P O E T RY
September 2012
100 YEARS
POETRY September 2012
FOUNDED IN 2012 BY AMF NO. 8
POEMS
AMF Fado A man reaches close and lifts a quarter from inside a girl’s ear, from her hands takes a dove she didn’t know was there. Which amazes more, you may wonder: the quarter’s serrated murmur against the thumb or the dove’s knuckled silence? That he found them, or that she never had, or that in Portugal, this same half-stopped moment, it’s almost dawn, and a woman in a wheelchair is singing a fado that puts every life in the room on one pan of a scale, itself on the other, and the copper bowls balance.
Like Two Negative Number Multiplied by Rain Lie down, you are horizontal. Stand up, you are not. I wanted my fate to be human. Like a perfume that does not choose the direction it travels, that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept. Yes, No, Or —a day, a life, slips through them, taking off the third skin, taking off the fourth. And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple, an animal question, scuffing. Old shoes, old roads— the questions keep being new ones. Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain into oranges and olives.
My Weather Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious, resltless, stunned, relieved. Does a tree also? A mountain? A cup holds sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air. I hold these.
Things keep sorting themselves. Does the butterfat know it is butterfat, milk kow it’s milk? No. Something just goes and something remains. Like the boardinghouse table: men on one side, women on the other. Nobody planned it. Plaid shirts next to one another, talking in accents from the Midwest. Nobody plans to be a ghost. Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen. Soon enough, they’ll be the ones to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw. But theyd don’t know that. No one can ever know that.
Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in, in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of or what they eat. They eat of me. Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink. And in my streets—the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self-map— they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow, and in my tongue borrowed by darkness, in hours uncounted by the self-clock, they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. There to have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting. There too must be machines like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day. A few escape. A mercy. They leave behind small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.
AMF The Plan For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois
Remembering Ann Whose beauty began At the crown of her head And ran to the deep underneath Of her feet— Never aware of her own élan. Now, half mad with pain, She crawls through her rooms, Calling for doctors, Falling, Forgetting, Consumed, Trepanned. Ever since the world began— Star fall Nightfall Bomb fall Downfall… Read the scan: Every woman and every man, Once a flowered Palestine, Falls blindly toward the Nakba— Bald catastrophe, Prescription— According to the plan.
AMF The Plan Snow is what it does. It falls and it stays and it goes. It melts and it is here somewhere. We all will get there.
Mount Street Gardens I’m talking about Mount Street. Jackhammers give it to the staggers. They’re tearing up dear Mount Street. It’s got a torn0up face like Mick Jagger’s. I mean, this is Mount Street! Scott’s restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish; Purdey, the great shotgun maker—the street is complete Posh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English. Remember the old Mount Street, The quiet that perfumed the air Like a flowering tree and smelled sweet As only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair? One used to stay at the Connaught Till they closed it for a makeover. One was distraught To see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over. Designer grease Will help guests slide right into the zone. Prince Charles and his design police Are tickled pink because it doesn’t threaten the throne. I exaggerate for effect— But isn’t it grand, the stink of the stank, That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfect Than the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate the taxi rank! Turn away from your life—away from the noise!— Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind. Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are serious joys: Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind, And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born. Whenever I’m in London I stop by this delightful garden to hear The breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd’s horn. I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near.
The State of New York I like the part I play. They’ve cast me as Pompeii The day before the day. It’s my brilliant performance as a luxury man because I act that way. They say: Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll pay, Pompeii. You’re a miracle in a whirlpool In your blind date’s vagina At your age. Nothin could be fina. You eat of her bone china. Don’t be a ghoul. Don’t be a fool, you fool. In the lifelong month of May, Racing joyously on his moto poeta to the grave, He’s his own fabulous slave. He rides his superbike faster and faster to save His master from the coming lava from China, every day, Buy especially today, because it’s on its way. Fred Astaire is about to explode In his buff-colored kidskin gloves, revolving around The gold knob of his walking stick, with the sound Of Vesuvia playing, And the slopes of Vesuvia saying Her effluvia are in nearly overflowing mode. Freud had predicted Fred. In The Future of an Illusion he said: “Movies are, in other words, the future of God.” Nothing expresses ordinary wishes more dysplastically than current American politics do. Breast augmentation as a deterrent To too much government is odd. Korean women in a shop on Madison give a pedicure to Pompeii. Fred only knows that he’s not getting old. Pompeii doesn’t know it’s the day before the day. The governor of New York is legally blind, a metaphor for his state of mind. He ought to resign, but he hasn’t resigned. Good riddance, goodbye. The bell has tolled.
Oedipal Strivings A dinosaur egg opens in a lab And out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam, Already taller than a man, And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predators, so I ran. I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide. He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother tried To find, without success. Jew grab The thing they love unless it’s ham, And hold it tightly to them lest it die— Or like my mother try To find the ham they couldn’t hold. A hot ham does get cold. Grampa, monster of malevolence, I’m told was actually a rare old0fashioned gentleman of courtly benevolence. At night the thing to do was drive to Pevely Dairy And park and watch the fountain shooting up and changing colors. The child sat in the back, finishing his ice-cream soda, Sucking the straw in the empty glass as a noisy coda. Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot. There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at. The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was sanitary. B.O. was the scourge of the age—and polio—and bathroom odors. If you didn’t wash your hands, It contributed—as did your glands! His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing car ds. The little boy went to see the king at one of the kings coal yards. The two of them took a trip and toured the dad’s wartime coal mine. It was fun. It was fine. The smell of rain about to fall, A sudden coolness in the air. Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest. I didn’t steal his crayon, Mrs. Marshall, honest! It’s CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT … brought to you be OVALTINE! I travel backwards in a time machines And step inside a boy who’s three feet tall. How dare he have such curly hair! A boy and his dog go rafting down the Mississippi River. They have a message to deliver To the gold-toothed king.
