Poetry in my life

Poetry, one of the oldest flowers of this world, was already object of countless definitions and analysis by people who wanted to understand its essence or rather the reason of existence as well as also the reason of life. How it is similar to life itself, that resulted in many determinations; in numerous interpretations one gives poetry a secretive role. One connected poetry with deity, with the sky, one saw in it the enemation of the cosmos, even as poet creator of the world.
The biographies of poets fall to my feet like heavy drops of a sad rain, for grey is the rain and only rarely do the drops glitter. Always I have been impressed by the contrast between the messianic image of the poet, as it is attached to some people, and the often poor and curtailing real existence of poets.

Personally these definitions and theories of poetry do not touch me, except as writing exercises in emptiness. However what I know is that poetry has helped me to live, a half a century devoted to it almost exclusively. But I do not mean with that I emerged myself completely in poetry, in order to forget the poisoned reality. Rather I mean that poetry lies over a path which leads directly to the source of things. To that place where passion develops before it can become love for a single person; the entire notion of the unknown, which life clothes until it becomes fear of own death; and the despise for pettiness, indeed at times for the treacherousness of people before it becomes hostility and to personal distaste. The terrible anticipation of a catostrophe which you feel approaching transforms itself into a ‚holy touch, which captures body and mind’. Or else“ the world reveals itself to you while at the same time it retains the various meanings to itself.…As a matter of fact poetry has given me many magic moments. Thus I see suddenly very clear, for example, how few objective unchanging things there exist finally. That life and death alone, perhaps…That same object or happening takes on in a different light, at a different moment a new value, and has other consequences, mostly upon different facts. This relativity runs throughout poetry, ruling in an almost natural way, then that is the call which to express is what poetry is called to do.

Poetry helps me and helps me to live, not because I believe, since things become what I make out of things in order to exist – “…upon such pretentious hope I do not rely upon…”- nor equally because I belong to an order which serves holy goals. It is because that I know, when poetry is there and close to me, even if it abandons me and I feel myself on my side the air despite being naked and shaking out of cold. Moreover I have learned and poetry has taught me, to present the sense of life as love for life.

Katerina Angelaki-Rooke Athens 24.Maerz 2002

Taken from: 'further stone – large heart – modern Greek poetry'
selected by Kostas Giannakakos & Christian Greiff, Babel Verlag, 2002
translated from German text into English: Hatto Fischer

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Poetry in my life

Poetry in my life