Artistic statement by te poet

I think poets write to account for that first poem nobody understood.
Poetry is like water. It’s all around us, inside us, but we don’t know we are made of water. It’s the same with poetry. We find ourselves – whether on land or inside land-imitating contraptions, floating, submerged or airborne – at the center of water. And water, of which we are mostly made, is at our center. We are born bathed in fluids and we are washed when time comes for us to sink. But we are mostly not aware of this.
It’s the same with poetry. It’s all around us. It is inside us. But we rarely, if ever, know it. Our solidity depends on being fluid. There is no life without poetry. Poetry (from poiein, which means “to make”) is what we make. Life is what we make of it. It is perhaps sad, but may also be fortunate, that we don’t know it.
Ink is fuel spent on the road. We may wish to change the future thereby. Instead, we are only able to change the past, by rewriting it. The conflict between the oral and the written, between form and content, between history and creation: These are all represented here.
Is a road book a book for the road? We wish roads to take us somewhere, anywhere. What is certain is that they take us away.
The content or theme of a poem must be conceived of as a pretext. It is literally not the text. When confronted with grand ideas, I become a formalist. If confronted, however, by formalities, I’d rather go for content.
In poetry, what matters is not what you say, but how you say it. Having said this, it only matters if you have anything to say.
Poetry emerges at the border between the written and the oral. It is a struggle, a contest, and a sexual union between these two forms or forces of language. In epic times, memory aided by metered rituals became a registry and writing depository. In our times — in the West since Gutenberg, that is — poetry is a necessarily written craft that returns or must pretend to return (as no origin is authentic) to its oral origins.
This is why readings are required. Although contemporary poetry is too complex to be understood without the hypertextual assistance provided by books or other print and electronic media, very much is lost if voices are not heard.
Good advice to poets is to write. Better advice is to read. The best advice is to erase what they cannot hear.
Any potentially outstanding act of creativity, such as poetry, is a denial of history. It is an act of standing out of the stream that takes everyone along in its indifferently, leisurely or violently becalming way.
What is heard and is then written becomes sacred. It is a scripture. Each poem starts a new religion. Human modesty is firmly based on this kind of hubris.
At the same time, humans are both creators and creatures of history. Their home is to be found neither in concrete houses nor in abstract nature. The home of humans is history, which is lived self-knowledge that appears to exceed understanding.
Poems, when and if they work, as acts of human creation, are historically grounded to the extent they deny their parentage.
Don’t think of poetry as exalted or obscene. It’s both. Very much like mathematics, poetry is an inquiry into the universe that takes humble, everyday words — similar to numbers crunched by accountants — and builds simple and elegant linguistic designs that can only be compared to the enchantment of higher mathematics.
Diaspora and exile are necessary conditions for writers today. Whether internal or external, imposed or elected, ugly or beautiful, these experiences always raise their head into a writer’s lap.
Since Babel, language is provincial and the dream of a universal tongue leads to nightmares. Writers, even when their words become the coin of a lingua franca, are provincial creatures whose home turns into a language in exile.
Poetry may be untranslatable, but language of and by which it is made, is by definition translatable as it belongs to a community of speakers.
As hare-brained as writers may be, they still resemble turtles in their motion, alive in the shell of their language as they move it along persistently in hieroglyphic, cuneiform, ideogram-generating, alphabetic or any other conceivable patterns.

excerpted from: Interview with Chouliaras Kathimerini English Edition/International Herald Tribune

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Artistic statement by te poet