Tag: human-condition

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more ambitious translation and publishing projects in contemporary poetry — and this week's posts from vequinox make that scope impossible to ignore.

Mara: We're covering two stretches of territory today: the Modern Greek poetry tradition, from Ritsos to Seferis to Patrikios, and the narrative fiction side of the site, with excerpts ranging from small-town drama to historical adventure.

Pip: Plus a short stop in the territory where longing and unrest do most of their best work — which, it turns out, overlaps with both.

Mara: Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, From Guilt to Glory

Mara: This segment is about what Modern Greek poetry actually does — how it moves between the intimate and the historical, the personal guilt of a single speaker and the collective weight of a whole tradition.

Pip: The Yannis Ritsos post, from Poems Volume II, opens with a poem called "Suspicious Sleep," and it sets that tone immediately. The setup is a small, almost domestic guilt — a star announcing happiness, a fruit seller's voice — and then the speaker turns inward: "You felt guilty because you didn't have the urge to respond. If you at least hadn't seen, hadn't understood. Guilty, not counting the guilt of others. You, all alone, put all the responsibility on your shoulders and you understood all your innocence."

Mara: The consequence there is the paradox at the heart of a lot of this poetry — that full awareness of your own innocence arrives only after you've already accepted total responsibility. That's not a comfortable place to rest.

Pip: Ritsos Volume IV, "Maturity," goes the other direction — outward, chaotic, guards running, flags lowered, and a crowd that can't decide whether it's laughing or crying. The intimacy is gone; what's left is noise and doubt.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis post, Selected Poems, is warmer — a spring morning, flour on lips, a name written on steamed windows. The Kariotakis-Polydouri piece, "The Tragic Love Story," pulls the other way: bells that spread evil, a prayer to beauty, an untimely death. George Seferis's collected poems land somewhere between — "a great sun greater than light," the garden between equinoxes, but arrived at only after staring into a black cloth.

Pip: Titos Patrikios writes a love made of "bones of our dead comrades" and "a black wind that spreads its fiery metal on words, in jails and exile camps." That's a tradition that has earned its darkness.

Mara: The anthology post, Neo-Hellene Poets, gives the broader frame — voices across generations asking the same question: "Why does our joy, our little joy, to sadness only lead us?" Antony Fostieris, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, the collections Impulses, Marginal, and Wheat Ears all circle that same tension between sensation and loss.

Pip: And then the fiction asks it differently — through plot.

Stories Under Pressure

Mara: The fiction excerpts this week span centuries and continents, but they share a structural pressure: characters navigating power, prejudice, and survival in confined spaces — a chair across a mayor's desk, a ship in plague, a monk tied to a stake.

Pip: Fury of the Wind opens that territory with a scene that looks domestic and turns out to be a confrontation about social standing. Will Andrews has put a woman named Sarah Fielding to work alongside the town women, and his wife Molly is furious. The exchange lands here: "Then it would be their loss, not mine. Anyway, none of you even know Sarah. What've you got against her except that she married Ben Fielding?" And Molly's answer — "She married Ben Fielding, and only a coarse woman or a slut would have considered doing that" — is the whole town's prejudice compressed into one line.

Mara: What this means in practice is that Will is fighting a social order that has already decided the verdict. His mild needling doesn't move it; Molly slams the door, and he's left muttering at his papers. The power isn't in the argument — it's in the silence that follows.

Pip: Poodie James runs a similar dynamic at higher stakes. Engine Fred sits across from a mayor named Torgerson and tells him, quietly, that he knows what Torgerson did twenty-one years ago. Torgerson's defense is pure contempt: "He's a freak, an unclean little freak. He contaminates the town." The machinery of official cruelty, dressed as civic concern.

Mara: In Turbulent Times opens differently — a birthday drive through the Irish countryside in a new Bentley, stories of drumlins and dolmens, a hotel dinner. The ease of that scene is doing work; it establishes exactly the kind of world that turbulence will later disrupt.

Pip: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts Brother Rordan tied to a pole, a burning bough at his scalp, a painted warrior demanding he sing. He chooses the Salve Regina. That's not a metaphor — it's a man deciding what he is in the worst moment available.

Mara: The two Arrows excerpts — posted on different days but from the same novel — follow a narrator navigating the Spanish Inquisition, protecting a plague-stricken captain and outwitting an inquisitor with a well-placed mention of the king. The stakes in both are life and death, and the tool is language used precisely under pressure.

Pip: Small Change is quieter — a boy sent home from choir practice for looking at stained glass windows, explaining to his mother that the other kids are slow. The Circle is quieter still: a retired admiral visiting his sister's vegetable garden, at peace with himself for reasons he can't yet explain aloud.

Mara: Swamped and Straits and Turns round out the range — one a business negotiation over wine, warrants, and commissions; the other a solitary traveler burying a wolf with stones and walking away smiling. Hours of the Stars adds a poem in the mix, a Roman galley caught in the Euroclydon wind, cargo thrown overboard, salvation uncertain.

Pip: Cloe and Alexandra sits at the edge of both fiction and lyric — a poem that asks what "I wish you the best" actually means, and answers: probably not much. Which is its own kind of pressure.

Mara: That question — what words mean when feeling has already left the building — is exactly where the longing segment picks up.

When Longing Outlasts Its Object

Pip: This is the territory where the poems aren't about a tradition or a history — they're about the specific ache of wanting something that has already shifted into absence.

Mara: Cloe and Alexandra frames it as a linguistic problem: "Would have been better if he wrote: 'Sorry that I couldn't?'" The polite farewell as evasion — the nine-headed monster of circumstance doing the work the speaker won't do.

Pip: Marginal puts the same absence in physical terms: "night laments her dark role in the photosynthesis of your absence." That's longing metabolized into the body's own chemistry.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's selected poems move through environmental grief into something stranger — horror at the destruction of forests that "strangely mixes with elation" when the ego finally releases its grip. Tasos Livaditis, Poems Volume II, carries a grief that leaves no footprints. Titos Patrikios turns it political. The Neo-Hellene anthology, Antony Fostieris, George Seferis, and Kariotakis-Polydouri all ask the same question from different angles: what do we do with what we cannot stop feeling?

