Poetic and political ethics

18 januari 2006 Titos Patrikios: Similarities and differences

This series of articles was begun before last winter became rough. I foresee that it will continue beyond the summer solstice. And since this has dragged on for so long, I owe perhaps some belated explanation.

I do not pretend to be a historian of our postwar poetry – this task is beyond my scope and inclination. What caught my attention is the particular signal of three poets of the first postwar generation who became related more in my own mind than in the domain of our letters. This signal I call, offhand, political and poetic ethos, fully aware that in this case this name (which is not, of course, proposed as a term – for a name and a term are not the same thing) is both inconvenient and unpleasant.

This is perhaps because it appears to bring current ethics into two areas (poetry and politics), neither of which would welcome it, defending – and rightly so – the first of them its objective realism and the other two their subjective sensitivity. However, what I am interested in here, both in terms of a decision and a position, is the specific human political behaviour as manifested in the poetic art. From this point of view, what is called here the political ethics of the poet is the other side of the poetic style: both the name ([ethos=style]) and the respective adjectives ([political=poetic]) can be equated. Thus, under these terms I will now proceed to the third member of the poetic trio I had promised to comment on, after Anagnostakis and Alexandrou.

Although the new edition of the early phase of Titos Patrikios’ poetic production presents us with new material mostly for his early style (Poems I: 1948-1954, Themelio Editions, 1976), it is not necessary, I believe, to revise some general comparative thoughts that were basically supported by what was known to us of his work until recently. I will thus start with them, in the belief that I touch upon characteristics of his political ethics as reflected in his total, by now almost thirty-year-long, poetic work.

(1) Patrikios is the youngest and the most prolific of the three. With his first three collections he had already published almost twice as many pages as the other two. Now, with the recent publication of more of his early work (1948-1952), this volume becomes proportionately even greater.

(2) He is the only one of the three who engages, from very early on, in multiverse and multipart compositions in the model of Whitman, Mayakovsky, Neruda and our own Ritsos. At the same time, he also writes self-contained, short – sometimes epigrammatic – poems aiming ambitiously toward the famous similar example of Pound.

(3) As far as politics and the arts are concerned, he is the least heretic of the three. Although Patrikios’ poetic dispute is quite often directed towards the inside of the postwar Greek left, it seldom takes a critical position as acute as what we see in Anagnostakis, and even less often does it lead to the anarchistic impasse of Alexandrou.

(4) He is undoubtedly the most optimistic of the three, if one is permitted to use this term about a poet who describes conditions of political exile in a nightmarish manner. In spite of that, even in the most dark and sombre of Patrikios’ poems there is almost always a window of functional or programmed hope. From this point of view, I would say that Patrikios is the most engagé of the three poets under discussion.

(5) He is also the most persistently and sensually attached to nature: earth and water, fauna and flora vitalize his poems with a frequency that we encounter very seldom in Alexandrou and almost never in Anagnostakis.

(6) Together with his lyrical love of nature goes Patrikios’ strong eroticism, which is missing from Alexandrou and is transformed very early into political passion in Anagnostakis. In Patrikios, the subjects of eros and love retain their adolescent freshness through the poems of his last collection. Around this centre of passion he builds, I would say, a peripheral tenderness that at times becomes a rich sentimentalism surrounding people related to him – mainly the mother figure.

(7) However, this erotic syndrome is combined, from very early on, in Patrikios with a scientific formalism. His poems are often built like proofs of a mathematical theorem. This intense thinking process is manifested also in his specialized vocabulary, which encompasses, with ease, terms from the natural and political sciences, used sometimes to provoke, but very seldom to show off.

(8) I would say that Patrikios’ poetry is more closely related than that of the other two of this group to the masters of the generation of the thirties. Ritsos’ influence is obvious, but there are also traces of Elytis and Gatsos, while the old rhetoric of Palamas is not rejected. At least on the surface, one could say that Patrikios is the least dependent of the three on the tradition of Cavafy and Kariotakis, whose shadows fall obliquely on Anagnostakis and dominate the late work of Alexandrou. As for Seferis, he also remains Patrikios’ secret relative.

(9) I have already noted the non-Greek models of Patrikios: Whitman, Mayakovsky, Pound, Neruda. I will now add, for his later phase, Brecht. To what extent the breaths of these great teachers blend in his poetry is another subject, not for the present.


“Long is the road from desire to decision”

I am returning now, in late August, to the third and youngest of the poets of the first postwar period whom I had left mid-way, to spend the short war-mongering summer on tourist oddities. At that time, with a not entirely unjustified guile, in composing the list of the nine characteristics attributed to Patrikios that make up his similarities with and differences from the other two poets in the group, I had not taken into account his early production (1948-1952), unknown until only yesterday, which was presented to us in the first volume of the new edition of his collected works (Poems I, Themelio, 1976). And since I intend to continue somehow today with this July bluff, I owe a more elaborate explanation than the one I gave last time.

