«Το ποιητικό μονόφυλλο με τίτλο “Αγία Αναρχία” εκδόθηκε τον Μάρτιο του 2016 και αποτελεί μια ποιητική οφειλή του συγγραφέα στην Αναρχία» διαβάζουμε στη λιτή ανακοίνωση. Δημιουργός ο Χαράλαμπος Π. Σοφίας (Εκδόσεις «Κουκκίδα»). Από τα περιεχόμενα (οκτώ ποιήματα) μπαίνουμε στο κλίμα του κειμένου: Αλφα, Αναρχικοί, Μαύρος Σπόρος, Μιχαήλ Αλεξάντροβιτς Μπακούνιν, Σεργκέι Γκενάτιεβιτς Νετσάγιεφ, Μαύρη Σημαία, Μητρόπολη, Αγία Αναρχία.

Ιδού η κατακλείς από το ποίημα για τους Μπακούνιν – Νετσάγιεφ:

Στης νύχτας τη χαρά, το χώμα από ενοχή απάντησε/περιμένοντας κι αυτό τον δαίμονα του ανθρώπου./Εκείνον που αγρυπνά στο πρόσωπό του η ομορφιά της ταραγμένης θάλασσας./Εκείνον που πολεμάει τις λέξεις εμπρός στον καθρέφτη μη αντέχοντας το μοιρολόγι του δούλου./Εκείνον που στο χείλος της αβύσσου συλλέγει κάθε νύχτα από τη σιωπή των άστρων την αστρόσκονη/χορεύοντας ξυπόλυτος/σκορπίζοντας την εξέγερση που γεννάει την επανάσταση.

Τα ποιήματα «υπακούουν» στο μότο που κραυγάζει, θα ‘λεγε κανείς: «Πυρπολήστε το παρόν αν θέλετε να έχετε μέλλον».

Πώς βλέπει τους αναρχικούς στο ομότιτλο ποίημα;
Είναι έτοιμοι να πυροδοτήσουν τα όνειρά τους/Σκιές με ασημένια φτερά στον αέναο κύκλο/ Ταξιδιώτες του μέλλοντος με το όπλο στο χέρι/Ετοιμοι να παγιδεύσουν τις ήρεμες νύχτες σας/Να διαταράξουν τη λογική της αρχής/Να επιτεθούν στη συνεχή ροή του χρόνου/Είναι ήδη έτοιμοι να κηρύξουν την κοινωνική επανάσταση.

Τι κάνει η Αγία Αναρχία;
Δαγκώνει τα χείλη της καθώς η αστροβροχή συνεχίζει να πέφτει/Αγκαλιάζει τα παιδιά της/Τους μιλά για την Αγία Αναρχία/Το οπλισμένο χέρι της/Τη νεανική της φλόγα/Την περπατησιά της/Το θάρρος της όταν πυροβολεί τον καθρέπτη και τις μισές λέξεις/Την ιερή οργή της για τους ανθρώπους που σιωπούν στο φως της ψυχής.

Μια πραγματικά αυστηρή ματιά μέσα από έναν εσωτερικό κόσμο που εκρήγνυται και φωτίζει τις νύχτες και τα «αγόρια και τα κορίτσια με μαύρα ρούχα, που μοιράζονται τη χαρά στους δρόμους καίγοντας είδωλα» (Μητρόπολη). Ασημοφέγγαρο, σύμβολο της αναρχίας το θέλει ο ποιητής: «Ανθίζουν μαύρα λουλούδια στον ουρανό/Ενα ασημένιο φεγγάρι ανατέλλει και μέσα του ένα Αλφα».

