My Rialto pamphlet won the Michael Marks prize, and part of the prize is that you get to go to Greece for two weeks to be the poet in residence for Harvard University\u2019s Hellenic summer school. I think if someone were to ask me what was the best single thing about this experience, I would say that it showed me how to write about big things without fear.<\/p>\n
Most of the Greek poets that I met and read with seemed to soar effortlessly into the places I want to get to in my own poems, the places I hold back from because of a fear of \u2026 I\u2019m not exactly sure what, but anyway let\u2019s not get into that now, let\u2019s ask where the Greek poets go, because that\u2019s what matters. They kept returning to the high risk place where poetry is about the soul, and death, and love, and beauty, and myths – the place where bits of myth fall into their laps, soft and ready to be made into poems. And they used the whole array of words associated with those things \u2013 precisely the words that I can remember being slapped on the wrist for using in some of my first workshops. I can still remember the advice that it was better not to speak directly about beauty, or the wince of embarrassment when I was told that an allusion to Odysseus was pretentious.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying that there aren\u2019t British poets who write about these things \u2013 of course there are \u2013 but rather that an emerging poet in this country, someone who is just starting out, is too likely to get the message that taking one\u2019s images into this area is a foolhardy thing to do, something to be discouraged.<\/p>\n
One of the poets I met in Greece, Siarita Kouka, writes about exactly this.<\/p>\n
Beautiful the lists of words
\nFrom alpha and epsilon.
\nIt is urgent to have a flexible language
\nTo allow a beginners’ poetry
\nThe bravery of ignorance
\nThe sweet swoon of idiosyncrasy.
\nSo you handle it
\nWithout shame
\nYou play with passion like a child
\nTo offer succour.<\/p>\n
\u2018Shame\u2019 is absolutely the right word, and the more I think about it, the more I think that\u2019s the source of the fear.<\/p>\n
But my fortnight was too rich for me to stop at a single best thing. The other best thing was taking part in the Paros translation symposium in Athens. I loved this not only because I am new to the slightly giddy ego boost of having my poem translated at all, but also because it made me aware of the very specific sorts of precision that poems call for. What I found, was that sometimes, at least, this precision is not located in the words \u2013 the words are the vehicles that get you there. So for example when we were working on a poem, either my own or someone else\u2019s, we were often looking for a word that would identify a precise bit of something; a particular place within the body, a particular part of a ship, a colour or a texture. When we got stuck we used gestures or drawings \u2013 which was possible because the solution to the problem was not so much the word as the thing the word served to name. And what I noticed was that the places where we got stuck, were the places where the poem was at its strongest, where it was pushing itself right up against the limits of expressibility. So there was an amazing sense in which translating a poem is like having another go at writing it, only this time it isn\u2019t a solitary activity, it\u2019s a collective one.<\/p>\n
My residency began on the day of the Tsipras\u2019 referendum, and ended as angry crowds demonstrated in front of the Parliament building in Athens. And of course everyone was talking about the crisis, constantly and passionately. So it would be odd not to say anything about that here. But in a way I don\u2019t want to because now I\u2019m back in the UK, that way of talking about Greece, as a place of crisis and economic failure, strikes a very different note. It is as if the whole conversation has shifted into a harsher, more judgemental key where Greece has to constantly wear its humiliation every time it appears in front of us. And I don\u2019t want to take part in that conversation because the place I\u2019ve been lucky enough to go to isn\u2019t essentially the country of financial failure. It is so much more than that.<\/p>\n