Eleni Sikelianos : Memory Rehearsal

Today’s guest is writer, poet and translator Eleni Sikelianos. We discuss her hybrid-genre, ancestral memoir Memory Rehearsal, a work that moves between poetry and prose, image and text, human and animal, history and mythology, and perhaps most of all tells the story of a poet’s self-discovery, finding her voice within a dual poetic lineage, within a chorus of remarkable voices, past and present. As Anne Waldman says: “Sikelianos’s voyage is a spiritual quest to untangle a history that only she and only poetry can accomplish. It is a meditation on gender, place, and reclamation, a struggle for a whole vision and version for the writer of her own self and purpose. The genius of this pursuit is staggering. . . .The intricate weaving and array of image and language to get there leaves me breathless. There is nothing like it that I have seen.” For the bonus audio archive Eleni contributes an electrifying reading from book one of  H.D.’s Trilogy, called “The Walls Do Not Fall.” This joins many unforgettable contributions, whether Lisa Robertson reading her translation of the long Baudelaire poem “Hags,” Jorie Graham reading Robert Creeley, Jen Bervin reading Paul Celan, a late night whispered reading by Bhanu Kapil from her writing journal, and much more. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the BookShop for today’s conversation. [Author photo by Laird Hunt]