Μαύρη Σημαία:
Στου χρόνου τη λήθη δε λυγίσαμε, δεν σωπάσαμε/Παραμείναμε με τον άνεμο της πρώτης νιότης/Με τα φτερά του πετάξαμε στις πράξεις της φωτιάς/Στο τέλος του αγνώστου κλέψαμε τον ήχο του κύκλου/Και όλο χαρά τσακίσαμε τη φορά του βέλους/Σηκώσαμε ψηλά τη μαύρη σημαία/Ετσι φτάσαμε πολύ ψηλά ώς τα άστρα/Δεν αφανιστήκαμε μέσα στης νύχτας τη σκοτεινή βλάστηση.

(Ηλεκτρονική διεύθυνση: xpsofias@gmail.com).
Επιμέλεια: Γιώργος Σταματόπουλος
*Από το https://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/i-viosi-mias-xenitias

On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne
by Matthew Hall

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015

Violence and poetics are the key poles in Canadian-Australian critic and poet Matthew Hall’s new scholarly release. Hall charts how the British late-modernist poet, Prynne, responds to violent events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – from the Holocaust, through apartheid, Chernobyl, and Australian colonialism, to Abu Ghraib. These affective sites of violence are linguistic, too: chapter two takes its subject as the ‘the sociolinguistic war’ which takes place under ‘the strain of economic factions and the reach of the multinational resource sector’. In dealing with these events, which are all tied up in language whether they seem so or not, Hall argues that Prynne infects his work with that which cannot be reconciled; ‘pure violence’. He writes, ‘Prynne’s poetry problematises an experience of the world inextricably knotted with the manners in which it may be understood’. Violence, consisting of its ‘perpetration’ and its associations with ‘systematic and political constructs’ of power, frames this experience of the knotted world.
In considering these violent events, the book dedicates its five chapters to close readings of three of Prynne’s editions – News of Warring Clans (1977), Bands Around the Throat (1987) and Acrylic Tips (2002) – and two of his poems, ‘Es Lebe der König’ from Brass (1971) and ‘Refuse Collection,’ published in a special edition of Quid journal in 2004. As Hall argues, his readings, like Prynne’s poems, are ‘engrained with the history of the event’. Much of Hall’s argument around the significance of Prynne’s work hinges on Alain Badiou’s theory of the event, which, for Hall, consists of a ‘real rupture’ of an existent paradigm, in the wake of which forms a ‘new subject,’ which persists by ‘fidelity’: ‘the name of the continuation of the existence of the process of the new subject’. Similarly to John Kinsella’s argument that ecopoetics is largely an ‘egopoetics’ in that its placement of nature as a dialogic correspondent is ‘an act of convenience and not reality’, Hall emphasises the reality that the three elements of Prynne’s project – the historical event, its non-poetic (mythic or mediatised) representation, and the poem – sit together irregularly. Such an emphasis drives his attention to the fact that the poem is a ‘momentary clarity, easily soluble,’ or, in other words, that it holds its structure briefly before subsumption, and until further attestation.
Violence is articulated in various ways throughout the book. In chapter one, the Holocaust is the violent event and we track the aesthetic distension and incompleteness it causes – its ‘estrangement’, ‘displacement’, and ‘dissonance’ – through Prynne’s elegy (of sorts) to Paul Celan, ‘Es Lebe der Konig’. In chapter three, on Bands Around the Throat and looking at Chernobyl and South African apartheid’s ‘necklace killings,’ violence is experienced as a ‘“continuous formation, rupture and reformation” of sensation’. Chapter five deals with the embodiment and sexualisation of violence via Kafka, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception. But it is Hall’s identification of a public ‘coopt[ed]’ into the ‘democratic process of decision making’ that is most compelling here, and that indicates the most insidious violence, in a poem responding to the mainstream media-spread images of torture at Abu Ghraib. It reveals Prynne’s poetic function of critical resistance: America’s mediatised coercion – or Prynne’s great metonym, ‘call-sign Freedom’ – is interrupted by his use of its ‘public language’ against itself. Aporias double up and down, and the ouroboros is reinvited.
The way that Hall is able to be close to the linguistic ‘constriction’ and ‘censorship’ that Prynne represents is really the outstanding mark of this book. The concept of ‘survivors keeping watch over the annihilated’ expounded in the first chapter carries throughout. It is through this kind of attestation that language and, indeed, scholarship can do ethical work. (Ethics is broached fleetingly, but seems more of an implicit motivation of the study). It can symbolically, or, in the case of scholarship, analytically, admit its complicity in the violence (and there’s a substantial nod to Slavoj Žižek on this point) while concurrently bearing what Derrida calls ‘witness for the absence of attestation’. Long sections of glistening, close poetic analysis demonstrate how comfortable Hall is in this space.

