Three Poems from Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis
- Three Poems from Futures:Poetry of the Greek Crisis
The poems in this collection (published by Penned in the Margins in 2015), even when speaking in a more personal tone and alluding to the crisis in an oblique fashion, tell a story which exceeds their original scope: the dense, cramped, often violent spaces which define and determine the context and the discourse articulated within them automatically connect the most personal struggles with the wider political context. The personal concerns expressed in the poems resonate with greater intensity as a completely different story seems to occur and vibrate within and through them.
Poetry thus seems to function not only as an instrument for tracing and capturing the often traumatic experience of a given historical moment but also as a tool that allows us to enter a zone of proximity to events whose final outcome we cannot possibly know. Poetry now comes to be seen as a tool through which the health of the world we live in is revealed. To slightly adapt Deleuze, the poet ‘returns to us from what he has seen and heard in the world with bloodshot eyes and pierced ear drums’ (Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, University of Minnesota Press 1997, p3). The poems in Futures might refer to the Greek crisis but their scope is ultimately broader than that: this is poetry that speaks to a global audience in its mission to investigate how one might approach history in a way that engenders new attitudes to politics and new ways of perceiving history and its relation to the human life. The poems in Futures examine and communicate the ever-proliferating emergencies of the commons and attempt to conceive of new strategies to connect, speak, assemble, love and survive. [End Page 136]
- Short film
My homeland is a lowcost flight, it lives by sapping off shorelines like goats grazing on salt in postcards. A bailout loan drags it along, all sorts of hoists lifting its limbs, with snipers at the corners covering the procession. Doing one-takes of it, I recognize it from its bond-like form. An investment with a time horizon, surely; I accredit it androgynously, script-like. I wear vintage glasses so it can see its own reflection and treat it to mastic liqueur I had stolen for it. It lights up a fag and looks, once again through my glasses, my short film of a homeland, laden in awards at festivals abroad. [End Page 137]
Theodoros Rakopoulos has published two collections of poetry, a hybrid book that explores conspiracy theory in texts between prose and poetry, and a collection of short stories. He has been awarded the State Prize and the National Centre for Books prize for a debut author.
- This city
After C.P. Cavafy (& AES)
The ruins urge you to ‘find another city,’look for another shore. Even the broken fingerof a still white statue in the park pointswestward. You could take that advice,travel, find your way far from the hungry,the shut-down stores, hope for another life.But you’re mesmerized by the ignited peopleand that priest or bishop in the parkmissing half his finger (who knows what his story was,a thrown rock aimed for the statue’s facehit his raised hand instead?) - they won’t leave you,the gouged marble, the graffiti scrawls,the statue standing like something outragedremind you, you who yearned to live beyond this,that hope marked you too. [End Page 138]
Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of two collections of poetry and several chapbooks, most recently Passion Maps (2009). A book of essays, Ruin, Essays in Exilic Living (2014) engages with political and personal crisis-moments during Greece’s austerity years, in conversation with wider discussions of mind, place, and gender in late capitalism. The poem included here is part of a manuscript in progress.
- Thalassa
The road leads toward the splintered sun.A shrub leaps into a single conifer.Suddenly there are two conifers, then three.They multiply into a forest...