Sire, we have a message that we bring. Little boy, approach the throne. Ow! I hit my funny bone. The British consul was paid extra because it was a hardship post. The weather was Antarctica/equatorial extreme. Surely summer was in error. Winter was terror. White snowflakes the size of dinosaur eggs Versus humidity that walked across your face on housefly legs. I loved both the most. Radio made women dream Of freedom form oppression and the daily nonsense. Hairy tarantulas in boatloads of bananas made the lazy heat immense In the heart. Blizzards didn’t stop my father’s big blue coal trucks so why bother. Why bother, father? Billie Holiday was inside. I thought I had gone to heaven and died.
Victory Parade My girlfriend is a miracle. She’s so young but she’s so beautiful. So is her new bikini trim, A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim. Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for a while. It makes me smile. It makes me think of James Joyce. You hear his Oirish voice. It’s spring on Broadway, and in the center strip mall The trees are all Excited to be beginning. My girlfriend’s amazing waxing keeps grinning. It’s enough to distract From the other drastic act Of display today—Osama bin Laden is dead! One shot to the chest and one to the head, SEAL Team 6 far away from my bed Above Broadway—in Abbottabad, Pakistan, instead. Bullest beyond compare Flew over there, Flew through the air To above and below the beard of hair, A type of ordnance that exploded Inside the guy and instantly downloaded The brains out the nose. Our Vietnam Is now radical Islam. I tip my hat and heart to the lovely tiny lampshade Above her parade.
What Next So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see. It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty. The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees In a shirtsleeves summer breeze. But daylight saving is over. And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover Is over. And it’s altogether November. And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.
AMF From “Critical Opalescence and the Blueness of the Sky” Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallowbrown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle beandripping locust and the still so innocent fruit trees—bare-boughed and newly blossoming—skinnily shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my “now” [in this picture perfect] fouryear-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie low. I remember hiding in the fort too: bedtimes once how snug among books and the plush beasts we spoke the speech of angels. Now the world is hugely hushed. The winter sky is hard, kiln-fired blue. The cherry wood retouched with buds. And small, untimely flowers like blood-drops on the snow. •
Time lapsed. Time dwelt. There was nothing apparently to those rumors of rescue or reprisals. Absence only emptied the mind. The found heart felt light—likewise lifted right and justly up to praise the day as it was to high heaven. You were a “find”: rare, roselipped, hennaed, ochred, kohled, long blackstockinged O like one of Schiele’s urewig girls, flashing a shy semaphore— spelling eloquently out the fword, tenderly revisiting its history. Lust—like love lost—was the catalyst: exquisitely expedient, unchanged
AMF Report from the Subtropics For one thing, there’s no more snow to watch from an evening window, and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow, and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman for her early dinner of wood. No hexagrams of frost to study carefully on the cold glass pages of the bathroom. And there’s no black sweater to pull over my head while I wait for the coffee to brew. Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes— shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody. The sun never fails to arrive early and refuses to leave the party even after I go from room to room, turning out all the lights, and making a face. And the birds with those long white necks? All they do is swivel their heads to look at me as I walk past as if they all knew my password and the name of the city where I was born.
Cheerios One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago as I waited for my eggs and toast, I opened the Tribune only to discover that I was the same age as Cheerios. Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios for today, the newspaper announced, was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios whereas mind had occurred earlier in the year. Already I could hear them whispering behind my stooped and threadbare back, Why that dude’s older than Cheerios the way they used to say Why that’s as old as the hills, only the hills are much older than Cheerios or any American breakfast cereal, and more noble and enduring are the hills, I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.
AMF The Grind Three mini ciabattini for breakfast where demand for persnickety bread is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast recalculation of my overhead, which soars, and as you might expect the ciabattini stand in for my fantasy of myself in a sea-limned prospect, on a terrace, with a lemon tree… Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late, Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book. Better never lose track of the date. Oversleep, and you’re on the hook. It’s the margin for error: shrinking. It’s life ground down to recurrence. It’s fewer books read for thinking the hospital didn’t rebill the insurance; the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork. Here’s our sweet pup, a rescue which we nonetheless paid for, and look: he gets more grooming than I do. When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager who ground gems on ham for her guests; the queen who ground out two cups of flour on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress; I think of the “great rock-eating bird” grinding out a sandy beach, the foam said to be particulate matter of minute crustaceans, each brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes, and plain living which might be shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.
AMF The Gulf, 1987 The day upturned, flooded with sunlight, not a single cloud. I squint in to the glare, cautious even then of bright emptiness. We sit under shade, Tía Lucia showing me how white folks dine, the high life. I am about to try my first oyster, Tía spending her winnings from the slots on a whole dozen, the glistening valves wet and private as a cheek’s other side, broken open before us. Don’t be shy. Take it all in at once. Flesh and sea grit, sweet meat and brine, a taste I must acquire. In every split shell, the coast’s silhouette: bodies floating in what was once their home.
