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Morton Marcus: How did the vinyard door get locked, we wonder. How did the light fade from the roofs and trees? Who will dare to tell why half of us are beneath the earth and the other half locked in irons?

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Hello, this is Mort Marcus. I'm here with Joe Stroud on this week's Poetry Show. The words I just read by the celebrated Greek poet, Yiannis Ritsos, are from a long elegiac poem, "Romiosini," dedicated to the revolutionaries of Greece's

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Civil War, which was fought between 1944 and 1949. Set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, the words introduced both the subject and guest of this week's show, Eleni Fourtouni, a Greek poet, editor, and translator, who is in the Santa Cruz area

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this week for several readings and talks. Among other things she has answered Ritsos' question by daring to ask why half the revolutionaries are beneath the earth and the other half locked in irons. Not only in her poetry and the poetry she

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edits, but in a just released book called, "Greek Women and Resistance: A Selection From the Journals of Several Women Resistance Fighters." Welcome to the show Eleni. Eleni Fourtouni: Thank you very much. I would like, as an answer

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to Ritso's question who will talk and say why and when, I would like to read a translation of a poem I made, which is in my, "Greek Women in the Resistance." This poem was written during the dictatorship of the Colonel, 19- which ended

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in 1974 was written by a woman who was in a prison hospital in Athens. She wrote a very long poem, and smuggled it out of the prison. It happened to fall again in the hands of Mikis Theodorakis who wrote music to go with it. And the title of the

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poem as well as the music he wrote is called, "In the Stage of Siege." This is just an excerpt, and she articulates who might be able and when to speak about that. Perhaps someday, when all is done, when the ice core of

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memory thaws again, when the colors are back again, maybe someday the doors will open -- doors of houses, of prisons, of loves. Perhaps the only ones to understand will be the children, rich from our inheritance and forgiving in their memories,

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children may read for once in time, the clumsy messages of the shipwreck, correcting the errors, deleting the lives, naming accurately, children marked by lightning. The knowledge of their loneliness, their strengths that came to us

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too late. Perhaps the children will catch up with life for one moment before dark, then there shall be nothing left of me, neither remorse, nor my touch upon your hand. I will flow in all the rivers, spelling your name with all the snows heaped

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on precipices. I will have crossed the dark I fear, and my body dead but intact once more, so let's surround it by your remembrance, and this sun in this sunlit, this sunlit life. Morton Marcus: Eleni is here for two readings and discussions.

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One is on Thursday, that is tomorrow at 12:30 at Cabrillo College in room 514. And another will be the next night, that's Friday, 7:30pm at the YWCA on Chestnut Street in downtown Santa Cruz. Her books, translations of her own poems

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and the poems of Greek women poets, as well as a women resistance fighters, the journals, will be on sale at both readings and also at the Bookshop Santa Cruz after Eleni has gone. Eleni, why have you done all of this work with women

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poets and with the womens resistance fighters? Eleni Fourtouni: Well, I have been to America for a long time. I came to this country when I was eighteen years old as an exchange student. For many, many years after that, when people

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asked me where I was from, and I'd say Greek, they seem to be very excited about my being from Greece, they would say, "How wonderful, Zorba the Greek, Never on Sunday," and finally, "Jacqueline Onassis." Of course, this used to upset me very much

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because I could see that most people really didn't know anything about Greece, the real Greece, of course, Zorba the Greek and Never on Sunday are one aspect of Greece. But the other aspect, the other aspect of Greece, the struggle, the

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tragedy and the triumph. The people used to think and still think that we're just a bunch of natives, happy natives, who drink ouzo and dance only, and sit in the sun, and that we do, with gusto but we do other things as well. And this is one

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of the reasons I decided to do this work, only one of the reasons. Well, the other reasons? Of course, the most important reasons I think, are that I am very committed, I am a Greek, and I'm a writer, poet, and fiction writer, and I'm a

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woman. And I would like- I do want to present and to give a voice to the work of the other women who write and struggle in Greece and who don't have an opportunity to put their voice to be heard.

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My first book, "Greek Women Poets," actually was conceived when I was in Greece in 1974 when the junta, the dictatorship of the Colonel's was still going on and oppression was really very palpable. I wanted to participate in the struggle

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going on, but I didn't know how. The only way I thought I could do it was by translating poetry by young poets whose work was oppressed, is oppressed rather, because of political reasons. So I started to collect many wonderful books and manuscripts.

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So halfway through this project, I realized something was missing and that was the work of women. I realized that among all these dozens of wonderful poems and poetry books that I was translating from, there wasn't a single one written by a woman.