An abstract conceptualisation of the usually lyric subject also occupies this closeness to Prynne’s poetic re-events. Violence is done to it, but it also attests to violence. Chapter Two draws us into tracking this almost paratactical progression of the lyric through Prynne: Hall shows that News of Warring Clans uses ‘the usurpation and subsumption of the lyric into the violence of exploitative and warmongering language’ as its material constraints. He elucidates Prynne’s precarious maintenance of the lyric in his analysis of the subject’s catharsis in Acrylic Tips. The book perhaps even shows symptoms of being over-invested in this maintenance of the lyric and its associated person-centered approach to violence response. When ‘Vocab[ility]’ is the position to which a child ‘graduat[es]’, we might be drawn to enquire after those who cannot lyricise their own experience. Or can everyone lyric? As Hall makes explicit, though, that we’re asking these questions are part of the point of Prynne’s affect: ‘The reader is left travelling into the heart of a contaminated country [both Ukraine and the lyric form] without the means of expressing the horror of bearing witness, and with the knowledge of the eradication of the account of the victims’.

The book’s attempt to negotiate the tensions between a dialectical procedure and a nomadic one is clearer and more critically generative. Fittingly, Hall seems to wrestle with the dialectical, and I think he lets it maintain its corner. He quotes the famously dialectical Clausewitz in the introduction to chapter five, and in chapter four proposes that the ‘occasion[ing]’ of a ‘cultural hybridity’ made of Indigenous and Western ‘values and traditions’ would be ‘the most providential conclusion’ possible for a nation built on colonial violence. Although the adjective, providential, seems to come out of nowhere, we might understand Hall’s expression in light of Dominique Schnapper’s notion of ‘providential democracy,’ a projected conclusion that orients practice (which, in regards to Schnapper’s term, privileges equanimity between individuals as an alternative to ‘civic transcendence’). Dialecticism in this case of Prynne’s is particularly challenging because it asks us to look at both sides, the violator and violated, fully in the face, up close and ugly, and accept that parts of each will constitute the new subject.

It is hard to discern from the book what should be done in response to violence; either what Prynne advocates doing, or whether the point of his work sits at a distance from the idea that something could or should be actively done at all. In the conclusion to his analysis of the title poem of Acrylic Tips, a short work dealing with ‘forced adaptation’ (‘language … under pressure’) in direct reference to British colonialism’s imposition on the indigenous people of this land, Hall writes, ‘The utilisation of a model of pastoral elegy aligns the poem’s narrative and Prynne’s poetic construction of colonial conditions to a movement from loss to possible consolation’. Consolation is a significant idea for Prynne via Hall in making sense of the after-realm of violence. It is central to the arch of this pastoral elegy form he uses and departs from, and is analogous to the subject’s return to a musical fugue’s tonic key, a form riffed on in Hall’s analysis of ‘Es Lebe der König’. Hall suggests that in the face of violence, Paul Celan in the poem ‘Todesfuge,’ and Prynne responding to ‘Todesfuge’ in ‘Es Lebe der König,’ use the fugal form and its boomerang-like fidelity to itself as a way of representing a remembrance of the pre-violated subject.