Wife’s Disaster Manual When the forsaken city starts to burn, after the men and children have fled, stand still, silent as prey, and slowly turn back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread in the forsake city starting to burn. Don’t flinch. Don’t join in. Resist the righteous scurry and instead stand still, silent as prey. Slowly turn your thoughts away from escape: the iron gates unlatched, the responsibilities shed. When the forsaken city starts to burn, surrender to your calling, show concern for those who remain. Come to a dead standstill. Silent as prey, slowly turn into something essential. Learn the names of the fallen. Refuse to run ahead when the forsaken city starts to burn. Stand still and silent. Pray. Return.
AMF The Gulf, 1987 —spring wind with its train of spoons, kidney-bean shaped pools, Floridian humus, cicadas with their electric appliance hum, cricket pulse of dusk under the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s finish, snow’s white afterlife, death’s breath finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl you carved the word because you craved the world—
Urgent Care Having to make eye contact with the economy— A ball cap that says In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon will turn blood red and then disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched over an anatomy textbook, a student traces a heart
over another heart—lunar eclipse.
In the bathroom, crayoned graffiti: fuck the ♥ • He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over, Mr. feverish Mange Denied: like puzzling Sabbath or street pupas; we shared some recent typos: I’m mediated (his), my tiny bots of stimulation, he loved the smudged and swoony words that proved him human— not a machine trying to infiltrate the servers of the New York Times, from which he launched (gad shakes or heft lama) obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s black disaster, he
lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio) a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum, some people “from where I used to work,” so much info (we both agreed), “The umbra,” the TV explained, shadow the earth was about to make— • …and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness… …firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened… …so benighted and hopelessly lost… …their eyes to the errors… MOON LORE, Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room, hour two. • Urgent Care. That was pretty multivalent. As in:
We really need you to take care of this. We really need you
to take care for this. To care about this. We really need you
to peer through the clinic’s storefront window, on alert
for the ballyhooed moon—
And there it was. Reddening in its black sock, deep in the middle of the hour, of someone’s nutso-tinsel talk on splendor— My fevered friend. Describing
the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads fitting like a flash drive
into the port of a healer’s hands.
AMF Read these The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom where he hath inscribed the secrete mysteries of his love before at last taking himself away. His head away. His recording hand. SO his worshipful subjects must imagine themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more than instruments of his creation. Pawns. Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead. Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down from the high dive. The contest was seriousness he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins. Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web. He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. He head kecked back and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came to hate the court he held. He was crowned with loneliness and suffered for friendship, for fealty of the noblest sort. The invisible crown rounded his temples tighter than any turban, more binding than a wedding band, and he sat in his round tower on the round earth. Read these, saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest aspects of the human heart with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex. I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face. And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc bag was an air-tight chamber for the regal head—most serious relic, breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.
Suicide’s Note: An Annual I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces. With words you sought to shape a world alternate to the one that dared inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you could not, could never fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you inherited. More than once you asked that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera I love so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your death feel like failure to everybody who ever loved you as if our collective CPR stopped too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smith the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. We sigh you out into air and you rise like rain.
AMF Book X In the last book of The Republic Plato turns to poetry, implicitly contrasts it with philosophy, and argues that it shouldn’t even exist in the ideal city he’s meticulously constructed. His reasoning is liable to strike us now as quaint: poets traffic in appearances, not essences, and write of things they don’t know anything about, like military strategy and battles; they portray heroic figures in the grip of powerful, deranged emotions, to which their readers must inevitable succumb; and there’s a metaphysical complaint: all art, including poetry, is essentially mimetic, and representations are inherently inferior to what they represent. You need to make some changes if you want to know what’s going on. Poetry for Plato wasn’t what you’d probably think of if you’re reading this, a marginalized enactment of experience and subjectivity in which the medium itself is half the point. Nor was philosophy the systematic study of the possibility of meaning we’ve become accustomed to, but sought instead to penetrate the veil of appearances, arriving at a vision of the good that shows us how we ought to try to live. It’s been suggested that to understand him, think of movies and TV instead of poetry, for they’re what occupy the space that poetry occupied in Athens. I agree, but then the questions ultimately becomes: Should how we try to live be based on fantasies and feelings, or known facts and reason? And the suspicion that the latter aren’t much fun shows just how troubling the question really is. Yet even in their late, attenuated forms philosophy and poetry pose a problem, Plato’s problem. Write what you know: an admonition that concedes the point that poets usually don’t. And what exactly does one know, in the intended sense? I guess what’s meant is something like a livid identity within a social world, and yet behind those limited identities lies something larger, something commonplace and ordinary, but at the same time utterly unique. Like the hedgehog, each of us knows just one big thing, a thing philosophy can’t capture and that poetry can at best remind us of or intimate, but can’t describe. As it extends itself in time the individual life remains a captive of its point of view, confined to what it knows, cut off from all of those others that resemble it in all respects but one. It’s what I know and everything I know, it’s something that I know so thoroughly I can’t imagine or describe it, though it fills my eyes. But there’s no need for imagery or words; you know it too, for it lies floating in your eyes. Would Plato even recognize a poetry of consciousness? And what of consciousness itself ? It’s sometimes said to have a history, a recent one, and to have been unknown to Homer’s Greeks. But that’s a fallacy, inferring how you feel from what you write; moreover, Bernard Williams showed that what they wrote shows that they felt like us. And yet the poems of the articulated consciousness lay in the blank, unwritten future, poised to spring from Hamlet’s mind, not Oedipus’s; and their challenge to Book X was still to be
