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.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Notebook Poem (Kamienska)- Hannah

THE HAPPY MASK


When you wake up everymorning it’s midnight.
*

When he was in the ninth grade, Brian Cloch pushed my father off a stage. He landed on top of his arm, it was S-shaped. I study the stitches that zip the bicep, a centipede buried beneath the skin.

*

We are in the parking lot, crickets like pebbles turning over. My mother has something in her hair.

*

I own the happy mask shop. I travel far and wide in search of masks.

*

You have no illusions. You rise at the earliest light to gold the bread and score the avocados. You rub your fingers together—the flour thinning—at the tips.
When he wakes,
you are goring
the lemons
of their sting.

*

You look just like your father. Yours is his nose. It is also
the wild look in your eyes when you are taken by rage.
It is the grating of your rage. The grasping of your rib cage.

*

Three of us in the room. Between exhaled smoke we talk about broken pairs.

*

The lemons are not ready yet, I tell you, though I am lying. If you pursued the truth you could smell it on my hands. My cuticles are thrumming from the citrus.

*

He asphyxiated from the exchange. Too much smoke, the room is too small, in this household, why have our eyes turned to pools rimmed with rust?

*

The lemons are in a sack beneath the stairs. One day we will beat each other with them like bars of soap in a bag, like bullets. But there are lies you must tell for protection.

*

You come in with coffee and a wild look. After you break the cornflower porcelain, we sit among the ruins.
*

We are in the parking lot, crickets simmering like an electric fence. There is a piece of avocado in her hair. I laugh and try to pick it out. She flinches at my reach.

*

My father used to pitch a fastball.
In athletics my arm was eternally disappointing.
In the kitchen, his was not.

*

There are no lemons or avocados in Illinois, not in the trees.

*

Everything is a gun used the right way.

*

Car parked, smoke blooming
out the windows. If we leave
the windows up, the pressure
will run our eyes to rust.
We crack them, though it disturbs
the ritual asphyxiation.

*

I practice stillness in my face. I prefer it with my eyebrows up, but this rustles my hair, and there must be silence. If I stare long enough I believe I am the bottom of a well.

*

The lemons are beneath the stairs, sagging in the paper sack.
The darkness makes them ripe, they are sweetening the air.
The lemons are becoming harder to hide. They are sagging
in the paper sack beneath the stairs.

*

She is shaking. She wants to tell me this is what it was like being shot, but she does not know that I know that she has ever been shot. She has discovered that not all bullets are made of metal. For example, lemons may be thrown. Avocados explode on impact.

*

Are we to hear the word bloom and think eruption?
Are we to smash avocado with our fists in the kitchen?
Are we to remember green flung onto the cabinets like intestines blown apart?

*

The writhing insect of his throwing arm. The avocado in my mother’s hair.

*


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