Lyudmyla Diadchenko
- Ukraine -
Poet, a Ukrainian literary rating "The Book of the Year" expert. Doctor of philosophy. Scientific interests: mythopoetic, hermeneutics, spatial studios.
The author of poetry books: La Fobia dei Numeri (Italy, 2023), Magnetic Storms (USA, 2023), The color of geography (Greece, 2023), Cot la cot cu duhurile (Romania, 2024), Kedem (Ukraine, 2021), The Hen for Turkish Man (Ukraine, 2017), Fee for Access (Ukraine, 2011).
Poems were published in Poetry Magazine, Gargoyle magazine, Turtle Island Quarterly (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Internopoesia (Italia), Channel Magazine (Ireland), România literară (Romania), Poezija (Croatia), Golem (Mexico), Altazor (Chile), Cardenal (Mexico), Dendro Editorial (Peru), Difat Thalitha (Iraq), ObserverKult, Telegrafi (Albania), Exacting Clam, Mad Blood (USA), Siirden (Turkey), Armagan (Bosnia), Anthology “Area 17. Revista hispanoamericana de poesia” (Chile), others.
A winner of The international Ceppo award for peace and poetry (Italy, 2023); Oles Gonchar International Ukrainian-German Prize (2012).
Took place in such poetry festivals: POIETIKA (Italy, 2024), Cosmopoetica (Spain, 2024), Medellin International poetry festival (Colombia, 2020), International literature festival “Poetry Port la Danube” (Romania, 2024), International Poetry Festival in Zagreb “Stih u regiji” (Croatia, 2023), Poets in Transylvania (Romania, 2023), Sofia Metaphors (Bulgaria, 2022), International poetry festival in Sidi bou Said (Tunisia, 2019), International Istanbul Poetry and Literature Festival (Turkey, 2017; 2019), International Sapanca Poetry Evenings (Turkey, 2018), International Fikret Demirağ Poetry Festival (Nicosia-Cyprus, 2019), others.
Where Poetry Begins and Ends
Poetry presents the mystery of organic Spirit and yields in line after line its ceaseless cascades of meaning, where weather, mood, season, life, age, and eternity are mutually absorbed, illuminated, and realized. Her poetics are her nature: her own brokenness and pain "break" the syntax and pour it into a peculiar form, where form becomes personality and character. She believes novelty makes art evolve, and she rejects old-fashioned syllabic rhythms that lull to sleep. She seeks restless energy and discomfort in her lines, making destruction part of her aesthetic. She breaks poetic form at all levels—syntactic, rhythmic, lexical.
She follows a natural need for “surprise,” as described by Viktor Shklovsky, allowing it to take hold of her from another dimension. Unsettling enjambments and inversion prevent the reader from relaxing; attention is required to engage with the broken meanings of her stanzas. She embraces truncation and ellipses. Ukrainian grammar allows for omitting predicates or subjects if they’re implied, so she shortens fixed expressions and well-known proverbs, leaving only essential traces. She also uses ellipses to avoid repetition or stating the obvious. While some perceive this as an attack on language, she sees it as part of poetry’s deeper mission: to break away from narrow, worn-out speech that no longer expresses anything.
For her, lyric poetry isn’t about narrative—it’s about being affected by pain. When she sees Munch’s original works for the first time, she feels an inexplicable, soulful kinship. Her poetics lean toward expressionism, intuitively. At 23, her first book, Fee for Access, appears and receives the Ukrainian-German award. Critics react by questioning how someone so young can write in such a way—one even suggests that once she becomes an “adult woman,” her writing might change. She experiences early on how art is filtered through lenses of age and gender.
She distinguishes between empirical and acquired experience as the twin roots of artistic text. The subject doesn’t matter as much as the freshness of how it’s written. She believes that only when a poet speaks to herself can she be heard by others. A poem doesn’t explain—it liberates. The zone of poetic lyricism offers no space for indulgence or suffocation. Literature, to her, is both rival and enemy. Poetry, under the yoke of independence, remains poetry.
Though not a formalist, she understands that form enables art—since content is often shared, but form is unique. She searches for new form, new sound, new voice. Voice is everything. The eternal tension between form-for-content and content-for-form collapses only when one is weak. She resists choosing sides in this literary debate. With a lasting interest in philosophy and religious studies, she sees poetry as the most sensual way of knowing the world.
Ukrainian poet Taras Fedyuk writes: “She writes. She tears the soul, the language, the world, and thereby gives a deeper understanding of her own... This voice is unexpectedly bright, self-sufficient, and no longer dependent on literary predecessors... She turns out the most secret, the most sacred, the most hidden, and the most open. Sincerely and honestly. Fee for Access is a fee for the opportunity to see, feel, and say. And to choke on what is said. That’s why the syntax breaks here, why the rhythm breaks here, why the language is missing here. Light destruction creates the effect of catching one’s breath, frantically sifting through words in search of the right one, while at the same time extremely intensifying the emotion.” Poet and novelist Serhii Zhadan highlights the rhythmic fracture, precision, and timeliness of her statements. Her later books, A Hen for the Turkish Man and Kedem, continue to explore the same themes and techniques.
Motifs of otherness, abandonment, isolation, imprisonment, and exile flow through her work, echoing Odyssean themes of searching and displacement. The lyrical subject often feels unlike others, and this sense of difference becomes a kind of refrain. Being in another space transforms the internal world—so isolation is both consequence and conscious choice. Living as an outsider in another culture inevitably causes a clash of values, inviting loneliness but also unveiling resilience.
She views poetry as a deeply national genre. Translation is the only bridge across linguistic borders. Poetry freezes uncertain reality so that the reader can reorganize it through their own lens. True art requires effort of the soul—it is the human attempt to manifest Spirit. Poetry is the constant pulling of meaning and feeling to the surface. To read poetry is to willingly enter the unfamiliar, to practice being oneself in the Other. She sees poetry as a spiritual being that grows within daily life. Paraphrasing Wilde, she says: “Poetry begins on the day you are born and must not end on the day you die.”
Poetry
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