“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions
in Time of War”

Ekaterina Derisheva, University of Pennsylvania
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Jamie Olson, St. Martin’s University

The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
University of Louisville, February 22, 2025

“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions in Time of War” introduces the work of experimental poets writing in Russian and Ukrainian, from positions of opposition, emigration, and displacement, from the late Soviet period to the present conditions of war and exile. The notion that “the non-solution must signify” is a formulation by critic Terry Eagleton that seems apt to the present moment, where poetry can best address a situation of profound indeterminacy.

Ekaterina Derisheva, “The Poetics of Exile: Shaping Space and Language,” addressed how war and rapidly changing environments can alter one’s understanding of space, identity, and the dimensions of language. During the first two years of the current war, the poet relocated through over ten places and visited more than fifty European cities, eventually settling in the US. This constant change profoundly affected her sense of stability and identity. As the immediate effects of war recede, her poems increasingly integrate evolving landscapes and visual imagery, reflecting displacement through abstract forms rather than narrative. Language transforms into a shelter—a third wall—offering refuge against the internal and external conflicts of exile. Her work features a flexible yet irregular syntax, mirroring the fragmented experience of displacement. The philosophy of photography and phenomenology offer valuable frameworks to understand this transformation. [See below for her statement in poetics and link to original poem translated below by Ryan Hardy, Andrew Janco, Olga Livshin, Asher Maria, and Kevin M. F. Platt.]

*

follicles on the heads of mountains

multitude {apex1, apex2, apex3 . . . apexN} with
freckles of brushgrowth and halftones of skin

the horizon bisects the vitruvian pine
/_ 180° to each side

the shadow of branches’ tremors is growing
by the exponent of the echo’s retreat

[the negative tree
describes a square]

Ekaterina Derysheva is a displaced poet from Kharkiv, born in 1994 in Melitopol, Ukraine. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day, Asymptote, Circulo de poesia, Buenos Aires Poetry, Plume, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Volga, and others. She is the author of the books Tochka otscheta (Starting Point; 2018) and installyatsii nye budyet (There Will Be No Installation; 2023), and the co-author of Insulua timpului (Island of Time; Romania, 2020). Her poems have been translated into eleven languages. She has received fellowships from Villa Concordia, Literary Colloquium Berlin,the IIE Artist Protection Fund Fellowship in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Philadelphia.

Barrett Watten, “Signifying Non-Solution in Time of War: Alexei Parshchikov @ the Battle of Poltava” assesses Parshchikov’s recently translated epic ode, published in 1985, connecting its oppositional moment in the late Soviet period to the proliferating reception of his work, through republication and translation as well in his online reception and readership (see his author’s site, https://parshchikov.ru, readable in English via Google translation). The essay situates the poem within the oppositional poetics of “metarealism” as a metaphor-based language-centered writing that contrasts the more metonymic and indexical works of Dmitrii Prigov or  Ron Silliman. The discussion maps the palimpsestic displacement of Ukraine through multiple historical registers to the formal construction of the poem and its current reception among a displaced community of writers, in Russia and elsewhere. Further questions prompted by this reading could include the poem’s selective representation of Ukrainian and Soviet memory and trauma while presenting a baroque, ironic, and fragmented account of the Battle of Poltava (1709), which consolidated Russian empire through acquisition of a Baltic outlet (St. Petersburg) and greater domination of Ukraine, versus the poem’s local valorization of gardening, animals, and nature in opposition to  overblown memorial architecture. It may extend further to critique the ideological mystification used to justify Russian neo-imperialist designs through what has been termed “Eurasianism,” which Parshchikov’s poem excludes. While Russian avant-garde poetry has touched on the metaphysics of origins, reflected in deep linguistic structures, since Velimir Khlebnikov’s notions of “the man of the continent” and “the man of the coasts,” Parshchikov’s ode ironizes any “founding moment” of the Battle of Poltava with its linguistic absorption and displacement in the post-Soviet period. [See below for the introduction; draft version 2.0 here.]

