Kostas Karyotakis - Maria Polydouri

and the Beginning of Questioning

By Lili Zografou

«Men die irrevocably. Poets are just killed. Postmortems don't do any good. Poets' bodies are riddled with their sensibility and their pain of men and things πόνο των. Poets' bodies are flags of defeat. But there are no beaten poets, just like there are no winner poets. There are poets. (page 23)

On 28 of July 1928, with the same shooting that Ekaterini Karyotaki was loosing a son, the passing by of a poet was announced to Greece. (page 24)

«Let's take two extreme views, by two extreme political consciousnesses:

Dimaras: «Karyotakis is not even a poet» (1938)

Avgeris: «A technician with a sick consciousness can shos off his sickness like a state of life itself (1956)» (page 30)

«When Karyotakis is a child the other children avoid him. He won' t run, he won't shout, he won't lough out loud. Proud and terrified he will settle down imprisoning inside him a flock of birds which yearn to fly away in the feast of the dusk. His little spontaneousness, that was left by his "strict raising", will die in the merciless and heartless indifference of his co-students» (page 34)

«Karyotakis write his first lyrics when he is 16. The artistic creation, just like madness -- yes, insanity -- is the exit from the inner collision between man and the world or with his close enviroment. Creation is the temporary abolition of a climate and the transportation to another, which is constructed by the Creator, where he takes shelter so as to comfortably breathe inside it.» (page 43)

«April of 1922. Maria [Polydouri] is twenty years old and Karyotakis 26. And their youth coward and wild, desperate and thirsty for belief will light fires on Holy John's Day where they stand and where they look, from where they pass, any time of the day, at any spot of the earth they meet and their eyes look at each other. Every time their fingers touch each other's skin. Everywhere fires will be arising, to burn the witnesses, to set the traces on fire, to burn down their own bodies.Because no-one else will come, no-one else is even worthy to look at the blinding and destructive flame which surpises, gives birth, drunks those two children, until it burns them down». (page 46)

«Karyotakis, through his numerous inferiority complexes, of birth or acquired, was carving a new road for the poetry of his time, humiliating grandiloquence, the pomposity, the obsession for heros and the sugary love of beauty. He didn't just throw over that Establishment, the sacred order of the bourgeois poetry, provoking it. He has been the first denier. Along with Karyotakis begins the first suspicion that poetry is a weapon, so powerfull and dangerous, as the social revolution. It can tear down values, errors, illusions, frauds. Just like they were preserved by the poetic grandiloquence and the romantic courtesy, letting loose the jingoists, the abusers, the colonialists (the only exception Solomos and Kavafis)» (page 65)

«Only on the last days of his life, and when it seems that he has already decided his death, Karyotakis weighs up the depths of his denial. And he scares in front of the rift that has oppened by his confrontaion with his era, which didn't digest him. An it didn't digest him, not because of his own cowardness, his hesitations, his incompetence to react, with a vigour that he didn't have, but because in fact it didn't have anything to offer to him. How far he sees when he writes his last S.O.S., as he suspects that sooner or later more will see and more will suspect and they will reject what he did himself, with the danger to quit, just like he did.» (page 66)