imagined, still to come. “There’s the part where you say it, and the part where you take it back” (J.L. Austin). I say these things because I want to, and sometimes even think they’re true; but now I want to take them back. Knowledge is factive, meaning once can’t know what isn’t true, and truth is simply correspondence with the facts. What are the facts of consciousness? They’re all analogies and metaphors, a feeling of existence but without reality’s defining contours, like a sense of something hesitating on the brink of being said, or hiding in the shadows of an inner room. They’re all appearances, but appearance of what? Something that wanders up your limbs and nerves and blossoms in your brain? They’re all just figments of perspective, of a point of view from which the time is always now, the place is always here, and the thought of something hiding underneath the surface of a seductive spell. The harder I try to pin them down the more elusive they become, as gradually the shadows disappear, the words turn into syllables, the face becomes anonymous and leaves me starting at a sliver sheet of glass. What starts out as self-scrutiny becomes a study in self-pity, and instead of something tangible and true one winds up chasing the chimeras of Book X: the fruitless quarrel between philosophy and poetry, reason and unreason, and that tedious myth about the soul, of what becomes of it at death, then of its journey and rebirth. I’m tired, I’m far from home, I’m waiting in a chamber in a castle on a mountaintop in Umbria (poets get to do this), seven hundred miles from Athens as the crow flies, where perhaps “the sun still shines upon the hills and has not yet set.” I write the way I do because I want it to exist, but the spell breaks and it dries up like a dream, leaving me with just this smooth, unvariegated surface, which remains. “His words made us ashamed, and we check our tears. He walked around, and when he said his legs were heavy he lay on his back as he had been told to do, and the man who had given him the poison touched his body, and after a while tested his feet and legs, pressed hard upon his foot and asked him if he felt this, and Socrates said no. Then he pressed his claves, and made his way up his body and showed us that it was cold and stiff. He felt it himself and said that when the cold reached his heart he would be gone. As his belly was getting cold Socrates uncovered his head—he had covered it—and said—these were his last words—‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius, make this offering to him and do not forget.’—‘It shall be done,’ said Crito, ‘tell us if there is anything else.’ But there was no answer. Shortly afterwards Socrates made a movement; the man uncovered him and his eyes were fixed. Seeing this Crito closed his mouth and his
AMF By the same Author Today, no matter if it rains, It’s time to follow the path into the forest. The same people will be walking the same dogs, Or if not the same dogs, dogs that behave in similar fashions, Some barking, some standing aloof. The owners carry plastic bags. But this is the forest, they complain, we must do as we like. We must let the dogs run free, We must follow their example, The way we did when we were young. Back then we slept, watched TV— We were the dogs. By the time the screen door slammed, we were gone. Nobody really talks like that in the forest. They’re proud of their dogs, Proud especially of the ones who never bark. They’re upset about the Norway maple, it’s everywhere, Crowding out the hickories and oaks. Did you know it takes a million seeds to make on tree? Your chances of surviving in the forest, Of replicating yourself, are slim. Today, the smaller dogs are wearing raincoats, The bigger ones are stiffing it out. They’re tense, preoccupied, Running in circles, Getting tangled in the leash— It’s hard remaining human in the forest. To move the limbs of the body, To speak intelligible words, These things promise change.
Opus Posthumous When I painted, everybody saw. When I play piano, everybody heard. I ate your raspberries. The sign no trespassing applied to me. Now, the hemlocks have grown higher than the house. There’s moss on my stoop, a little mildew In the shower but you’ve never seen my shower. I can undress by the window, I can sleep in the barn. The sky, which is cloudy, Suits the earth to which it belongs.
COMMENTS
AMF Austerity Measures: Letter from Greece “Seferis, Seferis. Do we have him? Is he one of ours?” (eínai se mas) shouts the clerk to a colleague sipping a frappe at a desk across the room. Fani Papageorgiou and I are negotiating the labyrinthine bureaucracy of death at some lesser Ministry of the Underworld. “George Seferis?” We confirm he has the right Seferis, and he finally reads the coordinates off a faded Xerox taped to a metal closet behind his desk: 12/45. We are not so lucky with the other Nobel Prize winner, Odysseus Elytis. (“Try Alepoudelis,” Fani suggests, “Elytis was his pen name.”) Yes, he’s in the family plot. Angelos Sikelianos?: 18/14. For Kostis Palamas we are sent to the colleague, who opens a wooden desk drawer and draws out a folder with famous graves organized by profession (military, politics, literature, etc). The man’s face is disfigured with what look to be severe burns—perhaps he’d been transferred from a hotter area of hell. (“Everyone in Greece is scarred, one way or another,” Fani whispers, echoing Seferis’s famous line, “Everywhere I go, Greece wounds me.”) There is an old dusty computer on his desk, but evidently it is there for decoration only: it looks like all the records are still held in crumbling, jaundiced manila folders. Civil servants shuffle listlessly through papers in the un-air-conditioned office, awaiting inane requests from the living. The dead file no complaints. Success! Coordinates in hand, we leave the mysterious office and climb down the stairs (we dare not enter the ancient elevator, for fear that there might be a power outage and we’d get stuck—necessitating different paperwork from the Ministry of Death altogether), back across the square to the First Cemetery where the rest of the class is waiting. (t is the last day of a week-long poetry seminar. The students—mostly intrepid Americans who were not frightened off at the dire predictions of our recent election—and I have decided to take a field trip, withering heat notwithstanding. Along the square, the various businesses associated with death are thriving, in stark contrast to the moribund and defunct businesses in the rest of the city: florists, marble cutters, cages that offer funeral receptions of bitter coffee, strong brandy, koliva (a Persephonic Chex mix of wheat grains, nuts, and pomegranate arils), and, for the family, fish soup. A spanking new undertakers’ office has opened, all polished stone and glass and tasteful plantings. Suicides and heart attacks are up all over the city. Austerity is good for death. Not that the coordinates are that much help. We take a gander at the chart on the wall of the cemetery gates, but it is hard to tell if the sections are numbered according to any system or, as it appears, completely random. Once out in the heat among the tombs we lose our way, and to get our bearings we have to constantly stop gravediggers, marble cutters, or the cleaning ladies hired to sweep out family crypts.
