MPR’s Beth Friend interviews Greek nature poet Olga Broumas, who discusses her viewpoint on poetry and teaching. Feature also includes readings of poems “The Massacre” and “The Bird,” from her book “"Perpetua."

The Massacre -
The friends of the dead lie on my table.
I do what I can
with their breath and my hands.
Witless, the birds are singing.
The crocus-garland month lengthens our light.
I want it
always to be light. I fight the night
and win. I peel my eye
against the black and white
TV until it dawns then sleep.
The Palestinian and Boston
homeless split the screen.
Number of children living on Brazilian streets.
What is forty million? Jeopardy's prey fill the camera
their stripped and stunning faces
emblazoned in the halogen
a kind of sustained lightning
and the peasant heart
who counts the seconds between flash
and fall of thunder shrinks
from the looming toll.
Horror is toxic.
The lesions
on our organs keep the score.
The gentle and the hard are being
taken
in legions and the globe
might shake us off its flank like quarry dust
and start again with something less
free, less
wrecked by greed but it suffers us
on its blue cetacean patience
like festered barnacles.
Like counted sheep midair over a stream
the friends of the dead pause on my table.
The shofar is ringing like starlight
too young to have reached us.
I do what I can
with their breath and my hands.

The Bird -
To make poetry's possible
At home even briefly in the human wild…

Transcript:

(00:00:00) I've always trusted my body much more than my mind because my mind has been in school for how long you know, 20 some years and then I'm teaching so it's been in school basically since I was 6 nobody has done too much to my body and my mother said me and you know to ballet but that didn't work out too. Well, and I've done a lot with my body with a lot of yoga and I've done many many body oriented. Activities but it hasn't been as indoctrinated and I trust the information that I get from my senses first takes a long time for me to trust the interpretation that my mind puts on that information. And also I do think because I'm not a native speaker that there is a stress in speaking English for me, which I'm not aware of but it is always a little leap whereas the sensual information.
(00:00:57) His immediate
(00:00:58) so it rests me to live among the immediate perception of the
(00:01:02) body.
(00:01:04) I've been a massage therapist now for nine years in a licensed what I've been doing for much longer than that and I love it as work for one thing. It's quiet. I mean you say hello. How are you feeling today? You say please breathe you say? Oh, I'm glad you feel better. You said goodbye, and that's about it. I like a lot of Silence. I spend many many hours. Hours a day in silence. That's part of my discipline as a writer is to listen. Writing is interesting in that although the deals with language. It can only be generated and silence much the same way as photography which deals with light can only be generated in a dark room for me at least. So it gives me an opportunity to work to to enact a lot of my beliefs about kindness and gentleness and generosity and immediacy and honesty and caring in a very immediate
(00:02:01) way and still be quiet, you know, but it also seems to be a
(00:02:09) metaphor for creating poetry and for writing. I know that you're going to be speaking here giving a presentation on Saturday and the name of that presentation is body sound and text a kinesthetic consideration of composition. So you're making here some kind of relation between the body and its Movement and the composition of poetry. Well the you know poetry has to do with rhythm and and Rhythm has to do with breath and heartbeat and that's that's where it all begins. I mean, there's there's really only four ways to make rhythm in English and in most languages, you know, you can go to the doctor or Dada or Dada or Dada that's
(00:02:49) it and all of those are variations of the heartbeat and
(00:02:54) I wrote my first first two books while I was walking they have the rhythm of walking in them. I often tell my students if they're having trouble with revision to memorize the poem and go for a walk or memorize the poem as you're going for the walk because all the syllables that are extraneous will have to fall off The Walking will not allowed. Those are the kinds of things you'll be talking about on Saturday. Yes. And is that how you teach when you want to teach someone how to put their heart on paper? I well when I teach at a university, I am usually In 2 Min a three-hour format or something like that, even then I take 40 minutes of that three hours and do some Bodywork and some breath work and get people to really feel their emotions rather than intellectual by about their emotions. When I teach privately I teach a seminar class. We did two hours worth of movement and breathing and then we do vocalizing which really makes you aware of the source of the voice, you know, people could talk about finding their voice, but they don't actually I do that it's a metaphor. Whereas when my work we really work with vocalizing and understanding the stage of the mouth because really a piece of
(00:04:05) literature
(00:04:07) virtually takes your
(00:04:09) mouth, you know, when you're reading and shapes it
(00:04:13) into long A's or a multiple of owes or whatever it is that it's doing and I think a writer has to be aware of that. And then after we do about four and a half hours worth of that kind of thing we do what is normally called the work.
(00:04:25) Up and I like teaching like that very much. It's so
(00:04:30) brings up an enormous amount of feeling and people and it also brings up an idiomatic language because we grow up and we live in such a devalue
(00:04:41) language Arena or
(00:04:44) constantly bombarded by pieces of language that really have very little meaning whether it's politics or advertising or you know, the shorthand that we Use every day and to go from that into speaking simply and truthfully and its complexity something that you feel in. Your own Cadence is a long
(00:05:07) leap and I find that using these techniques helps make that leap
(00:05:13) so that when someone create generates a text at the end of those four
(00:05:17) hours, it's much more personally
(00:05:20) idiomatic than what they might have generated the night before. Can we read she'll learn where to from perpetua? Sure. I will let you choose and I'll read a part two of a poem called a massacre. Okay, which I also often called the masseuse. Why do you choose it today? I like this poem a lot. It was one of the last poems that I wrote for the book and I feel that it. It is learned from the book, you know, you work for eight years and you learn and then the last poems you write. Hopefully hold all that learning in them
(00:05:55) and then you finish the book and you have to learn
(00:05:56) all over again. The friends of the Dead lie on
(00:06:03) my table, I do what I can with their breath and my hands witless the birds are singing
(00:06:12) the crocus Garland month lengthens are light. I wanted always to be
(00:06:17) light. I fight the night and win
(00:06:21) I peel my eye against the black and white TV until it Dawns then sleep the Palestinian and Boston homeless.
(00:06:29) Flip the screen
(00:06:31) number of children living on Brazilian streets. What is 40
(00:06:36) million?
(00:06:38) Ja Purdy's pray still the camera, they're stripped and stunning faces and blazoned in the
(00:06:43) halogen a
(00:06:44) kind of sustained
(00:06:45) lightning and the peasant heart who
(00:06:48) counts the seconds between Flash and full of
(00:06:51) Thunder shrinks from the looming toll. horror is toxic the lesion on our bodies keep the score
(00:07:01) the gentle and the harder being taken and Legions on the globe might Shake us off its flank like Cory dust and start again with something less free less wrecked by greed but It suffers
(00:07:15) us on its blue sedation patients like mustard Barnacles, like counted
(00:07:21) sheep made are over
(00:07:22) a stream the friends of the
(00:07:25) on my table The shofar is ringing like Starlight too young to have reached
(00:07:31) us. I do what I can with her breath and my hands.
(00:07:39) So the poetry and the massage is doing what you can against
(00:07:44) what's cruel and what's on
(00:07:45) just very much. So I took a nuclear empowerment and despair Workshop about eight years ago on this book was beginning probably nine years ago. Now it's been a
(00:07:55) while
(00:07:57) and one of the things we were asked to do is write down what our concept of Peace was when we all busily wrote it down the way read it out loud and all of these very active social minded people. Who have really dedicated their lives to kind of serve as had written these very static concepts of Peace absence of War basically and the workshop leader pointed that out and challenged us
(00:08:19) to come up with a more dynamic definition
(00:08:24) and the only definition of new able to
(00:08:25) come up with his healing. If you're
(00:08:27) not tearing it down you're building it up allows me to live a little more at peace with
(00:08:32) myself.
(00:08:35) How do you measure whether you succeeded with a
(00:08:37) poem well, Well,
(00:08:39) if it makes me feel still hopefully will make someone else feel still. I don't know. It's a physical Sensation that I get.
(00:08:46) You know, how do you know when you've eaten enough? It's kind of
(00:08:49) not easy to talk
(00:08:50) about
(00:08:53) but I do have I think I've worked all my life toward a poetry of
(00:08:57) gentleness. I've had to
(00:09:00) pass through searing regions of anger to get there. But I do think that to be able
(00:09:06) to speak a gentle tenderness in the times that we live in. This is a very healing and political act everything conspires against it. the bird to make poetry's possible at home even
(00:09:27) briefly in the human Wild.