POET-IN-RESIDENCE, 1.1: Eleni Sikelianos

From the Flatmancrooked Winter 09/10 Poet-In-Residence, Eleni Sikelianos, comes selected poems, chosen by the poet from her body of work. These posts will appear every Sunday for the next ten weeks, after which a new Poet-In-Residence will be introduced and his or her work featured.

Eleni Sikelianos

I’ve decided, in these ten weeks, to run through a short history of my work, beginning with my first book, published in 1993 when I was 28 years old, moving through five out-of-print books and chapbooks to a few books that are still available, and ending with a new poem or two.

This week’s sonnet was probably written when I was 26 or 27, living in San Francisco. I’m kind of retrospectively amazed at the audacity of calling a section of a book “The Sonnets,” but there it is. I was more influenced by Bernadette Mayer’s than Ted Berrigan’s sonnets (I’d just studied with her at Naropa, and her Sonnets had just come out), though I used some of his methods to create them. I’ve cleaned up some embarrassing “yrs.”

First Selection

(from The Sonnets section of to speak while dreaming)

the place between your legs which is the place

arched & described

____between 2 stars

____wound of a fashion, it was said,

________as an orchid, & opens

____sweetly confident in sword/

Swarm your battalions, little brother,

with honey & ants, inch your way

toward luminous night where we

disarm the eye & bone pipes whistle

with birds singing through them, our dark

coral in blood swinging from tide to tide,

never arrived, always just begun.

Begin. ____Again.

—From to speak while dreaming, Selva Editions, 1993