LIANA SAKELLIOU Interview by KARINE LENO ANCELLIN
Plaka, April 24, 2021
(Series: The Vanguard Women of Athens)
Liana Sakelliou is one of the Mentors of the association A Poets’Agora, so naturally the interview took place in the neoclassical house in Plaka holding its events. It was a pleasant sunny Athens day and Ms Sakelliou had brought her collections of books to share with our readers. She is relaxed and confident, and speaks of the giants of American and Greek literature as friends. A treasure of anecdotes is scattered casually during this interview about her erudite and voluminous work.
KLA: Where does your literary bent come from? Does it run in the family?
LS: No, I’m all alone in that. Note that my mother has a huge bookcase filled with books, and every time I wanted to read something, as a child, she always found a book to give me. Of course, they were chosen according to her own tastes, and the books had to do with the period she was reading them. That’s in the 50s when she started collecting books. Estia, a major publishing house at the time, offered many translations of different authors, French, American, British, Russian…. Twice a month, in the afternoon, someone would come to her house in Athens with bags filled with books, and she chose the ones she wanted and paid for them. She was eagerly waiting for him to come—he would talk about them. I wrote a short story about this because it’s superb to have the classics chosen for you at your own place instead of having to go to Athens’ center where Estia’s bookstore was. It also offered a taste of the period, the 1960s, such as translations of Pearl Buck’s works, all of which she bought. (laughs). Now it’s something that I do as well, when I like one book by one author, I buy all the published books by this author. That’s how I read Françoise Sagan, Ernest Hemingway, A. J. Cronin, Lawrence, V. Woolf! So, we had a large choice, and that’s how it all started with me. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer for the security it offered.
You have lived in many places around the world. How is Athens special to you?
LS: Athens is a home and I always come back to a form of security here. Nonetheless, I always want to leave and go elsewhere and create bridges. The places outside of Athens give me space, ideas, offer different behavioural patterns. I always look forward to leaving this security, to leaving the city because it is a desert of cement buildings. In the ’90s the architecture didn’t match my likes, we lived in the polluted center then, and we needed fresh air, so we moved out, to Agios Stephanos, a beautiful area with houses and not blocks of flats. The pine forest there is ancient, it has a river and streams. It’s very close to the forest of Parnitha. I go for walks in the forest with my friends who are also my neighbours (smile).
You live surrounded by this amazing forest and wrote about the fire that destroyed it. Do you draw inspiration from nature?
LS: I do, and it really started long ago, with Gary Snyder. I met him early in my life, in 1984, as he was invited by this talented and so humane poet and teacher, John Balaban, to Penn State University to a creative writing class which I was part of. John invited amazing poets to talk to his students on campus, like May Sarton, William Meredith, Howard Nemerov, or Galway Kinnell, and many others, and then John would invite the poets to his house for a party and we would have fun there! Gary was one of them, his immediacy, his style of writing, his life, his love of the world, his spiritual endeavours, he stayed in monasteries in Japan in silence, not speaking to anyone for days on end. He became a Buddhist monk and travelled all over the world and wrote wonderful books about his experiences. For these reasons I decided to bring him over to Greece to inspire my students so they would know more about the Beats, him, and what his life was like. You know, he had entirely built his house in Sierra Nevada, with his wife, children, neighbours, friends and students!
I met him at the University of Davies, where I met other poets from the San Francisco scene, visited his classes and interviewed him. I was a Fulbrighter then, very lucky. He was an inward-looking person and was deeply and genuinely interested in what it means to be a poet. When he came here in 1998, I also introduced him to the wider public, to my students and to high school students and a book came out in Greek, Gary Snyder: The Poetics and Politics of Place, and we translated his essays, his poems from No Nature, not everything of course, he has written so much! (laughs) A student of mine was doing her Ph.D. on Snyder and she and I put the photographs together. Gary taught me to know nature deeply, affectionately. And not to use generic terms but names for its fauna and flora. So, in my poems the roses in the garden are damasks, the butterflies are monarchs, the birds squawking are kingfishers.
You wrote your Ph.D. on Denise Levertov. Did you get to meet her, and what has she brought to your art?
