The Poet’s People

We have to learn not to write, the poet says with great intensity. Not to write! We write too much, he says. We think we can write, and that we're entitled to write. But we're not so entitled, he says. We don't have that entitlement, not now, not here.

He doesn't have that entitlement, the poet says. Would could he write? What could have fallen to him, and uniquely to him to write? Do we struggle?, he says, looking up at me. Do you struggle? No, I don't struggle, I tell him. There's no struggle, the poet says. And where there's no struggle, there's no entitlement to writing.

Of course, it would be easy enough to undergo a certain kind of suffering, the poet says. He could come off his benefits, for example. He could come off the long term sickness benefits, he says. After all, he's not sick, not really, he says. He's rather morose, admittedly. Rather depressed, on occasion. But he's not sick, not really sick, he says.

If he wrote, he says, he would be the equivalent of one of those state-funded German writers, he says. One of those state-funded expressionists, there's a lot of them in Germany, he hears. Probably in Scandinavia, too, he says. In Denmark, for example. They're very comfortable in Denmark, poets, he says. They probably have a union: a poet's union.

No, he's no different from them, on his benefits, he says. But there's no point coming off benefits, he says, not really. It's not as if there's a general movement to come off benefits, he says. It's not as if he'd be part of something, a great wave.

To the poet, there has to belong a people, the poet says. The poet is part of a people, speaking for them, he says. The insulted and the injured, he says. Sufferers, he says. He has no people, which is to say, no constituency, the poet says. You have to be part of something to write, but in the end, he's part of nothing, he says.

*

Elytis. Gatsos, the poet says, reading the spine of one of his books. Elytis is famous, of course. Didn't he win the Nobel Prize? Seferis won the Nobel Prize, the poet says, he's sure of that. But Gastos is more obscure. Who's heard of Gastos, outside Greece – is that where he comes from, Greece? 

Gastos is probably a local poet, the poet says. He's probably from and represents a particular region of Greece. He's our poet, the people of this region would say. He speaks for us, they would say. Forget Elytis, they would say. We have Gastos. Elytis is for the Nobel Prize Committee, not for us, they would say. Forget Seferis, they would say. He has his admirers, they would say – even they admire him – but Gastos, now. Gastos: he's our poet, they would say.

Mitteleuropa is very regional, the poet says. Of course, Greece is not really part of Mitteleuropa, but it's near enough to it, the poet says. It's close to Macedonia, for example, which is really part of Mitteleuropa, he says.

What he knows of Greece comes from Angelopolous films, the poet says. And in Angelopolous films, Greece looks very like Mitteleuropa, he says, or at least the Mitteleuropa of his imagination, he says. It's very rainy and bleak, he says. Does it remind him of Manchester?, I ask him. No, it's more wild than Manchester, he says. More mountainous.