Orpheus’s ordeals and thus attains eternal life. Aestheticized, Orphism carries more than a tinge of softening war’s blunt, traumatic violence.

Orphism sustains the latter half of Still City, an existential buoy: in ‘Orphic Euphemisms’—

We say she died

but really, she got killed

slaughtered along with others

at the unlikely location

of sacrifice

—and ‘The Head of Orpheus’—

[Butchers and tyrants —]

Prone to lose their minds

maddened by orphic breathing

. . .

—as well as ‘Pure Poetry’:

What orphic urges pushed me

into creating formulae

for all

that I most desired?

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Does myth become real during wartime—if not in its exact plot, then in scale, rawness, and themes of slaughter and sacrifice? The lived experience of war verifies mythology’s epic, earth-shattering magnitudes and logic of aleatory violence, “singing the wrath of the demi-gods…” And Still City’s narrative makes an epic of self-purification in the time of war, narrating a journey from the embodied, sheltering self to an almost physically detached spirit, hovering in formal economy above the constraints of the body:

How I levitate, the force of a scream suppressed

lifting me up and up!

It’s easy to see how the euphemizing rhetoric of Orpheus’s myth appeals to Maksymchuk, who researches and teaches classical philosophy for a living. Her knowledge shapes her speaker’s high register and sparse, precise structures of language:

What formal paucity

caused me to weed

around words and phrases

I dreamt essential?

As a language, Orphism speaks of violence as a means to salvation, and death to deliverance. In Still City, Maksymchuk’s Orphic poetics move through the verbal katabasis of decapitation, defamiliarization, damnation—“monstrous severed heads / buried in the sand / mouthing verses / unintelligible, barbaric”—to attain a kind of cathartic fruition or formalist familiarization with the massive cost of the war. “… How do I take / the measure of business / so unmistakably human?”

But in addition to Orphism, Maksymchuk also subverts the anti-epic of the modernist firmament, ironizing Eliot in ‘Puppets of God’:

Do I dare

disturb the music

of the universe, its slow-turning

spheres, threads of spindles

meted out by Fates

So the poet raved, impersonating

another poet

Interrupting Orpheus and Prufrock, setting them in Ukraine, Maksymchuk dares “disturb the music / of the universe”—the mythologies of violence harmonizing the Western psyche—without ever pitching into hallucinatory histrionics, perennially self-aware.

my imposter’s voice collapses

back into a box—

an embarrassed jack

with a spring for a spine

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But this “embarrassed jack / with a spring for a spine” is only rhetorical; instead, and in blatant contradiction to the singular “box” of the “imposter’s voice,” Maksymchuk crosses the wall of mythology and modernism to intertwine with the verses of other voices. One of Still City’s most stunning pieces, ‘Pegman,’ paraphrases Ukraine’s seminal poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), who wrote in Ukrainian when Ukraine’s contemporary territory was subsumed within the Russian Empire. Shevchenko suffered long exiles in Russian penal settlements for doing so. Compare the opening lines of his ‘Testament,’ written in 1845 and translated by John Weir—

When I am dead, bury me

In my beloved Ukraine …

—to those of Maksymchuk’s ‘Pegman’—

If I die

in the war

bury me on Maps

     Maksymchuk’s ‘Pegman’ glitches Shevchenko’s lyrical desire for burial in Ukraine to the metaphysics of digital mapping applications. Where Shevchenko speaks of “the blood of foes” pouring in the “deep blue sea” and charts Ukraine’s “fields, the boundless steppes, / the Dnieper’s plunging shore,” Maksymchuk writes a warscape of “the zone”: “vacant yet sharable, amid / phantoms of trunks with missing limbs / startled-half empty streets…” Like ghosts, like witnesses, we roll through the stanzas of both Shevchenko’s and Maksymchuk’s Ukrainian landscapes into the purgatory populated only by appeals for remembrance. See Shevchenko’s concluding lines—

With softly spoken, kindly word

Remember also me.