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And when I realized that there is an oppression here, far deeper than any of the Colonel's can impose, and that was actually the censorship, illegal, and invisible, and perhaps unintentional, of the work by women. And also, I

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realized that even though there have been many wonderful Greek poets translated in English, there wasn't a single woman. And that's when I realized that I need to do this work. And my search for Greek women poets brought me to the work I did,

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later, later, and my latest book, "Greek Women in the Resistance," because two of the poets I translated, their subject, their poetry, and the subject was taken from those years, the Second World War and the resistance, and the tragedy

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of the Civil War. And I decided there must be some journals, there must be some oral histories, some primary documents written by the women, who I knew had gone through all that. And again, it was a very great struggle to find it

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because it was not recorded by the official historians. Morton Marcus: We will get to the the journals after a while, we will go into the poetry. I think this might be the right time -- and you and I were talking about this way over here

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-- to give a brief thumbnail sketch about this struggle that we're talking about. To do it very briefly, let me just say that in 1935, a dictator took over the reigns of Greek government by the name of Metaxas. He was in power in

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1941, sided with the Nazis and with the fascist regimes in Europe and the Italians, suddenly and without provocation, invaded Greece. The Greek people rose up to a man and a woman, and not only repelled the superiorly equipped

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Italian forces, but drove them all the way back into Albania. At that point, Adolf Hitler entered the scene and he invaded Greece from two points. And between 1941 and 1944, the Germans occupied Greece. There were British troops who were

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also- had been sent to Greece. And when Germany invaded, they were reeled back and in a headlong retreat, they were sent to Cairo. I don't want to get too long on this. What happened after that, though, was that the Greeks on all the islands, the

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Greeks on the mainland rose in huge resistance groups, one of the resistance groups had over a hundred thousand troops in them. And one of the best organized was the Communist Party group, the KKK, who were behind a coalition group called EOM,

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which was the political wing of the resistance groups, and their military ring was called ELAS. To make a long story short, when the Germans pulled out, they had set up before that a Greek puppet government that had security forces, politicians,

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and police forces that were amazingly brutal to the Greek people, their own people. When it was time to disband the armies under an agreement called the Varkiza Agreement in 1944, EOM and ELAS disbanded. And then, mostly through the work of

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Churchill -- whose hand behind everything that went on after World War II has become very, very apparent -- the Greeks were put back into a situation where the government that came in was right-wing and was monarchist, and that all of the people, who

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were the security forces and the police forces and the politicians who had collaborated with the Nazis, were put back into power. There was a bloodbath. Within one year, two years officially in 1947, ELAS with whoever wanted to come back

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went back into the hills to fight a civil war, which was a civil war based on survival alone. Then Stalin and Churchill got together and by 1949, there were only three thousand survivors of the entire army of liberation that wanted to bring

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into Greece among other things: first, to defend the country against foreign invasion; second, they wanted to bring in a democratic government for the people. Now, this is an untold story. All of the histories of the Civil War have been from the

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viewpoint of government apologists or extreme right-wing groups. This is what we are talking about. And the resistance is particularly women who were in the resistance during World War II, and especially during the civil war

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that followed, and the period is 1941 to 1949. Eleni Fourtouni: Yes, I think you summarized that period, the complex and terrible events very well. I would like to just to read an excerpt from the journals written by one of the

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women of that time and in her own words, what she says, and this period is called in Greece The White Terror. And this is what she writes: After our leader sign the Varkiza Agreement and we were

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disarmed, chaos reigned. The prisons were full, the government enacted new laws every day to make it easier to send thousands to their death. There was no conscience, no sense of moral limit, court-marshalls worked overtime,

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and the dry echo of gunshots from the firing squads filled us with fear and anger at dawn. We were numb with terror. We never knew what the next moment would bring. When we left our homes in the morning, we didn't accept to-expect to return in the

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evening. When we went to bed at night, we didn't know whether the morning would find us still there. Every day, there were new arrests, new murders, and new reasons for them. Prisons were full of people from all walks of life: mothers with babies in

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their arms, factory workers, teachers, doctors, students, boys and girls who had not yet tasted life or were guilty of the same crime, believed in freedom of thought, all were tortured, humiliated, broken, made to sign the Declaration of

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Repentance. Murders, beatings, attacks of all kind where the rule. Today one village, tomorrow another. Women were tortured, raped, murdered. To save themselves, many left their children with their mothers, shut up their homes, took a gun

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if they could find one, and when to the mountains. Those who stayed behind suffered years of imprisonment and exile. Their lot was beatings, disease, and death. And Victoria Theodorou, who has written one of these journals,

