Welcome

Welcome to the 2013 Poetry workshop, Thessaloniki and Thassos. This workshop meets under a pergola with a view of the Aegean, or it meets in a café near the water's edge, or one overlooking a marble quarry. We take our breaks in the water. Our poems feast on the poems of the ancient and modern Greeks, and draw from the light around us, and the full sails. When we have finished talking and writing, we go out with Stomatis on his boat to catch the fish we might have for dinner. In the evenings, we listen to poetry read to us near an olive grove, and then we feast and dance in circles to Greek songs. Sometimes we are up very late, lighting fires on the beach, so in the morning we have our tea and coffee first, with cheese and hard rolls and yoghurt under the grape leaves. In the late afternoons we learn a little Greek, or we write in our notebooks or float in the water looking up at the small clouds. We write a lot without worrying about whether or not the writing is “good.” We know that whether it is as yet “good” or not, it is the seed of something, or it is what we had to have written before we could write something else. We play with our poems and move things around in them. We let some words go. They go, they come back. Sometimes we let a Greek poet say something, or we become a Greek poet ourselves. The assignment is to soak up the light, read what everyone writes, and learn about octopus. The assignment is to light candles, have a little psipouru or something else, and learn some dances. To say kalimera to everyone in the morning and Καληνύχτα when we go back to our rooms at night. We hope to leave with many pages of something or another, and to see our work in new ways.˜

We'll most likely be meeting on the lovely terrace at my house (up the road from where you'll be staying). The plan is to meet on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings there and to meet on Wednesdays at Beach Two for intensive writing mixed with private consultations.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Adri's Untitled Poems

40 Word Poem 

See how light gathers among
the grape leaves. See
how time weaves
a smoke above
our bread. See the
lines where linen
made its mark
body and body.
See how rain turns
rocks into ruins. See
that this
is the closest we have
to feeling forgotten;
the nearest to that
which is holy. See the
mirrors. Mirrors of clouds.
See your face. See
weeds and urchins and
glass in the lucid
water. See the
stillness.

Night.

Greek Present and Past 

Beyond the dahlias
trees are shaking with the terror
of another soft night.
How old can a place get
to still call it mortal?

On the last night of La Feria
we stood on the rooftop
watching fireworks
in between the hanging dresses.
Even when Carmen called me by name
I did not turn around.
Yes, she was the one
who discovered the robbery.
They heard her climbing the stairs.

The sound the leaves make
is not a rattling
not a warning
nor a pleading to a power above
but a question:
do we continue?
do we repeat ourselves
or the sun?

More than the open window
more than the gutted clothes
beside the broken wardrobe
what I remember from that night
were the lights
forgotten, in escape.

Watching this night
set fire to the mountain
I see the memory become
the horizon of ocean;
darkness to put out the
invasion of light.


-Adri Smith
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