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.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Self portrait

Self Portrait with Nazi Demonstration  
Leipzig 4/20/15

Just like that the day is black
And blue, bruised with hate.
Just like that my skin, black
As fine leather stretches so tight
I might tear into bright black
Ribbons. See the flag-- spent
And flaccid-- the windless black,
Red and gold clutched in a fist
That I fear will name my black
Face dirt, and land. And so, just
Like that plans fade to black--
A sunlit walk home folds flat
Into a taxi’s steel skin, the black
Seat holding my body upright.
See the street draped in black
Uniforms, the shrill blue shout
Of sirens, the march of black-
Draped demonstrators, faces set
Toward the sun in rows of black
Sunglasses. I want to shoot
Something, to become a black
Grizzly and claw someone’s throat:
What I mean is I want to be black
And brave, but today, I am not.
Just like that, shame.



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