Svetlana Litvinchuk

The Interview

Your political poems are so uniquely angled, so familiar yet so strange, accessible yet often highly experimental. How do you approach your more politically oriented poems? What inspires them and, in the case of V. for Voice, how do you expand your vision across so many distinct, varied sections?

Counterintuitively, my most political pieces arrive there quite innocently. Sometimes, I follow a prompt that has nothing inherently political in it, but it’s what rises to the surface. So, sometimes writing poetry is a bit of a Rorschach test. I like prompts for their ability to create just enough constraint, while still allowing the mind to wrestle with its current concerns. One of my favorite prompts is to incorporate 10 random words into a poem. This is better if someone else comes up with the words, so I have a friend with whom I exchange random word lists that we curate for each other.

“V. for Voice” actually began this way from a prompt in one of your poetry workshops. I believe the prompt was to record 10 things you saw in the last 24 hours and then use those words in a poem. So it was one part exercise in word association and one part intimate glimpse into what was on my mind a lot that week. For example, blueberries were on that list because my toddler was (is) firmly in her berry phase, and we can barely keep them in stock at home. The shopping cart and fruit and alligator moat extended to connect to the deportation of migrant workers in news stories. I think the mind naturally seeks to make connections. There are threads connecting everything, and I think if you’re someone who concerns themselves with current events, you can’t help but write about them. I believe we make art about what matters to us.

With this particular poem, I wanted it to mirror the feeling of living in a nightmare the speaker couldn’t wake up from, because this is how many of us feel when we watch the news these days. So, the scene breaks were like shifts in a bad dream, symbolic of how it might feel to be fully awake right now.

Incidentally, the title “V. is for Voice” is also a bit of wordplay. You’ve probably noticed that there is no section with the roman numeral V in this poem—it’s missing because the poem’s underlying theme is the speaker wanting to call out and discovering they don’t have a voice. So the title is a subtle way of saying that using our voice is the only way to wake ourselves from this nightmare.

We live in a world with so much constant input. We witness big events happening and can’t control or change them. Writing political poetry becomes a way to offload some of that helplessness, to engage with injustice, and connect with others on an ideological but also feeling level. To say, “Look at this horrible thing happening—what are we going to do about it? Anyone?”

These poems are consistently emotionally devastating while never falling into sentimentality, preachiness, or didacticism. You are always walking that tightrope between narrative clarity and approaching very difficult subject matter from a less linear perspective. How did you work to balance emotional clarity with unique metaphors?

I think there’s new insight to gain when approaching something from the side rather than head-on. A poem is a great place to do that. I like to play with associative leaps. I have always been curious about the ability of magical realism and surrealism to create internal logic in a poem that can be understood intuitively.

A poem creates room for sensory experience, where objects become proxies—a way to make emotions tangible without having to name them. Metaphor and symbolism work as extensions of that same impulse, making something abstract more concrete. There's a little bit of magic in all of this, because a few short words can cover as much ground as a long essay—except the reader is doing a lot of that work. You're just leading them to the proverbial water.

In my pieces, a lot of the emotional clarity develops in the editing process. I try not to steer too much in the first draft; I just get everything out. Then I get obsessive about shaping it as I revise. A piece may have dozens of revised versions before it feels like it comes together. I look at myself as both the poet who brings in mundane details as well as the poem’s speaker, whose job is to make meaning from them inside the poem. Sometimes an image may not be factual, and it doesn’t have to be to say something honest and true. And that’s what metaphors can do. I find it exciting to discover what the poem wants to say, and I like to let it surprise me.

You employ a variety of structures, from prose poems and more traditional forms to white-space-heavy indents to columns. How do you decide which structures and overall styles to use for a poem?

I never really know a poem’s final form until I try it many different ways. I often write a prose block, then break it into lines, then eliminate the line breaks, then start over another way, only to decide it wants to be a prose poem after all that. A poem’s appearance is so nuanced.

It is as much a visual object as it is composed of words. Their arrangement on the page does a lot to pace the reader, to create a sense of separation or collision. I think a poem is the relationship between the words and the shape of silence on the page. The white space does a lot of the talking. It’s also the relationship between the two-dimensional text and the three-dimensional images the words conjure. This leaves a lot of room for play and experimentation, and it takes me a long time to decide on form.

Over time, I’ve gotten better at feeling out what a poem needs. For example, a prose poem can make a narrative feel more linear, like it accumulates or snowballs. But add some virgules (those diagonal slash marks), and you have a choppier feeling, like someone who periodically taps the brake when going down a hill. A line break does something similar to a virgule—it introduces a pause or a breath, but in a smoother way, which is similar to the breath of a comma, but a comma might be half a beat rather than a full beat. So a period and a line break can serve similar functions. On the other hand, line breaks create other opportunities entirely. Short lines slow the reader’s pace. A word at the end of the line is emphasized, so the poet can highlight words to add another layer. Where a sentence is broken in half can create fragments of meaning, like little capsules, allowing for ambiguity and surprise.