LS: I was very fond of Denise Levertov from my student years at the University of Athens. I did my Ph.D. on her, I published two books on her, we had a long correspondence. She was the reason why I went to the States to do my Ph.D. because I wanted to work on her. I was first collaborating with Professor Audrey Rogers, who had already written articles and books on Levertov by then, and she became my adviser. Denise and her husband Mitchel Goodman were politically active against the Vietnam war. She wrote all these wonderful poems-palimpsests, and you must dig deep to get to the heart of what she is talking about. She had a hard time during the 70s with the Vietnam war, as she would read poems against the war, the most famous of these poems is ‘What were they like’, with poignant questions about the Vietnamese culture, the poetry, the art, and the loss, and her audience would leave the room. She and John Balaban were fond of each other and worked on the understanding of the Vietnamese culture and the people. She sent me some beautiful postcards from different museums, all about Egyptian artefacts. I sent her cards from our museums here. She wrote two books of essays on what it means to be a poet and what it means to be living then. One is called Light Up the Cave and the other is The Poet in the World. I was influenced by her aim to attain in a lifetime’ s practice of poetry the ability to reveal the world, or a world, to others, and to originate meaning in our lives.
As you speak, I want to ask you if we, with our western centrism, have now closed doors to understanding other forms of thought, emotions or even cultures?
LS: No, I don’t think the doors are closed. Being a writer, I want to open doors. First of all, I have to open my doors and see through things. That’s what I have been doing all my life. This is why I didn’t concentrate on one writer but studied different writers throughout the ages. It was Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hilda Doolittle, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, or now various poets of the twenty-first century. Therefore, I chose to be an academic because my students can open more easily to challenges than when they were in their high school years. They follow different directions and higher education does that. It’s also why I translate as much as I can. To reveal something different and strange and unique. I don’t think the doors are closed; on the contrary, I feel they are opening up. Literature and Poetry help so much. The people who write do achieve such an opening to the society where they belong. An invisible wall is always there, but we move ahead. We work towards demolishing the walls. Hilda Doolittle wrote her breath-taking Trilogy during the Blitz; the German Nazis had bombarded London for seven consecutive days. The bombs had a delay technique, they fell, and you heard the explosion shortly after. It drove people crazy and during this stressful time people wrote in order to survive, they went out to meet at the squares, they gave pamphlets to each other, they helped the children whose parents were absent or lost forever, and they survived. So, humanity survives in one way or another. She wrote the third book of the Trilogy, as she was going on a bus ride and saw a square completely bombarded, black with soot, one tree was absolutely charred, it was an apple tree and she saw it blossoming and she wrote the flowering of the rod and she used the patriarchal symbol—the rod, to turn it into a symbol of humanity, of guidance, and of female energy. She wrote to May Sarton: “We are all cracking up, aren’t we?” and she saw a vision on the wall of a hotel in Corfu, which she psychoanalysed with Freudian techniques, but what I want to tell you is that she wrote her unique poetry, her best poetry, to show what survival is. The Trilogy is always current.
You spoke of 'secularization' as being not merely a matter of religion and state, do you think that today culture has emancipated itself from the Greek state?
LS: By ‘secularization’, I extended the idea of the separation of church and state to the separation of traditional culture from individual states. In my opinion, globalization and the European Union reduce the power of the national governments and reduce the value of some traditional culture to a secondary status in relation to a new emerging global one. It is interesting to me that the power of nations is linked with their traditional cultures. Literature and the arts can give people a sense of common character and national identity, and so the arts influence the will of the people to be governed. I think the process of the separation of culture from the Greek state is ongoing, but I don’t think it is complete. I am happy that the state can fund some cultural projects; however, they seem to be the ones that promote tourism. In this way the cultural development is guided by economic and international principles with secondary status given to any uniquely Greek ones. Then, there is less opportunity for the development of the unique Greek past. Tourists influence the preservation or loss of some forms of Greek culture. For example, some folk singing is not entertaining because it does not sound euphonous to tourists but dancing in traditional clothing is more marketable.
What was your role at the Hellenic Authors’ Society and what projects have you initiated there as a member of its board?
LS: At the Hellenic Authors’ Society we give awards to different important authors and translators and academics whose work contributed to the circulation of Greek literature. I helped the council choose to award a scholar whom I treasure a lot, Willis Barnstone, a Jewish American poet and professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, now in his nineties, who lived and worked in Greece. Through many publications, he promoted Greek literature: he translated Sappho, Cavafy, Elytis and Ritsos and collected the revolutionary texts by 25 Greek authors, written during the Greek Junta during the dictatorship, and he and his wife Ellie Tzallopoulou translated them into English and published them in the US. I also helped organize an international conference on ‘The Role of the Author’. But also, what I did for the Society was to go abroad, to Lisbon, and to Brussels to voice the complaints on behalf of the Greek authors about copyright laws and benefits, royalties, etc. We were different writers from the European nations. Here in Greece, we face a big problem, we write books, and we don’t get any benefits. So, writers (if they are not independently rich) usually end up having two or three jobs and eventually they leave their writing behind. Lastly, I organized meetings of the public with important authors and translators, the Book Club so to say.