Pip: Impulses answers with a sculptor making everything too large — hands big enough to embrace the world, legs to straddle the universe. Overcorrection as grief's own logic.

Mara: The fiction excerpts were asking the same thing. The ideas don't stop at genre lines.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the longing — is about the gap between what language can carry and what it can't.

Mara: The next episode will likely push further into that same territory. There's more to cover.

Podcast Episode: Poetry, Place, And Human Frailty

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where ancient Greek verse, Irish family secrets, and Soviet farm life share the same address — and somehow that feels completely reasonable.

Mara: vequinox has been busy. Today we're moving through Greek poetry and translation, crime and family fiction, art and memory, and a jazz-inflected novel set between two very different worlds.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Verse Across Centuries

Mara: The posts here are doing something specific: bringing Greek voices — classical, modern, and original — into English, and asking what survives the crossing.

Pip: The poem "Troglodytes" makes the stakes plain from the first image: "the modern shaman's imposing figure with the glittering tiara always commands him to kneel, his slavery is a smooth curse he cannot escape."

Mara: So the troglodyte is not a relic — he is anyone still kneeling before spectacle dressed as authority. The poem argues that the costume changes; the command does not.

Mara: The translations of Yannis Ritsos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Tasos Livaditis extend that argument across different registers — Ritsos lyrical and rural, Engonopoulos urban and restless, Livaditis brutal and spare. The anthology "Neo-Hellene Poets" and the Kariotakis-Polydouri volume show how wide that tradition runs.

Pip: "Entropy" and "Chthonian Bodies" are original work sitting alongside those translations — which is either an act of confidence or an open invitation to compare notes.

Mara: "Red in Black" and "Medusa" round out the range, moving from quiet metro-car intimacy to a poem that weaves erotic longing and domestic interruption into the same breath. The translation project and the original work are in genuine conversation here.

Crime, Family, and the Weight of Consequence

Mara: The fiction collected here keeps returning to one question: what do people do when a secret arrives and demands an answer right now?

Pip: "Straits and Turns" opens with George walking alone through the Bulgarian mountains toward something — the excerpt is all forward motion, all deliberate distance covered, one careful camp made in the dark.

Mara: The prose earns its patience. "He put his backpack against the boulder and gathered a bunch of leaves from a tree, which he used to make a makeshift bed onto which he laid his sleeping bag." Every detail is functional, which makes the isolation feel real rather than atmospheric.

Pip: That's a man who has thought through exactly how far he needs to get from wherever he started.

Mara: "In Turbulent Times" puts the secret right on the kitchen table — literally a birth certificate, no letter, just a name where it should not be. Caitlin's voice stays calm and controlled even as everything shifts: "May to February is nine months, Michael."

Pip: Calm is the most devastating register for that line.

Mara: "The Unquiet Land" works in a similar key — a witness who almost certainly knows who beat the priest, and decides, quietly, that he will not say so. Community loyalty and personal feeling outrun the facts.

Pip: "The Circle" pulls back to San Francisco, two old colleagues in a twenty-year-old Chevy Impala negotiating what retirement means when your whole identity is the job.

Mara: "Swamped" moves into financial territory — stock tips passed in hallways, lunch invitations with unstated agendas, the low hum of a world where every conversation is also a transaction.

Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" is the sharpest tonal shift — a childhood narrated with the flat precision of someone who learned early to read a room and trust nothing.

Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" and "Prairie Roots" anchor the domestic end of the range — a girl who decides she does not deserve kindness, and a Saskatchewan winter where the horses were always fed before the family sat down. "Small Change" closes the loop with something warmer: a ukelele passed down through grief, summers on the farm, a family that keeps showing up.

Pip: The fiction here spans continents and decades, but the engine is always the same — someone knowing something they have to decide what to do with.

Mara: Which is also, in a different key, what the poems are about. Let's move to the work that holds art and memory together.

Cities, Canvas, and the Accountant's Ledger

Mara: This segment asks what art preserves — and what it cannot.

Pip: "Hear Me Out" builds its answer slowly: "All the cities are the same at dawn; they're all alike you told me once and I didn't believe you."

Mara: The poem earns that return. By the end the speaker has lived enough departures to know the other person was right, and the recognition lands as loss, not wisdom.

Pip: "Ken Kirkby, A Painter's Quest for Canada" takes the canvas into the tundra — literally, since Kirkby ends up pushing a boat through a freezing river for four days with no tent poles and mushroom soup.

Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" and "The Incidentals" complete the picture — the first a healing ceremony where old grief and new arrivals find common ground, the second a poem about an accountant whose entire life was other people's numbers and whose funeral drew almost no one.

Pip: Art and memory, it turns out, are what fill the space the numbers leave behind.

Mara: Speaking of filling space — the last post is set to music.

Pavel, Vera, and the Long Way to a Passport

Mara: "Jazz with Ella" lands in Soviet agricultural life, which is not where the title points — but the novel earns the contrast.

Pip: Pavel is a man with plans for sunflower-field picnics and a growing competence with a broken-down motorcycle, living entirely outside the system that made him: "he lamented all the years spent in studying academic subjects without getting a good grounding in what every adolescent learned while growing up: working on the family car."

Mara: The upshot is a man rebuilding himself from practical knowledge up, while the larger problem — no papers, no passport, winter coming — waits just outside the frame.

Pip: Bureaucracy as dramatic tension. The oldest jazz structure there is.

Mara: From troglodytes kneeling before tiaras to Pavel fixing a motorcycle in the provinces — the through line is people navigating systems that were not built for them.

Pip: And finding, occasionally, a ukelele or a sunflower field or a line of poetry that makes it bearable. More from this site next time.

