Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Since starting to write 'Profound Thoughts' I have found a sense of loneliness  attached to this form of writing. I have become apprehensive on sharing my thoughts and aware of the fact that they may only be   found in a particular moment in time. I cannot pursue my writing as one would pursue a moving object, it has to come to me. This generally happens when there is a void that needs filling.

Reading Anghelaki's experience of this has made me feel less like an a typical melodramatic art student/writer. 

This I found on the poetrydispatch.wordpress.com an article on how artists can self destruct. 

Matter Alone
(I Ili Moni)

I take hold of an object and change its place.
I don’t know why, maybe something bothers me.
Seconds later
The cloth, the paper
Produces a whisper, a cry
As matter changes position.
Does this imperceptible noise
Express discomfort
Or relief for this new relation
Of the inanimate world with infinity?
Or maybe the object misses
Its place of origin?
A tiny movement,
A glance, a spark of light
And an inner self springs up:
Look how it moves freely
In an abstract now.
Something like a lover’s murmur
Is heard then
Or like a hungry dog crying…
“That is how matter behaves when it is alone” I say
before I am snatched by another silence,
my own.

Katerina Anghelaki Rooke

I'm not sure if it is because she is Greek, but I feel a great connection and a type of empathy towards this great female contemporary poet. Whom “filters her passion through a delicate irony and a calm humanism”.
Anghelaki-Rooke was awarded the National Prize for Poetry in 1985. Her work includes: The Body Is the Victory and the Defeat of Dreams, Beings and Things of Their Own, From Purple Into Night, Translating Into Love Life’s End, In the Heaven of Nothing Was Less Than Nothing, and The Scattered Papers of Penelope.

Lipiu Once Again

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Silence is the language of Lipiu

Prologue

As with love
poems are born
in silence
only that unfeeling silence
has a habit
of giving birth
and swallowing its young.

I.

In Lipiu you study silence

as if it were a foreign language

if you practice enough

you can tell the dialect

of day from the heavy accent

of night.

You learn the birds by heart

and the light that alters

the meaning of nothing.

You will never be able

to express yourself freely in this language

but you will always be surprised by its truth.

You read the trees, the mountains in the

original.

You ask: What do I have to say in this language?

The wounded animal deep inside you

doesn't answer.

It remains silent.

1  

In Lipiu you study silence
as if it were a foreign language
if you practice enough
you can tell the dialect
of day from the heavy accent
of night.
You learn the birds by heart
and the light that alters
the meaning of nothing.
You will never be able
to express yourself freely in this language
but you will always be surprised by its truth.
You read the trees, the mountains in the original.
You ask: What do I have to say in this language?
The wounded animal deep inside you doesn't answer.
It remains silent.

2

Today the rain broke out
in a flood of incomprehensible curses.
On the TV screen humans
move around without sound:
bodies, smiles, embraces,
handshakes, the tying of ties, punches...
I couldn't hear the words
and the bureaucracy of existence
seemed absurd.
Why, why him, the sweet, absent-minded one?
With what does passion agree?

It seems I have forgotten the syntax
of youth.


3

In the taverna garden
it is spring and the blossoming
chestnut trees lean attentively
over the pensioners.
Beards, mustaches, all white,
a little laughter in their faded
blue eyes peeking out behind the beer froth
the slender waitress
like a doll just out of her box
with the divine department store tag
still around her neck.
The brown spots on the old men's hands
—maps of an unknown geography—
the flowers scattered by the wind
on the wooden table
and suddenly I understood silence:
it is the womb of all languages.


4

It is the language of the beginning,
of the question when you search for the phrase
of leaves and you ask yourself what's the use
of so many daybreaks, so many breaths
so many cries smothered in the grass
what is this life for, how will I open the door?
Will I be accepted? How do I take
the first step in the rain alone
toward the first meeting
with the savior-destroyer?
Even the most beautiful imagination is useless
in the face of a pile of days
a shapeless pile, with no scent and no known meaning.


5

But silence is also
the mother tongue of the end
when you try to read the word EXIT
written in the darkness with tar
over a gate or maybe it's a burrow? A hole?  
Are you going to emerge in pain

or triumphantly
or will you have become a baby again,
carefree, sucking the breast-
clouds of the day?



Translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck

This poem and more of her work can be found here..

She also has various books published, one that I would like to find 'Beings and Things on Their Own' won the 1985 Greek National Poetry Award.