Introduction
By Panos BosnakisLANGUAGE EXPERIMENTATION AND POETRY REVOLT TO
NATIONAL MODERNISM: THE CASE OF THE GREEK AVANT-GARDE POETRY
Some explanations are necessary from the beginning. I was born and raised in Greece from both grandfathers who were war refugees from a Greek city in the Black Sea. Well before I went to school, I had learned from my family to treasure books, especially poetry, and love diaspora, as most of our relatives were dispersed in various countries the USA, Bulgaria, Israel, Australia, France and Italy. In my early school years, I was immersed in hundreds rare to find books of Greek and American Literature. When other children had toys, I had old editions of Cavafy, Shakespeare, Classical European and American authors, rare Greek Poetry Anthologies in the Purist along with old purist Greek translations of Gothic and Detective Novels, and much more. Until today I never had a TV in my house, anything but books and music.
The fate of the Greek poet is one that needs an explanation. My birth country is one of the oldest with records of 100.000 years of history. Our language is the best reminder of it and the Modern Greek State is merely an abstraction of a very long and complicated lost history. The Greek poet carries with him this challenging heritage which is difficult to manage by following accepted modern rules. History flows in the poet's blood so live that blinds and troubles him to come to terms with modernity and contemporary time. The anxiety of the past creates special priorities, hierarchies, and conditions that exempt Greek Literature from other Modern ones.
Modern Greek State was never a free State but a colonized one by Great Western powers to serve specific geopolitical purposes of the Near and the Middle East. The colonial status was always well hidden under the agenda of Europeanization and Westernization exempting Greece from other neighboring States, which even today are declined equivalent European Status. Greece, accordingly, was not placed neither in the Balkans, nor in Anatolia, but at the same time it was not also "encouraged" to place itself in a Western position along with Italy and France; its European status could only be managed by the directives of the European Union. In this way, Greece was left "alone" from Western and Eastern allies to serve Western interests best. The Greek elite was always an instrument of Western interests. The Western capitalists and the banks were giving them loans and in exchange, they were sharing privileges with them. Academic and literary culture apparently was following the same route. Official Modern Greek Literature, consequently, acquainted a colonized status and became subservient to foreign and imported trends. Pivotal and influential Greek poets, for instance, G. Seferis and C. P. Cavafy, were deceived and flattered by Greek historical, "philhellenic", and popular Anatolian ideas, and "accepted" a peculiar " Orientalized national" style in their Modernist writings. Greekness as an aesthetic ideal of Greek National Modernism adopted this colonized style and assorted itself in the Greek elitist behavior and consciousness. Greek official culture, therefore, felt comfortable to overlook and dismiss experimental and innovative writings as immaterial, paying greater attention to the ones that were serving the national canonical styles more effectively. Academics, journalists, and literary critics almost unanimously praised "National Modernism" that flourished from the 1930s onwards and excluded alternative voices.
The Greek Avant-Garde movement is the one that has suffered more than anything else and was completely marginalized -- sometimes anathematized -- by the old and new academic guards and the official publishing order. Although Greek Avant-Garde poetry was not a uniform movement, but a pluralistic one, it was organized, sometimes even militarized, against the official establishment publishing its own small periodicals and chapbooks and maintaining its own literary places. It was progressively created in a time span of forty years (1890-1930) predominantly in Athens and Paris in France. Prior to this, we did have sporadic attempts to challenging canonical norms of their age, such as D. Solomos' The Woman of Zante and The Free Besieged together with I. Karasoutsas, D. Valavanis and N. Kampas.
The earliest Avant-Gardist works include Lambros Asteris's (pseud. of Dimitris Karachalios) The First Fire and The Flameful Passage (War Odes), Michael Mitsakis's poems, Alk Gian's Italian Futurist poems and John Rompapas's Anarchist and Surrealistic writings in the Greek diaspora in New York. In conjunction with Asteris we should line up further early Futuristic texts, such as Mafarkas's (pseud. of Sophocles Pharmakides?) To Moutousis's Flying: A Reverie and Fotos Giophylles Chaphteia. These texts were worthwhile attempts to adopt an urban innovative style of Athens as a growing European cosmopolitan city. Some other bohemian, aestheticist, and cosmopolitan poetries of the 1910s and 1920s coupled with underground writings should also be noted as preparing the ground for innovative experimentation and aesthetic skepticism which later gave rise to Dadaism and Surrealism in the 1930s. Among them we should mention the French poems by the prematurely lost poet George Georgakopoulos, Doris Kouvaras's early missing Modernist poems, Thales Rhetoridis's and Demetris Mentzelos's early Surrealist poems, Teukros Anthias's Holy Satan...Bless me and The Vagabond's Whistles, Fotis Basoukeas's The Oracles of Vakis, Dionysis Chorafas Mephisto's Songs and Manolis Kanellis-Sissyphos The Shivers of Earth.