The book advances several distinct and significant contributions to Prynne scholarship. Being on a dramatically under-read poet, the book benefits from Hall’s deep historiographical research and its resultant new theoretical concepts. One can imagine that a few of these have initiated what will become further enquiry, perhaps beyond Prynne studies. The idea of public language as refuse, which underpins chapter five, for example, opens a field of enquiry into the power of the public reader. This is also the utility of ‘Refuse Collection’ as lyric poem, which ‘asks the reader to formulate her or his own judgements with regard to the experience of suffering, a judgement the reader must create and defend from her or his own position within the world’. Hall’s attitude towards discourse and its subject, here, is representatively and demonstrably non-violent. One might further identify the importance of thinking about dialecticism in relation to Prynne’s work, in that the reader is invited to form their own judgement in the face of Prynne actively subsuming meaning and obfuscating ‘expressive interpretation’ through devices like ‘glottal sonority’. Again, we’re called to fidelity. And then there are Hall’s many, many crystalline insights into the affect of Prynne’s poetic practice, such as his examination of ‘the function of the command, used in close proximity to alliterative, onomatopoeic word clusters’ in Prynne poetry since Brass.

Hall’s depth and rigour of analysis relating to single poems, concepts, or words is necessary with Prynne’s work, which deliberately charts its own various, thoroughly developed, and interweaved, ontologies. In chapter three, for example, Hall identifies in ‘Fool’s Bracelet’ that ‘specialised languages of economic theory and financial trading, biblical data, reports on psychoanalytic testing, and nursery rhymes all have contingent and mixed operations’. Hall doesn’t ease the complexity of these interweavings, rather he pin-points some of their affective capacities and suggests connections. On the poem ‘Ein Heldenleben,’ Hall states that ‘Leisurely movement and its pastoral associations are radically juxtaposed against the imposed restrictions on movement for the people living in the direct line of fallout of the Chernobyl reactor,’ incorporating a historiographical sense-making into Prynne’s deliberately jarring juxtapositions. Hall refuses to simplify Prynne’s interruption of these lines of movement, whether they chart the passage of thought, displaced persons, or lines of a poem (as in the poem ‘Write Out,’ in Bands).

Another key introduction to Prynne studies is the book’s focus on ‘experiential knowledge within the poem,’ as is the argument that the experiential is fundamental to Prynne’s work, ‘even if the manner in which experiential knowledge is utilised is not explicit’. The argument along this line is that, in response to extra-linguistic violence, as well as the violence of the speech act, both of which he would say he (as a representative of we) is complicit, Prynne ‘turns upon his own prior propositions and reinserts presence within the questioning framework of the poem’. An effect of this experiential approach is that Hall’s work is very much middle, and not so concerned with resounding conclusions. Linking the torturers’ craft in staging the Abu Ghraib atrocities for cameras with their self-protection against the recollection of childhood trauma in the last paragraph of the last chapter, for example, leaves a lot unexplained. It opens a psychoanalytic line we have not yet pursued, and will not. We are not left with the realisation of an argument Hall has been building, rather, a hypothetical question, and highly contingent strands of its constitution. The subject we began with, namely, the poem, has transformed into the subject we finish with, a polysemous one: ‘life,’ but in the tight framing of the function of sovereign power, ‘unreal suffering’ and the violence done to identities. I think this is testament to the kind of reading that Hall provides, which shares traits with the reading styles of his Australian poet-critic contemporaries, Michael Farrell (see a really nice section on constriction, bridging, camping, and puns on pages 158-9) and Astrid Lorange: precise and radically generative, theoretically accomplished, referential and witty, and less concerned with dictum than it is with the responsive stuff of the procedure.

