Oleksandr Mymruk: "The end of the world is perpetual and fleeting, like a river."

— Your new poetry collection, “A River With The Name Of A Bird,” has finally been released. Seven years between publications is quite a gap, though.

— I’ve been tied up with writing and editing texts about books instead of creating my own. Being immersed daily in the literary and publishing world often leaves little desire to work on personal projects in my free time—it just feels like an extension of the workday. Sometimes you just want to watch a movie or play some games instead.

— With your new book out, do you feel anything has changed?

— I think my perspective on the process of writing has evolved. I’ve come to understand that time for writing doesn’t just materialize—you have to carve it out for yourself. Writing takes effort and a certain level of self-discipline, which I now realize I was lacking. Over those seven years, I wrote bits and pieces, but the majority of the new collection was created in 2023. Perhaps someday, I’ll look back on this year as the start of a more structured and consistent writing practice.

— It might seem obvious, but is “A River With The Name Of A Bird” about a river or something else entirely?

— I’d say it’s less about the river itself and more about the city alongside it—a place intertwined with nature and shaped by the landscape. If we’re talking about the setting, that’s the idea. But thematically, one of the central concepts is the crisis of delayed adulthood. I use this term to describe a mindset where the fear of losing a familiar, seemingly stable reality is stronger than the desire for change. Change, after all, involves taking responsibility and facing uncertainty. There are many reasons this happens, but nothing remains static—a river is never the same, even though it may seem so at first glance. Self-deception won’t prevent the inevitable.

— The end of the world?

— Only in a symbolic sense, because the actual end of the world is perpetual and fleeting, like a river—you can’t hold it in your hands or fully comprehend it. In real life, its catastrophic nature essentially reduces to nothing. But the end of the world as a metaphor, as an imagined concept, can be tied to the holistic worldview of a hypothetical lyrical hero. How it manifests—whether as complete destruction or some form of change—is another question, but the integrity of its original form will inevitably be disrupted. Ultimately, this idea can be scaled to an individual or a society. In the latter case, it might make more sense to think of something more literal—for that, you only need to open any news feed.

Another key theme in this book is the loss or disintegration of form—not just as a challenge to a coherent view of the world, but also as the breakdown of the elements of space, objects, human bodies, cultures, and even poetic form. Anything, really—because over time, everything dissolves in the river.

— Can we interpret this disintegration as a transformation moving toward some kind of progress? What’s happening with poetic form today, and why do you describe it as disintegrating?

— I like to think poetic form has already fully disintegrated and that we’re now in a kind of “end of history” for poetry. That doesn’t mean it will always be this way—it’s simply how it feels to me at this moment.

If disintegration can be seen as a process, it’s something we can only recognize in retrospect. Avant-garde poets began breaking form apart over a century ago, but by the mid-20th century, with the rise of the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, poetic form had reached a state of entropy. Their narrative free verse, often casual and ironic in tone, could be arranged into any line structure—even prose—and read with any rhythm or none at all, without altering its meaning. While some might trace this back to Walt Whitman, it’s not quite the same. The Beats, in my view, solidified modern free verse as a convention, stripped of its formal constraints, and established the precedent that virtually any text could be called poetry. They showed that poetry could rely solely on the writer’s intuitive relationship with language. We also can’t ignore the way spoken word poetry has transitioned into books or how page poetry has moved toward performance. 

This isn’t just about the evolution of Ukrainian poetry or shifts in poetic styles—it’s about broader trends in poetry as a whole. Contemporary poetry, whether it’s found on Instagram or in a student slam, doesn’t necessarily draw on tradition. Instead, it reflects whatever is current and immediate in the cultural atmosphere.

That doesn’t mean everyone writes like Allen Ginsberg today. Even his work varies greatly, and the Beat movement or poetry from the 1950s-60s was far from uniform. Today’s poetry spans classical forms, pseudo-avant-garde experiments, syllabic-tonic, tonic, and a wide range of free verse styles. Still, free verse without formal restrictions has become one of the leading approaches, particularly among the youngest poets. Writers now mix, remix, and reinterpret styles, create their own rules, and either stick to them for a single book or build an entire poetic philosophy around them.

What we’re seeing isn’t about progress or breaking new ground. Instead, it’s about inhabiting a space of infinite possibilities, an even playing field of variation that says a lot about the era we’re living in. It’s a fascinating landscape to think about.

— Do you think poetry might evolve within this framework to produce entirely new forms?