Hear Me Out

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All Cities are the Same at Dawn
“All the cities are the same at dawn; they’re all alike” you told me once and I didn’t believe you.
When day break arrives to their beds they all sigh the same way. And the night lovers whisper things or embrace each other before they get up and at the first light walk away with heavy footsteps.
They wear clothes half undone some inn their underarm when they kiss a soft silent kiss not to awaken the one sleeping next door.
And the door closes behind them most carefully, silently.
The car is turned on, a sound that seems very loud in the quietness of the night and even the gas petal seems to be half asleep and heavy from being asleep or exhausted from making love all night.
And the home they return to is always empty and cold.
Only the blackbirds chirp in the garden.
Half of the sky is lit and the day commences when you enter the shower to let the water run over it and take away the breaths and sweat of the night.
All cities are the same you told me once and I didn’t believe you.
Because I saw you leaving and I still wanted you in my bed, to take you in my arms, to breathe your breath one more time and to go back to my dreams.
And you kissed me softly and closed the door behind you.
How long has since gone?
I don’t remember.
How many times I closed the door behind me after I kissed someone softly on the cheek and whispered good night?
How many empty streets have I driven to reach home?
You were so right!
All the cities of the world are alike at dawn…they all sigh, they toss and turn in bed, some empty and others full of the all night long lovemaking.
Each day break one door closes slowly and one other opens and welcomes the loneliness of the traveller.
Only blackbirds chirp in the garden always the same way like the day break.
People change.
Some leave others come. What difference does it make in which city you are?

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562946

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763807

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Social Struggle

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the ancient and the urgent share the same page — Cavafy and civil war, hobos and murder investigations, all in the same week.

Mara: vequinox has been busy across a wide range of territory — modern Greek poetry, political conflict and social upheaval, and narrative fiction with some sharply drawn characters at the center of it all. Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, Ancient and Modern

Pip: The poetry posts here span centuries of Greek sensibility — from Cavafy's cool historical ironies to contemporary voices wrestling with longing, identity, and the weight of the body itself.

Mara: The Cavafy post sets the tone. Translating the poem "In 200 B.C.," it ends with a pivot that reframes the whole Macedonian campaign: "And from this marvellous Panhellenic campaign, the victorious, the splendorous, the most famous, glorified, as no other has been glorified, the incomparable: we were born."

Pip: So the Spartans sitting it out becomes almost beside the point — the world that emerged from their absence is the real subject.

Mara: Exactly the move Cavafy makes. The Yannis Ritsos posts — two of them, from Volume VI — work very differently, in tight, surreal domestic images: a severed antler left by a mirror, an owl made of sheet metal perched quietly on a roof.

Pip: Ritsos does a lot with a very cold room.

Mara: The Livaditis post, "For Maria," takes grief further: "as I stretched my arm to find your hand, it was as if I stole bread from the hands of the hungry." The Titos Patrikios piece, "Obstacles," turns inward — the speaker raising walls not to repel but to test how far endurance can reach. Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Stowaway in a Dream" and the Kariotakis-Polydouri post, "Lost," both circle longing and absence. The Fostieris, Livaditis, Introspection, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Medusa, and Neo-Hellene Anthology posts fill out a week's worth of translated voices, each one landing a different emotional register.

Pip: A lot of that longing has a political undercurrent — which is where the next segment lives.

Conflict, Division, and the Cost of Conviction

Pip: Several posts this week place characters inside political fracture — moments where ideology hardens into something people are willing to die, or kill, for.

Mara: The novel excerpt from Redemption captures it in texture rather than argument. Two characters are hunting near an olive grove when the mood shifts: "Hermes bent down and reached for the fluttering bird; he could see the huge pain in its eyes. Suddenly, the strange shudder overtook his body again, like when he was aboard the ship."

Pip: A man who can shoot without hesitating suddenly can't. That's doing a lot of quiet work.

Mara: The Unquiet Land goes louder — a pub argument about Irish partition, Lloyd George, Carson, and Sinn Fein, where Flynn Casey and Jim Patterson talk themselves toward the edge of civil war. The Troglodytes poem frames the same pattern more abstractly: institutional power dressed in sanctity, "Four Golden Gates to Heaven still stand firm while dividing into castes, races, and creeds." Ugga compresses it to almost nothing — half the planet on the line of fire, white doves, international agreements, and a dead avatar. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy asks where conviction actually leads: "Strike Chimera mercilessly, life is just a dream."

Pip: From a pub in Ireland to a collapsed avatar in seventeen lines — the scale changes, the problem doesn't. Which brings us to the fiction, where the conflict gets personal.

Character Under Pressure

Pip: The fiction excerpts this week are less about plot than about the moment a character's interior life collides with what the world expects of them.

Mara: Small Change is the clearest example. Rico comes home to an empty house, finds a note, and sits alone in the dark rather than cross the street. When Marianna finds him, she asks what's wrong, and the excerpt gives us this: "He goes to the piano bench and opens it. He takes out the papers he has worked on and holds them up to her. Suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy."

Pip: A kid showing someone his work in the dark — that's the whole thing, right there.

Mara: What the excerpt does well is hold the reader inside Rico's hesitation without explaining it. Poodie James works a different register entirely — a public hearing where Engine Fred defends a hobo against a bully's insinuation. He tells the council: "It is so not because he risked his life to save someone. It is so because under circumstances that would defeat most of us, he lives his life with independence, dignity and joy."

Pip: A defense of dignity delivered at a lectern, which is somehow more moving than it has any right to be.

Mara: Savages and Beasts stays procedural — RCMP officers questioning a caretaker and a Cretan cook about a murder, a missing kitchen knife surfacing as the key detail. Fury of the Wind puts Sarah in the middle of a crowd enjoying her distress, with Will Andrews forcing his way through to help her. Swamped follows Eteo walking English Bay, his thoughts moving between a drilling project, his parents in Crete, and Vietnamese fishers working nets in the shallows — immigration and displacement held in a single afternoon walk. And Cloe and Alexandra delivers the sharpest scene of the week: Antigony standing before six judges, hearing none of their words, then offering them her severed breast and announcing her name.

