Johanna

If you write a lot as I do, you are always searching for and looking for words. They sit on a page or they talk back to you. That is, you can read the word or say it out loud. The Greek poet, George Seferi , says that poetry is breath made evident. That we do simple breathing and dare call it poetry.

Chatting with Johanna one day on the phone, I apparently said I revel in the sheer joy of sounds. She remembered I said that. I guess I do. It is a sign of civilized behaviour to care about the sounds you and other people make.

Another curious thing for me is I love to hear the words I write come out of my mouth. I sit on the couch and watch the vids I do at good old DCTV and the wholany one passing by. I guess I mean to say that you dare to make words and sounds and then take responsibility for them. They are your children. Your creation. Three. Sense what Marsalis does and Seferi does. Words form our collective memory. They cause us to have tradition that is alive and muscular. Without tradition we become bums, drunks, addicts, fools, warlike monsters. Only words formed into traditional statements of intent can save us and salvage the world. Good words are mantras. In them is salvation for our species , the human one.Four and last, I ask you to respect learning, books, talk that is good, the fine values we find in our culture in all sorts of places. In the tv, in the book, in the eyes of a teacher, in the words of a friend, in the careful upbringing of a parent. It is your responsibility, really yours to be all you can, so we can be all we can.

I learned in my high school how important what I did was to all the forces around me. My family, my Greek culture, my Americanþ
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�Ð8�d� 3�ÿÿÿÿ��в3�–"1� If you write a lot as I do, you are always searching for and looking for words. They sit on a page or they talk back to you. That is, you can read the word or say it out loud. The Greek poet, George Seferi , says that poetry is breath made evident. That we do simple breathing and dare call it poetry.

Chatting with Johanna one day on the phone, I apparently said I revel in the sheer joy of sounds. She remembered I said that. I guess I do. It is a sign of civilized behaviour to care about the sounds you and other people make.

Another curious thing for me is I love to hear the words I write come out of my mouth. I sit on the couch and watch the vids I do at good old DCTV and the whole thing nourishes me, calms me down, gives me pleasure. It is hedonism or narcissism or some other bad -ism, on my part, but I don't care. I love the logos, the word, the bunch of letters that make a thing so real. That is what language is really, just words, made of letters and when we put the whole thing together, it becomes the verbal intercourse of a whole society and a world. I love words. I always have. My first language was Greek. In the home, but early I began to hang around libraries. I actually loitered, as one would in a less than savory place. Say, a billiard parlor or bowling alley.
Since this has become a kind of confessional opportunity for me, I might as well admit that I am addicted to libraries. My pulse quickens when I enter the Wellesley Free Library. I am as excited now as I was when I first went to the annex of Curtis Hall in Jamaica Plain, as a small one, to get my card and take out books about the sea by Stackhouse. My life has always been books and words. I love them both. I get carried away by the smell of a library, by the rush of colors on the jackets, by the sheer number of books, each representing some author at his or her best. Seems to me a library is an assemblage of genius-type people and I am at the party. I am also prone to slip into street American at any time . This makes me less than grammatical, so a student shouldn't take what I say too seriously. I am not much of an example to follow.

I wish to share with you today some things I am working on. I've done some forty or so vids on a variety of subjects. The Greek diaspora, movie reviews, a cow farm in Medway. I have loved the words of Rita Attegretto in the two shows we did on her poetry, called Treasures and Rita. Also the vid on John Wright's marvelous grandfather. The work is fluid. I sit and I write. The key , I say to you, the young who will occupy our adult seats in society soon enough, is in work, work, work. If one does enough of it, the quality sort of improves all by itself. That is how I see it.

So let me dream about the things I dream about, with you. It is my love affair with the words I speak on the tv. I did a show on the two masters, Langston Hughes , the poet and writer and also the musician and intellectual, Wynton Marsalis. I shall start there. Here is a little poem I like. Aspiration by Langston Hughes. When I read it , I think. What the poem means to me. I am not nervous. It is selfish to be nervous. When I read a poem, it is a special event for me. It is a kind of rescue.... off the page. It makes Langston Hughes live for me again. Almost like I can feel him in the room with me. I know a bit about him and what he means for the African American literary and poetic tradition. I can read. I can think. I can make a sound with my voice. Here goes. I am a lucky person.

I wonder how it feels\ to do cartwheels?| I sure would like to know.

To walk a high wire\is another desire\ In this world before\ I go.

It's just a little thing but I like it very much.

And here is the music person , Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, anothe genius to say a few words of his own, about his forebears, the musicians who preceded him in jazz. They are just words, but it becomes apparent quickly that they are not just words, really, but interwoven emotions and feelings all vibrating on the page. About the old oak trees of men who preceded him. "Look close and you will see a timeless joy in these ol' oak trees of men. They have touched divine intelligence through music, and that is their identity. They were born to proclaim the majesty of the blues and it is how they will go down , swinging."

Marsalis is just talking but it is strategic talk. It is not talk about a dunkin donut or what you did last night or saw on the tv or talk about clothing or food. It is talk about tradition and powerful emotions that drive men and women. It is serious talk and that makes it good indeed.