So, when I play with form, I am looking for a way to pack as much meaning and nuance into a piece as I can without overexplaining, to make the poem’s appearance on the page amplify mood in a cinematic way, and to illustrate something the poem wants to imply without stating it.

How do you balance your work with Chill Subs and ONLY POEMS and your own writing? Do you find your editorial work impacts the way you write or that your own writing passions and preferences impact your editorial work?

I’ll answer this in two parts, if that’s okay. The first question is difficult to answer cleanly because I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with work. I admit that I have workaholic tendencies. I have a habit of keeping poor track of my work hours, often underselling my labor. I love to multitask and cycle between projects that allow me the creative freedom to shift my focus or to let it get stuck somewhere for a while. So, I’m always searching for balance because I like to juggle a lot of things.

Writing is something I have to do to survive living in this world with my sanity intact. So, because I need to write, I make time to write. These days, I do a lot of my personal writing while my family sleeps.

I consider labor both life purpose and exploitable resource. I think labor is a capitalist idea we’re sold to ensure we base our identities around making others rich off our bodies.

But I also think writing isn’t created in a vacuum, so having commitments and obligations exposes us to ideas that inform our writing. I think there is something beautiful about obligation that keeps the world together; that is the basis of society. Still, I loathe the notion that we are meant to spend ⅔ of our lives toiling away, unable to frolic in the daisies or skinny dip on the beach or simply spend the day with our loved ones whenever we want.

Work is important to my sense of identity. When I gave birth to my daughter, it was the first time in my life that I permitted myself not to work, to be a mom for a while. But I was so consumed by motherhood that I found my sense of self dissolving. I needed some way to track the passage of time, or all the days blended, like I was stranded on a desert island. So, I turned seriously to writing. Then, I became a reader for ONLY POEMS, then their reviews editor, then associate editor, and then managing editor, and now I am stepping away from that role to focus more on my writing as I embark on my MFA program this fall.

Embarrassingly, even with all the essays and book reviews I wrote just for fun in my younger days, I never looked at writing as a viable career. Which is unfair, because it is real and tangible labor. I believe that if you do what you love enough—if you become really obsessed with it—it will eventually cobble itself into a career. So, I guess looking back over the last three years, that’s what I’ve been doing without realizing it.

All of this is to say that I cannot separate my writing life from my work life. There’s something spiritual in work. Which is exactly how I started working with ONLY POEMS and Chill Subs. I felt like I had a strong critical and curatorial eye that could be of value to the industry, and it welcomed me.

Now, to answer the second part of that question. Before becoming a volunteer reader and then editor, I had never taken a writing workshop, so it was a crash course for my writing. I had always loved literary analysis, but it wasn’t until I stepped into those roles that I  applied it to my own work. I learned the most from the poems that weren’t accepted— asking myself where something might have fallen short or wasn’t ready, where the voice felt underdeveloped, or the form felt arbitrary or mismatched, and then looking for similar patterns in my own work. I’m an experiential learner, and I will always be grateful for how much I learned about poetry from this experience.

The ultimate challenge, the more you learn about craft, is to continue writing like yourself. My work as an editor gave me the courage to do that. I saw how much voice mattered more than almost anything and I didn’t want to emulate or copy successful writers. I didn’t want to self-censor. I don’t think a poet’s job is to write for palatability. I think there’s a shortage of vulnerability, sincerity, and honesty in mainstream culture, especially with the accessibility of social media. Everything these days seems highly curated and artificial. I think poetry is also highly curated, but the goal is the opposite of artifice.

When I’m reading work as an editor, I’m not looking for work that fits a certain mold, so my preferences favor work that is uniquely its own. I try to apply this expectation to myself equally. I like work that breaks rules so long as it does it with intention. I feel like I’m just getting started in writing the work I want to be able to write.

How do your experiences as an immigrant affect your work and your life as a poet?

My identity as a Ukrainian and an immigrant shaped me, and this remains an important facet of who I am. Immigration at a young age emphasized that part of me that made me feel like an outsider, which allowed me to be a keen observer of cultural dynamics, so this reinforced itself. Throughout my life, I have kept myself pretty busy thinking about immigrant identity, and poetry gives me an outlet for that. There are a handful of topics I write about obsessively that will probably keep me busy forever.

