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

On the Boat

***

We wandered the waters for nearly three hours, hugging the border between ocean and rock, heading out, circling back, retracing, but always moving. The sea was only stillness. In some places, the mountains were so tall that they hid the sun. It was then we could look at each other’s eyes.

***

“So that now at dawn/ You must be attentive: the tilt
of a head,/
A hand
with a comb, two faces
in a mirror/ Are only forever
once, even if unremembered”

            - Czeslaw Milosz, “After Paradise”

***

The fisherman sat unbraiding his net, removing every rock and throwing them back into the Aegean. Two hands for two hours. There was never a question of patience or frustration. This was the work that had to be done.

***

Their eyes swallowed their lungs.
Waiting and leaping
the fish could not escape
the white bucket.


***

I love the water too much

***

I stood in front of the engine, drinking the fisherman’s wine. Looking out. I realized that I could not see the road. On this side of the mountain there were no roofs or farms. Only trees and rocks. I never thought I would see something that had looked the same for a thousand years.

***

When I did not catch more fish he told me Now go to another place.

***

He smelled of ocean and sweat
the skin of his hands smoothed
by fatherhoods. His grandson,
driving the boat, was young
because the hair on his cheek
matched the color on his head.
The back of the neck
will tell you how hard
a man has worked.

***

Asteri - starfish. I admired it in my hand.

***

“But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.
            -  D. H. Lawrence


***

You know you caught a fish
if you see the water glimmer
silver and blue.
The best time to catch a fish
is when there is no moon.
Swimming blindly
the fish will rush in a torrent
into the open net.

In English we use agape to say
an open mouth, expressing shock
or fear.
the net the fish the water
But in Greek agape means love,
the highest and deepest, most God-like
love.

***

“What use are you? In your writings there is nothing except immense amazement.”
-       Czeslaw Milosz

***



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