Comments & Greek painters, Greek artists: Lets play the winds...

Poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek fine art


Yannis Stavrou, On Red Background, oil on canvas

Reading greek poetry...

I penetrated matter howling
Nikos Karouzos

Two seas pursue me: life and death

two currents which, damn them, are in my heart . . .
I am trying to find in my dog-drunk head

/second possessive pronoun/

intelligence – can’t be found. I didn’t petrify anything.

Lets play the winds

let’s sweetly play the damned.

What a sensuously-seasoned infant the poem and poor Jesus

wearing orange stained underwear

is hung up every year in spring.

Our art: the ego’s most horrible disguise.

-------------------

From Stones of Dreams by Dimitris Kalokyris:

Issue 2.699 of the 57th year (August 9-23, 1979) of the French weekly literary review of the time Les Nouvelles Littéraires, included a folio supplement with a densely printed tribute to modern Greek art and literature. This six-page supplement was edited by D.T. Analis, who was also responsible for most of the translations. I also contributed to the collection and partially to the choice of the material. Amongst the eighteen authors that were invited to express their personal relationship to writing was, of course, Nikos Karouzos. He wrote the following self-explanatory text, typed in red ink and in the traditional polytonic system:

Nobody asked me to write. Consequently, no mathematical logic is in my favour if I should seek justification. In the end, the way I am adapting to exist as a poet is like a man who is grazing his own personal sheep without being a shepherd at all. Possibly I may exist as a poet because I did not become an astronomer, as I imagined I would as a child, or a philosopher, as I thought about later, absorbed exclusively in philosophical interests. The fact is this: poetry keeps me hanging onto the bitterness that we call life, and life devotes me to poetry. I resent existing, but existing – damn it to hell – has a certain allure, as they say. This contradiction is crushing me. I would say that no, I am not a automobilist of verses, I am a walker of verses; I don’t belong to highways (Pythagoras told us to avoid walking on them); I created my own path by myself, and nobody treads it but love and I. The poet’s drama, in my opinion, is not to express reality, but to overcome it. The true poet creates outstanding business with existence – that’s what I believe – and his vision, a chimera if you wish, is to break the fetters of reality. For me, poetry is an ontological self-illusion, unless the poet meets and achieves the freedom of existence (i.e. the extinguishing or reduction of the ego to the intellect of the heart – i.e. what used to be called holiness) which shatters reality and leads man to the living infinity of universality.