The more we become accustomed to a given form of a collection, reading it again and again for fun and for a purpose, the more strongly we react to the sudden change of scenery, especially when the new edition adds new material that challenges our impressions of analogies, visual and aural, with the old book. Up to now, we knew three books of Patrikios, the first two with some overlap in time: the Dirt Road, consisting of seven, as a rule multipart compositions, written between the summer of 1952 and the winter of 1954; the Apprenticeship, divided into six sections, covering in its 171 short poems the decade 1952-1962; and finally the Optional Stop, with twenty-six mature poems, the earliest of which was written in September 1967 and the latest in June 1973. These three divisions permitted some general and some specific, almost automatic, evaluations and some easy characterizations: for example, early epic-lyric period (Dirt Road), middle dramatic (Optional Stop). All of a sudden, the first volume of the new edition arrives, reversing this three-part system and its assignation. It takes us back four or five years earlier than the origin known until now (from 1952 back to 1948). It presents four new collections of compositions: Return to poetry, 1948-1951; Largo, 1951; Exercises, 1952; and End of the Summer, 1953-1954. To some extent it also changes the structure of the old Dirt Road (the first part, with the characteristic name ‘Long letter’, now becomes an independent collection) and also rearranges the material of Apprenticeship (the forty-six poems of the section ‘Years of the Stone’ now become independent and provide a counterpoint to the preceding collection).

All these new facts (and I remain intentionally on the surface) require time to learn and digest – to juxtapose them with the old and wait for the result. And though it is possible that the surprises coming from the expected combination will not reverse the basic features of Patrikios’ poetic and political ethics, the careful reader will find, to be sure, corners and shadows that were not suspected before. Let us mention, for instance, the enthusiasm for music. To note one aspect of this, musical terminology often provides titles and names for collections and parts of this early work: Variations on Two Themes, Largo, Exercises. Also evident is the dual disposition of the poet towards the smooth narrative advance and the instant dramatic stop. In addition, Kariotakis’ radical satire dominates this work both in terms of structure and in metric forms, while at the same time the poet confesses his admiration for conservative Eliot and his devotion to socialism. All these features, and many more not at all insignificant both for the practice of the art and for the purposes of action, are now for put on the scales for the first time, to be weighed. But, as we have said, there is no need for haste. As long as one suspects there is a void, he is in no danger, I suppose, of a crash. I return, therefore, more or less, to the trodden paths of the well-known poetic trilogy of Patrikios, to supplement and complete what I have promised.

The optimistic revolutionary spirit that characterizes primarily the first collection of Aris Alexandrou can also be easily recognized in Patrikios’ early poetry. In his case, in fact, the commandments of the left are, I would say, accepted more magnanimously, and the result of this freshness often leads to an optimistic climate of humanistic communism.

However, Patrikios’ personal ethics is defined not as much by the years of struggle in the resistance to foreign occupation as by the conditions of his exile. Isolation, degradation, wasting of the body, erotic thirst and recollection, torpor of the mind are dramatized with increasing frequency, especially during the period of Apprenticeship. A motif derived from these conditions is the human history of survival with all its degrading syndromes: the reinstatement of the outcast in public life is internally undetermined by the ghosts of dead friends and the memories of a group of people that has completely fallen apart.

Yet the subject that also becomes intensified in Patrikios as time goes by is the practice and function of poetry within the sphere of politics and the party; the limits of its effectiveness, its exhilarating moments of escape, its eclectic drama juxtaposed with the events taking place all around.

And no matter how strange this sounds, although Patrikios’ position with respect to the poetic act and its political repercussions is more critical than it is in Anagnostakis and Alexandrou, the final impression we gain from his middle and his most mature work is that we are dealing with a devotee of poetry more fanatical than the other two.

Retaining the division of his work in three parts – not a very clear-cut division, as I have already said (1948-1952, 1953-1962, 1967-1973) – I must admit that, personally, I am more attracted to the first and last phases than the middle one. The first period, centred around the Dirt Road, shows something rare in our poetic history: Patrikios’ penchant for long compositions, almost symphonic in character, with lively language and a style alternating between the narrative and the lyrical. The middle period, that of Apprenticeship, persists in a kind of immediate dramatization of a dense material that does not, however, have the time to be ripened and become the core of the poetic fruit, which is anyway small. However, the most mature collection, the last known until recently, succeeds where the middle one walks on a tight-rope. Because in Optional Stop there is already a resolution: the poetic body is not identical with the material of the dramatic explosion but is composed of its postdramatic fragments: those that suggest what happened before but do not turn it into the main theme. The result is that the finished poem is by now at an equal distance from the poet and the reader in a sort of dead zone, not hanging from the umbilical cord of its creator. This in a way neutral tone permits some movement around the poem that is visible from all sides. In fact, in the best cases, even after the exploratory circling around, the poem still remains in the centre: solid, intact, with many meanings. The apprenticeship to Brecht has already produced its fruits – even in the uncomfortable field of allegory, as seen for instance in the last poem of this collection:



When the oak tree fell
some cut a branch, stuck in the earth
and called us to worship the same tree.
Others lamented with elegies
the lost forest, their lost lives,
others arranged dry leaves in collections
exhibited them in country fairs and made a living
others asserted the harmfulness of leaf-shedding trees
but would not agree on the species or even on the need for reforestation.
Others, myself among them, maintained that as long as there are
earth and seeds there is the possibility of an oak tree.
The question of water remains open.

June 1973

Around the traditional (and Greek) symbol of the oak tree are traced in chalk the circles of an almost Brechtian syllogism that shines, cuts and teaches, leaving always, however, the last door open. In the face of political failure, people’s typical and reiterated attitudes: political mysticism, poetic emotionalism, sentimental exploitation of the disaster, Byzantine anarchism, socialist realism, mathematical sobriety and scientific inquisitiveness. This gamut helps me bring to a close the chapter on Patrikios’ poetic and political ethics.
From Poetic and Political Ethics, based on a series of articles in the Athens newspaper To Vima.