Poetry as Cultural Doorway: Reflecting on the war in Ukraine by Camberwell student Petrică Bistran
- Written byAnnika Loebig
- Published date 04 August 2022
Since Petrică Bistran decided to study painting at Camberwell College of Arts, he’s been interested in paying homage to tradition while embracing the future of creative change and progress. While this has turned him towards using painting as a medium to address contemporary issues such as climate change, writing has also become an increasingly important element in his art practice.
“I find myself writing ‘poetry on the go’, grabbing images and ideas from the world around me without much planning or scope, which later feed back into the studio work,” he tells us.
Not long after his journey at UAL began, he decided to join The Many-Languages Poetry Club, founded by Intercultural Communications Trainer and Language Development Tutor Karen Harris in Autumn 2021, to further explore how poetry could feed into his work.
“Each week, the gathering would start with a ‘theme of the day’, in other words, different types of poetry, issues surrounding translation, and so forth,” Karen tells us. “Then we’d get on to the open mic section, which needn’t connect with the theme.”
One of Petrică’s poems responded to the theme ‘Poetry as a Cultural Doorway’, coinciding with this year’s Poetry Day on 21 March. Since this was at the hight of the war in Ukraine, Petrică, who’s originally from Romania, started imagining what it might mean to be a Ukranian poet forced to flee from immediate danger and seeking refuge from the war, and how he might use poetry and art to enter a different cultural reality by taking us out of the familiar.
“The very painful reality of the war in Ukraine has had a traumatic effect on me and my work right from the beginning,” he tells us.
“I started sketching about the conflict, integrating text and colour, whilst watching and listening to the news, and developing these images of confusion and suffering – a meaningless, upside-down world – as a way of processing these horrible events of destruction, loss and death that befell Ukraine.”
In the process of writing his poem, Petrică sought to put himself in the shoes of a Ukranian poet by addressing him as the poet himself: something he calls ‘a double act of empathy’. Even though he feels like he failed to adequately impersonate the poet in mind, as “nothing makes it more real than being in the actual situation”, he argues that there remains a sense of hope at the end of it, a universal feeling, which might make someone enter the poet’s experience through their imagination in a more appropriate way.
In an effort to merge the poem with his primary creative practice, his poem is accompanied by one of his own paintings ‘S.T.W.’ (Stop the War/Save the World). The piece includes a flyer found at Camberwell calling out ‘Stop the War’, which he used to disrupt the aesthetics of the painting and interrogate the role of beauty in shaping our world in the face of tragedy, powerlessness and injustice.
“I am not a so-called ‘political artist’, or much of an activist, but I want my art to mean something when there’s so much injustice and suffering in our world."
Read the full poem below:
untitled (we run)
so I’ll let you be me. the familiar
has stopped. stillness is no longer an option.
death falls on us like a damned season of hell.
snow on open wounds, ash flowers, shelled cities
for a runway. we run. you may know the eerie quietness
at night but not the rumbling noise and fire in the dark sky
close enough for the deaf to hear it. we run and the blood-dust
of our fathers’ land stick to our shoes. mothers and children are we,
and my thoughts alone are a doorway to a measure of peace,
the peace that reminds us that only fear is worse than death.
my words are the mind of the world open to love.
a poem is not a bomb, a poem is not a circus of evil.
a poem is you and I when the bridge we cross
from opposite directions
disappears
behind us.
If you’d like to join the Poetry Club starting again this Autumn, please email Karen Harris (k.harris@arts.ac.uk).
For other opportunities to merge language and art to unite students from across UAL, check out the annual Language-Art Project.