I write poems to create space in language for hope

"I write poems to create space in language for hope"A Conversation with Danae Sioziou Translator's note: "Poem for My Birthday" is from Probable Landscapes (Antipodes Editions, 2021). Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 40] Danae Sioziou (b. 1987) was raised in Germany and Greece and works as a cultural manager and educator. Her books to date include Useful Children Games and Probable Landscapes, published by Antipodes Editions. Her first poetry collection was awarded both the Writers' Society "Yannis Varveris" Prize for Young Authors and (ex aequo) the State Literary Prize for New Authors. Sioziou was, for several years, co-editor of the poetry journal Teflon. Her poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages, anthologized (e.g., by Karen Van Dyck in Austerity Measures, 2016), and presented at numerous festivals and other events in Greece and abroad. She is a member of Versopolis, PEN Greece, and the Book History Hub at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has facilitated many artistic, cultural, and educational projects in Greece and in Europe collaborating with local and international institutions. Adam Goldwyn: Many anglophone readers, myself included, first came across your work in the 2016 anthology Austerity Measures, which framed what the editor Karen Van Dyck called in the subtitle "the New Greek Poetry" around the economic crisis of 2008, when you were in your early twenties. How did coming of age during the economic crisis shape your poetry? How has your poetry changed as the economic crisis has become less acute? Danae Sioziou: It has been fifteen years since the beginning of the economic crisis. Back then I was a student and co-editor of the literary journal Teflon. I have worked since I was eighteen years old to support myself, and the crisis only made my life more difficult. I think the crisis shaped my hopes and dreams and fears, but not in a flourishing way. I tried to understand who I was as I witnessed how people all around me were—and still are—struggling with profound and often disorienting economic, cultural, political, and social insecurity. The crisis in Greece and the media attention it generated increased global interest in all things Greek, but it also imposed certain exoticizing, reductive, and colonially inflected frameworks. It is a fact that things like Greek cinema and anthologies of recent Greek poetry in translation—such as those by Karen Van Dyck and Theodoros Chiotis—have reached broad English-speaking audiences. The Greek arts scene has been said to have flourished during the crisis, but I resist this idea. "Crisis" is more than a term; it is a gaze and a framing that enables certain narratives of the present while excluding others. It's a cliché that art thrives in times of crisis. Artists, for example, need money, and money is time out of your life. I have always felt that this cliché underestimates and dehumanizes artists. Sometimes certain works of art shape the grounds for critique and resistance to hegemonic power and foster alternative languages and radical artistic and social imaginaries. But a crisis can also destroy voices. In Greece, for example, there is almost no literature produced by second- or third-generation immigrants. This is a huge loss. Yes, we can call it a crisis, but that means it requires both critical thought and creative and sustained interventions, and what followed the crisis of 2008 was far away from that. Goldwyn: One of the tensions that I find so engaging is that your poems are not explicitly political but still respond to the current political and economic moment. "Poem for My Birthday," to me anyway, shows how even passing the time on your birthday is shaped by invisible political forces; the narrator is literally covered in bills and tax forms, fielding calls from debt collectors, despairing yet resilient. How do you, as a poet, balance writing in and about a specific cultural moment in a way that can still be understood by a global audience not familiar with the Greek economic crisis, or even future generations of Greek readers who will not have lived through it? [End Page 41] Poem for My Birthday by Danae

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