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and she was in exile for five years on a Greek island, simply because when she was fifteen years old, she participated in the resistance against the German as a messenger and as a person who would steal medicine from German supplies and bring

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it to the partisans in the mountains. She spent for that works, she spent five years in exile. She has written a very beautiful journal and also wonderful poems because she's a wonderful poet. She tells us that twenty years after her

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exile was over, she went back with certain fellow exiles to the island of Trikeri to remember again and to find traces of their lives there. Of course, she said that the island, there was nothing to be seen, the island was made into a

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haven for picnickers. But she did write a sequel of poems, which is called: PICNIC, and I'd like to read some of those poems. Morton Marcus: Sure, why don't you read them now? That'll be

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great. Eleni Fourtouni: Yes, I think that's what I'll do. On these branches I left my youth. At the crack of dawn I prowled around these shrubs for mushrooms. Four years I lived on

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sea-watching. Here I dug, over there I nailed down post for my tent. On bits of broken water jugs, I wrote my verses, hiding them inside the hollow of trees. I've come back to look for them twenty years later.

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And I imagine her when she went back to Trikeri with her lover, or her friend, telling him about what happened to them there. And I imagine her telling her this- telling him this: Against this wall where they stood me up barefoot to take my

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measurements– warm me now, uplift me. And here, where I was pushed down– give me your hand. I'm light now and I wear a shirt as bright red as an aloe. Come over here, where they made me roll the triple-thick barbed wire, wrap me in the velvet of

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your arms. And over here, where I lugged the cauldrons and ammunition cases. Here is the olive tree where I was getting the fifty grams of bitter, tasty "dry nourishment," where I stood up only to be shoved down. I place on the linen cloth the

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bread I made between two poems, here is roast meat and nuts, and here is wine. Let's eat today, let's drink for the hunger of those years. One of the reasons I really love Victoria's poetry, as well as

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the journals I translated, is because they don't concentrate on the horror of the situation, on the torment, and the torture. Of course, these things are there, they have to be there, every situation like that has plenty of this thing, but she

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celebrates the triumph, and the victory, and the resistance, and the creativity that the women managed to have in that place. Now, they were thrown in these islands, the women found themselves alone for the first time in their lives, without men

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to direct them, to help them, to tell them what to do, how to do it, but they were thrown there to be broken, humiliated, in order to sign this Declaration of Repentance. Well, instead, the women discovered they were tough, capable, and they really

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summon their energies, and their creativity, and they created a microcosm, they created a society with everything they needed, perhaps because they had little children with them, babies, until twelve years old, all women, and these people had

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to be sustained. Morton Marcus: What were some of the things that they did in organizing the camp? Eleni Fourtouni: Well, first of all, they put them there without

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any kind of sanitation, no health care at all. They saw that they would not do anything, that the camp management will not do anything. The women got together, they dug up the latrines, they cleaned up the place, they took care of the

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sanitation, that was first. Then they had no health care. There were a lot of doctors, not nurses among them. They built huts with tables, they picked herbs from the mountains because they had very little medicine, and they cared for their own

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sick. Then their children, their children were left to roam the wilderness, hungry and terrified, they realized that they need to take care of the children. And they created a child center where a teacher will collect the children every

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morning and teach them and make them play and sing songs and they became children again. Then they had literacy for all. There were many women who were from the mountains of Greece, the northern parts of Greece, who were totally literate. So the

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professors and artists among them, they taught these women how to read and write. And Victoria talks about the women tracing with such excitement, then the ABC on the sand at first, and then on paper they had stolen from the office. And

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then they realized that they needed more than that, they needed evenings of literature and poetry, and evenings of theater, and evenings of song and music. But creating all these things was a very difficult undertaking, because

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they always had to push against the authority. But- and Victoria again talks about that in the journal. I'd like to read just one passage about that. Well, she says: The more they tried to fence us in, the more we struggled to

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break through. We crawled under the barbed wire to visit and care for the sick. When the fields inside the fence were littered, and with garbage and excrement, and the water in the camp became polluted, we pushed the barbed wire aside, we dug

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latrines far from the tents and bathed in clean water. Finally, we uprooted the fence blocking the path to the wells. The more they oppressed us, the more they restricted us the greater grew our anger and defiance. Risking the few individual privileges

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they allowed us for good behavior, we pushed unrelentingly to make living conditions for the group more tolerable. We always paid dearly as individuals for every success we had as a group with solitary confinement, beatings, and

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additional personal restrictions. Even the children could not move about freely in the fields or the beaches. Fearing they might be used as messengers, the guard put them under the same restrictions as the adults. Once when five year