— When I speak of the "end of form," I’m intentionally exaggerating and simplifying the idea. In reality, the discussion is much more nuanced and complex. That said, I do believe it’s possible, and I hope that at some point, someone will develop a new convention that becomes widely embraced. However, at this moment, I’m less focused on the idea of groundbreaking changes in poetic structure and more on innovation through new concepts and themes in poetry—a trend that’s been unfolding over the past five decades. Poetry remains capable of reacting to the world, expressing emotions, and merging with other media forms. For many, this is more meaningful than analyzing the metrical patterns of a sonnet. The so-called ‘end of form’ doesn’t mean the end of quality poetry. Formalist approaches to writing are still very much an option. Even ideas like Hegel’s or Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ didn’t signify a literal conclusion.

If we broaden the scope beyond poetry, the fragmentation of form is happening in many areas. For example, the repercussions of splitting the atom, despite the warnings of the 20th century, seem to be something we’ll only now fully grapple with in the years ahead. At the same time, we’ll also confront how far we’ve come in delaying our collective maturity. In this context, the idea of the ‘end of history’ could take on a new, somewhat ironic meaning.

I find it intriguing to think about different scales because the same processes seem to operate universally. Poetry is deeply personal and subjective. For a lyrical persona, a catastrophe could be anything—from a small, private event to a massive global shift. What truly matters is how they experience and internalize it.

— If we consider that progress doesn’t necessarily occur through form, it certainly happens over time — through generational shifts, written works, and so on. Younger people read older ones, and vice versa. Who did you read while working on "A River With The Name Of A Bird"?

— I read a wide range of authors, but I’d say that reading had less influence on this collection than listening to music. Music, in my view, better conveys emotional experiences than literature, which relies on verbal expression. Music can express emotions that words haven’t yet captured. While there are often lyrics in music, it’s the sound that fills in the emotional gaps. This time, I felt I drew more inspiration from music than from poetry, which is why I included a mood playlist in the book — not as a "soundtrack for reading," but as music to enhance the mood after finishing the book.

— What kind of music are we talking about? Are you not concerned that it might limit the range of emotional interpretations for these texts?

— *It’s more about highlighting the underlying foundation of the work. Since the book explores themes of growing up, I chose music from my teenage years. Deftones and Team Sleep songs, in particular, became key influences for many of the texts in the collection, as well as the playlist. The music featured is diverse, but all of it shares elements of shoegaze. While I’m not a huge fan of traditional shoegaze, I enjoy when it’s blended with other alternative or heavy music styles. There are various names for it now, like Deftonescore, zoomergaze, nu-gaze. You can hear a lot of shoegaze influence in post-metal, post-hardcore, and even in contemporary, secular forms of black metal.

It’s amusing to me that Deftones have recently gone viral on platforms like TikTok and imageboards, with teenagers rediscovering the band and turning it into a trend. They might interpret it differently, but it represents a cultural intersection of generations. It’s also part of a broader movement of nostalgia for pop culture from the ‘90s and early 2000s — the time of my youth. So, the playlist is both a retrospective and contemporary piece. It’s a guide to melancholic moods, which is something universally understood by everyone.

— Nostalgia seems like a form of escaping reality, doesn’t it? It’s easy to retreat into your own thoughts or memories, lock yourself in them, and wait. But can you truly avoid thinking about the war this way?

— Some might believe you can, but that’s exactly what we were talking about earlier with delayed maturity. The theme of war is present in the book because it’s impossible to avoid when the poems even slightly touch on the real world. Here, it acts as a force that reveals catastrophe — an objective truth that crashes into the protagonist’s world whether they want it or not.

Right now, it’s hard to write without considering war in some way. Some might argue that only soldiers can write about war, but that’s a long-debated issue. Poets at the front write from their experiences there, while those displaced or as migrants write about their personal experiences in the context of war. It’s different poetry, but it addresses the same topic. War spreads like tar, covering everything. Even when you try to push away from it, you still have to deal with it as a constant. Perhaps within this, a new poetic convention could emerge, as the times shift and require new forms of art. Looking at what’s happening in Ukraine, it’s clear that history is far from static — it’s erupting like a volcano, and something unexpected could emerge from it. But only time will reveal that.

Translated by Anna Petelina

The project "Strengthening Independent Media for a Strong Democratic Ukraine" implemented by DW Akademie in cooperation with Lviv Media Forum and Ukrainian Public Service Media, Suspilne, is funded by the European Union and co-supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.