Pip: Antigony gets the last word, which feels right.

Mara: What ties the week together is that question of endurance — whether it's Cavafy's Alexandrians, Flynn Casey's republicans, or Rico in the dark with his papers.

Pip: Everyone's deciding how much of themselves to show, and to whom. More of that next time.

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more unusual literary archives on the internet — translations, original poetry, fiction spanning centuries and continents, all landing on the same site like it's nothing.

Mara: vequinox is behind all of it, and today we're covering the range: modern Greek poetry in translation, a wide stretch of literary fiction and drama, and poems that sit at the intersection of love and loss.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices From Modern Greek Poetry

Mara: The question this cluster of posts raises is what modern Greek poetry is actually doing — what it reaches for, and what it refuses to let go of. The anchor here is Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Unexpected Development."

Pip: She sets it up plainly: "It was when words overflowed / images flew like wild birds / that refused to feed on words / even if they were hungry for them."

Mara: That tension — images that won't submit to language even when they need it — runs through the whole collection. Anghelaki Rooke is mapping a kind of loss that precedes grief.

Pip: Antony Fostieris takes a harder geometric line in his selected poems: a snake eating its tail, beginning collapsing into end, the body always absent. Tasos Livaditis, longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, closes his poem "Coincidences" on the line "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth" — which is either profound or a very elegant shrug.

Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos writes about Georg Trakl — a poet who "never agreed with them" and whose only longing, once he understood what it meant to be alive, was to escape. Yannis Ritsos, the Neo-Hellene Poets anthology, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Ugga, and Troglodytes all appear here too, each finding a different pressure point between the lyric and the world pressing in on it.

Pip: Fiction carries some of that same weight — let's go there.

Literary Fiction And Drama Across Time And Place

Mara: What this range of fiction shares is an interest in pressure — the moment a situation tips, when a character can no longer hold the ordinary shape of their life. Straits and Turns is the anchor, and it earns it.

Pip: The excerpt follows a couple and their dog Elvis through a cancer diagnosis and a slow, careful goodbye. The prose doesn't reach for drama; it just watches. "Two days went by. The situation worsened. They called the vet, who suggested that perhaps the cancer metastasized from his bladder to his bones, as it was statistically the case in most of these dogs."

Mara: What that sentence does is hold clinical language right next to love, and the gap between them is where the whole excerpt lives. The decision not to pursue chemotherapy, the daily medication ritual, the final day when Elvis doesn't touch his food — it's a portrait of grief that arrives before the loss does.

Pip: Jazz with Ella moves in a completely different register — Cold War tension, a border crossing, a woman watching a man she's trying to protect navigate an interrogation line. The stakes are geopolitical, but the writing keeps its eye on the human pulse of the scene.

Mara: Fury of the Wind is quieter — a community fair, a husband and wife negotiating small social obligations, the ordinary friction of a marriage visible in a single exchange about who covers the preserves booth.

Pip: Redemption takes a young man named Hermes Dragakis back to his village with a diploma and a scholarship to Canada, and the scene where the mayor tries to understand what an economist actually does is somehow both funny and genuinely moving.

Mara: In Turbulent Times goes somewhere more intimate — an Irish drama of paternity, secrecy, and a woman who tells a man quietly, "You let me down, but I forgive you."

Pip: Wellspring of Love watches a woman named Tyne move through her sleeping children at night — each child rendered in a sentence, the accumulated tenderness of a parent who has already known loss. Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts a monk named Rordan in early medieval Ireland, furious that the Church buries medical knowledge while people die of infected throats. He's not wrong, which makes it worse.

Mara: Arrows delivers its moment in a single blackout — a priest counting the dead, touching foreheads, finding one name missing. Savages and Beasts opens on a murder inside a residential institution and the slow, formal way the news spreads through the building. In the Quiet After Slaughter follows a bush pilot whose final chapter is written in retrospect, quietly. The Unquiet Land gives us Caitlin and Michael on a clifftop after something has broken, and Caitlin describing a dream of the sea gone still and black "the way the world will look when it's ended and we've all gone."

Pip: Poodie James puts a police chief in a room full of political pressure, defending a hobo from a sabotage charge with nothing but logic and a flat refusal to perform certainty he doesn't have. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Marginal round out the theme — the first a lyric sequence of departure and transformation, the second a short, still poem about absence that ends on silence mimicking footsteps. And Ubermensch contributes a poem called "Funeral" — a poet buried while the hawk watches and the wine flows and someone begs for two bits at the edge of the scene.

Mara: The emotional through-line from fiction into poetry is loss — anticipated, survived, or simply witnessed. That's where the next segment lives.

Poems Of Love And Loss

Mara: The question here is what poetry does with grief that prose can't — how it compresses the experience until the image does the work the argument refuses to do. Yannis Ritsos anchors it.

Pip: The poem is called "The Dead House," and Ritsos doesn't soften it: "Soon the marbles sweated out blood again. The cleaners left too. They deserted us; so, we forgot about everything too: sweeping, mopping, dusting and the marble kept on sweating out more and more blood."

Mara: What that gets the reader is abandonment rendered as a physical law — the house bleeds no matter who tries to clean it, and eventually everyone stops trying, including the people who live there.

Pip: Antony Fostieris in his selected poems makes the same point through pure geometry — the circular trap where every beginning joins the end. Tasos Livaditis, the Griffin longlisted volume, closes on "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth." And Troglodytes frames the young poet standing against bigotry, recording grace — which is its own kind of elegy for what keeps getting buried.

Mara: Grief and witness, across every form the site carries.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the elegies — is about things that refuse to be cleaned up. Blood in the marble. A dog that won't eat. A monk who can't make the Church listen.

Mara: Persistence against forgetting. That's the thread. More of it next time.

