Tasos Livaditis-Poems, Volume II

Long Listed for the Griffin Poetry Awards, 2023 https://griffinpoetryprize.com/press/2023-longlist-announcement/ Herbert Read, the English literary critic, poet, and anarchist (1893-1968), said the modernist poet "has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sort. He/she reserves the right to adapt rhythm to mood, to modulate meter as the poem progresses." Andy Warhol, some might say, reduced that equation to its lowest common denominator: art is whatever you can get away with. The poetry of Livaditis fits Read's open description. His poems can be lyrical, significant, and opaque; most are spare and refreshingly free of obscure literary references. He can be impressionistic, surreal, confessional, maudlin, challenging, and very funny. Some of his poems ramble, freeform, spilling on to several pages; others, pithy, consist of a single sentence or two, what these days is sometimes referred to as napkin poetry or tombstone verses. "Don't fall asleep, it's dangerous," says one. "Don't wake up, you'll regret it." The poems read as hallucinations, dreams, drunken epiphanies. "I met Christopher Columbus one night when I was walking, drunk, the roads of old Europe." Or as delusions, ravings, Ginsbergian howls. Some share the biblical cadence of Whitman, and some are cryptic: "I saw the teary old man sitting on his wet mattress, asking for his doll." His poems are set in the ancient world, in heaven, alongside the gods, in the future, thousands of years ago. He writes often of rain-slicked streets; in damp, coal- heated rooms. He's drawn to "cheap hotelswith dirty sinks into which future, unsuspected murderers or suicidal men leaned and cried." Elsewhere he writes, "I lived in rented rooms with their dark stairways that led nowhere." He visits asylums. People hang themselves. It rains a lot in these poems. Cheerful, he isn't. Yet Livaditis can also be humorous: "And when they approached me with pointed guns, I smiled in disdain, and raising my armsI started to gather the annual apple crop." Surprisingly, but possibly not to those who speak the language and can better detect nuance, they are not overtly political. Populating these pages are ghosts, murderers, the poet's parents, a dying brother, an amorous aunt. There are beggars and thieves and soldiers, birds and babies, dead comrades. All are exposed under his critical scrutiny. Don McLellan, author of 'The Brunch with the Jackals'

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