—while Maksymchuk’s iambic, alliterative appeal juts its chin out:

I reserve the right

to respawn

While we’ve juxtaposed ‘Pegman’ against ‘Testament’ in the historical continuity of Ukrainian poetics, we can also re-orient Still City’s map of intertextualities towards the ongoing genocide in Gaza, committed by Israel. Both Maksymchuk’s ‘Advice to a Young Poem’ and Mahmoud Darwish’s Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘To a Young Poet,’ translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, similarly subvert Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Contrasting Darwish’s poem to Rilke’s epistles, Joudah writes: “[‘To A Young Poet’] is not sanctimonious advice … Another thing … is its reliance on paradox and contradiction.” Maksymchuk channels Darwish’s elusive heart in her “young poem,” where “little” words “trickle out / of the cage through bars / one can barely see …/ in a windowless and evasive / mind.” 

Since October 7, 2023, poetic languages have recorded the Palestinian genocide wreaked by Israel in Palestinian lands. These poetics also deal in the ideas of “recovery of broken / hope, delivery of the forgotten,” that Maksymchuk writes to her ‘young poem’; and the poetics of witnessing—glancingly narrative, historical, holistic, (de)familiarizing, intertextual—“form like clouds / woven of gauze and mucus.” Likewise, in Darwish’s eyes, we readers, witnessers, become “guests / of an excess, fugitive cloud.”

These poems invite us into the “fugitive” cloud of recognizing horror, remembering it, witnessing it. To enter the cloud is perhaps another way of saying that we’ve crossed the wall to wartime language.

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In binary conceptions of national languages, translation effectively constitutes a border-crossing from one language to another. In one country we understand what is said and written; we can even contribute to the construction of ideas, a collective way of being. Once we cross the border into a state whose language is unknown to us, we become opaque, silenced, secondary to those who can and do partake in national discourses. Language is a land intersected by walls; or, from another perspective, walls fragment language into countries.

Linguistic walls divide the Ukrainian from the English, but by publishing her own work in the English language for the first time, Maksymchuk has rendered her poetics legible to the Anglophone audience of her adopted country. In the English language, we witness Maksymchuk rewire the Russo-Ukrainian War’s startling, urgent violence into a poetics of philosophy and ahistoricity. Her work transcends war’s artlessness to attain the mimetic force of empathy. As English-language readers, we learn to hear Still City’s syntax of sparsity, a “formal paucity” that resituates war’s terror in the stride of the collection’s metaphysical and mythological ventures, beyond the “fourth wall” of the bomb shelter. And we aim to defamiliarize the terror we feel in the wake of this war.

But what can Maksymchuk’s defamiliarization do in the foreign arena of an  English readership? Does it convey the absurd pain caused by the Russian invasion to the non-Ukrainian reader, just as Efimov’s photograph folds the checkered grief of war into a small, black, portable square? Does its defamiliarization catharize the Ukrainian reader’s experiences of war for a wider audience? In English—the language on the plinth of the neoliberal world order—who does Maksymchuk intend to write to, or for? Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all? And what lingers up in the “fugitive clouds,” unbound by any barriers?

Perhaps there’s a world where diaries chronicle dinners, and our familiarity with war is irrelevant; where we don’t despair over the euphemisms of salvation, where Ukraine is victorious over Russia, and Israel ceases its genocide in Palestine. In other words, this would be  a world so utopian that it circles back to inhumanity, uninhibited by the deep imperfections of human structures.

Let’s not mythologize these wars and genocides; their systems of oppression generate tangible, devastating impacts on other human beings whether we consciously feel them or not, with no space for the mysticisms of Orphic self-purification. The holistic “I” that surpasses historical time in Still City is one we can project only our own selves onto, funnelled into the walled realm of English.

Regardless of its impulse, crossing the wall between Ukrainian and English makes Still City a migratory document in a poeticized world where transgression is possible. The poet retains her freedom to observe and narrate, her words to witness and testify; and she empowers us to enter the clouds of other languages, other lives, Ukrainian or not. Maksymchuk’s poetics defy the mutilations imposed by the weaponry of Russian socio-military forces, and in doing so, steels us—close or far, familiar or unfamiliar (or defamiliar)—against the wounds of any and all tyrannies. In times of war, Maksymchuk undoes the still city’s walls of language.