Hall uses the word ‘the’ a lot, which might seem facile to note, but it indicates a few important things about this scholarly style. The’s effects is to encumber Hall with a mandate to prove existent knowledge. The ‘the’ sentence’s passivity indicates an objectivity conceit. Similarly to Prynne of his conceits, Hall seems acutely aware of the semi-permanence of his scholarly voice, only willing to lean truth-objects against each other in an almost deliberately awkward way, and not against anything more ecologically certain. As mentioned above, his close analysis feels palpable and counterposes any ‘innocuous tedium of the “slogan vestry”’ that might be represented by his ‘the’-full sentences. A further effect of Hall’s ‘the’ sentences is the feeling that these sections are collections of sense data. Their pieces are valuable in themselves – the book is highly quotable – but they sit together, I think deliberately, uneasily. It’s indicative of Hall’s internally cohesive argument concerning attention and responsive intertwinement that the ‘the’ sentence is endemic to Prynne’s own theoretical style. For example, charting a sentence like, ‘Through these experimental linguistic means, the conditions of labour and the relation to the sustentive are also problematised’, would involve the kind of minute deconstruction of the phrase that Hall conducts on sections of Acrylic Tips.

On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne is a valuable addition to what should be described as an invigorated moment in Australian poetic criticism. Taking on the transnational, decolonising, and ecopoetical sensitivities of this moment, Hall turns alertly to a powerful poetic, and perhaps pioneering, proponent of this mode.

*Simon Eales was born and lives in Melbourne. He recently completed a MA on Australian satirical poetics at the University of Melbourne.

**Taken from http://cordite.org.au/reviews/eales-hall/

Exhumed
by Cassandra Atherton
Grand Parade Poets, 2015

Dazzling, vibrant and terribly witty, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed does not give itself over entirely to the horribly serious, gruesome images invoked by its title. Nor of course does it travel down to the desperate depths of its epigraph’s hero, Rosetti, who (in)famously ‘recovered’ the book of poems he had buried with his wife. Yet Atherton’s collection of prose poems is nonetheless morbidly fascinating and even darkly exhilarating, with some of the more raw, emotionally-fierce poems evoking similar queasy feelings in the twenty-first century reader, perhaps, as the nineteenth-century poet might have experienced recovering writings from the grave of a loved one. For loved ones haunt the pages of Exhumed in abundance, with all their conceits and betrayals on display, coupled seamlessly with high literature or popular TV, colour or sound, texture, taste and scent. These are embodied, visceral poems, alive with sticky sex, sugary gastronomy, grandiose and not so grandiose imbibing: ‘no gripe water. Maybe absinthe’ (‘Seed’ 22).

Picking up Exhumed, I confess I was daunted. Perhaps I was in a bad mood, perhaps glancing over the great chunks of text with their pages of intertext endnotes felt a little like facing the suggested reading list for an end of semester essay. This collection felt heavy, both in word length and subject matter. And yet within moments, the opening poem, ‘Bonds,’ sucked me in and under, even with its thirteen references in the back pages:

There can be no valedictions here./ So now our lives are cotton. And although cotton breathes, it is also the/sarcophagus of our relationship. Embalmed memories. But I promise to/ dig you up. Like Heathcliff. Or Rossetti. I promise to unbind you and gather you in my arms (11).

Exhumed contains a romantic, Romantic quest: to ‘write the space between / my heart and my pen’ (‘A Room of One’s Own’ 28) or perhaps to uncover what was lost (often before it becomes lost): ‘I worry every day that you will go to ‘Empty Trash’ and / I will disappear.’ (‘Rubbish’ 49). The quest of the reader, then, is to follow along, to become lost deep inside the narrative (and then of course endeavour to dig themselves back out). For this book of prose poems unfolds a love story, with its everyday ins and outs: ‘I want a red Smeg 473L fridge. I want my whole kitchen/ to be red. He draws the line at a red fridge.’ (‘Plum(b)’ 12), moments of exhilarated hope: ‘I belong / in Massachusetts twirling myself in his sheets. Rotation. Revolution. / Spinning ginny. Ginnie to his Riddell’ (‘Anonymous’ 15) and boldly confessed fears of the imminent end: ‘But you have never bought me flowers. / Or shown up unexpectedly. And you won’t stay for a lifetime. Because / neither of us has a lifetime left to spend. Together. Or apart.’ (‘Tsundoku, Neon Love’ 74). There is no small amount of sorrow at the inevitability of imperfection in relationship here, coupled with a maudlin yearning for perfection nonetheless; all cleverly drawn out with the grand device of allusion. A supermarket notebook in ‘More’ becomes a motif for all that cannot be gained: ‘You want to buy/ all the green notebooks at $1.99 each but know they will replenish the / stock when you leave. You can never have them all. Somewhere, someone / else will be using one of your green notebooks’ (34). Yet, in ‘Chigger’ there is still joy in what can be experienced, what may be grasped, albeit momentarily: ‘I fell in love with fireflies in Pennsylvania. / I remember trying to take photos of their luminous green abdomens as / they took of and landed in the long grass’ (60).