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old Rula(?) crawled under the fence to play with her friends in the next cage, she was put in solitary confinement for insubordination. But the best, really, the best way she talks, Victoria

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Theodorou describes their lives, is in a poem in about ten lines, and I'd like to read about that: Women by the thousands were walled-in in this empty, nameless island officially declared unfit for human

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habitation, infested with yellow fever and typhus. We were the first to camp here, on this meager soil we worked, we gave birth, we buried, we sang, we abolished emptiness. We build kilns and workshops, wells and windmills. Here we lived out the

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clay age, we dug for roots, we coaxed the music from the reed, we made a lyre from the turtle shell. Morton Marcus: Eleni, let's go to your poetry now and read some poems from what is your second book of poems, which is called,

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"Watch the Flame," and I know will be on sale, one of the books that's on sale. And in the first part of that book called, "A Bouquet of Death," you go back to the village that you are from and where you spent World War II. And as both an older

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woman and then remembering things from your childhood, you talk about things to give a sense of what life was like and the horrors, a poem that jumps between two times, which is when you are a mature -- a woman, a mother -- and then a childhood

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memory that is brought on. Would you read a poem called, "Child's Memory?" And all I will say is that this is the experience that was experienced as an everyday thing, a joke by a blonde soldier in a green uniform with black polished boots, which

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identifies the Nazi Wehrmacht uniform. So here is, "Child's Memory," by Eleni Fourtouni. Eleni Fourtouni: Yes, actually, I wrote this poem in my kitchen in New Haven while I was cooking for my family. And I wrote it, I

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think, well, good thirty-five years after the incident that provoked me to write it. It was one of the first poems I wrote. I started writing ten years ago and I am very happy to say that writing this poem was a very good and encouraging thing

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because I got the first prize in a poetry magazine. Yes! Well: CHILD'S MEMORY Every time I think of it there's a peculiar tickle at my throat especially when I clean fish -- the fish my blond son brings me

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proud of his catch -- and I must cut off the heads. My hand hesitates -- that peculiar tickle again -- I set the knife aside, furtively I scratch my throat. I bring the blade down on the thick scaly neck -- just below the gills -- I hack at the

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slippery hulk of bass. My throat itches, my hands stink fish, they drip blood, my knife cuts through. The great head is off. I breathe. Once again the old image comes into focus, the proud, blond soldier, his green uniform, his polished black

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boots, smiling, he lugs a sack into the schoolyard. The children curious gather, the soldier dips his hand inside the sack, the children hold their breath. What is it, what? He must have been looting our gardens again. Our brown hands

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fly to our eyes but we're full of curiosity between our spread fingers we see. The soldier's laughter is loud as he pulls out the heads of two Greek partisans. Quickly I rinse Joseph Stroud: the Poetry Show once again. I'm Joe Stroud, I'm

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here with Mort Marcus and our special guests this afternoon Eleni Fourtouni. I have a few announcements to make. The final reading in of the In Celebration of the Muse will present Lucille Clifton, Maude Meehan, and Patrice Vecchione and Gael

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Roziere on Tuesday, November 26tg. These women will present their thought-provoking and inspirational work as a benefit for the National Festival of Women's Theater, 7:30pm the Louden Nelson Community Center. Now that's Lucille Clifton,

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Maude Meehan, Patrice Vecchione, Gale Roziere, Tuesday, November 26th. Also at the Sweet Williams India Summer Cafe Readings, November 20th, that's this evening, Roz Spafford, Dale Pendell, and Dorianne Laux will be reading. That's at the Sweet

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Williams. It begins at 7:30, Roz Spafford, Dale Pendell, Dorianne Laux reading tonight. We also have a ticket to give away on our program today, a ticket to- a single ticket to the Pete Seeger concert, which will be taking place at the San Jose

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Center for Performing Arts on Sunday, November 24th at 2pm. And along with this free ticket, we have a record player- I mean a record player- a record to give away, it'd be nice if we had a record player to give away... We have a record to give

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away titled, "Hard Traveling." All you have to do is be a subscriber to KUSP and answer the following question: give us the name of the Greek epic poet who wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey? And if you can answer that question, you will get a

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free ticket to the Pete Seeger concert on Sunday, November 24th at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts. I was going to ask a more difficult question, I may ask that too since if you may not know the answer the first question: name the two

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Greek poets this century who won a Nobel prize? Okay, you can answer any of those two questions or three questions and you will win a free ticket. You have to be a subscriber to the KUSP. Okay, we'll be turning to our program. Eleni, you have a

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book coming out that will soon- that's out there that will soon be a film, titled- Eleni, do you want to say a few words about that? Morton Marcus: Okay, it's not Eleni's book but it has her

