— Since August 2020, when violence against peaceful people erupted in Belarus, and during the ongoing horrific Russian attack on Ukraine – destroying so many lives, homes and streets where people went about their usual delights and sorrows, creating memories, creating themselves, libraries, planting trees for their grandchildren – I have seen poetry used to disturb people who should have been comforted and to comfort people who should have been disturbed. I have seen journalists and academics use poetry for the purpose of plucking the silence. The poem creates the silence, it doesn’t pluck it! I love Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s line ‘When the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden’, from the poem ‘Maestro’ (2004) set in Moldova. People speak about being saved by poetry, but poetry cannot save a child’s life during a bombardment. If there was a choice to give up poetry, to make it as if poetry never existed, so that one child would survive a bombing, one
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