Ritsos, 11 shortish poems from Parenthesis

Hello and welcome to Two New Years, a weekly poetry podcast where I, your host, Cody Rose, read some number of poems every week.

This is season four.

This is episode 31.

This is a poet that I just found out about, Ritsos.

He's a Greek poet.

But this is an interesting and really fun thing, which is that I've been really studying Frank Stanford this last year.

And one of the wonderful things, I think this happens in any body of knowledge, but when you start looking at one thing, then there's like seeds and clues for threads to pull on.

Sorry about the mixed metaphors.

to track back and find like, what are you studying? What's your lineage? So in one of Stanford's letters, he mentions this guy, really liking this guy.

So I was like, okay, shit, I'll look him up.

He's a Greek poet, communist.

Apparently, according to the introduction to this book, writes a lot of really long, sort of like epic working class poems.

This is around World War II, I think.

yeah um and but these ones this one particular book is called parentheses and um it's it's these sort of smaller rarefied and sort of despairing moments um sort of cinematic and majestic uh and then with a with a lot of ambiguity and and you can say oh i can see how stanford would have would have got that, would have had an allegiance there and something to study there, which is nice.

Because one of the things when you're studying poetry, so many different worlds have something sort of a little different that they mean by like what a poem is or what a poem can do.

And As a poet, you have your own world of that, but then as a scholar, you get to say, oh, well, this is one way of, this is one school of thought about what a poem is and can do, and then these people over here are doing sort of a different and that can be really interesting.

So this guy's name is Ritsos.

This translation is by Edmund Keeley.

This came out on Princeton University Press in 1979, and I'm going to read 11 pretty short poems.