Description
Book SynopsisPoems on the craft, the risks and the subversive power of poetry, selected by the translator in conjunction with the author from the the Greek Collected Edition of Andonis Fostieris’ poems published in 2021 (Apanta ta Poiimata 1970–2020). A bilingual edition with the Greek text from that edition and facing English translations by Irene Loulakaki-Moore. In her Introduction the translator writes:- If Fostieris draws the reader’s attention to the alphabet, its sounds and the processes of syllabification, reading and writing, in other words to the “materiality of the text” and the “mechanisms of writing”, it is because, like many poets of his generation, he is suspicious of the ways in which vocabularies create descriptions of the world and ourselves, instead of adequately or inadequately expressing them. The socio-political, economic and intellectual developments in Greece and elsewhere in the 1970s rendered obsolete previous generations’ search for the “lost centre” and the grand narratives that validate it. Unlike the Modernist poet-authority, Fostieris, does not stand in the centre of his creation, like a unique owner of truth and sole creator of meaning… Fostieris’ poetics surpasses Modernism and marks a turn towards the Post-modern, constituting a new approach to the role and function of contemporary poetry, while it also proposes a coherent conceptualization of the role of language and its relation to the truth… One could say that Fostieris and the poets of his Generation attempted what Surrealism (another avant-garde movement which met with a great deal of resistance in Greece) had attempted: the secularization of inspiration… The transformation of inspiration after the Surrealists made available for everyone what had been the privilege of the poet-initiate, in line with Lautréamont’s injunction: “Poetry should be made by everyone. Not just by one.” With his “prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning” (Paul Valéry) Fostieris wants to bring the written word closer to the mental experience, the feeling or the thing in itself. He does not deny the referential function of language, he only exhibits his suspiciousness towards the authority that says, “my language is true”. By doing so he cleverly abstains from imposing on the readers his version of meaning, inviting them instead to join in the game of signification.
Table of ContentsIntroduction ix From THE GREAT JOURNEY (1971) Poetry is a noble shroud 3 From DARK EROS (1977) The black 5 Fire poem 7 Who are you 9 And so they go by 11 Metamorphosis 13 The poem 15 Decadence 17 To the critics 19 POETRY WITHIN POETRY (1977): sixteen poems 21 From THE D AND A OF DEATH (1987) The prodigal 53 Impervious to immortality 55 That the poet must if he would be a poet 57 The sound of words 59 The sound of the world 61 Genesis 63 From THOUGHT BELONGS TO MOURNING (1996) Thought belongs to mourning 65 River poem 67 Before an audience 69 Metapoetry 73 From PRECIOUS OBLIVION (2003) Poetry is not made with ideas 77 Purgation 79 You always emerge alive from a poem 81 The spoken words remain 85 From LANDSCAPES OF NOTHINGNESS (2013) Writing 89 I write 91 I’d like to write a poem 93 The tare-weight 95 The cell 97 Poetry 99 The poem 101 The poets 103 Memorial of a birth 105 Notes 107 Bibliography 111
