Night of contemporary poetry held at the Shevchenko Scientific Society (01/15/06)

Night of contemporary poetry held at the Shevchenko Scientific Society

by Dr. Orest Popovych

NEW YORK - Three luminaries of contemporary Ukrainian poetry - Bohdan Rubchak, Oleksander Irvanets and Vasyl Makhno - treated a packed house at the headquarters of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) to a delightful evening of their art on December 17.

Doubling as an emcee, Prof. Makhno introduced his two colleagues as representatives of two distinct schools of Ukrainian poetry.

Prof. Rubchak is a member of the renowned New York Group of Ukrainian writers, who were especially active in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Prof. Makhno, this unique group provided a much-needed contribution to Ukrainian literature by reviving Ukrainian modernism, which in Ukraine was decapitated in the 1920s. Mr. Irvanets, a guest from Kyiv, is a representative of the so-called Bu-Ba-Bu Group in Ukraine.

When Prof. Makhno referred to the two guests as "great poets," both of them graciously interrupted to say that the great poet among them was the one holding the microphone.

The first featured speaker was Prof. Rubchak, poet, prosaist and literary critic. This was his first appearance in New York after several decades of teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has recently settled in New Jersey.

Citing T. S. Elliot's motto that "home is where one starts from," Prof. Rubchak started by reciting nostalgic verses about his native Ukraine, followed by lengthy excerpts of prose from his memoirs of the great escape from Ukraine to the West in 1944. At that time many among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, especially in western Ukraine, chose the hardships and dangers of exodus when faced with the alternative of impending enslavement or worse by the Stalinist Soviet regime.

Choosing "travels" as the theme of his narrative, Prof. Rubchak recalled how he as a little boy traveling with his family joined the massive escape to the West by car, horsecart and on foot. Relating in painful detail the miseries of the day-to-day existence of the refugees, he cited examples of the ugliness and cruelty exhibited by some people under the stressful conditions. That included a blow to the head of the little boy by an angry Nazi policeman, which caused physical damage that has lasted a lifetime. "Angst" is the word Prof. Rubchak used to describe the mental state of the refugees.

Next to address the audience was Mr. Irvanets whose writings have been described as falling into two categories: irony, expressed by satirical verses, and other, more serious, works. He is the author of several collections of poetry, five plays and a novel.

Mr. Irvanets began by recalling the first, historic meeting between members of the Bu-Ba-Bu Group and the New York Group, including Prof. Rubchak, which took place in Kyiv in 1989 on the occasion of the World Festival of Ukrainian Poetry.

He then recited several short verses of his political satire directed at situations and attitudes in Ukraine, at its leaders, and even at Russia's President Vladimir Putin. Written in the years 2003-2005, these very entertaining verses are usually composed of three stanzas, with four lines each. This format was mandated in part by the fact that the poetry had to fit into brief TV slots assigned to it in a program called "5 Kopecks" broadcast on Ukraine's Channel 5. This was the only opposition channel functioning during the regime of Leonid Kuchma. A collection of these satirical verses titled "Preambles and Texts" (Kyiv, 2005) was available for sale at the end of the program, as was Mr. Irvanets's book of plays and more serious verses, titled "Lyskunchyk - 2004" (Kyiv, 2005).

Prof. Makhno, a representative of the modernist school and the resident poet at NTSh, opened with his as yet unpublished poem "Gertrude Stein," which was inspired by the statue of that American writer and patron of the arts in New York's Bryant Park. Next came "The Weekend of An American Family," a jarring, heart-wrenching exposé of the tragic lives of two illegal aliens who cohabitate as a couple, having left their wedded spouses in their home countries.

The poem "Nytka" - "The Thread" - was used as a metaphor for human life, enabling the poet to express his philosophical views. Prof. Makhno concluded with an old favorite of his "The New York Group" - about the previously mentioned group of Ukrainian poets, one of whom (Prof. Rubchak) was present. That poem has been published in Prof. Makhno's collection of verses about New York.

To date Prof. Makhno has published six collections of his poetry in Ukrainian, of which two have been published also in Polish translation in the form of two books. Many of his individual poems have been translated also into German, Russian, Serbian and Romanian, and, most recently, into English.

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