I spend a lot of time with George Seferi, the poet who lived into the early 1970's. He is an inspiration to me and I will tell you why. He uses plain speech. The plainer the better. Like Marsalis, there is nothing casual or diffident in his approach. He is deadly serious as if what he says can make a difference. He thinks he matters. He goes through a couple of world wars, two balkan wars, a horrible civil war in Greece, the disaster at Smyrna, four years of Nazi occupation, the change in Greece from an agricultural nation to one industrial. He really is seldom in a kidding mood. He is a diplomat, out of the country most of the time. In what we call the diaspora. So many of our great poets and writers have been in the diaspora and not residing in the homeland. About war, here are a couple of lines. In a poem.

We should consider how we go forward.

It should be in some other way.

Besides killing and lying and all that. He uses the words economically, Like Hughes does in his poems.

I should like to do a few lines of Seferi for you from what I feel is his greatest piece, " Three Secret Poems." He thinks the sun and the fire can cleanse. He senses his own mortality. He will die soon. He is most concerned as all intelligent people are about human, cultural continuity. The kind that can and will bind us together as Americans, or Greeks or citizens of the world. I hope you know what is meant by continuity. It is the string, the tie between you and me. One generation that is older with another that is younger. I am after Senor Seferi. I am younger. I can carry the cultural burden to the next mountain and then pass it over to the next ones to follow. In my case I try to convey feeling and love to ones in their thirties, and to ones like you who are younger.

Seferi gives us,
"When will you speak again? Our words are the children of many people. They are sown, are born like infants, take root are nourished with blood."

He has the clear knowledge that there are no survivors in this our life. He goes on to say

"As pine trees\hold the wind's imprint\after the wind has gone, is no longer there\ so words\ retain a man's imprint\ after the man has gone , is no longer there."

So my friends we believe that words are the key to our immortality and the survival of our culture, whatever it is.

I would like to finish with a few phrases I am working on and play with, hoping to build a story or a poem around.

I came on the line a few days ago. Taxi to the sun. I was reading Odyseas Elytis. Another poet and he is always traveling to the light, so to speak. I would like to do something called, "Taxi to the Sun." I bet it would be a nice essay. I just have to write the thing.

He has a way with words. Here is how he sounds in English. Or I should say American. He says the Meditterannean zone is a precise moment. That it is a sensation that is frozen in time. Here is how he puts it. "Drops of light fall in the soul's large night, slowly, like drops of lemon on polluted water."

He reminds us of another Mediterranean Brother, Picasso who said, "The things of this world have a right to light." Nice line.

We may despair about the depressing times in the homeland , The poetry of Greece tends to be so heavy and scary and sad so Elytis says we have to lighten up and play and have fun. That is our mission as Greeks and as citizens of the Aegean sea and Meditteranean ocean. He tells us in plain words,that "it's crucial to unretire our liveliest self."

He is an explorer, like we have a ford explorer or a land rover explorer. His is a call to arms. The call to do art that is positive and lovely and romantic and joyous. ANd of course, Elytis's vast works are that way. He says to us,.
:"I want the first glimpse of the world....there are so many little things no-one has managed to explore.

Then he calls us. "Come you, who knows, let's do it one more time!In this horrid, frigid city, can we show people their immortal side once more?

Look, look; the dead- I do not fear the dead, I do not pity them. Death shall have no dominion. It is in our future. We are all in our future. Let's go. Music! Horses! Lights!"

You need to know there is a second condition of the world. It is occupied by artists, poets, jugglers, musicians. They go in their special room and won't come out until they are through. They form the future of the world. Point to directions. Some do it with words. Minor artists like me , who write and speak words. And every time I speak I am almost speechless at the beauty of words made sound.

I will finish now with a poem I did and one by my beloved, Nikiforos Vrettakos.\

Gold plate telephone. It is about how lonely some of us get in this America of ours. They speak in measured tone, They speak in dulcet moan, on gold plate telephone dial tone all alone.

One more

Americans one day

Decided to do me a favor\they had everything\ tried everything\ they made art\ It makes me happy.

ANd this is the philosophy of flowers by Vrettakos. One poem from a symphony of words he did on his beloved flowers. It is hard to know which to pick. Spring is here and the poet the greeks call god's little pauper comes into my mind a lot.

I'll do my favorite. I used it in a video I did with fotos of my family, the one that raised me. I was an orphan and this family took me and my mom in. The faces of the flowers.

Gia mia akomy fora, stamatysa.

symera ki ora polly kytousa

to prosopo enos louloudiou

bryka ta matia tou

Eskypsa

Mesa tou

ki eniosa

theos

kai giomisa agapy

giomisa evlabia

giomisa anthropo

For one more time, I stopped today and for a long time I looked at the face of a flower. I found its eyes.

I leaned over

inside it

and sensed awe

and filled up on love

filled up on godliness

filled up on humaness

As a one-time teacher of sorts, I must summarize for you, so as to make me feel better. That maybe I have taught you something. And the way one does this is efficiently. Using numbers to make the whole thing more orderly, scientific and scholarly. So here goes. One. Love words. They are but sounds waiting to happen. Two. Write a lot and stnand up and read your stuff out loud to culture, my city, Boston and on and on. I learned I mattered. It helped me get through the mess of my life. Any life is hard and yours won't be easy. If strong words are our companions and their sounds stay in our ears, we will make a good life and that is my wish for you all.

began to hang around libraries. I actually loitered, as one would in a less than savory place.