You just finished a book on El Greco, you wrote a poem on the “Old Flemish Masters” and you definitely have a sensorial touch in your poetry, so I wanted to know about your relation to visual arts or to music?
LS: My poetry is interconnected with the arts, specifically painting and sculpture. In my first collection (Touches in the Flow, 1991) I wrote about a sculpture by Janis Papas of a nude woman catching an octopus. It was a beautiful statue that I saw in a museum on Andros. I looked at it and thought “this is me” (laughs) so it brought myself and the seascape and what I do when I catch octopi, it’s a favourite pastime of mine during the summers, and I mean literally and metaphorically, this is what I do with my poetry. I try to find what is hidden in art. An octopus is so intelligent, it changes colours, and has three hearts. I see how it floats and I see how clever it is and I love to see its nest, so beautifully done. It leaves the shells of the clams it eats outside the nest, so you know that this is its nest when you see a circle of white shells. It’s impressive. There are male and female octopi, the females are usually red, and the males are grey or brown, though you can never really tell because they change colours according to the rocks they live under. They are the guardians of their stones. They stay there and their tentacles are amazing as they swirl and when they float, they dance. They are such intriguing creatures. I have stared at them endlessly and I think that this is also what poets do: they pay attention to hidden details that are not immediately recognizable. I talk about paintings quite a lot, I think.
You also wrote a book about photography, Take Me like a Photograph (2004), and we have it here, is that an artform you affectionate as well?
LS: Yes, I enjoy photography a lot. It’s Elena Sheehan—a Californian photographer–who came to me a long time ago. I had met her at a party in Berkley, organized by the Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis, and she showed me some photos she took of Greek statues and columns, asking me to write about them and I said, “I’m sorry I can’t.” So, she asked “Why not?” so I explained “These are national emblems, and I am tired of talking about symbols. When you prepare a different series of photographs, show them to me.” We met again seven years later in Chicago at Northwestern University, and she brought along Black & White photographs of flowers. I loved that collection because the photos are timeless, and they talk about loss. I wrote poems that don’t reflect the photo, don’ t explain the photo, they have their own identity and they only take an idea from the photographs. This is unusual. They are miniatures, what I am interested in.
Some contemporary Greek poets express lassitude at being enclosed in boxes relating to the ancients. Do you feel this way? What is your relation to ancient literature?
LS: I was born here, and I love being in my own country. I feel powerful about the dynamics of this country. For instance, I feel that Poros is a beautiful small island, interesting to walk around and find its characteristic beauty. I wrote a book about this island (Where the Sweet Wind Blows Softly, 2017) so I am not disturbed by the connection to the ancients, whom I have studied. I have translated some of their poetry into contemporary Greek. But yes, if I have to send a postcard to my friends in the US, it won’t be one of the Acropolis (laughs). This book is not really about Poros itself, but about my growing up there and what the inhabitants of Poros did in the early twentieth century, when they moved to the USA, in order to get a job and put aside some money to come back to the island and buy some property so they could live their own dream. So, I wrote about these people, and I wrote about my adolescence in the summers of the 60s and 70s and how different the summers were back then. Also, how we understand the history of the island, and I have this continuity in me, of course. That’s what remains that matters to me from all this, and I want to revive it with my poetry.
You also wrote about Doménikos Theotokópoulos who is not a contemporary artist. Why this particular painter -- because he made Greece shine with his name El Greco?
LS: Doménikos was a refugee. To develop his art, he left Crete to go to Italy and then Spain. There, he became a Renaissance master. But I wrote about one icon he created whilst in Candia, which remained hidden until 1983. I used different personae, it’s him in the beginning while making this icon, mixed with interesting features that I found in his biography that are not widely known. Then, I talk about the icon when it was rediscovered and its voyage through history. The poems have specific shapes, each stanza is triangular, and the middle is rectangular. I tried to recreate the icon and the invisible beams that come out of an icon for religious people.
ad you ever thought of yourself as a visual artist, a painter or a sculptor?
I only make visual collages. When I was in the States as a graduate, I was trying to write these long and difficult academic papers and I needed something else in my life, so I did collages. I write about art because I love it and if I were given a second life, I would have become a watercolour painter. I pay attention to the form of every poem that I write. I am also fascinated with Charles Olson’s poetics about the duration of a human breath, a basic human function that conveyed a poet’s vital energy, as the measure of a poetic line. So, if you are a tall poet and have healthy lungs, you can transfer your energy through the poem to the reader. I’m short and I don’t exercise, so my lines are shorter. I show my reader what I look like with my poems. Olson created the group of the Black Mountain Poets, and Denise Levertov contributed to the ‘Black Mountain Review’, and we can find her together with Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and others. I met Creeley, Michael McClure, and Li-Young-Lee at poetry readings in Chicago, and that’s what I wanted the most, to meet and hear poets who also were connected to the arts.