Tasos Livaditis – Selected Poems

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The Unexpected
in Tasos Livaditis’ Poetry


Tasos Livaditis was a man and a poet who knew how to be likable. Not only because he was handsome both in his youth and later on in his senior years, not because he was the center of attention in various gatherings of his days, but also because of his poetry.
But why was it so?
His creative life could be easily divided into three periods, first being the period of beliefs, second the period of the crisis and third the period of recovery and in all three periods Tasos Livaditis was a very likable man to everyone he met, dealt with, associated with, made friends with, shared his hours in exile with. And Livaditis was a likeable man also because of his goals. During the first period, his goal was the struggle, something that spoke on behalf of everyone and also talked of a better future. In the second period, he tried to conceal the crisis he faced and kept away from his poetry by turning his attention to the people around him. During the third period of his creative life, his most important, if you like, he’s the poet everyone liked because of his ability to select the unexpected. Evident in the first book of this period, when he dealt with the issue of defeat, he encountered:
He kneeled and laid his forehead on the floor. It was
a difficult time. When he got up, his embarrassed face
that we all knew well had stayed there on the planks like
a useless inverted helmet.
The same man returned home without face —
like God
That like God and the face on the planks are the unexpected images that put this poet apart from others. Tasos Livaditis could minimize his importance, to lessen the size of his stature, to present himself as haunted, as prey, as one who is punished; he never liked the pompous and unnecessary verbalisms:

For years, I’ve prepared myself for that big moment
the miracle of the century, on the other hand
you must admit I’m one of a kind in my field.
But, God, what happened, who betrayed me, where
they find all the proof? The procedure was quick.
The district attorney, to the point, “Are you him?”
he asked me, “him,” I answered
is there any worse charge?
~ Kostas Kouloufakos

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562930

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763831

Podcast Episode: Love, Land, and Greek Verse

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis publishes the kind of site where you can move from a Cretan Renaissance epic to a teenager breaking his ankle during an accidental wrestling match with an older girl — and somehow both feel like they belong.

Mara: vequinox has been putting out a steady run of posts that touch on modern Greek poetry, the textures of desire and longing, rural and domestic life, and the weight of historical conflict. Let's start with the poetry.

Voices from the Greek Tradition

Pip: What this cluster of posts is doing is presenting modern Greek poetry as a living tradition — not a museum piece, but a body of work that moves between sensuality, political witness, and lyric restraint.

Mara: The post titled "Wheat Ears" anchors that range cleanly. The poem opens on a heat wave and builds toward pure physical longing: "come close to me, I beg you / let me touch your skin / the day is fiery / and unbearable like / the body's conflagration."

Pip: That last word — conflagration — does a lot of work. The body isn't just warm; it's an event. The poem earns that escalation.

Mara: The anthology post, "Neo-Hellene Poets," shows the other register entirely — a poem called "Kiss" that ends, "My soul that never learned to kiss / then knows immaculate ecstasy." Longing held at a distance, not consummated.

Pip: And then Yannis Ritsos, in "Poems Volume VI," goes somewhere stranger — a fox in a chicken pen, old men lying on yard tiles, a thin woman threading a ring of smoke as "the only one who believed him." Ritsos makes the surreal feel like documentary.

Mara: The Constantine Cavafy post gives you the political register — a poem about Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra, Jewish monarchs who are "equal to the Seleucids in every way," the irony landing quietly in that final line.

Pip: Cavafy's irony is so dry it practically needs a humidity warning.

Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri, The Tragic Love Story" contributes a poem called "Modesty" — interior beauty as something fragile and untouchable, "a rose that balances on its own flame." Titos Patrikios, in his "Selected Poems," cuts even shorter: the speaker says experience earns him the right to go crazy, but he won't, because that would be a concession. And "Impulses" closes the range with imagistic compression — grief and erosion rendered through silver clouds and a carved heart.

Mara: All of it maps a tradition that moves fluidly between the erotic, the civic, and the elegiac — which is exactly the territory the next segment enters from a different angle.

The Body Remembers

Pip: Desire in this group of posts is rarely clean — it arrives tangled with anxiety, absence, and the particular ache of things that almost happened or already ended.

Mara: The excerpt from "Small Change" puts you directly inside a charged, disorienting encounter. The narrator, a boy, wrestles an older girl on a deserted street; they fall, and the prose captures the collision of arousal and confusion precisely: "her face looked shocked and she tried to twist away and we fell, and my ankle caught on the curb and she landed on top of me, both of us breathing hard, and I heard a dull crack, and a stab of pain like an electric current that shot up my left leg."

Pip: The body keeps score — and here the score is a broken ankle and a girl sprinting away down the street.

Mara: What the passage gets right is the simultaneity: wonder and pain and panic arriving in the same breath, no clean separation between them.

Pip: The poem "Message," from the "Medusa" post, is the compressed version of that same dynamic — someone sending a text three times, editing it, not knowing the person they're reaching for has already fallen asleep holding someone else's laughter.

Mara: "HEAR ME OUT" works in the same emotional space but from further along the timeline — a speaker alone in winter, pulling out fleece bed-sheets from a former shared life. The post reads: "Last night I went to bed in those fleece sheets after a long time I discovered something of our smell has remained in the fabric."

Pip: Scent as the last archive. That detail is doing real work.

Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" takes a longer route to the same territory — Rordan and Ula, a medieval Irish monk and a Native woman, building toward love through shared song, each afraid to speak first. The restraint there mirrors the Kariotakis poems from the previous segment.

Mara: "Cloe and Alexandra" asks where poets go at night and answers in images — bloodied hands, a bandage over the heart, a swan writing its last verse. And "Wellspring of Love" grounds desire in the domestic and the anxious — a woman gardening before a prairie storm, worrying about the people she loves, trusting a child to be responsible.

Pip: From wrestling matches to fleece sheets to medieval monks — desire here keeps finding new containers. What the rural posts do is give those containers a landscape.

