The Poet from Winthropos

Abstract

The Poet from Winthropos STAMATIA DOVA St. Porphyrios, the twentieth century Greek Orthodox Saint, wrote that in order to become a Christian, one has to first become a poet.1 This sense of profoundness inherent to poetry is omnipresent in Winthropos, George Kalogeris’s new collection of poems published in 2021 by Louisiana State University Press. Writing about the poetry of George Kalogeris is both a pleasure and a challenge, as it entails serendipitous discoveries of beauty in verse, which, despite their abundance, may prove too subtle to capture in words. The collection follows the author’s journey of self-discovery from the moment he started writing poetry after his father ’s death in 1979. This seminal event sanctioned George Kalogeris’s need for poetic expression, whose culmination we see in Winthropos. Named after the grammatically Hellenized toponym of his hometown in Boston’s North Shore, both the collection and its opening poem make a statement on the essence of humanity (“Winthropos”). With his father’s joke, Winthrop-os, evoking the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, Kalogeris merges the registers of language, memory, and identity. Anthropos is at the center of this masterpiece. The poet’s consummate art breathes new life in words “dead to the world,” (“Talking to Myself about Poetry”), fusing millennia of Greek poetic traditions with the immigrant experience of a Greek family in 1930s Massachusetts. In magnificent English verse, George Kalogeris unlocks narratives of belonging that had been “out of sight but never so arion 29.3 winter 2022 George Kalogeris, Winthropos: Poems. Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge, 2021. 106 pages. 20.95. 112 the poet from winthropos far out of mind” (“Peponia”). Under his pen, words become mnemonic codes ready to yield a bounteous crop of poetic themes, forms, and cadences. “Honeydew melons, swelling their shipping crates” in his father’s grocery store, trigger the remembrance of long-lost relatives in black-and-white snapshots . As he gently turns over the ripening fruit in order “to keep the luminous pallor of their moist complexions fresh” in the store’s dark cellar, his father illuminates the vault of memory in all its richness of sights and sounds. Throughout Winthropos, the gracefulness of formal versification releases enchanting music, summoning a rapid succession of images. The grapes, stafýlia, the poet and his Uncle Charlie weigh in preparation for Saturday sale at Winthrop Quality Market become a signifier of “[w]hatever hangs / In the balance, and always comes in clusters”—a child sensing his family’s anxiety about the military dictatorship in Greece, the Vietnam War, and the violence of the sixties (“Weighing Grapes”). From vri-shi, the rural pronunciation of the demotic Greek word for “fountain” and its ability to conjure up the poet’s Spartan heritage (“Berlitz School of Language ”), to the Homeric homophones, in modern Greek, for “city wall” and “fate,” τείχη and τύχη,2 fluttering between his Uncle Taki’s cellar in Argos and the burial chambers in Mycenae (“Mycenae Revisited”), language manifests itself as the DNA for culture with disarming immediacy. Even the sound of a single vowel wields the power to activate memory —“[i]ts the O in Victrola”—as the ancestral hearth in Arcadia witnesses the horrors of World War II (“RCA Victor”). A gramophone, sent with love from America to the mountain village of Ákovos, confiscated by the Nazis, and burned in a bonfire upon their infamous retreat. A grandmother who loved music, and died from immolation while trying to rescue her beloved record-player. In Kalogeris’s poems, English and Greek enter a synergy to serve poetry. This happens after young George’s speech class, when the liberating recollection of the Greek word for Stamatia Dova 113 sea, thálassa, during the walk home from school on Shore Drive, counteracts a stressful session of enunciation practice at the school’s basement (“Speech Class”). Or, when mandatory (and character-forming) mentions of horta, “dandelion greens,” before bountiful family feasts in Winthrop turn the humble weed that kept Greek families alive in times of hardship into a diachronic symbol of resilience in the face of uprootedness, as Syrian refugees seek shelter on “Sappho’s golden island” (“Dandelions”). The poet feels...