STORYTELLING
Poets in Performance and across the Arts
In summer 2015, at a reading organized by the poet Thomas Tsalapatis and the director Theo Terzopoulos at the latter’s Theater Attis in Athens, young poets gathered to read poems on the theme of Antigone and the unburied dead. Politically engaged, in keeping with Terzopoulos’s own focus on race and the migrant in his avant-garde adaptations of Greek tragedy, there was an electric sense of urgency. History was happening now. The work on show was noteworthy for its performative nature and its tendency to straddle different media and genres. There were poets who worked with composers, others who worked with artists, and even an unpublished shepherd. Many, in fact, were known primarily for their artistic output in genres other than poetry. Poets from throughout Greece and elsewhere were present, but what sets this section apart – only two of these writers, Elena Penga and Elena Polygeni, did not read – is its embodiment of the two trends in wider Greek poetry which dominated that evening. First is a narrative drive in which the double sense of the Greek word ιστορία (istoria), ‘history’ and ‘story’, is foregrounded. So, Apostolos Thivaios tells us the stories the news won’t cover; while Z. D. Ainalis and Stamatis Polenakis deploy myth and historical irony, respectively, to rearrange our sense of the present. Second, as already suggested, is multidisciplinarity: Demosthenes Papamarkos is best known as a short-story writer, Penga and Polenakis as playwrights, and Polygeni as a performance artist. Influenced by a strong tradition of the short story, prose poetry also plays a big part; and indeed Penga’s Kathy Acker-esque non-dramatic work divides its translators, being presented as poetry in France and, until now, as flash fiction everywhere else.