Barrett Watten’s writings on Soviet and late-Soviet poetry and poetics appear in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003), including chapters on El Lissitzky, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ilya Kabakov, and Erik Bulatov. A student of the Russian avant-garde, he was part of literary exchanges with post-Soviet poets after the 1989 conference that led to publication of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). With Lyn Hejinian, he published writings in poetics by Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Dmitrii Prigov, and others in Poetics Journal 8 and 10 (1989, 1998). In 2024, a collection of his work appeared in English and Russian from Polyphem Press, Moscow: Not This: Selected Writings/Nye to: Izbranniye teksti. A video of his presentation of Not This/Nye to can be accessed on YouTube here: https://bit.ly/3DejOfG.

Jamie Olson, “Protest and Transformation in Russophone Ukrainian Poetry after 2014,” discusses the politics of language that has led to an increasingly multi-lingual use of Ukrainian by Russian poets, along with the challenges of translation that results. He presented short selections of poems by Irina Yevsa, Boris Khersonsky, Alena Maksakova, and Anastasia Afanasieva, as in the following example:

from “What Do Sheep Talk About”

Above, the vault of heaven.
Behind, the landscape of home.
Ahead, the slaughterhouse gates.

The bravest march straight in,
while the others get a horn
in the flank. As everyone

is knocked about, some shout,
“Man the battering ram!”
But the last of them soils

the grass and strains his throat
as he lets out an awful
shriek, “I’m a veteran!”

—Irina Yevsa, trans. Jamie Olson

Jamie Olson is Professor of English at St. Martin’s University, Olympia, Washington. He has worked on global poets such as Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcot, and was “bitten by the Russian bug” about 1999. Since 2020, his focus has been on translating Ukrainian poets, either in Russian or Ukrainian (and at times both). His blog, The Flaxen Wave, may be accessed here.

Lida Yusupova [accepted but not able to attend], “On the Poetic Cycle Verdicts“: on the poet’s birthday, December 10, 2008, the Russian Duma passed a new law that would make Russian court documents freely accessible to anyone, through an internet database. That was then President Medvedev’s idea to make Russia “more civilized” in last years before the rise of Putin’s dictatorship. But the law lived through the darkness of the passing years and the database is still functioning. The poet created her cycle based on the court rulings she found in this database. In the progress of writing the poems she made extraordinary discoveries, leading to living persons who personally knew the victims. In her presentation, she will discuss the world that documentary poetry opens to the poet. Something that is impossible to document inside documentary poetry. The undocumented reality of the documentary poetics.

Lida Yusupova is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including her most recent book of poetry, Verdicts (Zoeme, 2023; French translation); Shutter (Shtorka; Centrifuga, 2021), The Scar We Know (Cicada Press, 2020; English translation and original poems); Verdicts (Prigovory, NLO, 2020); Dead Dad (Kolonna Publications, 2016); Ritual C-4 (Argo-Risk, 2013); Irasaliml (Petropress, 1995); the prose collection Love Has Four Hands (U liubvi chetyre ruki; Kvir, 2008; co-authored with Margarita Meklina); as well as many publications in magazines and journals. She received the Razlichiye Prize for her book Dead Dad in 2017 and the Vavilon Prize for her poetry in 2021. Her work has been translated into several languages.

Ekaterina Derisheva, from Poetics Statement

In my texts, I strive to convey several dimensions of image, sound, space, and language. I combine the potential of one word with that of another, working with various semantic meanings and contexts to enhance the affective dimensions. When writing a text, I conduct a small investigation: in what contexts are words used, how are these words connected to science, art history, or the environment? This helps me see a greater part of the contexts and layers that can be worked with. Often, this research shapes the number of dimensions that will form the reality of a particular poem. [. . .]

Thus, the linguistic work is just as important as the visual one. At the core of my poetics lies Russian avant-garde, concrete and linguistic writing, and phenomenology. It seems to be represented as a translucent prism of language that, when directed at various objects/ideas, will intentionally absorb objects and landscapes, considering their positioning and distance from each other on the coordinate axis. It may also include sounds and touches that accompany them. [. . .]

