To glean meaning from life

Contributor Spotlight on Svetlana Litvinchuk

Svetlana Litvinchuk’s poem You Forgot Yourself appears in Arkana’s Issue 17.

Arkana: What was your inspiration for this piece?

As with most of my writing, this poem was my way of slowing down time and pulling it apart to glean meaning from a chaotic and irreconcilable life event. Specifically, it reflects on my father’s three-year battle with cancer. This moment was a turning point from what we had convinced ourselves was stability, as if he could go on living like that forever. Of course, we knew he couldn’t—he had stopped all treatment and hadn’t gotten out of bed in 9 months. Every time we talked, he was “fine” until one day he called me, and he wasn’t, having suddenly decided to stop taking his palliative medicine for fear of becoming addicted to it. This was a surreal moment, especially considering his lifelong alcohol addiction but also just his sudden concern about a future that he knew deep down wouldn’t include him. After four days of withdrawal symptoms he resumed his medication, which precipitated a sharp decline. He lived another three weeks. Looking back, I believe his decision was the result of cognitive changes caused by the progression of his illness. But in the moment, he believed he could alter his outcome by making one final radical change, that it wasn’t too late, and this poem was an exercise in capturing the sense of desperation on both his end and mine.

Arkana: Your poem addresses the complex relationships we have with our parents once we are adults, especially when we have children of our own. How much does serious illness factor into that shift in perspective?

I think losing a parent is something no one is ever prepared for, whether it’s a sudden loss or an inevitable conclusion to chronic illness; whether the relationship was already lost or if there was potential for some last-minute reconciliation. I think we’re all raised with stories of characters who hit rock bottom and change for the better, so it is understandable to hope for some sort of turning point, all the way up to their last words. But real life doesn’t have neat and tidy endings like that. My father was a complex and conflicted man, and that’s how I describe our relationship. But, on some level, a child never stops yearning for their parent. When they pass, they take with them any hope of mending the past and the second chance that dies with them becomes replaced by a sort of emptiness, of a stunned and stark that’s it. So, there’s grief for the person, but also for what the relationship could have been and wasn’t.

But I think most people have complex relationships with their parents. True closeness—the kind we all long for is, I think really quite rare. Watching our parents age—as I get to do now that my mom has moved in with us after my father passed—is a sad process, filled with regrets and unfulfilled needs. I think we don’t realize that as our parents raise us, they themselves are still growing up and maturing, they’re imperfect humans and they make mistakes. It’s hard to see our parents as their own people, as vulnerable and fallible and needing to be cared for. You realize eventually, especially when you yourself become a parent, that they’ve always been those things.

Arkana: Talk to us about the form of your poem. It’s pretty complex visually, yet your reading is almost like a prose poem.

Yes, I think this ultimately is a variation of a prose poem. The disjointed form on the page is a representation of a fragmented moment. I think it is a way of stretching out the moment, the extra spaces highlight the surreal, dizzying nature of losing a parent in stages—the disorientation when months of a plateau give way to rapid decline. The disconnected visual form represents the cognitive dissonance and the fear of moving forward, the urge to try to take it back. Even in the face of inevitability, there is an element of disbelief, of stumbling through the stages of anticipatory grief.

I don’t think we talk enough about anticipatory grief—the kind that starts long before death arrives. It has its own rhythms, its own steps. We attempt to ready ourselves emotionally and spiritually, but it’s not a process we can ever complete. I still wake up on some mornings and have to remind myself he’s gone and have to repeat the grieving all over again. It’s like a ritual—repetition is required to slowly build the endurance to live with the void left behind.

As for my reading of the poem, it seems like the “performance” of a poem is sometimes more like a story while the poem on the page is more like a landscape of a moment. I’m not sure this is entirely deliberate but it’s what feels right. I’ve often had the experience of hearing a poet read their work that caught me completely by surprise. It was read so differently by the voice in my head, but afterward I could not imagine it being read any other way. I couldn’t have read this poem any other way. Ilya Kaminsky’s reading of Deaf Republic was like that for me.

Arkana: You are originally from Kyiv, Ukraine. How does that influence your poetry?