During the 1930s Avant-Garde poetry under the form and spirit of Surrealism focused polemic criticism against established Modernist writings of Greekness (National Modernism) expressed by leading figures, such as G. Seferis, O. Elytis, and Y. Ritsos, while C. P. Cavafy and K. Karyotakis placed themselves in the middle ground between Avant-Garde and Modernism. Surrealist poets Nicolas Calas, Andreas Embeirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos and Nanos Valaoritis among others created an alternative style that challenged national canonical poetics of aesthetic and cultural Greekness.
Surrealism was instrumental in the conceptualization of Greek Avant-Gardist aesthetic consciousness. Out of it a distinctly Avant-Gardist movement emerged that focused attention to subverting notions of nationality and Greekness. Furthermore, Avant-Garde criticized subjectivism, lyricism, rhyming, passionate and mimetic forms of writing and began experimenting with language and objectivity, abstraction and concretism, oral and daily communication, anti-Aristotelian and anti-representational forms of imagistic and unimagistic writings, substitutionality and trans-allusiveness and other trans-textual and inter-textual modes of stylistic aestheticism. Atonality, discordance and concrete sounding, oral musicality and many more experimental styles and novelties of sound and textual poetics, historical revisionism regarding identity of history and self or selves, plurality as an unconditional use of plural forms, and identities, diaspora, exile, combinations of cosmo-imaginations, idolatries and imagistic worlds and many more novel trends were imported by the Greek Avant-Garde.
The Avant-Gardist worldview was expanded to substitute the realistic and historical being with the poetic being of history. Historical time was changed to a philosophical time similar to the Surrealistic Time of Max Ernst, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. The entire literary world, which from Kostis Palamas to George Seferis was dreaming of building "nation" and "national aesthetics", collapsed and was substituted by the revolted individualized poet of Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, and the "exiled" poet who was seeking "justice" and "freedom" as Nanos Valaoritis states concluding one of his poems "Saint Free in the Age of Ages". Nevertheless, Avant-Garde was neither promising the liberal Western paradise of the Bourgeois elitist class that Greek conservative parties were promising nor the Communist disillusioned propaganda of a Socialist non-existent Utopia which the dogmatic traditional Communist party presented to the people; for this reason it was violently attacked by both sides as "anti-Greek" by the Right and "anti-Communist" by the Communist Party.
The WWII and the ensuing Greek civil war had another repressive impact on the poetics of the 1940s and 1950s forcing avant-gardist trends to further neglect and dismissal from the official canon. Only in the 1960s with the widespread anti-war and radical political agenda, Avant-Garde poetry re-emerged in the small but influential periodical PALI where many younger poets were given the opportunity to publish for the first time. Allen Ginsberg's trip to Greece in the early 1960s reinforced the Greek Avant-Gardist agenda and Beat poetry became a new trend to challenge traditional and conservative literary rules. Poets such as Yiorgos Makris, Lefteris Poulios, Dinos Siotis, Alexis Traianos, Spyros Meimaris, Mihalis Meimaris, Katerina Gogou, Dimitris Poulikakos and tens of others were influenced by American Beat poets. During the 1970s Nanos Valaoritis with Andreas Pagoulatos and Manto Aravantinou created a unique style of Language Poetry influenced by the French review Change Internationale edited by Jean-Pierre Faye. Valaoritis became a leading and a central figure in the post-war Greek Avant-Garde and his poetry drew influences from both American and French literary schools, Surrealism, Language Poetry and post-absurdist and post-modernist modes of writing. From the 1980s up to the present Language Poetry became the most serious trend in contemporary Greek poetry, especially among younger emergent poets Panos Bosnakis, Spilios Argyropoulos, Costis Triantafyllou and Eleni Merkenidou. At the same time, Demosthenes Agrafiotis from the 1980s onwards followed a solo career challenging modes of writing with visual and performative aspects mixing styles from international poetics influenced by Fluxus and Semiotics.