Exhumed contains far too much viscera to dissect in such a short review. For all their sparkling intelligence and playful satire, these poems, I believe, are profoundly embodied and emotive. There is a glorious layering here, and the themes flow on from each other through the interring process to the necessary disinterring to create what is an (albeit diverse) narrative whole. The ‘glue’ (‘Bonds’ 11) of childhood food such as a ‘McDonald’s Happy Meal’ (‘Alice’ 41) sticks literature giants like Nabokov (‘Lolita’ 23) to the ‘Hello Kitty love hotel’ (‘Shinjuku Morning’ 74) with seemingly little effort.

While there are some actual belly laughs to be had throughout, the vast blocks of text (and endless intertexts) do not make for easy reading. Sometimes it is difficult to determine who or what is hiding whom: does the sarcasm reveal a vast emotional void or does the almost gruesome body imagery and heavy reliance upon others serve to place a shield over what is perhaps a raw and unknowable human response to upheaval? Everything slightly mentioned on this expansive ground seems to open the way to something else entirely, and heaven forefend we should arrive at a conclusion concerning the speaker here, the quixotic voice is only too ready to set us off on yet another bisecting or bifurcating path. Perhaps, though, this obfuscation hardly matters, the pikes of prose alone are enough to ward off the queasy reader and the robust reader will devour it all, with vigour and a large dose of ‘Apple Pie Moonshine’ (‘Seed’ 22).

*Ivy Ireland is a writer who runs a bookstore café with her partner. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle, where she completed her Ph.D in 2012. She has been awarded the Australian Young Poet Fellowship, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for poetry, and has been commended in the Newcastle Poetry Prize and awarded the local section. Her poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies around the world. Ireland’s first book, Incidental Complications, was published in 2007 and her new collection, Porch Light, was published earlier this year with Puncher & Wattmann.

*Taken from http://cordite.org.au/reviews/ireland-atherton/

ΤΟΥ ΘΕΟΧΑΡΗ ΠΑΠΑΔΟΠΟΥΛΟΥ

«Ονειρικοί δρόμοι» ονομάζεται το νέο βιβλίο της Λίτσας Καβάκου-Στρατηγού, που κυκλοφόρησε πρόσφατα από τις εκδόσεις “Vakxikon.gr”. Πρόκειται για μια ποιητική συλλογή, που περιλαμβάνει ποιήματα σε ελεύθερο ή παραδοσιακό στίχο, ανάλογα με την έμπνευση της ποιήτριας και μας δείχνει τη δεινή στιχουργική της δυνατότητα, αφού στα παραδοσιακά της ποιήματα, χρησιμοποιεί ευρηματικές ομοιοκαταληξίες και τηρεί αυστηρά τα μέτρα της παραδοσιακής φόρμας, ενώ στον ελεύθερο στίχο μας δίνει άρτιες εικόνες με τις αδρές πινελιές της γραφίδας της.