I think it permeates every part of my identity, especially in relation to a persistent sense of otherness after immigrating to the west. It is said that identity is forged in contrast to something—we understand who we are by what we are not. Yet belonging is a universal need. I think somewhere in this tension between standing out and fitting in we find space for ourselves.

Stylistically, I am influenced by poetry I grew up reciting, like Pushkin. But having read a lot of Slavic literature, I embrace certain hallmarks such as passive voice, complex sentence structure, and tragic or unresolved endings. In my culture, lyricism and rich imagery are central, as is magical realism and stream of consciousness writing, which allows for suspension of disbelief and embracing absurdity in a way that feels cultural.

And then of course, there are the themes I grew up with that are pervasive and generational in my home culture—alcoholism in the family, rigid gender roles, poverty, and food scarcity shaped both my childhood and my understanding of what is possible. The intimate connection to events like Holodomor, Babiy Yar, Perestroika (less a one-time event and more an ongoing effect on the collective psyche), and, of course, Chernobyl still loom over me when I try to plan for the future. There has been a lot of cancer in my family. That sense of inevitability of the body and/or political climate as a ticking time bomb is something I wrestle with constantly. There’s a kind of grasping for control in my work and a need to make sense of things that don’t have clean answers.

Time and change move differently across cultures, so I don’t quite fit the mold of a typical millennial in the West. While I lost my accent a long time ago as a result of immigrating at the age of 7 and attended a state-run transition school that taught me English, I also returned to my home country in the summers, spoke my native language at home, and continued growing up with the same dynamics of my place of origin long after immigration, which created an identity that is not linear and is hard to categorize, leading to a sense of not feeling quite at home in either culture/country. This dichotomy is often present in my writing. But, I don’t particularly look very different from most Americans—whatever that means—so I think people don’t often notice anything different about me until they get to know me and realize that my formative experiences were quite different from their own.

Arkana: What are you working on now?

I’m standing at an exciting threshold. My first full-length collection is coming out with Fernwood Press in May 2026. It centers on embodiment—how we feel at home in our bodies, at home on the Earth, and become home for new life. As a climate activist, permaculture farmer, and a mother, it reads at times like an elegy navigating ecological grief at the intersection of futility and responsibility to shape the future in a way that remains habitable for generations to come. Magical realism, blurring the line between the body as landscape and the earth as sentient, is a thread through the collection.

I’ve also just completed my second collection, The Knot of Unsolvable Things, which includes the poem “You Forgot Yourself.” It’s a family portrait, braiding together a series of childhood memories with poems about my father’s death, creating two interwoven chronologies. It explores immigration, assimilation, and how our childhoods shape who we become.

Beyond my writing I serve as the Reviews Editor and Assistant Editor at ONLY POEMS, which allows me to contribute to conversations about the role of poetry in humanizing current events. This year I’m also an Editor for Rockvale Review and an Associate Editor on an anthology project called Solace: Consolations for the Soul.

Arkana: We’re all MFA students at various points on our journey. Any advice for emerging writers?

I’m an emerging writer myself, so I’m also still finding my way, but I think there’s value in peer-to-peer advice, so here’s what helps guide my process:

• Read, read, read. There is no better teacher than reading. Both excellent and not-so-excellent work will inform your craft. Reading thousands of poems will help you sharpen your instincts and hone your voice. I think part of writing is a passive process, the more you read, the better you’ll write, almost as if by osmosis.

• Write, then rewrite. My favorite college professor taught me that “there is no such thing as good writing, only good re-writing.” Don’t get too attached to your own words. Let your drafts rest between edits. Writing is like sculpting—you chip away at a block of words to reveal what the poem wants to say. Don’t be afraid to revise, even after publication.

• Rearrange. I often write out of order. I’ve found that moving lines or stanzas around can make for a stronger narrative arc or better emotional flow.

• Write down random thoughts and snippets of lines that come to you at inevitably inconvenient moments like driving, rocking a baby, or in the shower—they can be strung together later. My father was a prolific composer and carried around a voice recorder in his shirt pocket so that he could talk lyrics or hum musical arrangements into it during his workdays at the steel factory.

• Give yourself permission to make “bad art” if you want to make “good art.” Experiment, push past comfort zones, beware of falling into ruts. Once you find what works, don’t get formulaic with it. Discomfort leads to growth. Most great discoveries happen by accident. Stay vulnerable and open.