TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT
Poets in Literary Magazines
In the 1980s and 1990s, Greek poetry was going through a dry period. Haris Vlavianos responded by beginning a biannual book-length magazine of critical essays and verse, known first as Ποίηση (Poetry) (1993–2007) and then as Ποιητική (Poetics) (2008–present). Publication in these magazines is a key common denominator among the poets in this section; another is their prominence. The most established are cultural editors for Greece’s oldest newspapers, or hosts of poetry shows on the radio. Unlike the rest of the groups in this anthology, they are predominantly men. Poetically, the focus is on form, on what is classical and what will last. Yiannis Doukas puts rhyme and the poem’s shape to work in structuring the dark parts of history. Yannis Stiggas’s and Yiannis Efthymiades’s verse is more metaphysical, and Efthymiades’s more vicious, but both are equally interested in poetic form. Doukas Kapantaïs draws on his grounding in the Classics, as does Dimitra Kotoula, whose work combines the traditional rigour and formality of that literature with the next section’s approach to poetry as a healing art.
Poetics is defined, too, by its internationalism, offering emerging poets the chance to read and be read alongside not only the Greek post-war poets, but also the likes of John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert, Paul Muldoon, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Accordingly, the poets in this section are the likeliest to translate from and have their own poetry translated into English, French, and German. Panayotis Ioannidis’s wry, plain style takes something from both Seamus Heaney and Robert Creeley, whom he translates; Dimitris Athinakis, more elegiac and playful, is equally at home with the Anglo-Saxon tradition.