It is poor Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951) we track down first, in a scandalously obscure and unkempt grave next to the cemetery wall. The traffic from Vouliagmenis provides a constant, dull roar that one doesn’t associate with eternal rest. He is puzzlingly unknown in the English-speaking world. (His first wife was the movie-star beautiful American heiress, Eva Palmer. Their great-granddaughter is the American poet Eleni Sikelianos, and he was a brother-in-law of sorts to Isadora Duncan.) Though always in the running for a Nobel, Sikelianos never won one. He died in Athens having survived the occupation and famine of WWII and the bitter ensuing civil war, only to accidentally drink disinfectant instead of his medication. I read Sikelianos’s poems, “Yannis Keats,” which includes his visit to the English poet’s tomb at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. It seems appropriate enough to the surroundings, but as we went our way towards the coordinates of Palamas’s grave, it occurs to me that perhaps I should have read Sikelianos’s rousing “To Palamas.” Palamas’s grave would also have been impossible to find without the coordinates—again low, narrow, barely legible, shaded by an ancient cypress tree and overgrown flowering shrubs. When Palamas (1859-1943) died in Athens under the German occupation, huge crowds gathered at his funeral. Sikelianos had composed some sonorous quatrains the night before (“Greece leans upon this tomb”)—all sounding trumpets and drums of war and terrible flags of freedom—rousing the mourners, perhaps one hundred thousand strong, to an angry demonstration against the occupiers. Palamas would no doubt have relished this. He was a pivotal poet, known for vigorously promoting the demotic instead of the artificial “purified” language known as Katharevousa during the language wars—for which stance he was temporarily removed as registrar at the University of Athens. In some ways, he seems to have been inspired by the vernacular of Byron, whom he idealized. (He coined a word in Greek, Byronolatry) and for whom he had written an ode defending him from European detractors—in the fifteen-syllable meter of Greek folk songs. (Byron’s death was, of course, itself a major political event in the life of modern Greece, perhaps even the critical one.) But the lines etched on Palamas’s grave appeared to be in iambic pentameter. Neither Fani nor I could make them out very well. The letters were faded—we could make out laós and zeí kai basileúei and chiliópsychos— the eternal or myriad-souled people live and reign—and I answered the class’s query with a vague statement that the verses were somehow patriotic. Seferis’s tomb was grander but still very simple, stark, even. There we read his poem “Stratis Thalassinos among the Agapanthi.” It is a poem of exile, as Seferis was a poet of exile, having been born near Smyrna in what is now modern Turkey, at the dawn of the twentieth century and the sunset of the Ottoman Empire. Stratis Thalassinos (Soldier the Seaman) is
an Odyssean figure, tossed to the ends of the earth. When Seferis, who was openly critical of the Junta, died in 1971, his funeral too became enormous, impromptu public protest, and the crowds began to sing his poem “Denial,” which had been set to Music by Mikis Theodorakis and had become a popular song played in Plaka jukeboxes before being banned. What began life as a hermetic love poem had become, with its Rilke-esque closing line, an anthem of defiance. There is the secret cove, When the noon sun seemed to halt, I thirsted with my love, But the water there was salt. We wrote out her name Upon the blinding sand, Then—ah—the sea-breeze came With its erasing hand. So fiercely did we long With spirit, heart, and strife, To grasp at this life—wrong— And so we changed our life. Odysseus Elytis’s (1911-1996) family tomb was up on the higher level, in the grander neighborhood of Heinrich Schliemann’s mausoleum (designed by the German architect, Ernst Ziller). A simple plaque in bas relief had been added to the family tomb of the prosperous Alepoudelides to remind people of the Nobel laureate’s remains. He served in WWII on the Albanian front—one of his most important poems is “Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of Albania”—and then, under the Junta, lived in exile in Paris, as did many Greek intellectuals. (In Greece itself, many poets on the left we imprisoned in “detention centers” on the islands.) Later, when I returned home, I tried to find the lines of Palamas to make better sense of them. It turned out not to be from a patriotic poem at all (though from a series called “Fatherlands”), but from a meditative sonnet on Athens: Among the temples and groves of sacred olives, And here among the crowds that slowly crawl Like an inchworm on a flower, white and stark, The everlasting throng of relics thrives
And reigns. The soul shines even through the soil’s caul. I feel it: Inside me, it grapples with the dark. It’s a strange poem, a strange image: Athens ringed in light, the famous virginal whiteness of Pentelic marble gleaming even from under the ground, where implements of archeology unearth buried gods. The dark file of the living creep over the brightness like a caterpillar; it is the ruins that are most fully alive. Here, the past refuses to stay buried. In the center of the cemetery, near one of the churches, a side building announces on its window: Office of Exhumation. Land is at a premium, and until very recently cremation was illegal (the Orthodox church frowns on it—even now, one must drive the corpse to Bulgaria to have it done), so unless one is possessed of a family crypt, bones must be dug up after three years. You can buy an ossuary in one of the nearby shops. Even the dead are subject to eviction. • For living poets, the economic crisis of the past few years is perhaps a reminder that even their relatively recent poetic forebears, as well as their genetic ones, have seen worse: occupation, famine, civil war, military dictatorship. Only poets under the age of forty were born in the present democracy, dysfunctional as it is. (And in the gerontocracy of modern Greece, forty means a young, not just a younger, poet—Kronos is still busy eating