Bohdan Boichuk’s Childhood Reveries: A Migrant’s Nostalgia, or, Documenting Pain in Poetry

This paper examines Bohdan Boichuk’s poetry by looking into the role his childhood memories played in forming his poetic imagination. Displaced by World War II, the poet displays a unique capacity to transcend his traumatic experiences by engaging in creative writing. Eyewitnessing war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis does not destroy his belief in the healing power of poetry; on the contrary, it makes him appreciate poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise. Invoking Gaston Bachelard’s classic work The Poetics of Reveries: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, I argue that Boichuk’s vivid childhood memories, however painful they might be, helped him poetically recreate and reimagine fateful moments of his migrant life

The phenomenon and poetry of the New York Group, discourses, disguises, and liminality

grantor: University of TorontoThe New York Group is a circle of Ukrainian avant-garde émigré poets, most of whom began to write and publish in the second half of the 1950s in New York City. The purpose of this study is to examine those creative, philosophical and socio-political aspects that justify the existence of the group as a single literary phenomenon in the history of Ukrainian literature. I approach the group's output and activity by focusing on its discursive practices, thematic preferences, and liminal predicaments. In Part One, I introduce the individual poets and situate them against the background of Ukrainian and Western modernisms in order to elucidate the New York Group's general aesthetic orientations. In Part Two, I outline the group's emergence and formation, paying particular attention to the literary discourses underlying the poets' interaction with their predecessors, contemporaries and successors. In Part Three, I present a thematic analysis of the poetry of the New York Group, concentrating mainly on the poets' predilection for the erotic, the Spanish and the ludic. My aim in this part is to point out the multiplicity of signification inherent in these three selected themes. Finally, in Part Four, I discuss the group's creative, assembling and exilic trajectories and argue that the poetic shift from modernist to postmodernist way of representation as well as the poets' exilic condition can best be conceptualized from the angle of the concept of liminality. I employ the theoretical constructs of Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner to provide a framework for my analyses of literary politics and the texts themselves. In the conclusion I argue that the poets of the New York Group, despite their liminal émigré status, were able to transcend their periphery by pushing the aesthetic boundaries of Ukrainian literature. The group's overall contribution has been substantial and it cannot be omitted in any serious discussion of twentieth-century Ukrainian poetry.Ph.D