Oksana Maksymchuk and Lauris Veips discuss Still City at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, March 2, 2025. (Photo by John Griswold)
Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk was in town the last couple of days as a guest of WashU’s International Writers Series and on tour for her new English-language collection, Still City (November 2024, Pitt Poetry Series). She has previously published two collections in Ukrainian.
Maksymchuk is also a scholar and literary translator; she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (2017), an anthology of contemporary poetry funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities. (NEH’s funding is in question due to the new administration’s budget cuts.*). She grew up in Lviv, has lived in cities around the globe, and teaches at University of Chicago.
At her reading at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Sunday, March 2, she was in conversation with Lauris Veips, a PhD candidate in comparative literature at WashU. A small crowd came, hungry to hear a Ukrainian response in person to the war.
Maksymchuk explained that she started writing Still City in Ukraine, “maybe half a year before the actual invasion in the summer of 2021…and the Russian troops were amassing on the border, and we were assured that there would be nothing happening, but it seemed very threatening. I thought, ‘I’m going to write it as a kind of narrative about a non-event,’ something that I was sure would not take place.”
At the same time, it “seemed like a looming cloud that was significant enough that it was changing things for us and…I [wanted to] trace the contours of these transformations…. [W]hen we left 10 days before the actual invasion…we still thought that we were going to come back two weeks later….”
Her title, she said, was “inspired…by Homer’s war poetry, and in many ways, it’s trying to understand the condition of a city under siege and the condition of its citizens…. So it’s a city that’s still a city, it has not yet been destroyed, but at the same time, because it’s uncertain of its future, there is a stillness to it. There is a kind of contemplation and…a slowing down of all of the processes that characterize life in a normal study. And there is also the particular situation [similar to] women of Troy, who are anticipating what may happen and preparing themselves in various ways.”
Veips asked about moving between specificity and the universal in the collection.
Maksymchuk said the specifics of relatively new technology, for instance, needed to be included.
“[A] body cam transmits…through Starlink, and you’re watching people being obliterated in real time. […] You can see images from drones…dropping explosives into the trenches. You can also see interactive maps, [and] people in their apartments with their cell phones recording how things are being destroyed or…occupying soldiers entering this or that part of the city. […] It’s very much an index to the particular moment in history.
“And at the same time, I have this urge to transcend the current moment and write poems that are about war, and not about a specific war, but poems that would illuminate something about the conditions of civilians trapped in…difficult liminal situations. […] There are quite a few poems…about the Second World War, but…some seem even more ancient than that…. [T]hey’re about what it means to be writing poetry about war, and what it means to be living through a war, and what it takes to not just survive…but actually kind of flourish….”
Veips asked about a tragic chorus that appears in Maksymchuk’s work, which “would seem to stand for the wider community and futurity,” as in ancient Greek poems and plays.
Maksymchuk said she thought of the chorus as “more of an orchestration…motions in unison that…tie us with others. And even when we are dancing separately in our individual basements or cellars, we are still forming this community that is bearing witness to a specific set of events. So, I think there is a kind of chorus that we form, even when we are actually in different places in different parts of the world. And it’s…about harmonization, I think, of souls, right?
“[B]ecause we move in unison, we participate in the same song and dance, we undergo the same experience of war. This is what holds us together. I think often when we talk about war, we talk about loss of control, being a victim or being a hero undergoing violence. It’s this kind of experience that seems to leave very little room for anything else, when you hear people write about it or talk about it. But in fact, war is just like life, except there is war, and it’s demoralizing and overpowering.
“But just like in any terrible situation, you do and you should manage to find beauty and joy and amusement and sources of restoration and replenishment, and maintain…hope and maintain…faith. [A] lot of the poems return to…images of dancing and of not being isolated but being part of something larger that is resisting through commitment to beauty and harmony and togetherness.”
Still City is available at Left Bank Books, Bookshop.org or University of Pittsburgh Press.
* According to the NEH site, the executive orders that apply to currently frozen funding include “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”
