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Passage, January 2010, Sotiris Pastakas
This year starts with an outstanding poet, a doctor-psychiatrist that had the nerve many years ago to create the web-page poiein.gr that has developed into a review of poetry. This page has set and sets the pace to a lot of Greek poets by publishing their poems and by supporting the dialogue for poetry. We think that this try is very important especially nowadays that the huge flow of nothingness ostracizes poetry and civilization from almost everywhere. Without poetry there can be no civilization.
Sotiris Pastakas undoubtedly belongs to the most characteristic poetic voices of his generation. Although his poesy is deeply introspective and experiential, it carries clearance, directness and is vibrating from emotion.
The basic issue of his poetry is the human relationships from the angle of everyday life. His poems are pictures of honesty that spurt from his soul.
Sotiris Pastakas is writing clearly without abstract meanings and without being afraid of exposure. His poesy is cultivated, carries a depth of thought, and a power of self-criticism. He shares with us pieces of his soul that are reflected through his poems, which have the power to embrace the community with a special way that only great poets can.
In a recent speech at the conference of the Union of Greek Physics, Mr. S. Pastakas mentions that “only when the Artist is prepared to go after absoluteness and to sacrifice for the sake of it his personal existence, will we then again have poets.”
Surely Mr. S. Pastakas is aware that absoluteness is only notional in life and in art and only through poetry do we mainly search for the recomposition of our own life, but also Mr. S. Pastakas’ writing shows his passion and his great love for poetry, which are necessary elements for someone to belong among the greatest poets, where undoubtedly Mr. S. Pastakas belongs to.
We site below the full text of Mr. S. Pastakas speech at the conference of the Union of Greek Physics, which is an extraordinary text, which has raised many issues around art and science.
We also site a short cv and some of his poems, which we have chosen from his collections of poems that we especially chose for this month’s passage. Moreover throughout the month poems of Mr. S. Pastakas, read by him with music by us, will be broadcasted from our station.
Have a Happy New Year
Lambros Mitropoulos
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Art and science are two parallel worlds. The molecules that exist in them contribute to the creation of the universe by forcing each other back and by attracting each other. I have always thought that the beginning is the word. The word is namely the beginning of the universe. From Homers and even earlier at the time of Isiodos, the whole humanity believed and was fascinated by the poetic verse. This kept on until almost the 1950 or to be exact until the 6th August 1945: with the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima the world was fascinated by something that would slowly erode the interest for the fine arts.
The rapid evolution of Physics and of science in general has slowly transferred the world’s interest from art to the accomplishments of science. The accomplishments of science in the last 50 years have been so spectacular, are so deeply and persistently carved on the notional subconscious of all of us that have replaced the surprise that art only used to offer.
My personal opinion is that the crisis that all arts go through in our time does not come to all the stereotypes that we every day hear: the crisis of the creators, the weakness of the works, the small promotion of art through the mass media, the teenagers that do not read etc.
I have believed for many years now that the arts have stopped surprising the everyday man. The surprise that the scientific discoveries that bombard us on a daily basis offers him, have transferred his interest and his notional needs to Physics, Biology, Medicine and Computer Science.
The poet seems now unable to move: shut in a daily routine that is many times even more miserable than that of its readers, is consumed in trivial everyday experiences that do not have the alibi of the unique and the unrepeatable.
Poetry, as well as the other Arts, is in an emergency need to discover all over again its physics: that forwarding power that travelled it since Homers until nowadays, to take us at the end of the world…The word is the beginning and the word will again write the end.
An eschatological poetry is the one that will have again the first word to our emotions…We can no longer rely on the thought that in “antipoetic” times, the artist’s duty is to simply keep lighted, to preserve the candle’s flame with the hope that a new era will rise…
We cannot wait any longer… Andrei Tarkovsky, the last poet, has shown us the way: the Poet (with the capital letter P already) is the persistent cultivator of the absoluteness. For him to go after it presupposes the sacrifice of himself.