One might say that the linguistic work within the poem both constructs and deconstructs the text simultaneously. It forms and destroys it syntactically and semantically. However, given the phenomenology embedded in the writing, it is more a matter of phenomenology that exists both in creation and in the destruction of the text’s fabric. I believe that writing does not necessarily have to engage in a dialogue with literature or convey a clear and comprehensible meaning but can be elusive. [. . .]

Barrett Watten, introduction

This essay reads the futural non-solution of Alexei Parshchikov’s “epic ode” I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava (1985) at a present poetic and historical intersection. The poets who emerged in the late Soviet period witnessed the transition to post-Soviet realities such as the dismantling of the state; consolidation of the oligarch class and its absorption into global capitalism; corruption and wealth disparity; worldview fragmentation and the proliferation of distorted ideology; erosion of the legal system; a media landscape of disinformation and denial; military provocation and the Ukraine war; the incarceration and assassination of oppositional leaders. Counter to this history, an oppositional community of poets formed, was recognized, exploded, fragmented. One alternative for many who survived was emigration, establishing a new intellectual and creative community whose resilience—the word is justified only here—is unequaled for what “this time we are both” facing now. Two generations of poetic innovation and opposition have emerged and are connected: the historical groupings of Parshchikov, Dragomoshchenko, Zhdanov, Prigov, Rubinshtein, Aristov, Eremenko, Iskrenko, and others, whose works were translated and circulated in the West during the extensive exchange at the end of the Soviet period; and a self-aware collectivity of innovative and oppositional writers remaining in Russia or in emigration, whose work is being enthusiastically received and translated. This generational sequence, like most, is open to misreading: while the continuity with the previous generation is strongly upheld by later poets—witness the Dragomoshchenko Prize, for example—there is also a suggestion that the transition between the two involves a move from aesthetic and formal concerns to a “left” perspective that is more social than formalist, historical than literary, gendered than hermetic. This distinction may only show the need for a better critical framework, one that could show how the historical and ideological motives in the so-called hermeticism and formalism of the earlier writers persists in a deep continuity with those who coming later, even with a turn to more explicitly political or documentary content. Aleksandr Skidan’s affirmation of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s influence points to how the “formalist” demolition of the conventional and/or the “realism” of official verse culture opened the way for the new poetics. The later generational narrative also questions to an extent the Language/late Soviet exchange, but without accounting for the deep motivations in the critique of dominant ideologies common to both, regardless of differences of method. As one critic puts it, “As practitioners of what Foucault called fearless speech, unofficial Soviet poets have remained vital in the post-Soviet period. In search of ways to continue their practices of fearless speech, contemporary poets have built their legacy, particularly since 2000” (Sandler 38), locating their “turn to language” in a complex, unfolding historical series.

Notes and links

Image: Lada Nakonechna, “Popular view. Gaze through the lilac in Kiev Botanical Garden, directed towards the river Dnepr” (2014), pencil drawing on transfer print, 24 x 35.5 cm. Eigen + Art Gallery, Berlin; https://eigen-art.com/kuenstlerinnen/lada-nakonechna/arbeiten/arbeiten. 

Texts: Parshchikov, Alexei. I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava, trans. Donald Wesling (Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, 2023); here.

Bozovic, Marijeta. Avant-Garde Post—: Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union (Harvard UP, 2023).
Feshchenko, Vladimir. Russian and American Poetry of Experiment: The Linguistic Avant-Garde (Brill, 2023).
Sandler, Stephanie. The Freest Speech in Russia: Poetry Unbound, 1989–2022 (Princeton UP, 2024).

Links: “Russian attack in Ukrainian city of Poltava kills at least 50 people,” 3 September 2024: here.
“Ukraine war briefing: Russian barrage hits Ukrainian residential and energy sites, killing at least 15,” 1 February 2025: here.

Alexei Parshchikov Poet site, #biografiya: here.
———, #ya-zhil-na-pole-poltavskoi-bitvy: here.
Russian original of Ekaterina Derisheva’s poem above: here.
Jamie Olson’s blog The Flaxen Wave: here.
Carla Harryman, “To Russian/Ukrainian Poets,” barrettwatten.net: here.

Alexei Parshchikov