Another worth mentioning movement is Underground poetry which up to this day remains unrecorded. Our information, especially for the Underground poetry of 1850-1960, is very scarce, due to the fact that public and private records of it were never collected. The Center of Avant-Garde Studies has begun researching and collecting such scarce and disparate materials when available. We know much better early bohemian, gay and minor poets before 1930 who created their works in the margins of the recorded literary culture (i.e. Pantazis, Vokos, Velmos, Caimes, Zoufres, Galatopoulos). In addition, there was an Anarchist movement (from 1860 onwards) which was relevant to Underground literature but given its political and social beliefs it must be regarded as a separate and autonomous movement. John Rompapas, who left Greece to emigrate to the United States in a young age, was one of them. The Gay poetry of the 19th century up to 1930 was another separate manifestation which still remains unrecorded, but in this Anthology, it is represented at least with one poet Mimis Lymberakis. All these minor movements were mutually sympathetic and friendly with the Avant-Garde. Nevertheless, Underground and especially Anarchist poets were against any form of official inclusion, manifestation and public recording of literature refusing, therefore, to participate even in Avant-Gardist publications and events, such as partnering with Surrealists or with the periodical PALI. When they published, they preferred private editions in limited copies distributed hand to hand. Worth mentioning poets of the post-war Anarchist movement are Panos Coutroumbousis and Dimitris Poulikakos, both serious and complicated cases, who emerged out of the literary group of PALI, and could possibly combine Underground, Anarchist, and Avant-Garde culture. We know much better the post-war Underground poetry and especially from the 1960s to the present. Some information was recorded and passed on to us by Leonidas Christakis, Thomas Gorpas and Teo Romvos who preserved and published several poets of the Underground, Anarchists and Protest poets who wrote during the years 1960-1990.
Concrete and Visual poetries in Greece were rather scarce with a little impact on the contrary to what happened in Italy and the Latin American countries. Theon Spanoudis was the leading figure of Greek Visual and Concrete poetry, but his visual work was presented exclusively in Brazil, while in Greece his work even today is completely unknown. Costas Yiannoulopoulos, Michael Mitras, and Demosthenes Agrafiotis are the most important Greek Concrete and Visual poets. Performance poetry was almost unknown in Greece. Leonidas Christakis, Andreas Pagoulatos, Demosthenes Agrafiotis and Demosthenes Davettas and Panos Bosnakis were by and large the only Performance poets with theoretical knowledge and passion for it. Before Visual poetry, some Figurative poetry appeared in the 1930s with G. Seferis's Calligrammes and Psaltiras's Figurative Byzantine monophonic poems that were fashioned according to the ancient Greek Technopaegnia of Antologia Palatina. Sound poetry was almost unknown; beyond my own sound experimental poetry which was relevant to Sound poetries from New York owing very much to my extensive knowledge and research on New, Experimental and Electro-Acoustic Poetics and Music there was also the phenomenal Demetrio Stratos, a worldwide diaspora artist and pioneering in sound poetics who passed away very young, but he remained completely unknown in Greece.
In this Anthology, I have also included poets of the Greek diaspora with Avant-Gardist affiliations. Greek diaspora poetry, although important, has been neglected and dismissed by official culture and academics. Diaspora is necessary to the understanding of Greek Avant-Garde. Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange perhaps is the most important Alexandrian poet, or at least equivalent with C. P. Cavafy. Gisele Prassinos was influential among French and American women Surrealists. Equally important are also the presented Greek-American poets and especially Spiros John Pantos, George Kalamaras and George Economou. I wished to have included Greek-Australian Avant-Gardist poets as well, but I didn't receive responses to my invitation. I almost left out Surrealism (although Engonopoulos and Valaoritis are included) because Surrealism must be regarded as an autonomous movement that deserves a separate study.
We are never perfect and this Anthology certainly has some omissions. I would like to have included some more poets, especially Andreas Pagoulatos, Eleni Merkenidou, Lambros Asteris, Jason Depountis, Paris Takopoulos, Dimitris Beskos, and Ilektros Boumis and a few more but due to time frame available and the lack of translations that was not possible. I want to thank the editor and poet Michael Rothenberg for his patience and friendship and all that he has done for me, Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Bari, Italy, Maria Perlorentzou for sending me her book on Alk Gian Futurista, Vassiliki Rapti who helped me to finally locate the last copy available of Spiros Pantos which I was searching for twenty five years, I want to thank the Avant-Garde Poet, Theoretician and Teacher Richard Kostelanetz who is part of the Greek-Jewish diaspora from Smyrna, I want to thank all my friends Greek American poets presented here or not who for many years have given me strength to continue, I want to thank Nanos Valaoritis for his endless efforts to support Greek Avant-Garde poets and poetries, my Professor Vassilis Lambropoulos who has supported my work for many years, I want to recall three major poets-mentors and friends who would be very pleased to see this Anthology Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and above all I want to thank my mother Calliope for my inclination to poetry is completely owed to her and her amazing family history to serve poetry and diaspora, my brother Dimitris for his continuous support and my father Constantine who was a true poet and if he could be with us to see it he would be proud and peaceful for what he has offered to me. Most of the books presented and mentioned here come from my Library Archives and several of them are the only copies to find.
Dr. Panos Bosnakis Professor of Comparative Literature and Poetics Center for Avant-Garde Studies (CAS) Athens, June 2016