Land, Kin, and the Work of Staying

Pip: This segment is about what it costs and what it means to be rooted somewhere — a farm, a country hospital, a village, a horse arena — and what happens when those roots are tested or handed on.

Mara: The "Still Waters" excerpt sets the tone. A nurse named Tyne is being walked through an unfinished country hospital, and the exchange lands a quiet irony: when she questions the windows in the operating room, the doctor grins and says, "An air-conditioned operating room, of course." The passage ends on her honest uncertainty — "it would certainly take some getting used to."

Pip: A surgical suite with opening windows in a prairie winter. Rustic is one word for it.

Mara: "Fury of the Wind" gives you the farm side of that same world — a Scottish family's homestead passed through three generations, a daughter-in-law who has "become a regular country girl" with garden produce and homemade bread, planning for the fall fair months in advance. The continuity there is deliberate and warm.

Mara: "He Rode Tall" moves into the horse arena — a competition scene where a young rider named Tanya finishes Reserve World Champion, and the emotional peak is the older horseman Joel leaning over to whisper two words: "She's yours." The filly, the title, the whole arc handed forward.

Pip: That handoff is the whole story in two words.

Mara: "The Circle" widens the geography — phone calls coordinating airport pickups, a sick uncle in Iraq who can't speak freely over the phone, families dispersed but still pulling toward each other. The domestic instinct travels.

Mara: "Ken Kirkby, A Painter's Quest for Canada" takes rootedness into the Arctic — Kirkby describing the tundra as a place of simultaneous sensory deprivation and overload, where "the prairies by comparison are claustrophobic." "Straits and Turns" grounds things differently, in the very specific worry of a pet's health — a dog named Elvis, bladder stones, a second veterinary opinion. And "The Unquiet Land" puts a young Irish farmhand in front of a girl who hires him partly because his uncle is known to her family, the connection between land and kin made literal in a handshake over yellow-man candy.

Pip: Roots and conflict are harder to separate than the segment headings suggest — which is exactly where the next posts go.

History as Wound and Ceremony

Pip: The posts here are about conflict that has been institutionalized — turned into parade, into poem, into the long aftermath of war — and what it means to live inside that.

Mara: "In Turbulent Times" opens on the Twelfth of July in Belfast — the Orange parades, the bunting, the elaborate banners. The post quotes the poet Louis MacNeice on "the voodoo of the Orange bands / Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster." A Protestant character named Robert Hanlon, married to a Catholic, simply leaves the city every year to escape it.

Pip: An iron net drawn through a province, and the most honest response is to go find a quiet field.

Mara: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" puts you in a different kind of threat — a Yukon bar, a one-eyed man with a machete, a protagonist who talks his way out by claiming to be someone useful. The violence is immediate and physical, not ceremonial.

Mara: "Hours of the Stars" pulls back to the lyric register — a poem that opens "After the death of authority / we waited for the king's celebrations / messengers of the lost war." The weight of collective defeat carried in the body, wrapped "like an ivy." "Erotokritos" reaches further back still — the scholarly post traces the Cretan Renaissance epic to refugees fleeing the Ottoman fall of Crete, a poem preserved and carried by people in flight. And "Wheat Ears" contributes a poem called "Visitor" — an unknown soldier who arrives in a small town, touches one woman's life, and is found dead in the street the next morning, his name never spoken.

Pip: History here keeps finding the same shape: ceremony over wounds that haven't closed.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the insistence that the personal and the historical are the same material — a broken ankle and a battle, a fleece sheet and a refugee poem.

Pip: Next time, presumably, more of the same — which is to say, more of everything.

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis publishes the way some people breathe — steadily, in verse and prose, across centuries of Greek tradition and continents of lived experience, and apparently without pause.

Mara: That range is exactly what this episode covers. vequinox brings us poetry rooted in the Modern Greek tradition, fiction set in the rhythms of family and rural life, and prose that tracks what happens when people collide with systems, borders, and each other.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices Out of the Greek Tradition

Mara: The Modern Greek poetry segment raises a real question: what does it mean to translate and present a tradition this deep — from ancient myth to twentieth-century masters — and keep it alive on the page?

Pip: The excerpt from Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy puts that question in mythic terms. The setup is a figure who outlasts every riddler sent to challenge her: "all the mouths which uttered the riddles were swallowed by the hungry Hades and she walked over their bodies."

Mara: So survival here is the answer to every riddle. The Sphinx-like figure doesn't solve the questions — she simply endures them, which is its own kind of mastery.

Pip: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume V and Volume VI — work in that same register of weight and endurance. Volume VI's "The Sick Man" watches darkness move toward naked figures and statues until it "lights the whole house" and transforms ordinary objects into something luminous. Volume V gives us a messenger announcing victory amid thousands of deaths, the king returning with "a wound between his eyes" through which death itself could see.

Mara: Introspection closes on a similar note of earned return — "from which I have come and to which I'll ultimately arrive at my destined hour." And the anthology Neo-Hellene Poets anchors that continuity in something smaller: a poplar tree that once answered laughter and now answers only tears.

Pip: Antony Fostieris offers the most compressed version of this whole project — a poem that defines a poem as simply "rhythmically contemplating emotion." Three words doing the work of a manifesto.

Mara: Opera Bufa, Nikos Engonopoulos, Orange, Entropy, Medusa, Yannis Ritsos Volume II, Tasos Livaditis, Cloe and Alexandra, Troglodytes, Wheat Ears — all of them circle the same territory: desire, mortality, the weight of history pressing into the present moment.

Pip: Which is also, it turns out, the territory of the fiction — just told in longer sentences.

Seasons, Soil, and the People Who Stay

Mara: The fiction gathered here under family and rural life isn't nostalgic so much as precise — these posts ask what it costs to belong somewhere, and what it feels like when belonging is about to change.

Pip: Still Waters sets that up in a single anxious domestic moment. Tyne has just accepted a marriage proposal, and the evening should be simple joy — but the excerpt catches her mid-hesitation: "I'm tired, that's all. Tomorrow, I'll be fine. Just let me go to bed now, and I'll be fresh as a daisy to take Cam to church tomorrow."

