Bowery Poetry Club hosts Ukrainian reading (10/15/06)

Bowery Poetry Club hosts Ukrainian reading

NEW YORK - The Bowery Poetry Club hosted a Ukrainian reading before a sold-out audience on Sunday, September 24. The evening of music, poetry and fiction in English and Ukrainian - held as part of the Balaklava! Eastern European Reading Series - was organized by fiction writer Irene Zabytko and Prof. Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University in New Jersey. They had previously organized an equally successful Ukrainian evening at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village in the spring.

Performers included the Svitanya Eastern European Women's Vocal Ensemble, Ukrainian-language poet Vasyl Makhno, English-language poet Dzvinia Orlowsky and fiction writer Prof. Motyl. Although the evening would not have happened without Ms. Zabytko's initiative, the PEN Award-winning fiction writer and author of several highly acclaimed novels was unable to attend.

The evening began with Ukrainian and Bulgarian songs by Susan Anderson, Kim Fedchak, Sibelan Forrester, Laura Howson, Maryka Kalyna and Christine Steele of Svitanya, accompanied by Jimmy Mora, a classical guitarist based in New York City.

One of their most memorable numbers was "Oy u Lisi," an ancient Kupalo song full of dissonant harmonies and sung in the "bilyi holos" style, which they learned from the renowned Ukrainian singer Mariana Sadovska. Svitanya also dedicated a song about displacement to the victims of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and "to the victims of displacement and war everywhere."

Svitanya's CD, "First Light," has been played by radio stations in at least 12 countries, including Ukraine, and is available at www.svitanya.org.

Vasyl Makhno, a poet and playwright known for his love of language and wordplay, came next. He recited four poems in Ukrainian and their English-language translations (by Dr. Orest Popovych, president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society). Dr. Makhno's latest book is "38 Poems about New York and Other Things." Several of his poems have just appeared in translation in Kerala, India.

Dzvinia Orlowsky followed with a bravura performance. The Pushcart Prize-winning poet and author of "A Handful of Bees," "Edge of House," "Except for One Obscene Brushstroke" and the forthcoming "Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones" combined humor and razor-sharp observations of human nature in her poems. Ms. Orlowsky recently published a translation of Alexander Dovzhenko's novella, "The Enchanted Desna" (which readers may acquire from her at [email protected]).

Prof. Motyl completed the program with a reading from his latest work of fiction, "Who Shot Andrei Warhol," which depicts the imagined encounter between Andy Warhol and a Soviet Ukrainian journalist who comes to New York City in early 1968 to report on the impending American revolution. Prof. Motyl is a political science professor and painter, and author of "Whiskey Priest," a thriller set in post-Soviet Ukraine.

Ms. Zabytko and Prof. Motyl said they intend to continue with staging Ukrainian cultural programs in American venues in the years ahead.

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