Camel of Darkness, Selected Poems (1970-1990) (review)

In the wake of the experimental wave that swept all the arts in the 1960s, giving birth to postmodern trends and movements that continue to unfold today, no creative endeavor has experienced a greater crisis of confidence than poetry. It alone has chosen the path of dignified isolation to avoid the contamination of its tradition by mass culture and information, narcissistic adventures into hybridity, and the culture wars over the canon. For example, while painting, architecture, and dance have incorporated alien techniques and foreign elements, poetry (with few exceptions) has steadfastly protected its own distinct identity. While fiction, theater, and even opera have reached out to a broader, younger audience, poetry has increasingly detached itself from public taste. Furthermore, it has also abandoned much of its interest in aesthetic and other theoretical concerns while the essay, as a complementary mode of reflection and elucidation, no longer attracts its best practitioners. As a result of this withdrawal from poetics, poetry has forfeited the allegiance of its strongest supporters, the critic and the philosopher. Celan was the last living writer whose pieces inspired a thinker’s reflections. Poets now operate within a closed guild: they read, review, teach, and write for each other. Even the influential postcolonial literature has largely bypassed them.

This unfortunate situation is as common in Greece as elsewhere in the Western world and beyond. But there it is all the more disappointing and puzzling, given the robust Greek poetic tradition of the last one hundred years. The popularity of the canonical poets from Dionysios Solomos to Manolis Anagnostakis persists but the canon remains unchanged: there have been no additions to it from the dead or the living for some four decades. There are, of course, specific factors that apply to the Greek case and need to be explored by both literary and intellectual history. Suffice it to say here that the bold experimentalists of the 1960s, many of whom coalesced around the pioneer magazine Pali, encountered great hostility from a contemporary counterproject, the academic canonization of the Generation of the 1930s. As far as the present isolation of poetry and the accompanying indifference of the public are concerned, though, the loss for writers and readers is mutual, and so is the responsibility for overcoming it. It may be time for some coordinated effort, in Greece and elsewhere, toward a new dialogue. Poets and critics might initiate exchanges that emphasize commonalties rather than differences. Obviously, this would require learned familiarity with and determined confidence in each other’s work. The range of potential collaborations is broad, going from recognition to cooperation and from reviewing to translation.

A rare and instructive example of such an exchange is the ongoing transatlantic collaboration between a poet and editor, Yannis Patilis, and a scholar and poet, Stathis Gourgouris. Its latest product, covering twenty years of Patilis’s career, is the anthology under review, published by the Quarterly Review of Literature in its distinguished “Poetry Book Series” (presenting the winners of its international poetry book competition). Patilis has long been involved in literature in many creative ways—as writer, critic, magazine editor, anthologist, and high school teacher, to mention the most important—and has been recognized as one of the major literary figures of his generation. His work has been translated into several languages but never before in such a comprehensive format. By presenting Patilis (b. 1947) to the English-reading audience in a selection that thoughtfully represents the formal and spiritual breadth of his poetry and in a translation that bristles with zest and inventiveness, Gourgouris (b. 1958) affords us a valuable opportunity to examine the status of Greek poetry today.

Those who still judge verse according to the Elyto-Seferic model will be painfully disappointed by the length, tone, and worldview of these poems. But readers who are more attuned to the recent musical inventions by John Adams, the rhythm of films by Jim Jarmusch, the...