Mara: The gap between what she says and what she feels is where the whole novel lives. She watches her father take Cam's arm through the doorway and thinks "no more worries" — but the narration keeps undercutting her.

Pip: He Rode Tall trades domestic interiors for the arena. Joel and Tanya are in the finals, twenty horses, thousands watching, and the warm-up pen is almost meditative — he doesn't want nerves to make him overwork his horse before the performance even starts.

Mara: Swamped goes further back — two boys in a Cretan summer, watering tomato rows by hand, stealing a watermelon from a neighboring field, counting swims at the end of each day. Anthony selects the ripest melon by the sound it makes when tapped.

Pip: Prairie Roots does the same work in a Canadian winter register — stubble turned over, fences repaired, straw hauled to the barn, the first snow arriving before every chore is finished.

Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the stakes entirely. The rural quiet is gone — the scene is an airport, a man named Volodya terrified at a security line, his companions forming a quiet circle around him. The question "what are they looking for" carries a completely different weight here than it does in a tomato field.

Pip: And then there's Wheat Ears, which compresses all of this into a short poem about a person who keeps urging change while never leaving the recliner.

Mara: The tension between staying and moving runs through every one of these — which is also what the next set of posts is made of.

When the System Pushes Back

Mara: The fiction in this segment puts characters directly against institutions, communities, and the small frictions that reveal larger fault lines — the question is how people hold themselves together when the pressure is social and the rules keep shifting.

Pip: In Turbulent Times sets that up through what isn't said. Caitlin learns that Connie has stayed behind at the cottage after Robert left, and Michael never mentioned it. The scene plays out in careful domestic choreography: "If Caitlin had had any suspicions about Michael and Connie Hanlon, remembering how Connie had come on to him in the square in Corrymore on Tuesday, she did not show them."

Mara: The restraint is the point. The whole excerpt is about watching and not speaking, suspecting and not asking — the farmhouse kitchen as a pressure vessel.

Pip: Small Change runs a different kind of social friction — street-level, adolescent, transactional. A kid who gets straight A's in a neighborhood of C-minuses rents out a Stilson wrench to Paulie, the local legend, for a buck an hour or any fraction thereof.

Mara: The negotiation is sharp and funny, but the stakes are real — belonging in that world means knowing how to do business without losing standing on either side.

Pip: Straits and Turns moves that immigrant-workplace dynamic into a Vancouver factory, where Mike writes a poem on folded toilet paper while waiting for Luigi to finish his shift tasks, and the Italian-Greek solidarity is summarized in a single phrase: "una fatcha una ratsa."

Mara: The Qliphoth takes the friction into something stranger — Lucas, trapped in what reads like a nightmare transit terminal, punches an iron pillar to test whether the world is real, and the guards and bystanders laugh in unison while a security conference crackles around him.

Pip: All four of these are about the same thing: what a person does when the system looks back and doesn't recognize them.

Mara: From mythic riddles to tomato fields to airport security lines — the thread connecting all of it is people trying to locate themselves inside something larger.

Pip: And the poetry keeps asking whether language is the map or the territory. Next time, we'll see where that question leads.

Small Change

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

The grin left his mouth and he began to look wary. I was the one who got straight A’s, the only one in this pack of D’s and C minuses.
“Ten bucks, Paulie. You can read, can’t you? Go look it up. A British blue cheese. And if you lose, you also gotta buy a pound of the shit, and eat it with a pair of chopsticks.”
That did him in. He waved me off.
“So what. You know cheese. But you don‘t know shit about tools. Thought yer ol’ man was a engineer.”
“Yeah, well, what you think you’re talkin about here is a Stilson, a Stilson Wrench. Adjustable, with teeth and a long handle. A plumber’s tool, fool. What you want one of those things for?”
He tried to look like a poker player holding a pocket pair.
“Get me one and I’ll show ya.”
I thought about that for a second. I knew where I could get one, but the sure bet had bit the dust and here was another chance to do business.
“Cost ya a buck an hour.”
“Don’t need an hour.”
“Buck an hour or any fraction there-fuckin-of. Final offer.”
Paulie laughed.
“Some altuh boy, wid a mout like dat …” but he dug into his pocket and came up with a coin that looked like it had been dipped in chocolate and dusted with tobacco bits. “Heah’s fifty cent. The rest when you delivuh.”
Paulie had achieved heroic status when he organized the now famous watermelon raid earlier in the summer. A boxcar had been left for several hours on the spur track behind number five park and Paulie had picked the padlock, releasing hundreds of tubby fruits into the city. Kids from as far away as Railroad Avenue were toting melons on their shoulders, or sitting in small groups, slicing them up with kitchen knives, their faces and hands drenched with sticky juice. It was a hard act to follow, but whatever plan he’d hatched for the Stilson, it was designed to maintain his legendary, outlaw image. And as supplier of the necessary technology, I would earn a small slice of his notoriety pie. But I needed help with this enterprise, and I knew who I could count on. Anthony Morga was the smallest but scrappiest member of our tribe at Holy Rosary School, and I could get him on board for a tithe of the buck I’d make from the rental. He was a wary kid, always kind of skittish about promissory contracts, and as we made our way down the unpaved alley that ran like a neglected country

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157

Podcast Episode: Voices Of Loss And Memory

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site that could double as a library card catalog for the Mediterranean soul — except the catalog keeps writing back.

Mara: Today we're in the territory of Greek and Mediterranean poetry, translations that carry grief and habit and beauty across languages, and fiction excerpts that range from colonial frontiers to Cold War escapes. vequinox is behind all of it.

Pip: A lot of ground, a lot of voices. Let's start with the poetry.

Translations, Memory, and the Weight of Greek Verse

Mara: The anchor here is the work of translation — bringing Greek poets like Tasos Livaditis, Yannis Ritsos, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, Constantine Cavafy, and others into English, and what gets carried across and what gets left in the original silence.

