Craft: Galina Rymbu

Galina Rymbu ( Галина Рымбу, b. July 20, 1990) is a Russian feminist poet and activist. Her work is a model of how we can respond in poetry to autocratic control, dictatorship, and anti-intellectual power. It is vital, now in the United States, for poets to seek out such models because the future here is an autocratic state.

For Rymbu, and this is another thing for poets to pay close attention to, power and violence are bound with sex. She says because of power “lovemaking is impossible, but it’s also impossible without it.” Our job as poets is inextricably bound to critiquing layers of violence—whether it is state-sanctioned violence, interpersonal violence, family violence, or violence done to ourselves by ourselves. Rymbu says:

“We can’t live in a world without violence, we are born as subjects into a world of violence, we are formed by violence, and so is our desire. It’s important to understand the nature of these different manifestation of violence in order to struggle with them in ourselves, in order to explode the system of sexual relations not only at the level of institutions but at the level of our personal sensuous perception. This is what I want to write about.”

Rymbu writes poetry as if she is not alone. She believes poetry is a form of public speech and thought, and should be written as if there is a real, concrete person there, not just an abstract reader.