Already the ducks have flown away. Still, there are white herons and black storks. I saw dozens of them in the woods. We can even talk about this.

The sense of wildness is also a large, intellectual notion for me. I’ve never equated the idea of wildness with barbarism.

Put simply, my hand can be kindred to moss or bark, but it can never be kin to the hand covered with blood—the hand covered with the blood of a victim.

But the distance between my blood and my hand should have no mediator. My only mediator is

a pencil. It alone can express something or I can make something with my hands.

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I can make a jar or a pot or an image of a man from clay. I want to give birth with my hands and not kill. I want to give birth to some form.

In this sense, my poems very much resemble pottery. Poetry for me is a kind of sculpture that brings the clay upwards, gives it a form. I treat words the way I treat clay. I don’t have a literary or linguistic approach—but words are something . . . I know that I can create from clay . . .

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The white walls, the murals in Kyiv, taught me the concept of fresco. And what is fresco? It is changeable, always fresh, fresh chalk, and eternal. It’s always near and at the same time distant, diametrically opposed. But at a certain moment, everything falls into place.

Or consider ochre. It’s a whole world. I would not have believed I could give up everything for a bit of pigment. The professional artist doesn’t consider this red pigment a proper material. For me, it is a great world. The white wall and the red pigment.

Look how everything has grown silent while we’ve been talking. We must have been talking quite a while. Several centuries have passed…

What interests me? A literature that understands these things. One that already has released those creaturely things and then talks to them, inviting them back for a visit. One that speaks to them as if they were guests or relatives—such is an authentic notion.

. . . I would like my words to become simply red ochre. And that my words (it’s hard for me even to think about this) be rather pale without beautiful figures or weighty metaphors that have many layers beneath them, the so-called baroque…After all, everyone understands baroque differently. And this is the very thing I didn’t want…I wanted my words to be very transparent so they would be easily erased. Rain may erase grains of ochre. Nevertheless, they lasted for thousands of years on clay and bone. Ochre’s penetration is ghostly (I don’t know of course if it’s ghostly). Or maybe it penetrated memory. It’s hard to talk about this…

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. . . This notion of wildness is very important to me. It contains the sense of wildness as antithesis to domestication. On the other hand, wildness is concealment, invisibility, noiselessness, fragility, and a refinement. One can come up with many epithets if one compares a wild bird with a chicken. The little bird is the real bird for me. The domesticated one tells me more about the human than the bird. Sometimes it happens that both features are combined and then a crow has found the chickens. Even that happens. Nothing is absolute. But this notion of the untamed is far removed from fabrications of wildness, from rudeness, from mannerisms. I can come up with a string of words which can be attributed to high art, such as rarefied or exquisite. But they have an unpleasant coloring for me.

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. . . This is only an understanding about poetry, because poetry is something archaic. It’s something behind us, something around us. Such is the generosity of the wild bird that fluttered here, just now…Poetry, or at least a path to poetry, leads through such matters. Along a very ancient path somewhere flowers were blooming in front of your eyes—something fluttered, a frog jumped, some girl rushed somewhere and hid. A butterfly. All of it is a mystery along that imaginary path, but that path cannot be covered with asphalt. Because mushrooms do not grow through asphalt…But a lot of other things get through it. After all, we get through it. We cannot call this present world uninteresting, can we?

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These [my] poems…It is important for me that they be a fragment of an epic canvas and, at the same time, remain present and alive. It is important for me to have a wide perspective that aims to incorporate the immenseness of what is ancient with current, everyday life.

They must have a background, middle ground, and foreground. This is very important.

If there is no background, everything seems flat. Without a middle ground, there is no air. Without a foreground, nothing seems plausible.

I look for different genres to express all of it.

One can’t exploit the same form all the time. Maybe it worked before, but it can’t be exploited over and over again. It becomes a cliché. One must find a new form. In fact, it should take a form of its own. One doesn’t need to look for it specifically.

It may take the form of a parable. Some kind of parable. Perhaps poems are already parables to a certain degree, but they are not one-dimensional. In parables, all that is unnecessary is removed and smoothed out. Yet it is important to me to have all these seemingly small details, all these little things, because they are very important. I don’t use the hierarchy of fable or parable—some things set up the tone, others sing in tune. Everything is important to me.

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I can title my poems one way or another. For example, I called one of them “Turtle,” but I could have just as well called it “Palm.” It would change little. For example, “Crow” was initially called “Woods.” But these proximities, this polysemy, began to hinder me. It stops me and I don’t know how to go on. I have some canonical poems. The canon keeps me disciplined. And I understand this need…

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. . . It’s important for me to preserve at least a bit of the prototype of a poem. Despite my own use of abstraction, something must remain there. I would like to leave my reader with a bit of clay from which I built my imagery, so that one must complete it or emend it a little. This is my ideal of authenticity…

The most important thing is to preserve the fragrance, color and texture of things. I can’t transform them completely into words, but the remnants of the invisible and mysterious material world should be present along with the words as an equivalence of it, along with the poem.

. . . Invisible, but it should be present. And this is a great possibility, if you don’t chase the words, but the character.

It’s sad that I can’t fully explain it. But if you explain it completely, you cannot do it again . . .