{"id":1395,"date":"2011-12-28T13:48:46","date_gmt":"2011-12-28T13:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=1395"},"modified":"2012-01-19T12:17:42","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T12:17:42","slug":"kelvin-corcoran-wordy-postcard-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/1395\/kelvin-corcoran-wordy-postcard-1\/","title":{"rendered":"KELVIN CORCORAN: Wordy Postcard 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
I was in Greece for six weeks this summer and the reinvention of poverty was very apparent.\u00a0 The English woman running car hire in the next village agreed, there were fewer labourers around, fewer builders.\u00a0 For a few decades Albanians have been the casual labour and skilled house builders in parts of rural Greece.\u00a0 She thought that most had left; Albania was a better prospect now.\u00a0 Then she shrugged and said – Well, Greeks have always had slaves haven\u2019t they, they\u2019ll find some more.<\/em> This was an uncluttered, plain view of history I thought.\u00a0 Slavery is only one form of economic dominance. \u00a0We were having this conversation in Messenia, the slave grounds for Sparta.<\/span><\/address>\n

By chance I\u2019d been in Athens when the downgrading of Greek credit worthiness began.\u00a0 I was talking to an Athenian lawyer.\u00a0 Her view then was that, yes it would be hard for people on fixed incomes.\u00a0 Professionals, like lawyers, would just charge more for their services; this wasn\u2019t said dismissively but I wonder if she still holds this plain view of present events.\u00a0 It feels like an older, harder pattern has returned.\u00a0 The series of articles in London Review of Books by John Lanchester seems to be accurate about the economics of the crisis. The young are leaving.\u00a0 I\u2019m told Australia is actively recruiting for new Australians.\u00a0 The surface style of mainstream European expectations is being effaced. <\/em>Driving across the Peloponnese is instructive.\u00a0 The big, new post-Olympic Games roads are empty.\u00a0 Some of the towns we drove through looked like a war had rolled by and just stopped from exhaustion. Friends tell me the health system has become an emergency only service, unemployment and homelessness have rocketed and attacks upon immigrants in Athens are up markedly.<\/p>\n

Late one night we heard rembetika, the Levantine blues, sneaking out of a narrow street.\u00a0 For drinks, two young men and an older man were performing outside a kafaneio. The old man was missing several fingers, a typical injury for fishermen who dynamite the fish to make catching them easier. The music was completely authentic, the sardonic growl of the singing, its bite, its pissed offness and weary companionship. The young men and the old man all knew the same songs.\u00a0 It was like we\u2019d slipped back decades to earlier bad times; the population exchange in 1923, the war, the civil war.\u00a0 That the crisis is good for rembetika is no comfort to the newly poor.\u00a0 The bloody minded singing, its mode of bitterness tells you about this dark continuity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Such continuity is deeper than I at first thought.\u00a0 We went late one night to a performance in the ancient amphitheatre at Epidaurus.\u00a0 The play was Heracles by Euripides.\u00a0 I\u2019d been to the site before but had not seen a performance. The performance is in Modern Greek.\u00a0 I read the play in English several times and checked in with my friend Maria during the performance \u2013 and now this part Kelvin is when, and Madness is saying.<\/em> And indeed, as the guidebooks say, the acoustics are astonishing. From the centre spot of the circular orchestra you can hear the merest whisper to the top of the 54 tiers of seating and, perhaps, spreading out over the Argolid hills; the original psychorama to the plays themselves.\u00a0 The theatre has been there since the 4th<\/sup> century BC.\u00a0 The original capacity was 15,000.\u00a0 I think there were approximately 10,000 of us there that night.<\/p>\n

As ever the drama begins before the play itself, friends greeting one another, the selecting and settling of your part of the stone bench.\u00a0 Celebrities arrived in their down front posh stone benches, cushion provided, and a few were greeted with applause.\u00a0 The reception suggested these individuals were perhaps soap opera actors rather than politicians.\u00a0 The sky darkened, the play began and we became near silent.\u00a0 Heracles returns from his labours, releases his wife and children from captivity by the usurper Lycus.\u00a0 All\u2019s well. \u00a0And then Heracles is made mad and slaughters his family \u2013 and by now it is very dark.\u00a0 Aside from succumbing to the unwearied grip of the tragedy several moments in the play brought us back to present conditions.\u00a0 One in particular was well received.\u00a0 Amphitryon, father of Heracles, updates Heracles on the situation in Thebes.\u00a0 (This is the Vellacott translation.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a large class of needy men, who make a show<\/em><\/p>\n

Of being prosperous; Lycus has their strong support.<\/em><\/p>\n

They raised the riots; they sold Thebes to slavery<\/em><\/p>\n

In hope of lawless plunder, to redeem their own<\/em><\/p>\n

Bankruptcy, caused by extravagance and idleness.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

But the play is two and a half thousand years old, removed from us by translation and cultural specifics, and besides everything is different now.<\/p>\n

Kelvin Corcoran\u2019s first book was Robin Hood in the Dark Ages <\/em>in1985.\u00a0 Nine subsequent collections have been enthusiastically received and his work has been anthologised in the UK and USA.\u00a0 The sequence Helen Mania <\/em>was made a Poetry Book Society choice.\u00a0 Kelvin Corcoran has read at various art galleries in the UK in response to the Arts Council touring exhibitions, Spotlight on St. Ives and Geometry of Fear. His New and Selected Poems <\/em>is now available from Shearsman Books along with two major collections Backward Turning Sea <\/em>(2008) and Hotel Shadow <\/em>(2010).\u00a0 Words Through A Hole Where Once There Was A Chimpanzee\u2019s Face<\/em> is now available from Longbarrow Press. Work with the musicians of Tria Kalistos in the recording and performance of several longer poems continues.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

www.shearsman.com<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

www.longbarrowpress.com<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Greece for six weeks this summer and the reinvention of poverty was very apparent.\u00a0 The English woman running car hire in the next village agreed, there were fewer labourers around, fewer builders.\u00a0 For a few decades Albanians have been the casual labour and skilled house builders in parts of rural Greece.\u00a0 She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[29,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/issue2-poss-31.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-mv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1610,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions\/1610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}