Pip: Livaditis sets the terms pretty early. The poem "November Wind" opens with a door being closed and a reckoning beginning, and then it lands this: "I think music is the grief of those who never found the time to love."

Mara: That line does a lot of work. It takes the whole poem's accumulation of lost letters, absent friends, and unanswered words and names the feeling underneath — not sorrow exactly, but grief as an art form practiced by people who ran out of time.

Pip: Ritsos shows up twice, and both poems are about absence made physical. "Emptiness" is a house stripped bare where the mirror refuses to reflect the void, and the nails left in the wall after pictures fall still catch the last light — still expecting something to hang on them. "The Sick Man" is quieter, a man returning from some interior collapse, speaking in a detached voice while making a gesture of strange tenderness with an imaginary handkerchief.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "The Goddess Habit" works a different register entirely. The poem personifies routine as a protective deity, and it earns its ending: "Yes, goddess Habit, I believe in you and I serve you. You too, stay loyal to me until I get tired of you." That's a prayer and a negotiation at the same time.

Pip: Cavafy appears twice, and both poems are portraits of performance. "Leader from Western Libya" is a quietly devastating sketch of a man who learns to dress and speak Greek to impress Alexandria, and ends up so terrified of making a grammatical error that he says almost nothing — all those unspoken words piling up inside him. The later Cavafy piece, "Days of 1909, 1910, and 1911," is a young blacksmith's elegy: beautiful, unrecorded, wasted.

Mara: Titos Patrikios's "Final Defeat" is brief and brutal — a man who stuttered wanted to say something, and the speaker was always in a hurry. Antony Fostieris's "Five Painters" turns that inward: an aging artist who has just finished his most important work sits quietly at a restaurant corner, contemplating the thorny crown of the critics, while his companions talk about nothing.

Pip: The remaining poems spread the emotional range. "Impulses" holds a mastectomy at its center — the word repeated twice at the close, once as descriptor, once as fact. "Hours of the Stars" moves through water and myrtle and skylarks with a ceremonial lightness. "Introspection" names its destination plainly: the word "arts" appearing like a destination on the climb toward a destined Ithaca.

Mara: "Wheat Ears" and "Entropy" and "The Incidentals" and "Ugga" fill out the edges — a man reading the morning paper's catalog of violence before going to war again with his coffee pot, a coal seller sweating through summer to sell winter, primeval souls climbing from pages of books, and the twentieth century's art movements battling while Dali embraces Lorca timidly.

Pip: All of it circles the same question: what survives the passing of time, and who gets remembered. The fiction asks something similar, just with more people in the room.

Voices Across Frontiers: The Fiction Excerpts

Mara: The fiction segment covers a wide range of settings and genres, but the posts share a preoccupation with people navigating systems — political, social, colonial — that are larger and less trustworthy than they appear.

Pip: "Arrows" is the sharpest example. Friar Salvador is caught in a military council where the power dynamics are shifting in real time, and the excerpt ends with a sentence that earns its weight: "Not one day among the Spaniards, and already I smelled unshed blood."

Mara: The tension in that scene is precise — Infante's insubordination is theatrical, Losada's tolerance of it is suspicious, and Salvador reads the whole room correctly while being unable to do anything about it. The approval that follows Infante's suggestion to interrogate the caciques is described as mockery rather than respect.

Pip: "Jazz with Ella" has a completely different energy — a group smuggling a Soviet musician out of the USSR, the airplane cabin full of people pretending not to know each other, and Jennifer barely containing her relief while picturing Volodya hearing live gospel music for the first time in Vancouver. It's one of the warmer excerpts here.

Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" is quieter tension — Tyne waking up and walking into a kitchen where Moe and Ken are already dressed and waiting, and the whole scene turns on whether she can read their faces before she sits down. The line "Have you heard anything?" comes out as little more than a whisper.

Pip: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" is the most expansive excerpt — a Celtic woman named Ula, sold to a convent for six chickens and a pig, who has ended up among Indigenous people in what reads as early North America, and is slowly being reached by a monk named Rordan through the shared medium of song. The detail about the children calling him Mountain Thrush for his happy laugh is the kind of thing that earns a reader's trust.

Mara: "Redemption" follows a young man named Hermes preparing for a meeting with a university dean, coached by his aunt to find out the conditions before agreeing to anything, because nobody offers something without expecting something in return. "Poodie James" puts a lawyer for the Great Northern Railway in front of a civic hearing about hobos, and the exchange between the committee chair and the railway counsel is drily procedural — the shortest speech ever heard from a lawyer.

Pip: "Wellspring of Love" is a quieter domestic register — a girl named Rachael sitting by a stream, overhearing herself described as running with someone fast, and trying to figure out who she could ask about it without causing more trouble than the question is worth.

Mara: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" is a biographical excerpt tracking how Kirkby's Arctic paintings became nationally recognized, and how the Inukshuk eventually became the symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — a consequence that started with a single ministerial meeting and a well-timed exhibition in Spain.

Pip: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" closes on a man who spots someone he may or may not recognize — a face with a distinctive mark — returning to a place that once meant something. He could verify it, but he chooses not to. "I preferred to believe it was him," the narrator says, "because it's what I did. It's who I had become."

Mara: "Straits and Turns" is a travel piece set in Madrid, a narrator exchanging an imperceptible kiss with a Minoan-featured stranger across a restaurant, and "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" is a scroll and a water well and a horse riding toward a country of castles that threaten the wide open skies. "Red in Black" ends the range — a love poem about texting instead of writing a letter, and being called a student of the old school, and sending a kiss from the other side of the planet.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry and the fiction both — is about the gap between what people mean to say and what actually gets said.

Mara: The stuttering man in Patrikios, the unspoken words piling up in Cavafy's Libyan prince, Salvador reading the room and leaving afraid. The gap is the subject.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else is waiting in the archive.

Mara: There's always more.