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name, so it is not her. And it is Nicholas Gage's book called, "Eleni," which is about the death of his mother. Eleni Fourtouni: Well, yes, I'd like to say something about this book. Actually, it is- what, two years ago, almost three years

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ago, when I read a long article in The New York Times Magazine, with an excerpt from the book, and I realized what the book was about. It really made me want to finish my book as soon as possible. I have been working on, "Greek Women Resistance,"

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for five years doing research and translations. And I was horrified with the one-sidedness, with the bias, historical- the presentation of historical facts. Of course, there's no doubt that his mother was killed. It was a civil war

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and there were many murders happening. I grew up in my village, I saw many such horrible incidents happening- most of them by the government's side and I will never forget the mother and father, they're all people, of five sons and two

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daughters who had fought, all of them had fought and been killed in the resistance against the Germans, who have been stoned to death by the government forces which Gage unfortunately presents as the forces of good, whereas the other forces, the

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communists as he calls- presents as the forces of evil. I'm afraid his historical background is very simple-minded, black and white, black and white against black and white, light against darkness, communism against democracy, you know, this is a

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very unfortunate- unfortunately timed book because for the past four years since the war was ended, the whole movement, the resistance, the people who fought in the resistance, the people who were trapped to fight in the Civil War, they were

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anathema, they were the niggers of Greece. They were persecuted, they were in jail, they could not be given passports, they couldn't get their driver's license, they couldn't even become garbage collectors without having to sign a

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Declaration of Repentance. They were exiled and they really suffered all kinds of discrimination, and for the first time after 1974, when the movement, and the resistance, and the people who suffered have been recognized not- and I mean,

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they're no longer bandits, they're not described as bandits. Morton Marcus: It should be said also that they were not necessarily communist by any means.

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Eleni Fourtouni: Well, the reason that the Communist Party led this very effective resistance against the Germans was that the communist leaders were the only ones left after the Germans came in Greece, everybody fled: the king, and

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the government, and all the politicians went to Cairo and England and left. And the only people who were left, who could really consolidate the resistance movement and make it effective, were the communist who were exiled in different

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prisons and concentration camps by the Metaxas Government. And they were the ones who really consolidated it. Anyway, "Eleni", even though that their personal story is true, the historical background and their point of view that it gives to

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the world about that period I think it's very sad, and I'm very sorry that this book is written that way. Morton Marcus: Gage also moved to the United States as a young boy after that experience, in fact, and was educated over

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here, became effective, a very famous journalist, but was not over in Greece and did not really have his finger on the pulse of what was happening. Eleni Fourtouni: Well, I don't think Gage doesn't know what

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happened in Greece. I think Gage knows very well, but I think he chose to write his book that way. Morton Marcus: Okay. Anyway, can we get to some more poems? You did want to read another one by Theodore [unidentified], I

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think- or it wasn't, it was by- Eleni Fourtouni: No, I'd like to read a couple poems about some of these horrible people that Gage describes, these women again, who wanted to give Greece over to the communists, over to

00:43:04.710 - 00:43:23.280

the Russians. And these people who were branded as bandits, and as whores, and as terrorists. These young women, most of them from the northern parts of Greece, from villages, who fought in the resistance, and then they were trapped in the

00:43:23.280 - 00:43:35.670

Civil War, were executed summarily for intimidation, to intimidate other people. Within- Morton Marcus: Well, one thing before we start reading these [unintelligible] in the poem, can you give the general age of

00:43:35.670 - 00:43:47.250

these women? Eleni Fourtouni: Yes, I am going to. Well, they were between seventeen and twenty-one years old. They had nobody to really work for their benefit, intervene, so they were really

00:43:47.250 - 00:44:04.200

executed and killed. And I took these poems from a whole volume called, "A Thousand Murdered Girls." And each poem has as a title, the name of the girl, and the poems itself, and the poems themselves consist of, in essence, of what the young women

00:44:04.200 - 00:44:21.240

said or wrote to their families before they died. So I want to read a couple of those poems. And to me, these are the modern day Antigones. They're women, like Antigone, who decided they're not going to listen to the tyrant, they're going to

00:44:21.240 - 00:44:38.940

listen to another voice. And the poet's name is called Rita Bounipapas(?), and this is what she says in her introduction to: A THOUSAND MURDERED GIRLS These executed girls are my daughters, your daughters, the

00:44:38.940 - 00:44:57.320

daughters of all real people. They fell not only for political freedom, but for personal freedom, for their right as individuals to choose. They did not die to be silent. This is called:

00:44:57.500 - 00:45:15.860

ARASMINA, it's the name of the young woman. I wasn't afraid of death. I walked tall with him between two rows of guns and silent, bent soldiers. My head was pounding when I howled over the open ditch, loud enough for even the

00:45:15.860 - 00:45:39.230

death to hear, "I'm innocent!" Nobody believed me. My scream didn't break the wall. The wind kept blowing and the city was unmoved. Peiraiás, workers of 5am, factory where I was locked for twelve hours every day, mother, house, winter cold,

00:45:39.830 - 00:46:01.880

small mirror, shining like moon when I looked in you. My twenty year [unidentified], standing against this wall at 5am, that same hour, and the same work dress. Who will sing? Who will collect what is coming to me, what I've lost, and for which

00:46:01.880 - 00:46:20.610

they shoot me down? And Victoria Theodorou gives a very nice answer, I think, to this plea, to this demand in one of her poems, and she says: A passing poet will sing her song, harmonius sparrow inside

00:46:20.610 - 00:46:41.130

the river reeds. I don't sing, I don't cry, I don't forget. I have marked the side of my nest. I don't leave for the winter. And this is exactly why, Mort, I like to read these poems and talk about the subject more than I read my own poetry, but I

00:46:41.130 - 00:46:56.950

think you want me to read some of mine now. Morton Marcus: Yes, let us at least- as these hours just go so quickly. Eleni's poems themselves are really wonderfully touched by the mythic and the personal and

00:46:56.950 - 00:47:10.030

she's already mentioned Antigone. And I would like you to read this mythic and almost ritualistic coming to birth in a poem called, "Good Friday," which is in the first part of the book.

00:47:10.260 - 00:47:26.010

Eleni Fourtouni: Okay, I should say a few things about this poem because it is a little bleak, even though I don't like to write bleakly. And this is a poem about abortion, okay? And that's all I have to know because I don't want to leave

00:47:26.010 - 00:47:43.500

the reader wondering what it's all about. GOOD FRIDAY Your hair still holds the light as you shut the door and gaze up the dark staircase. Slowly you climb, one by one the steps are

00:47:43.500 - 00:48:04.380

left behind you, the scent of bitter-orange trees still clings to your skin. The women sit silent on hard chairs in the bare room, they are glad you too have come to wait with them. The Easter eggs are painted red by now. You think as the clock,

00:48:04.410 - 00:48:23.940

minute by minute ticks you closer to the end of your time. Soon you'll be out again, out in the blue morning, light-footed you'll walk again beneath the blooming bitter-orange trees When your turn comes, the eyes of the women catapult you

00:48:23.970 - 00:48:46.050

through the open door. Soon it will be over. They stretch you on the marble slab -- lovely marble, ripped from the bowels of Penteli -- they pull your legs apart, they strap you down. Morton Marcus: I wonder if we could jump to the next section

00:48:46.050 - 00:49:01.980

of the book in which you talk through the masks of various women from classical literature and myth. And in this one you speak as a character from the Odyssey, a woman by the name of Kalypso. It's a very touching poem.

00:49:01.980 - 00:49:20.190

Eleni Fourtouni: One of my favorite poems. I was inspired t write this poem when I wa reading the Odyssey -- well, don't know which time around - and I came to this passage wher Odysseus, when he came back an he talks about his adventures

00:49:21.690 - 00:49:42.480

and this is what he said: "Th enchantress-" and he talks abou Kalypso because- let me just s y that Odysseus took his time n return and he didn't hurry. A d he stopped for seven years wi h the goddess Kalypso who- wi h whom he had a fantast

00:49:42.480 - 00:50:00.220

c beautiful love affair and stay d there for seven years, so that s how he talks about tha The enchantress in her beauty fed and caressed me, but in my heart I never gave consent, though seven years detained.

00:50:00.220 - 00:50:15.690

[Commentary] I thought that's terrible, that's really denying responsibility for everything you do. And this is what Kalypso speaks: There was consent in your heart when you furled the sail and

00:50:15.690 - 00:50:35.130

beached your ship and let it rot on my shore. There was consent in your eyes when you lingered inside my sea-hollowed cave, when you pulled the veil and your gaze flashed like blue fire over my body. There was consent in your flesh when our hands

00:50:35.130 - 00:50:53.610

reached for each other's feast and we drank long and deep. And there was no stopping you when at dawn -- our limbs untangled -- you'd sit at the edge of the thyme-scented island, averting your eyes, and your thoughts from me. There was no stopping

00:50:53.610 - 00:51:13.200

you, you knew where hard seasoned lumber lay, you knew linen from my loom was yours for asking. And when at dusk I'd take path and stand beside you -- my spells, my speech drained out of me -- waiting. There was consent in your heart.

