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

Greece past-and-present poem

JEWISH MUSEUM

I.

I arrive in the city of Thessaloniki
in search of words the first I find
slander me poison out the mouth
of a girl ignorant I am called Goldstein.

I am not made for this season or else
Greece I belong to the ragweed
seek allergic reprieve scraping
my throat with my tongue.

II.

Alexander believes his bride
will be pleased to learn he has
named the city after her though
it is not complimentary it is

convenient. He is unimpressed
by ruin and tastes tax as
suckling pig. He selects its
government with shining fingers

orders its people counted
within his domain and departs
the city’s heat.

III.

Highness I am appointed
by the king as head of the Jews who
are oppressed and live
by silk weaving. They spend

much time speaking with foreheads
pressed against cemetery marble they
go together to speak in the shade
they explain they must consort with

the dead but also with the living they are not to be trusted they are to be tolerated they are the wound of this city they are this city.


IV.

It is not so much the exhibit
but that the museum exists
at all. Two rooms, a corridor
air conditioning for

three euro. We walk through
tombstones first we are not
surprised when half turn back
and head rather to the Agora.


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