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.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Livia M: IMG_609 - IMG_615

IMG_609 – IMG_615

I’ll take you to the pine tree
                                    honey.
and we’ll absorb like clouds in a river.
            I know I did when I met eyes
                        with the white
                        cat’s Egyptian gaze.

Here comes the deep sea
                                    Aegean glass,
            see the surface
                         rocks. Under

the surface cup your hands
            and let the sea write you a letter.
            Use the color of that lily (so Godgifted yellow)
                        as ink to write a reply

because I prefer letters, can’t you tell?
               I still need to take a picture
                                                    of that lily.
               I took one of an octopus in Thessaloniki.
               I took one of a fish’s gills
                                                outside its body
                                    (once inside and filling
                        now spilling blood on the floor of Aliki.)

Look, see the cook fill
                        his cupped hands
                        with the sea too (washing the blood).

Take me to Mount Athos
so together
            we can determine whether
the white in my sky is a striation of clouds
                        mirroring marble
or the faraway remnants of a river
dotted on each side by invisible pine trees
(at least invisible to me).



LM 2015
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