his children.) Everyone agrees that there is an added sense of urgency. (“With the crisis,” someone utters wryly, quoting the newspapers, “Greece has reentered history.”) But the poets also agree that their calling is to speak to the human condition, to what is timeless rather than to current events. That is the job of journalists; it is the work of prose. Poetry needs distance. Katerina Iliopoulu, who studied chemistry and makes jewelry for a living, adds her concern that during the crisis people want to make poetry answer questions, whereas poetry “is rather the field of the multiplication of questions.” I say I have heard that the crisis has renewed people’s interest in the arts—that the arts are thriving. Does anyone have anecdotal evidence of this? Stamatis Polenakis, who writes plays as well as poetry, agrees that the theatres are doing well. Someone points out that Athens has the most theatres per capita of any other European city. No one is sanguine on the subject of publishing, however. Bookstores and publishing houses have been folding at an alarming rate. The line between “official” publication and vanity publishing is ambiguous, since poets
are often expected to put up money or to purchase most of their volumes. As with every aspect of Greek society, it is the young who suffer, with poetry being no more immune to the nepotistic patron-and-client system than the rest of society, and every bit as political. (Many cultural positions, some of them for all intents and purposes argomishtos—a uniquely Greek word with no English equivalent, meaning a salaried position without actual duties attached—have long been the gift of the ruling part.) Off the record, some younger poets complain that poets in positions of power (almost exclusively male) work only to cement their own place in the firmament. The generation of the seventies (and eighties), as one younger scholar puts it, is obsessed with replicating the generation of the thirties (to which Sefeis and Elytis belonged) and does little to champion the work of the next generation. This is in stark contrast to, for instance, Palamas, who tirelessly brought to public attention obscure older poets as well as younger contemporaries such as Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos. Perhaps the crisis and the outer world’s focus on Greece are changing some of that, emboldening the younger generation to initiate their own readings, journals, prizes. Panayotis Ioannidis (born 1967) has started a popular reading series that juxtaposes older, established writers with young ones, alternating those readings with readings of a foreign poet in the original and in translation. He also started a campaign to “Write a Sonnet for Mavilis” in honor of the centenary of the poet’s death. (Lorentzos Mavilis, 1860-1912, was Greek’s preeminent sonneteer; his last sonnet was found in the pocket of his uniform when he was killed in the Balkan Wars. Now he is probably best known in Athens for his eponymous square near the American embassy.) Since modern Greek verse is almost exclusively free verse and often in the surreal tradition and postmodern vein, this challenge seems mischievously provocative. Can charming sonnets answer the crisis? Stamatis Polenakis (b. 1970) suggests not: Gentlemen, don’t let anything, anyone, deceive you: we were not bankrupted today, we have been bankrupt for a long time now. Today it’s easy enough for anyone to walk on water: the empty bottles bob on the surface without carrying any secret messages. The sirens don’t sing, nor are they silent, they merely stay motionless, dumbstruck by the privatization of the waves and no
poetry doesn’t suffice since the sea filled up with trash and condoms. Let him write as many sonnets as he wants about Faliro, that Lorenzos Mavilis. —Poetry Does Not Suffice (Faliro, now a seaside suburb near Piraeus, was the subject of a rather whimsical love poem by Mavilis involving an heiress with a newfangled automobile.) Frustrated in some ways by the generation directly above them, the younger poets seek out not their poetic fathers and mothers but their poetic grandparents and great-grandparents. Panayotis lists some of these poetic antecedents he thinks are particularly relevant: Eleni Vakal—a true modernist, a wonderful, pioneering poet, and an extremely important art critic and art historian. Nikos Engonopoulos—the less discussed (but arguably the better poet) of our surrealist Dioskouroi (Andreas Empeirikos being the other one.). Kostas Karyotakis—who has been termed the “major of the minors,” and whose importance was buried under Seferis’s and Elytis’s personalities (though we should really say “masked” rather than “buried” in the case of Seferis, who arose partly from that same climate). Takis Papatsonis—a scandalously neglected modernist giant, the first to use free verse in Greek. But he was a (devout) Catholic, and wrote in a language that was not “pure” demotic. With the crisis, Panyotis says, “It’s time to choose our ancestors.” • The older generations have their own frustrations. I meet with a poet I am translating. As with many Greeks, his forefathers hail from Asia Minor, tossed here on the waves of misfortune. He himself grew up in a village in Boeotia, for which he has little nostalgia (“freezing in winter, boiling in summer, unpleasant all year round”). As with many Greeks he is embroiled in a never-ending lawsuit—this one with his brother over some property in the village left to them by their father. The legal system is a mess, the judges are “bribe eaters.” His view of the current political situation is black: “It
