Interview with Eleni Sikelianos

Interview w/ Eleni Sikelianos

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of eight poetry collections, including Make Yourself Happy (2017), The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (2013), Body Clock (2008), and The California Poem (2004). She is also author of the hybrid memoirs You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (2014) and The Book of Jon (2004). Her work negotiates the boundary between poetry and prose and other forms of documentation, including visual art and notebook writing. 

Read Eleni’s poems in TIMBER.

Connor Fisher:  I first heard about The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead from Julie Carr — we discussed it last spring. Julie mentioned that, in reading Loving Detail, she was impacted by how influenced the work was by H.D. I read the book with this in mind as well; H.D.’s influence seemed present in a hermetic, sealed quality to many of the poems (in a good way) and your use of focused — yet diffuse — imagery or symbols from nature. To whatever extent this was intentional, how did you approach the influence and presence of H.D. in constructing these poems?

Eleni Sikelianos: H.D. didn’t influence these poems in any direct way, but I consider her one of the great poets of the 20th century, so it makes sense that she’s in the background.  I’d have to go back to her in a deep way now to think about notions of the hermetic (she was of course playing with her own initials when titling her book Hermetic Definition — but her whole path can be seen as linked to that taken name, and its self-sufficiency and condensation).  What I can say might unite these poems with H.D. is a notion of the self-sufficiency of the poem itself.  That all vision, thought, investigation, and spirit might be embodied there.  That real work might be done there, by both the writer and the reader.

“Hermetic” in relation to H.D. makes me think of the cartouche — that circle around an Egyptian hieroglyph (usually the king’s name) that indicated everything the sun encircled.  Her poems are like that — self-contained and expanding out to touch everything at the same time.

I don’t really see the poems (or poetry) as separate from nature (or other parts of the world), so I don’t see what’s operational as symbolic (or even, strangely, as a use of imagery — since I would say imagery uses me, or the poem, more than I use it).  The poem arises from the world (visible and otherwise) and from language (the part of our world that allows us to think), and is not separable from them.

Just after typing this, I happened to be reading Fanny Howe’s essay, “Bewilderment”: “An aesthetic that organizes its subject around a set of interlocking symbols and metaphors describes a world that is fixed and fatally subject to itself alone.” At the same time, language itself is symbolic, so we are engaged in a relationship of deferral and approach at root.  That is part of poetry’s drive, to explore those proximities and distances between thought, self, and world.

CF: Loving Detail deals in many ways with the idea of death — whether by honoring and commemorating the recently deceased, or by expressing a child’s concerns with death’s finality. In reading these sections, I began thinking of them as somehow cathartic — both to the persona of the poems, as well as to a sort of “ideal reader.” In writing these poems, what was your engagement with the idea of catharsis — not so much for yourself personally, but in the ways that the poems could enact cathartic processes?

ES: The explorations of death came about for a number of very real reasons, the first being that several people close to me died in the time period I was writing these.  So death was around me.  I was also linked to death by birth — you have suddenly to worry about the death of someone you’ve given birth to (how do you protect someone from death?), and you have also at some point to figure out how to explain death, because the child will ask (how can death be explained?).  My father died over 10 years ago, and that is a death that’s always around (death has a habit of hanging around), and that was also an absence that had to be explained.  In a third fork, I woke up every morning for a time thinking “I am going to die, maybe today, maybe not.”  In this I felt linked to Dante in the middle of his dark woods, which he hit in midlife.  You live to 35 or 40, and it may (or may not) be the middle of your life.  You are nudged to thinking about what else you will (or will not) do in the time left.

I was seeking to handle (literally, to palpate) death, with detail and care.  Catharsis wasn’t a concern, though I suppose when one sets out on these inquiries, it has to do with coming to terms.  (Catharsis has been a more significant side-effect of other books of mine.) Death can’t be purged, obviously.  Though our vision of it can be burnished.  I think that’s something poems do — they allow us to polish an idea or possibility or reality (which come in images and sound), not so that these things become smoothed over, but so that they do shine with more relationship.

CF: At the &NOW conference at CU Boulder, I attended a reading by Laird [Hunt] in which he described fiction as “a type of thinking” and a means of thought. I often note similar effects in poetry, including your own . . . poetry enacting thought-like processes through its engagement with concepts, placing meaning in objects as symbols, etc. When you compose poems, do you consider them to enact a type of thought — or — do you feel that poetry is itself a type of thinking?

ES:  Absolutely, both. Poetry is a vehicle and method of thinking, exploring, experiencing, and also of consciousness. “Thinking with the things as they exist,” as Zukofsky had it, but also thinking with things as they don’t exist.

Conner Fisher was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. He has an MA in English Literature from the University of Denver and an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Issue 3