Many dolls / Without children live here,” writes Maryna, a fourteen-year-old poet living in Odesa, Ukraine. Her poem opens by asking her sister what it’s like in heaven: “Quiet, yes? / Without fear and night.” Tamara, age ten, takes a more playful tone in her poem: “I have a sore throat, / The doctor will come / And start bossing everyone around— / Drink this and drink that!”
Ukrainian Children participating in the Odesa Poetry Studio at a libarary in Odesa, Ukraine, receive awards during the New Odyssey Kids’ Poetry Festival in April. (Credit: Oleh Vladimirsky)
Maryna and Tamara are students of Odesa Poetry Studio, a free program in Odesa through which Ukrainian children gather to write poems, share their work, and be in community with one another. Since the summer of 2023, Odesa Poetry Studio has been leading volunteer-run poetry workshops for children made refugees by Russia’s war on the Eastern European nation. Although some Ukrainians—particularly those with jobs in science, technology, or other in-demand fields—have evacuated to homes elsewhere in the world, others have had a harder time finding refuge. Many have flocked to Odesa, a city in the southwest part of Ukraine that, despite being a frequent target of Russia’s aggression, is more livable than cities like Bucha, Mariupol, and Kherson, which have experienced some of the war’s most harrowing atrocities. While parents in Odesa have been busy securing food, housing, and employment, their children have had the opportunity to work with the poetry studio. There they are told their voice and their culture matters, a message that counters the logic of violent conflict: “War is trying to fill your whole life,” says Oleg Suslov, one of the poetry studio’s cofounders and the editor in chief of the newspaper Evening Odesa. “It is trying to subjugate you so that you don’t think about anything but war.”
Suslov created Odesa Poetry Studio with Odesa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky, who teaches at Princeton University, and Maya Dimerli, who heads the UNESCO City of Literature program for Odesa. The aim of the program is to ease the suffering of Ukraine’s children while resisting Russia’s attempts to erase Ukrainian culture. Their workshops relieve the deprivation of wartime by bringing young people together to engage with a medium that is particularly suited to uncertainty and emergency. Poetry provides “a scrap of air in our lungs,” says Kaminsky, author of the poetry collections Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2014) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019). “When you are running from a bombarded building, you don’t carry a one-thousand-page novel in your hands. But you might have a few lines from a poem in your head or some rhymes or images.” Poetry can help articulate the enormous losses the studio’s young students have to contend with. They also provide entertainment: a tune to hum while staring at the blank wall of a shelter, a game to play with language.
If the notion of play feels at odds with living during wartime, you’ve likely never spent time with Odesans, who are known for their wit and irreverence, even in dark times. Kaminsky recalls an e-mail from his cousin Petya at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022: “I woke up because of explosions. They were bombing the beach. Who do they think they’ll hit? This isn’t vacation season!”
Shortly after receiving this e-mail, Kaminsky, who returns to Odesa several times a year to visit family and friends, began volunteering at Hostinna Khata, or Hospitable Hut, a refugee center in the city that provides food, clothing, toys, and essential services. It was there that he connected with Suslov to raise funds for, among other things in Ukraine, those who have lost limbs in bombardments, a children’s dance group, struggling journalists, and a museum that chronicles twentieth-century genocides. When the idea for a children’s poetry workshop arose, Dimerli—who is well versed in the city’s literary scene—emerged as an ideal collaborator, particularly for bringing visiting poets to lead workshops. Recent instructors have included Kaminsky and other Odesan and American poets, including the poet and painter Armine Bozhko, who lives in New York, and the Ukrainian poet and marine biologist Mikhail Son.
In the year since its inception, Odesa Poetry Studio has drawn refugee children ranging from six to seventeen years old from bombarded cities all over Ukraine. The logistics of holding workshops are understandably complicated. Meetings don’t follow a set schedule. Suslov advertises them in the newspaper Evening Odesa, and related information is often conveyed through social media and phone messages. More than two years into the war, air-raid sirens ring through the city daily—sometimes hourly—and parents are not always comfortable letting children out of their sight. Some workshop sessions have included just five children, others have drawn more than twenty-five. These young poets do not know what tomorrow will bring. But they do know that Odesa Poetry Studio will be waiting when it is relatively safe for them to venture outside.
In addition to workshops, the studio runs open-theme poetry competitions, offering cash prizes to three winners in each age category judged by local poets and community members. All who submit are awarded a certificate and prizes such as books, toys, flash drives, and winter gloves. Each submission is published in a newly established anthology, New Odyssey Almanac, which is printed in color on high-quality paper and distributed to all contributors. Eighty-four children from twenty regions of Ukraine were published in the first edition.
“In wartime, a poetry contest is not so much a creative competition as a way to unite children who need support,” Suslov wrote in an e-mail accompanied by photos of shrapnel that landed in his yard the previous day, after a building in his neighborhood was bombed. While the studio’s founders hope that their students grow up to be poets, they see the fact that they are writing and sharing poetry amid relentless bombardments and blackouts as a victory in itself. They have also offered other activities for the studio’s young poets, including collaborations with a Hawaiian jazz trio to record music inspired by their work and field trips to the zoo and a film studio—because, as Kaminsky puts it, “poetry isn’t separate from the world but lives in us and among us.”
Thousands of miles away, Americans metabolize news of Russia’s war on Ukraine primarily through depersonalized media coverage. The numbers are staggering, even by conservative estimates: more than eleven thousand Ukrainian civilian casualties, according to the United Nations, and more than fifty-five thousand Ukrainian forces killed, according to UALosses Project, an organization that records the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers. Schools, apartment buildings, and museums housing irreplaceable cultural artifacts have been razed. As the war drags into its third year and Western media becomes less interested in covering its daily realities, the poetry of Ukraine’s children bears a deeply intimate kind of witness.
Running the poems published in New Odyssey Almanac through Google Translate provides, admittedly, a poor substitute for the original Ukrainian verse. But even in Google’s English, what a gift to spend time with lines like this: “I was given a cat for my birthday. Wonderful, small, with yellow eyes,” writes seven-year-old Andrei, who is smiling widely, eyes sparkling, in the photo that accompanies his poem in the anthology. “I am ready to be friends with him all my life.”
Ruth Madievsky is the author of the national best-selling novel All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, 2023) and the poetry collection Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her work appears in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere.