is bad,” he says, “to be an honest man where felons rule.” IT’s no wonder crime is up, with youth unemployment close to 50%: “The idle man who lives on empty hope and has no way to earn his living turns his mind to crime.” “We’re living in the age of iron,” he explains, over bitter coffee. “By day, men work and grieve unceasingly; by night, they waste away and die.” A British ex-pat poet is concerned that the bailout is being jeopardized by the atmosphere of political uncertainty. He writes: I must frankly confess, that unless union and order are established, all hopes of a loan will be vain; and all the assistance which the Greeks could expect from abroad—an assistance neither trifling nor worthless—will be suspended or destroyed; and, what is worse, the great powers of Europe… will be persuaded that the Greeks are unable to govern themselves. I wish something was heard of the arrival of part of the loan, for there is plentiful dearth of everything at present. The Greek poet I am translating should know an iron age when he sees one, being Hesiod, and writing from the eighth century before Christ. And the ex-pat poet is, of course, George Gordon Noel, AKA Lord Byron. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s certainly true of Greece, where the punitive terms of the bailout—the “austerity” (which, in Greek, is litotes, probably better known to you as a rhetorical device whereby two negatives connive to make a lukewarm positive)—eerily echo the crippling terms of the initial loan on which the country was founded (and terms of the initial loan on which the country was founded (and nearly foundered), as well as the rhetoric about shiftless, spendthrift, shady Mediterraneans who cannot be trusted with self-government. • Verse, if not necessarily poetry, is everywhere. Verses are scrawled on the sides of buildings: much graffiti rhymes and scans. The chants of protestors during general strikes tend to be in the driving fifteen-syllable meter of folk song—that is to say, ballad meter, with its feminine ending. Greek rap, too, tends to the decapentasyllabic. It is the pulse that comes up through he medieval Cretan romance, The Erotokritos, the poems that many Greek poets, Seferis in particular, have considered the essential document of modern Greek poetry. Verse seems to be the natural public response to tragedy. On April 4 at 9:00 AM, as people poured out of the Metro station on their way to work, a seventy-seven-year-old Greek pensioner and retired pharmacist shot himself in the head in front of Greek parliament. His widely-circulated suicide
note declared: The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival…And since I cannot find justice, I cannot find another means to react besides putting a decent end [to my life], before I start searching the garbage for food and become a burden for my child. The rhetoric is incendiary. He conflates the current administration with the collaborationist government under Nazi occupation, easily read by people as a comment on the government’s cooperation with the demands of Merkel’s Germany. The suicide note concludes with a call for Greeks to puck up machine guns. The image, too, of a middle-class Greek who has lived through occupation, famine (during the unusually cold winter of 1941-42, perhaps as many as one hundred thousand people died of starvation in the greater Athens area alone), and the Junta years, picking through the garbage for food (something that was a few years ago unheard of, and is increasingly visible in the city), strikes a chord. By the end of the day there are violent clashes with police in the Square. The ancient cypress tree (which has itself survived countless riots, clouds of tear gas, and street battles) becomes a makeshift shrine, surrounded by flower wreaths, banners, and letters. The banners make much of the fact that in Greek, suicide (autoktonía) rhymes with murder (dolophonía). Another asserts, “Austerity Kills.” Some have a sort of Greek Anthology elegant simplicity: My the earth lie lightly And your sacrifice not be in vain. Some quote others. A snatch of prose for Nikos Kazantsakis: There is in this world a secret law—if it did not exist, the world would have been lost thousands of years ago, cruel and inviolate; Evil always triumphs in the beginning, but in the end is defeated. Another quotes a poem (in rhymed quatrains) of Alekos Panagoulis (19391976): No more tears, The graves have closed. The first dead Are the fertilizer of liberty.
Fertilizer is accurate, but uglier in English that lipasma is in Greek—perhaps something like “enrich the soil of liberty” would have a better ring? Panagoulis is better known as a political figure than as a poet, particularly for his attempted assassination of the dictator Georgios Papadopoulos during the Junta, in 1968. He, too, lies somewhere in the labyrinth of the First Cemetery. It occurs to me later that the suicide occurred shortly before my yoga class in the center of Athens—a class where we are exhorted as part of our practice to tune out police sirens, car alarms, megaphoned sloganeering, gloomy Communist anthems, the occasional stun grenade, the odd whiff of tear gas, and other evidence of strikes and protests. The cleanup of the bod was probably going on while we were lying on our narrow mats in shavasana: corpse pose. Poetry also enters the political rhetoric. After May’s fruitless elections, as a caretaker government was sworn in, the previous prime minister, Lucas Papademos, worried about an exit from the Euro, said in an open letter that the sacrifices of the Greeks were not “an empty shirt” (poukámiso adeianó). Crime writer Paul Johnston was quick to point out (via Facebook) that this was an allusion to Seferis’s poem “Helen.” In that poem, the Greeks learn after the Trojan war that Helen was never in Troy, only a phantom of her was. The real Helen was in Egypt all along. All that suffering, all that destruction “for an empty blouse—for a Helen.” On the floor of parliament, Cavafy is evidently a weapon of choice. An exchange in July between Alexis Tsipras (the youthful rising star, or angry young Turk, of Greek politics, head of Zyriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, whose recent success at the ballot box sent shudders through the financial world) and Antomis Samaras (current prime minister at head of a moderately right-wing New Democracy party) went as follows. Tsipiras: Now your job is not to deconstruct Syriza’s platform and to talk about its dangers. Now you are faced with harsh reality, not with Syriza. And now, what will become of us without barbarians? as the poet said. After calling Tsipras out on his casual paraphrase, Samaras retorts with a carefully accurate quotation: Since you like Cavafy, I will answer you with Cavafy: Tell Mr. Fotopoulous [head of the powerful workers’ union of the Public Power Corporation, DEI] whom you worthily represent: “Bid farewell to the Alexandria which you are losing.” •
