Discussion
The paper focuses on the imagery and narrative, stylistic, intertextual and paratextual aspects of the representation of disruptions in Maryna Ponomarenko’s recent poetry. Maryna Ponomarenko is a contemporary Ukrainian poet, whose works strongly resonate with the readers (Krychovska, 2023). The poems that are included into “The book of Love and Fury” were written in 2019-2022 – during the COVID-19 pandemic and then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Пономаренко, 2023).
The concept of “poetics of disruption” employed in this research to analyse Maryna Ponomarenko’s intricate and elaborate poems is informed by the studies of Alonso-Breto (2015), Devenot & Erving (2023) and Isherwood-Wallace (2022). By “poetics of disruption” I understand a complex aesthetic approach to create a literary response to disruptive events in human lives.
Maryna Ponomarenko’s poetics of disruption is characterised by the extreme penetrability of the worlds when the real and the imagined, the everyday and the mythological, the profane and the sacred seamlessly blend. The inhabitants of these ontologically different worlds easily communicate with each other. The protagonists of Ponomarenko’s poetic narratives take an active position and are capable of unusual and unexpected deeds. The two prominent poetic motives that feature in a poem after the poem are those of the repeated flow of disruptions in Ukraine’s history and the difficulty of explaining to the outsiders the experience of Ukrainians suffering because of the current war unleashed by Russia. The human drama represented through the vivid images of ruins, wounds and pain conjured up in the poems is heightened by the use of beautifully rhymed lines. Strikingly, Ponomarenko’s poetics of disruption features representation of strong links between different generations of Ukrainians.
References
Alonso-Breto, I. (2015). “A Poetics of Disruption”: Farida Karodia’s A Shattering of Silence and the Exiled Writer’s Dihiliz Position. Prague Journal of English Studies, 4(1), 77-90.
Devenot, N., & Erving, G. (2023). Psychedelic literary studies and the poetics of disruption. Frontiers in Psychology, 09 June, 14:1155908.
Isherwood-Wallace, E. (2022). “Seeming strangeness”: Mina Loy’s poetics of disruption and Julia Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic model. Irish Journal of American Studies, 11. http://ijas.iaas.ie/evaisherwoodwallace/
Krychovska, N. (2024). Story #155. “The world needs to be brought to its senses”: An interview with Ukrainian poet Maryna Ponomarenko. Ukraine World, 26 July. https://ukraineworld.org/en/articles/stories/story-155
Пономаренко, М. (2023). Книжка любові і люті: поезія. Львів: Видавництво СтарогоЛевa