I think of each poem on the topic as a piece of the flow chart of a problem I’m trying to solve in the greater equation of Self. Except there isn’t really an answer to making oneself fit neatly into a new culture; it happens imperfectly, incompletely. When I was growing up, the American identity was frequently discussed as a mashup of culture—a country composed of the melding of immigrants. In recent years, there’s been a palpable shift in the dominant image of an American identity, and mainstream culture seems less forgiving of cultural mashups lately. Immigrant identity has taken on a heavier tone, but I think there is a lot of space for it in poetry, which is a natural playground for playing with contradictions and nuanced topics.

This year, I’ve been working on my next collection with this idea of the immigrant self at the center. Many of the poems featured in this issue of Inflectionist Review are keystone pieces of that new collection.

How does Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine impact your feelings about your role as a poet and, in general, the poet’s role in the world, leaning toward authoritarianism and lack of concern for human rights?

The war in Ukraine is heartbreaking. Every time I talk to my family there, I learn they are doing worse and worse. It’s the most helpless feeling. Writing about it is one of my only outlets. They are barely surviving, but also— they are surviving, and for that I’m grateful. I have so much admiration for my niece, who plunges herself into her studies, and for my uncle, who prioritizes his family’s emotional well-being. They have another daughter who just had a baby. Imagine being a mom raising an infant under air raids, skies filled with bombs, rooftops across the street set ablaze from airstrikes, of living in constant fear of your apartment building being next. There’s no heat, no electricity, exorbitant food prices that we cannot imagine here.

In the West, we live with the privilege of not having to imagine these things at all. We interact with images on the news and have the option to keep scrolling. Or, if we choose to sit with the reports, we understand the horrors only theoretically, abstractly. Here, we are safe from any real imagings of any horrors that persist around the globe, horrors in which we are complicit or for which our own tax dollars are responsible. We live a climate-controlled existence with 24-hour grocery stores and appliances designed to remove the discomfort from every facet of life. Here we continue to be largely immune, able to ignore the real costs of war.

It saddens me that money has become the answer to all life’s questions, even those of war. Money is how we provide aid while being the simultaneous driver of war. War is profitable, and it powers a machine that is always hungry. One would think we would be a happy nation if money truly made people happy. But I look around and see all the ways our money makes us a sick nation and how we export that. Poetry feels counter to that, because it’s not profitable.

I think poetry’s power is in allowing the reader to feel something they’ve never experienced before. It triggers empathy in a way that few other things can. In my early 20’s, when I worked as a community organizer, I felt that it was a duty and a privilege to use my voice to speak out against injustice. I was proud to live in a country where I could do this without fearing for my safety. I have always felt like our voices are the greatest tools we have.

I believe that your voice can never be taken away from you so long as you continue to use it. You are always allowed to imagine a better future, a kinder society. I think a poet’s role is to use their voice to make observations about the world, a way of entering them into the official record. It’s a moral obligation to use your voice, and I acknowledge my privilege in being able to do so. We must never stop speaking out about injustice.

Your full-length collection is due out shortly. Can you please tell our readers about it?

I began writing these poems three months post partum on our small permaculture farm nestled into remote Ozark wilderness. Many of these poems came during times of profound sleep deprivation. I would bounce her on a yoga ball or rock her, watch her grow, and grapple with very large feelings, and my brain would come up with the lines that became these poems.

I found myself existing in the liminal space between wake and sleep, and there’s something about that state that makes the veil between the logical brain and the symbolic, creative brain very thin. I would get fragments of poems that came to me, like dream association, and I recorded them in my notes app or in my bedside journal and later shaped them into poems. Some of them you published in previous issues of the Inflectionist Review, for which I am so grateful.

The collection centers around themes of reshaping the self through motherhood while also interrogating what it means to raise children in a world in crisis. In five parts, the book examines what it means to be a vessel: for life, for grief, for the Earth, for love, and for safety.

In it, a symbolic river becomes a recurring character, elevating nature to equal importance to the human characters in the story. At the same time, the body becomes landscape, changed by motherhood and searching for the way to regenerate and become a place of nurture and safety while encountering an uncertain future. When I wrote the collection, I was seeking something archetypal and primeval, some wisdom to nurture hope, and that’s what I wanted to offer the reader.

I think there’s something maternal about rivers, something nurturing but strong. The way they cut canyons into the earth but feed an entire ecosystem is a paradox. There’s the saying that we can’t step into the same river twice, but there’s also something unbroken about them, a reminder that no water is separate. This is the understanding that the speaker in these poems comes back to again and again—that we are not separate despite a world of fracture, isolation, and loneliness.

The collection works through duality to examine tensions like holding on and letting go, the domestic and the cosmic, intimacy and distance, impermanence and timelessness, and between self and other or mother and child, etc.