'Are you here for the zen thing?' she asked us outside of the 'Poetry Place'. We could have been.
But it was also 'Poetry Unplugged': each one -including my friend Chris Sakellaridis and 23 others- reading for a maximum of 5'. A healthy mix of voices. And so nice that T., C., D. & D., and -unexpectedly- K., C., and P. were also there. Read "A poet growing up" then "Burning candle" -the two poems preceding the last one in the Lifesaver- then "The orchard", that opens the book (in English versions by myself and Stefanos Basigkal). Afterwards, we repaired to the nearest pub - a sweetly summery evening. [Photograph taken in London, April 2009.]
[A piece in Greek, weaving together the Saturday afternoon when I saw Let the right one in, with Niki-Rebecca Papageorgiou's astonishing 'prose poem fairy tales', John Felstiner's two books on Paul Celan, and a Greek version of Tadeusz Rozewicz's poem 'Pigtail'. The photo was taken in Cracow in May 2008.]
February 2025 _ 9 poems in the Greek original (to read or hear, recorded with my voice) and in various translations now on LyrikLine : https://www.lyrikline.org/en/authors/panayotis-ioannidis
this treefeller
Panayotis Ioannidis was born in 1967 in Athens, where he now lives. He works with words and images.
His poems are published byKastaniotis Editions: To Sosivio [The Lifesaver, 2008], Akalyptos [Uncovered, 2013], Polonia [Rhinoceros, 2016], Rinokeros [Rhinoceros, 2020]. They have been published in anthologies and journals in Croatian, English, German, Polish, Swedish and Turkish translation. Also, together with his translations of poems by Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Thom Gunn, Robert Creeley, David Harsent, Michael Symmons Roberts, a.o., they have been appearing in Greek literary journals since 1995.
He is poetry editor of the monthly "The Books' Journal", on the editorial board of the poetry, theory and visual arts bi-annual journal "Farmako" [Drug], founding poetry editor (2019-2021) at und.Athens, and curator of the monthly poetry readings "Words (can) do it".