New poetry by Vasyl Makhno, New Yorker formerly of Ukraine's Ternopil region (06/12/05)

New poetry by Vasyl Makhno, New Yorker formerly of Ukraine's Ternopil region

by Ika Koznarska Casanova

NEW YORK - Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian émigré poet and literary scholar who came to New York in 2000, and an active member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, where he coordinates and conducts the guest lectures and special events that are held throughout the year.

A native of Chortkiv in the Ternopil region, Mr. Makhno studied at the Ternopil Pedagogical Institute, followed by graduate studies. His dissertation, titled "The Artistic World of Bohdan Ihor Antonych," came out as a book in 1999. Antonych and the Modernist tradition have been referred to as a seminal influence in his early work.

As noted on the Poetry International Web-Ukraine (PIW) site, Mr. Makhno's first collection of poetry, titled "Skhyma" (Schema), was published in Ternopil in 1993. Since then he has published six collections of poetry, a collection of translations of the prominent Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, "Struna Svitla" (String of Light, 1996), and has compiled an anthology, "Deviatdesiatnyky: Antolohiia Novoi Ukrainskoi Poezii" (Poets of the Nineties: An Anthology of New Ukrainian Poetry, 1998).

In the late 1990s he taught at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and in 1997 he was published for the first time in Polish translation. The Polish literary journal Dekada Literacka published several of his poems in translation by Andrzej Nowak.

His subsequent move to the United States, as noted by PIW editor Kateryna Botanova in her interview with the poet, "effected a sharp division in Makhno's life and poetry."

The poetry collection "Plavnyk Ryby" (The Fish's Fin) - half of which was written in Ukraine and the other half in the United States - and published in Ivano-Frankivsk in 2002, two years after Mr. Makhno settled in New York, is referred to by the poet as his "most transitional book." His subsequent, and most recent, collection - "38 Virshiv Pro Niu York i Deshcho Inshe" (38 Poems About New York and Other Things; Kyiv: Krytyka, 2004), attests to fundamental structural changes in his work and to new forms of creative expression.

With reference to the poet's work, Ms. Botanova observes that Mr. Makhno's texts "continue to be unusually dense, saturated with metaphors, symbols and cultural allusions. They continue to preserve his characteristic rhythm, as if they are written to be read in the same breath, with only a dash separating the words or, inversely, linking them together." (Michael Naydan writes about this in more detail in his translator's note, written for the PIW; the analytical critique is printed below with Prof. Naydan's permission).

Commenting on the poet's transition, Ms. Botanova notes that "Makhno is no longer hiding in his own poems. Poetry for him is now transformed into a way of living through a liminal situation, of living with the unexpected questions that life generates: about the boundaries of the Ukrainian ghetto, about poetry as a gift or a craft, about the Western tradition and the Eastern canon."

The move to New York and the practice of his craft in new conditions have ultimately served to reenergize and transform Makhno "from a bucolic into an urban poet...[one] who speaks a common language with contemporary Ukrainian poetry," she writes.

Intent on establishing contacts with fellow poets as well as keeping abreast of contemporary currents in poetry worldwide, Mr. Makhno had the opportunity to attend international poetry gatherings in Serbia and Romania in 2003. Finding it germane to the creative process, such exposure has also led to his translation of works by his colleagues.

To date, Mr. Makhno's poetry has appeared in Polish, Russian, German, and Serbian anthologies of Slavic and Ukrainian poetry.

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