00:51:13.920 - 00:51:26.690

Because he said that I couldn't leave, I had no wood to make a boat, and I had no cloth to make sails, that was his excuse for staying so long. Morton Marcus: It really is lovely. There are others,

00:51:26.900 - 00:51:39.770

Penelope talks about when she was there, but as time goes here, I would love you to read one of my favorite poems, if not my favorite poem, from this volume of yours called, "Watch the Flame," and that is, "Klita's Ring."

00:51:41.490 - 00:51:57.420

Eleni Fourtouni: That's a very- it's a little difficult poem to read aloud because it leaps in time. It begins with- well, a story about this is a friend of mine gave me a reproduction of a museum ring once- what page is that?

00:51:57.450 - 00:52:12.810

Morton Marcus: It's 64. Eleni Fourtouni: Okay, and told me and with the ring came a little piece of paper with the story of the ring and that really moved me very much. And I wanted to write this because

00:52:12.810 - 00:52:30.360

through love, and someone giving to a beloved the token of love, thousands of years later, we get to know something about it, but nothing really, except that somebody loved this woman. So the poem, the first part of the poem, talks about that, and then

00:52:30.390 - 00:52:42.660

the narrator comes back and talks about an experience of her own. Morton Marcus: And then it goes into the future and that's one of the things I love. It unites the histories and it really

00:52:42.660 - 00:52:53.330

takes the whole human race, a this week the summit meeting is going on. I think this poem really just about talks for the whole population of the planet. Eleni Fourtouni: And to me of course, the thing that does that

00:52:53.330 - 00:53:11.630

is love, and it is erotic love you know, and love, erotic love between a man and a woman or whatever combination one chooses to have. The inscription on the ring, a silver, moonshaped disk, reads:

00:53:12.020 - 00:53:31.880

KAITAAfiPON -- gift to Klita. A museum copy, the original found in a woman's grave, unearthed on an island in the Aegean Sea. No one knows who, what that woman was. And we know nothing about the giver of the ring. But through his gift we can imagine

00:53:31.880 - 00:53:52.220

something of her life. Imagine him, on a morning of a summer night when the moon was a silver disk over the dark sea, stopping at a silversmith's shop choosing his telling gift, and on it, tracing her name -- Klita. A name lost. She must have died

00:53:52.220 - 00:54:12.050

young, leaving no daughters to bring her name to us. Nothing but his gift survives of what she must have been -- a woman with slender hands, a life marked by the phases of the moon. The cast of her face, the tone of her voice, unknown. The

00:54:12.050 - 00:54:30.730

moon, the ring, the name, and nothing more. When I finished what I knew of this story, carefully enunciating the Greek for you, a poem I meant to write once about another moonshaped ring, and a man from Flanders, the giver of

00:54:30.730 - 00:54:49.960

that ring, came to mind -- leaning on the stone wall, sharing a cigarette, our bare backs pressed against the salt-corroded stones, I remembered the topaz, perfectly round, perfectly luminous, set in intricate silver filigree --

00:54:50.770 - 00:55:09.940

on the sand, within our arms' reach, a carafe of ouzo and ice water, a single glass we'd lift to an oversized plum-of-a-sun rolling down the mountainrim, to whitecapped breakers soon to be washed in lavender and rose hues, to the night waiting for

00:55:09.940 - 00:55:31.240

us, and to the silvering moon, full over the Aegean Sea -- it must have been the memory of the full moon over another sea the Flemish silversmith crafted in the shape of that -- the moon, the instant she slips behind cloudbanks, the silver clouds

00:55:31.240 - 00:55:48.250

clustering around her. Leaning on the stone wall, sharing a cigarette with you, I told you of that ring and of the man who on a summer morning stopped at a silversmith's shop and chose that moonshaped stone -- his last gift to me.

00:55:51.000 - 00:56:10.920

Later that night, lying on thin mattresses on the roof of our house, you said astronomers predict one day the moon will fall, will strike the earth, the earth will shake, will turn, will spin out of course, the survivors, if any, will look --

00:56:10.950 - 00:56:32.580

you said -- at empty skies forever. I remembered then a dream I had -- a telling dream -- predicting the end of love, the loss of a beloved man: my ring had cracked, a dreadful dark where once the glowing stone had been. The earth will

00:56:32.580 - 00:56:53.370

shake, will turn, will spin, it may well be. But that night, lying within your arms' reach, I knew that the survivors, if any, will not look at empty skies for long -- I knew that love will seek and find another source of light.