My goodness you have met all these celebrities, you are really lucky!
So, you became famous yourself and received multiple awards, do you feel a difference between the very first one in 1992, the Fulbright Αward for the Arts, and your latest award? Do you still feel the buzz?
LS: Thanks to my awards I was able to travel a lot and far away. I could then explore some hidden places that I wouldn’t have seen when I went to Penn State as a student. They gave me the opportunity to go to California which I love and meet and interview and work with Californian poets, and to also give classes to their students. Through Bob Haas at Berkley, I met other poets. Therefore, the awards are important to me because they gave me the means to be immersed in the culture that I had studied all my life, so I consider myself very lucky and I don’t feel blasé at all, or anything like that, because mine were well-deserved awards as I had worked hard. I could not have done it otherwise, and so I did it this way.
How do the people in your family see your writing endeavours? Are they in awe of you? On a personal level, your husband and your son, do they help or contribute?
LS: My husband is American and now of course he is Greek, too, and he was with me all these years and was a great help all along. He is a philosopher and an academic, so he became Professor at the University of Athens, and he gave classes on the philosophy of Culture and critical theory. So, we have a life both isolated and isolating, we each work in our own office, then we share the rest of the time. He is a Derridean scholar and a Harold Bloom scholar. He wrote huge books on Derrida and was a recluse when he was writing. We met Jacques Derrida when he went to the US, and we would drive for hours to go to his conferences. There is this connection Bill has with European philosophers. Bill’ s work was fascinating to me, but it didn’t enter my poetry. My poetry has been influenced solely by my own reading, and mainly what I value from my own language and culture. My son is only twenty-five and he wants to be an artist, with a camera, and wants to do video art. It’s his big dream, he has studied communication up to now but I am sure he will be an artist I will be very proud of.
So has your motherhood been influential in your poetry?
LS: I have written several poems where I speak of the difficulties and the beauties of it. Motherhood is part of my path. Interestingly, most of my poems on motherhood came out now, during the Covid period, as if it was there all the time and now that we are estranged from each other it came out naturally. Motherhood was one of the subjects that surfaced. The other one was my adolescence during the Junta years (1967-1974). So Covid made me go into my subconscious, to find motherhood, the most wonderful and beautiful act on earth, surfacing together with the feeling of being haunted by a regime, and traumatized.
To finish I would like to have your reaction to the fires and the hard times Greece is traversing now?
LS: It might be hard for some people who do not live in countries with gigantic fires to feel the same way that we do. It feels like a military attack. A destructive force – 15 kilometers long (10 miles) -- is heading your way and you are the target. The television has continuous reporting, with journalists shouting quickly, loudly, and nervously over the noise of the fire and the firemen. At home you hear low-flying helicopters and planes all day. The sky is completely overcast with smoke. You cannot escape the smell of smoke even in your house, while ashes cover your balconies. You check your phone constantly to see if there is a message to evacuate your house. From past fires you know of people who lost all their property and people who lost their lives. The fires were more traumatic than they might have been because of other crises. In 2021 we suffered from the constant stress of the second year of the Coronavirus invasion, like the daily reports of deaths during a war, except you might be next. The crises pushed some people beyond their limits of endurance. It seems to me there were more violent crimes in Greece in 2021 – murders within families, like ancient Greek tragedy.
“I believe some of the presentation of one’s gender identity is unavoidable.” How is your gender relevant both to your profession and your writing?
LS: I do not try to write “like a woman.” Some people might say that my poetry is in the voice of a woman because of my themes, language, and my style. I try to achieve new expression – to make language say what it has not yet said and to make it reveal emerging feelings in society. Poetry that may show some gender traits while still transcending them. I have always wanted to believe that the most important human qualities are potentially available to everyone and unite us regardless of gender, sexual, racial, national, religious, or other differences.
Tell me some anecdotes while teaching at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
LS: We had a reception for a conference in a downtown university building. A Pulitzer-prize winning poet had given a reading in English. At the reception faculty, students, and staff were standing, talking, eating, and drinking. The reception was filmed. When reviewing the film, we noticed that some homeless people had joined us. They attended the lecture, pretended they understood every word of it, and then at the reception they ate a lot, were very jovial and raised their glasses to our health!