Η ποιητική συλλογή της Λίτσας Καβάκου-Στρατηγού «Ονειρικοί δρόμοι» ξεκινά με το προσωπικό δράμα του ανθρώπου, όμως, όσο προχωράμε στο διάβασμα του βιβλίου, το προσωπικό γίνεται συλλογικό και καταλήγει πανανθρώπινο. Έτσι, ενώ στην αρχή διαβάζουμε για τον σύζυγο, που χάθηκε και για την απουσία, που η ποιήτρια δεν μπορεί να αντέξει, συναντάμε τη μάνα του σκοτωμένου επαναστάτη, όπου η Λίτσα Καβάκου-Στρατηγού στέκεται ως παρηγορήτρα στον πόνο της, τον ήρωα, που με το αίμα του χτίζει την ελευθερία και στον τυχερό πολεμιστή, που πέθανε πριν δει την ειρήνη να σέρνεται σαν σκλάβα.

Αρκετό ενδιαφέρον παρουσιάζει και η άποψη της ποιήτριας για το χρόνο και τη φθορά, που γίνεται όλο και πιο αντιληπτή με το πέρασμά του. Η Λίτσα Καβάκου-Στρατηγού διαπιστώνει με τραγική ειρωνεία: «Πάντα νόμιζα πως έχω / κι άλλο χρόνο, / μόνο που ο χρόνος / δεν νόμιζε το ίδιο.», για να καταλήξει: «Τώρα στυγνός κι απρόσωπος / συνοδοιπόρος μου ο χρόνος / συντροφεύει την πορεία μου».

Σε άλλο σημείο η ποιήτρια γράφει για την μοναξιά του σύγχρονου ανθρώπου. Την φοβίζει «η ερημιά των πόλεων». Ανησυχεί για «τ’ όνειρο που χαμήλωσε». Αλλά, αυτό, που φοβάται περισσότερο η Λίτσα Καβάκου-Στρατηγού είναι η αλλοτρίωση της συνείδησης του σύγχρονου ανθρώπου: «Μα πιότερο φοβάμαι την ανοχή / που μεγαλώνει την αδυναμία μας / και την συνείδησή μας που συνθηκολογεί».

Κλείνοντας, θα θέλαμε να συγχαρούμε την ποιήτρια για τους ονειρικούς δρόμους, που μας ταξίδεψε. Περιμένουμε καινούργια «ονειρικά ταξίδια» με την ποίησή της.

***

Μαχητής

Δεν έχω κάτι να σου δώσω
μαχητή του πολέμου.
Αφουγκράζομαι την περπατησιά σου
στα μονοπάτια της άρνησης.
Μαζί σου σέρνεις
της κάθε φυλακής τις αλυσίδες
του κάθε συμπολεμιστή σου
την απορία και το θυμό.
Κι εγώ δεν έχω μια γωνιά
για ν’ ακουμπήσεις την απόγνωση
του λαού σου.
Ήρθες και πέρασες σαν το οργισμένο κύμα του πελάγου
που λαβώνει την αμμουδιά.
Αγωνιστής μιας περασμένης γενιάς
που ξεχάστηκες στο δικό μου δρόμο
κι ο χρόνος σε γυρνά ξανά και ξανά
στους ίδιους χώρους που μάτωσες
για να μας θυμίζεις
πως υπάρχει κι από ένας ήρωας
στον καθένα από μας.
Φτάνει να μην αφήνουμε
να τον ακυρώνει
και να τον μηδενίζει
η ανοχή, ο συμβιβασμός και η αδιαφορία μας.

