The author’s name, Pozayak, is literally one of numerous Ukrainian conjunctions basically meaning “since,” “in view of,” “in that,” and their more archaic equivalents. Using them a lot of things can be explained and described, because they all point to cause, reason, origin. Although what causes can one look for in this chaotically crazy world? Just the consequences. Today only one who has lost his reason can believe in reasons.
Since there are no causes, such conjunctions confuse rather than explain, leading one to false mythical causes that are purely syntactical. Causes existing after a comma. Just reach the comma and you will understand the rest. Take, for example, in this sentence: “The author’s sole objective consisted in entertaining himself and the reader, since publicity and money would come as a welcome supplement.” Here the cause determines the objective and the latter the means. The means are lingual, mostly lexical, a flow of words which at times reminds one of literature.
Yurko Pozayak places himself outside the literary process. It is a pose. Well, a poet has to be a poseur. His posture is his last refuge. Assuming and keeping a posture takes courage, unless you are a statue, of course. But statues will be erected in someone else’s honor, some sweaty taskmasters’. And one huge polynomial monument commemorating members of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, the dead, the living, and the unborn.
By the way, the Writers’ Union gathered for yet another Plenum the other day. This Plenum is a peculiar gerontocracy, a Council of Elders supposedly manifesting a supreme form of democracy. This time they discussed hermeneutics, codes, signs, hostile structures, northeast financing, and the secret meaning of certain acronyms. According to their latter-day findings, AUP (Ukrainian abbreviation for the competing Association of Ukrainian Writers) should be actually deciphered as Anti-Ukrainian Provocation, and SPU (Spilka Pysmennykiv Ukrainy or Writers’ Union of Ukraine) as Slava Patriotam Ukrainy or Glory to the Patriots of Ukraine. Now everyone knows finally where he stands.
Yurko Pozayak also has his stand — a shaky one, one should admit, from too much wine, the wine of poetry and the poetry of wine. His blood group is unknown in medicine: it is too blue and remains to be investigated. Its compositions is very special: cheap port, cabernet, sangria, vermouth, and then only wormwood stuff [Chornobyl literally means wormwood], without a trace of sherry or lukewarm beer...
Once we had a musical group called the Lost Scroll. Eventually the group got lost but the name remained (perhaps because of Gogol’s story of the same name). When still in existence, it was regarded as a punk one. One of them sang about firemen, another was a playboy, and another jumped off a balcony. But the times were like those punks were even favored by their elders. They even found a name for them: literary successors. True, no one succeeded anyone and nothing changed. A great power still needs great literature. Or vice versa: great literature causes great government concern.
Oh, damn all those mocking hacks, loud-mouths, 30-year-old Pinocchios, Buh-Bah-Buh alumni, and blank verse addicts! So you have lost your scroll, haven’t you?
So what’s left? Perhaps poetry. Or amnesia, partial or complete, as the sign of the generation.
Children of asphalt, backyard guerrillas, sons of bitches and of the epoch. The first words they learned were four-letter ones and they wrote them on walls and fences. The first cigarettes they smoked were non-filter and their first drink took away their souls. They made love first at nine and this was the first and last tenderness they would ever feel.
I don’t like Kyiv, and perhaps I don’t like Pozayak, but I love Pozayak’s Kyiv. I love its dialects and districts, including the Jewish Bazaar, Syrets, and Troyeshchyna. Because Pozayak is also a conjunction in Ukrainian and because he represents a rare breed of poets, conjunction poets. Ones that join the unjoinable like mixing champagne, moonshine, vermouth, and lukewarm beer. Please take this as a metaphor and please take this literally.