Only the Artist is prepared to go after the absoluteness and to sacrifice for its sake his personal existence, only then will we have poets again. Until then, until all these new artists (in music, in cinema, in painting, in poetry) appear, Art will remain a product for consumption and pleasure and it will continue to fall short of science.
Sotiris Pastakas
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Sotirios Pastakas was born in Larissa (Greece) in 1954 and studied Medicine at the University of Rome (Italy). Since 1985 he is working as Md. Psychiatrist in Athens (Greece).
He has published six volumes of poetry in Greece.
He has also published Greek translations of Italian poetry, including the work of Sandro Penna, Vittorio Sereni and Umberto Saba. His essays on reading are now recollected only on line in his personal site: http://www.poiein.gr
He is a member of the Society of Greek Writers since 1994 and also 1 of the 47 founding members of the World Poetry Academy, founded in Verona (Italy) in June 2001, by UNESCO.
In September 2001 he won a Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, International Retreat for writers.
In 2004 he published his collected poems “L’ esperienza del respiro” translated in Italian by Mauro Giachetti.
In 2006 he participated in Sarajevo International Poetry Meeting.
In 2007 he participated in San Francisco International Poetry Festival.
In 2008 he participated in Ancones’ Festival “Europa e non solo…”
Since 2001 in his personal website (www.poiein.gr) he introduces poems, poets and poetry (…perhaps) from all over the world.
Works:
* The silent fact, To Dentro 1986, Second Edition Planodion 2001
* The experience of breath, Planodion 1990, 1999 and 2001
* The associated to distances, Nefeli 1997, Planodion 2002
* The Chios Island, Planodion 2002
* The experience of breath…on three movements, Melani, 2006
* Prayers for Friends, Bilingual edition, Heteron, 2007
* Chorce, Melani, 2008
* The Chios Island, Bilingual edition, Panos 2009
The Isle of Chios
- 6
I am not talking about love.
Who am I to talk about love?
I know nothing, as indeed all
of you now reading me!
Ignorant and unread, sorrow took me along,
and I passed through the Gate.
I boasted knowing it
before I knew the feeling!
Ah, the big words,
the cries of wonder,
how gently they bend and sprinkle
the unfulfilled vow!
- 32
I want us to walk together
somewhere central, in the sunshine,
on a holiday
in the square of Nea Smirni.
Keeping in step with another
means love.
Woe betide anyone
if he remains one step behind
those who hasten on!
Aigaleo maountain
*
I have no complaint.
All went well
in my life: I succeeded
in acquiring a penthouse.
I can finally weep
with view the Parthenon.
*
Come, come all of you.
The way you are
with the cloths that you have on now.
My old promise
for us to live all together
in a magnificent penthouse
now that Acropolis has died out
I will keep. Don’t bring anything
with you, I will lie down
the red from geraniums.
Learning to Breathe … in Three Movements
Academy Street
to Michalis Ganas
As he walked down Academy Street, he didn’t feel
the yellow acacia floret that came
and settled in his hair. He didn’t realize
that people stepped aside for him to pass,
his way clear - green, too,
the next pedestrian light. He was unaware
of a host of erotic glances,
of smiles never returned, of faces
warmly beckoning with optimism,
Confidence, and kindness. Only when
he entered the lift did he blush with shame,
as he saw in the mirror the yellow floret
caught on his tie; and he smiled,
he, Tuesday’s honoured guest,
invested with the order of everydayness.
Debtor
“On a day like this,” he says, “even I
would write poems. Rich in chiaroscuros
and in the ideal temperature of thirteen
degrees, unwinding with the splendour
of a black-and-white film: the colour that goes well
with human suffering. A poem, therefore,
austere and decisive like an X ray,
about the promises and oaths
we violated, about those gone from us,
those we wouldn’t allow to approach us.
About the sympathy, the pity, the gifts
that no one offered and no one received.
A poem for us all regardless,
wandering orphaned and proud,
each wrapped in his transparent myth,
on a day like this, and all forgiven us
by the month of November”.
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