00:56:56.900 - 00:57:12.590

Morton Marcus: Really lovely poem, it reminds me of Seferis's "The King of Asine," in which he looks for some sense to connect the present with the past, but never finds it. Meanwhile, in this one, you have taken the past, brought it into the

00:57:12.590 - 00:57:31.040

present, and continue it on into the future, so it's a much more- how shall I say it? Not- well, it's much more interesting. Eleni Fourtouni: Yes, it is. To me, as I said, it's only through love. And I feel that that justifies even death, you know,

00:57:31.070 - 00:57:47.350

and if love is there, it's worth making the trip from birth to death. Morton Marcus: Well, I certainly agree with that. Let's get one or two short poems because time is just about [cross talk]

00:57:47.390 - 00:58:03.020

Eleni Fourtouni: Too bad, I really want to write two long- to read two long poems but I don't think we have time. So I think I will read one more love poem, okay, which again takes place in Greece and it's called:

00:58:03.000 - 00:58:28.130

AUBADE, and that means, of course, the ode to the dawn. The sun every morning, gliding through vines, through shutter slats, settling on our eyelids, days shimmering with cicadas, unrelenting sunlight, beside me, on my palm the smell of olive

00:58:28.130 - 00:58:50.780

oil, I rubbed into skin, you quiver as my tongue slides along spine, my belly, my thighs, a nest around hips. It's morning now, I sit under the same vines, ten days have passed since then ten days filled with absence. I can almost see you on the east

00:58:50.780 - 00:59:10.880

veranda -- the orange trees bend their branches toward you, the cat, away for a while from her demanding litter, purrs in the shade, the grapes glow overhead (I smell first cigarette when you reach for the second I get up boil water for our coffee,

00:59:11.450 - 00:59:32.690

cut the Zakynthino melon, spread wild cherry jam and thyme honey on fresh bread. We lift each moment carefully from the day's silver tray) and that's how is was for 22 mornings. On the 23rd morning, you reach out to me saying nothing, and I get up in

00:59:32.690 - 00:59:51.620

silence, in silence I bring our breakfast -- the pot of coffee, the Zakynthino melon, the bread with wild cherry jam and thyme honey -- I set them beside the mattress on the marble floor in the cool white room. The gauze curtains billow in the breeze

00:59:52.040 - 01:00:13.530

the eucalyptus trees boardering the street outside our house always still until now always listening in silence toss and turn and sway, pleading with you to stay. Morton Marcus: That was Eleni Fourtouni, today's guest, a

01:00:13.560 - 01:00:33.000

poet, translator, and editor from Greece, and then Eleni will be appearing in a reading discussion tomorrow at 12:30 noon, or a little after noon, at Cabrillo College in room 514. That's 12:30 tomorrow, Cabrillo College room 514. On Friday

01:00:33.000 - 01:00:49.650

evening at 7:30pm, she will be giving a reading at the YWCA on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. The books we have been talking about and from what she has read will be on sale at both readings, they will also be on sale at the Cabrillo bookstore

01:00:50.790 - 01:00:59.940

in the weeks to come. Let me say that- Eleni Fourtouni: In Santa Cruz. Morton Marcus: And the Santa Cruz- oh, Bookshop Santa Cruz as well, okay, at the Bookshop Santa Cruz as well. Let me say

01:00:59.940 - 01:01:12.990

that I think you should read these poems. I think they're very important. Women poets have not been represented. That's in one book called, "Greek Women Poets," Elaine's book, "Watch the Flame," that she has been reading from, and most certainly

01:01:13.020 - 01:01:28.950

a book that I think is a very, very important book, "Greek Women in Resistance," the journals of the Greek women who were locked away in exile, a real history, a very moving history of Greece in the 40s and 50s. Again, Eleni, thank you

01:01:28.950 - 01:01:42.720

very much. I'm here with my compadre, Joe Stroud. Joe, do you have anything to add? Joseph Stroud: I don't. I have some questions I'd like to ask but there are- no time for them I'd like to thank Plaza Book

01:01:42.720 - 01:05:42.640

for providing the support tha helped make the preceding hou of programming possible. Pl ase stay tuned for Leon and The azz Kitchen and we'll go out ith some Greek mu Leon Allen: KUSP Santa Cruz, community supported radio for

01:05:42.640 - 01:06:04.510

the Monterey Bay and Salinas Valley. And I'm Leon coming in behind Joe and Mort with my edition of- well, it's my birthday next week, so I think I'll do a little bit of celebrating, dedicating some things to myself beginning with

01:06:04.540 - 01:06:04.570

[cut-off].