One of the things that seems to enrage the Northern Europeans about Greece is what is perceived as a lack of proper contrition or gratitude among the Greeks towards their rescuers. That the Greeks, for all the austerity that is squeezing the life out of the country, continue to enjoy what pleasures they can—for the price of coffee you can still sit out all day under brilliant skies at a sidewalk café, and for next to nothing you can have a picnic at the beach—provokes the kind of fury diligent ants reserve for hedonic grasshoppers. (Never mind that the average Greek works very hard indeed and has no choice but to pay his taxes, which are deducted directly out of his salary. According to recent statistics from the OECD, in terms of actual hours, Greeks are one of the hardest working peoples out of the thirty largest economies, coming second only to the Koreans.) Even in suffering, the Greeks refuse to be miserable. Is that why there is a counter-intuitive flourishing of the arts—an exuberance that seems to come out of the urgency of the economic crisis when are realizes that it cannot be starved like the economy? Even I find myself working at a feverish pace—not writing per se, but reading intensely, translating furiously. The translations start almost subconsciously. As I struggle with a poem that niggles in the mind in Greek, it starts to nacre itself into English, as with this poem by Katerina Iliopoulou (b. 1967): In the beam of the headlights she appeared Crossing the road, A small brown fox. And again the next night Flitting behind a bush. And another time only her tail Brushed the darkness. And from then on Her footprints padded across your sight, Her warm furry body Skittering between us. Always in passing, never staying still. “But who are you,” we ask her. “I am,” she said, “what abounds.” —The Fox. Perhaps at first it was the elusive fox—distant Mediterranean cousin to Ted Hughes’s thought fox—that attracted. But it was the end that stumped me, that teased. The poems ends on the verb Perisseúei—a verb formed from the Greek for “more.” What is left over? What is extra? What is too much? What surfeits? Is superfluous? Overflows?
The possibilities multiply and kaleidoscope. It reminds me that it is through poetry that I live life more abundantly. It is the opposite of austerity. • The one things people will ask you here if you are, as I am clearly a foreigner is: Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go back? We have small children and people think us mad to stay. Our children’s future probably isn’t here. I can’t imagine them going to Greek university, for instance. Just a couple of years ago we were applying for jobs in the States in the face of what seemed the inevitable—that we would have to pull up stakes to make a living back in America. My husband had had to leave his job, and we were a one-income family to begin with. (News of the situation in Greece, however, seemed to have escaped American academia—I was asked in one job interview whether I would be able to give up my idyllic life of leisure on the Greek islands to “do battle” at the office. I was at a loss how to answer this, since my actual life in Athens involves negotiating a baby stroller through street protests while dodging billows of tear gas.) A deus ex machine in the form of generous grants suddenly changed things. For the time being, at least, we can contemplate not leaving. While living among the fallout of the crisis, we are somewhat insulated. Insulated, but not unaffected. The visible reminders are everywhere: the shell of a fire-bombed government office gapes two streets over; graffiti for the neoNazi party “Golden Dawn” has started to deface the neighborhood, twisting the Greek meander into a fascist symbol; around the corner a young man evicted from his apartment lives on the sidewalk with all of his belongings under a tarp, subsisting on food brought to him by neighbors. A few days ago we turned on the television to hear a news item that some youths in Neos Kosmos had gotten into a skirmish with police, resulting in gunfire and the hurling of a grenade. This turns out to have happened a couple of blocks away on our own street. Still, though, still… Athens seems extraordinarily safe to me, and there are many reasons to love our neighborhood---that it is a neighborhood, with a butcher, baker, and a candlemaker (in that order) around the corner—where everyone knows our kids’ names and to whom they belong, where the local square, for all its contentious graffiti, has a view of the Acropolis and fills on summer evenings with all the generations together: grandparents, adults, teenagers, children zooming around on bikes (naturally sans helmets). When I go to pay the rent on my office—a luxury suddenly possible because of the aforementioned grants—to the man across the street who runs a driving school (like us, in his early forties and a part of small chil-
dren), he says to me, “I always look at your husband’s face carefully when he leaves the house.” My husband, John Psaropoulos, is a journalist—very busy, naturally, in recent months, reporting for Al Jazeera, NPR, the Daily Beast. “When your husband is smiling, I think it is all going to be OK,” he says. “But when he is frowning, I think, it’s time to head for the hills.” “Me too,” I laugh. But he shakes his head at my lame joke. “You, you can always leave. You can go to America. We Greeks are dying.” For us, staying is a choice, as much as leaving would be a choice. It’s strange that we haven’t though of it that way before. You come here thinking it will be just for a couple of years and a decade passes. There is a Greek proverb: nothing is more permanent than the temporary. One day, you realized you may never move back after all. One day, you realize you are looking at the cemeteries, and at the graves of poets, in a different way. The way a young girl, perhaps, shyly glances at wedding dresses. You even have a nice little epitaph in mind, a gem out of Propertius. (Though would Latin look out of place in a Greek graveyard, you wonder?) Well, it’s where we’re all headed, one way or another, with or without coordinates.
Is that why there is a counter-intuitive? AMF