Someone out there will know the answer to this question: When humankind first developed a written language, how long did it take before poetry was created? Since that moment, whenever it was, for centuries the poet has been the one to bring forth all the emotions, sensations, observations, intuitions, and all manners of mindfulness to the written word. By doing so, we’ve learned from one another and, through the language of the poet, that learning has aided in our evolution.
Poetry is the music of the soul. Poetry is the expression of things we could not otherwise speak. It is the life, the living, the death of all things, expressed in word with or without timing. Poetry, probably more than any other form of communication, is exclusive to humans and therefore must make us even more human.
April is Poetry Month and the Mattapoisett Public Library closed it out in superlative form.
On April 28, the library opened its doors to Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Ukrainian American poet born in Cambridge, Ohio to Ukrainian immigrants. She and her siblings spoke only Ukrainian at home, learning English, well the American version, from television. They learned all the swear words, of course, as well as the cultural phrases and nuances.
As Orlowsky stood before the literary devotees who came to hear her read, a serine veil fell over facial features. She was comfortable in front of a crowd standing figuratively unclothed as her poetry flowed from her mouth – sometimes floating, sometimes bleeding.
Orlowsky is a master at her craft. She has received the Sheila Motton Book Award, is a Pushcart Poet, and, as a translator, received the 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant along with her translation partner. She currently teaches an MFA program at Pine Manor College and Providence College.
But it was her childhood, which she described as having been raised “in a minor tone” that texturizes her works.
Her most recent publication, Bad Harvest, has been praised across the country as “entrapping and entrancing … full of seductively quirky humor,” but it was her voice reading her own carefully crafted verses that reached out and touched us.
Several of her pieces began with the despair of painful experiences, like poorly tuned instruments searching for the right note to play and then emerging lyrically to a joyful conclusion. Others spoke to the harsh realities of a woman aging, the slow deliberate waning of desire that could be rekindled, if only, and of being a woman tied to the body image myth.
Orlowsky spoke a great deal about the wartime realities her parents faced in the Ukraine, the starvation and genocide that still runs like a river through her mental processing in spite of never having experienced those events firsthand. Children inherit all that their parents were.
Bad Harvestwas titled after her parents’ experiences of famine and torture and imprisonment. But ultimately she rises out of that darkness from the joys of life to the crazy humor of a father wondering aloud to his Americanized daughters what the word “fack” must mean.
Orlowsky’s presentation, while hitting on hard topics, was overall filled with light. And as an educator, she clearly is comfortable in that role.
Orlowsky said reading poetry was not what inspired her to write poetry; it was more so listening to the verses of songs her father would sing while playing the guitar at home. But, she also confessed that, as an American kid, “My urge was towards the British invasion, you know, the Beatles.”
To learn more about Orlowsky you may visit www.nepoetryclub.org.
By Marilou Newell