*Η Λίτσα Καβάκου-Στρατηγού γεννήθηκε στα Κύθηρα και ζει στον Πειραιά. Ο πατέρας της, Ιωάννης Τριφύλλης (Φώτης Κάβος), ποιητής και δημοσιογράφος, ήταν εκδότης της τοπικής εφημερίδας «Κυθηραϊκός Τύπος» (1954-1966). Έχει εκδώσει τρία βιβλία ποίησης, το πρώτο με τίτλο «Παλμοί», το δεύτερο με τον τίτλο «Ανηφοριές» και το τρίτο με τίτλο «Ονειρικοί Δρόμοι»

**Το ποίημα και το σύντομο βιογραφικό αναδημοσιεύονται από το http://fractalart.gr/litsa-kavakou-strathgou/

Βασίλης Κουντζάκης: “Το ζήτημα του ελεύθερου χρόνου είναι κρίσιμο”

Συνέντευξη στον Θεοχάρη Παπαδόπουλο

Συνομιλήσαμε με τον ποιητή Βασίλη Κουντζάκη με αφορμή την κυκλοφορία της ποιητικής του συλλογής “Δίχως όνομα” (Εκδόσεις Εκάτη 2015).

“Δίχως όνομα” είναι ο τίτλος της ποιητικής σας συλλογής και όλα τα ποιήματα, που περιλαμβάνει είναι άτιτλα. Το είχατε σκεφτεί από πριν να μη χρησιμοποιήσετε τίτλους ή σας βγήκε στην πορεία; Ο τίτλος δόθηκε, επειδή τα ποιήματα είναι άτιτλα;
Ο τίτλος της συλλογής και το γεγονός ότι τα όλα τα ποιήματα είναι άτιτλα αποτελούν μέρος της αρχικής σύλληψης και δεν προέκυψαν στην πορεία. Τα δύο αυτά σημεία σε συνδυασμό με τα χαρακτηριστικά των ποιημάτων επιχειρούν να συνθέσουν μια προσωπική προσέγγιση και αισθητική.

Πιστεύετε ότι οι ποιητές γράφουν κυρίως τις νύχτες; Εσείς πότε εμπνέεστε περισσότερο;
Δε γνωρίζω πότε ακριβώς εμπνέονται οι ποιητές. Σε προσωπικό επίπεδο, η νύχτα σηματοδοτεί το τέλος μιας εργάσιμης ημέρας. Συνεπώς υπάρχει το ελεύθερο εκείνο χρονικό πεδίο μέσα στο οποίο ζυμώνονται καλύτερα και με μεγαλύτερη άνεση σκέψεις και ιδέες. Το ζήτημα του ελεύθερου χρόνου θα έλεγα ότι είναι το κρίσιμο, ανεξάρτητα από τη χρονική του τοποθέτηση. Στην παρούσα δουλειά ωστόσο υπάρχει ένα προβάδισμα των βραδινών στιγμών.

Τι σημαίνει για σας η ήττα μιας έμπνευσης;
Η «ήττα μιας έμπνευσης» δεν είναι τίποτε άλλο παρά η μικρή ή μεγάλη φθορά που προκαλεί η πλήξη και η ροή της καθημερινότητας στο δημιουργικό κομμάτι του εαυτού μας.

Θα θέλατε να μας περιγράψετε τη χώρα του σχεδόν ποτέ;
Η «χώρα του σχεδόν ποτέ» είναι ο σχηματισμός ενός συνόλου ανθρώπων της λήθης ή μιας ελάχιστης, επιλεκτικής, κατευθυνόμενης μνήμης. Μια τέτοια χώρα, ένα τέτοιο σύνολο, που δεν προσπαθεί ή δεν μπορεί να διδαχθεί από προσωπικές και συλλογικές εμπειρίες δε νομίζω ότι έχει θετική προοπτική.

Με την πρώτη σας ποιητική συλλογή κάνατε ήδη το πρώτο βήμα. Έχετε σκεφτεί κάποια από τα επόμενα;
Επεξεργάζομαι αρκετές ιδέες σε μια προσπάθεια βελτίωσης των εκφραστικών μέσων και μεγαλύτερης στόχευσης των στίχων και κατ’ επέκταση των ποιημάτων που γράφω. Υπάρχει σκέψη για κάποια επόμενη έκδοση αλλά όχι το αντίστοιχο υλικό προς το παρόν.