Event

Speaker: Phoebe Giannisi, Poet, Professor at the University of Thessaly, Greece

Abstract: A crucial question posed in poetry could be a reformulation of the Socratic question of “knowing oneself”. Who is the poetic self, the lyric I, the speaking voice in the poem? Socrates in Phaedrus offers two alternatives: I am either a simple being or a complex one, as Typhon or Chimera or other mythical creatures.

In her third collection recently published in English, Chimera, (New Directions: 2024, translated by Brian Sneeden) Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics, poetics of assemblage that are both informed by the human and the non- human, where poetry blends with ancient texts, myth, orality, field recordings and state archives.

The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of a community of Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans who speak their own language and practice transhumance. The project tries to recreate from a modern and female perspective a certain relationship that goats may have with poetry, an hypothesis originating from the ancient word "tragedy", "song of male goats". Through poetry and fieldwork, the mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form.

Giannisi will present her way to continue a poetic research where the poetic self is reformed by the encounter with the others and their voices, the polyphony that is always embedded to a place. Her methodology implies a multiplicity of genres and media : reading, recording, writing, performing, or making a poetic installation, and finally, publishing. The poetic material is thus in constant becoming.