Millennial Afterlives - Brief Article

Stratis Haviaras, Millennial Afterlives. Aurora, NY: Wells College Press, 2000

The prose poem, perhaps inspired by the pensees of Pascal and other brief philosophical or religious meditations, flourished in France in the mid-nineteenth century, and has thrived in Central European poetry, particularly in Polish. But although its important practitioners, from Baudelaire through Zbigniew Herbert, have been much admired by American poets and critics, the form has never become especially popular or widely practiced here. Charles Simic won a Pulitzer prize for his brief collection of prose poems, The World Doesn't End, but the award triggered a controversy since Joseph Pulitzer's will apparently designated a prize not for poetry as such but for "verse." The best prose poems, however, are clearly poetry, not prose as we generally encounter it. The prose poem typically displays characteristics of the brief lyric: intense subjectivity (regardless of the voice in which it is presented), compression of syntax and grammar, and a self-reflexive circularity of argument. Some prose poems, such as Russell Edson's, are actually brief narratives, intense little fictions, but most seem as meditative and inward as the poems of St. John of the Cross.

Like Simic, Stratis Haviaras was born in Europe and has remained alert to and even part of the development of European postmodernism. He is best known in this country for two novels, When the Tree Sings and The Heroic Age (1979, 1984), both of which earned a great deal of praise and were translated into several European languages. But before coming to the United States in 1967, escaping a repressive military regime in Greece, Haviaras had polished four collections of poetry in Greek. It is unusual for a writer who has established a reputation in his or her native language to abandon it, learn a new language, and essentially start all over again. Haviaras began reinventing himself with a few verse poems and a group of prose poems, publishing the ensuing collection as Crossing the River Twice (1976), his first book in English.

Millennial Afterlives is a new collection of prose poems: a modest little book but with the confidence of mastery in an elusive form and a remarkable intensity of vision. Exile, the poet himself said when questioned at a reading, is his primary theme. But a sense of internal exile, rather than of being geographically distant from his origins, generates a powerful tension between the speaker's sense of self and the immensity of learning, experience, social and political realities that lie upon him like many strata of bedrock. This tension reveals itself as gaps between the persona's sense of self and his desires, aesthetic perceptions, and ambitions.

One of the most poignant expressions of this sense of self-exile is the poem "Green Leaf Bug Writes Only at Night," which presents a humble figure of the writer as a furtive if not entirely secret self at work. In its uneasy tenses and shift of voice from third to first person the poem exposes the fragility of its own metaphor. The speaker in the end violates his bug-mask and reveals the intimacy of his desire and fear:

   The August moon rose over the island, and a breath of cold air crept across
   the water. A fisherman, bringing his boat in, is singing a long-forgotten
   love song--the love-part perfectly unrequited. Up in a pine tree, a green
   leaf bug is trying to finish typing his novel before the first frost. But
   it's still summer.... But Bug writes only at night.... But summer night is
   short.... He is typing all this. He reaches for his fountain pen and even
   does some handwriting: If my hand is an extension of my mind and my
   emotions, and the pen with which I write an extension of my hand, extension
   of what, if I may ask, is the difficulty with which I write? Green leaf bug
   writes on even though night dampness slows him down. I wish an angel were
   here to give Bug a hug. But like Rilke I'm worried that she might crush me
   in her stronger embrace.

Conflicts between desire and need, the difficulty of finding, as the title of one poem names them, the qualities of "Beauty, Energy, Desire and Joy (and Wisdom)" in ourselves, and the importance of sharing the search and struggle thematically empower these poems, but the delicate structure of the prose, the balancing of various rhetorical modes and devices and the discovery of not only sentence rhythms but rhythms of the whole make them into poetry. "Still Life," the last poem, is one of the briefest, and thematically one of the simplest, being a straightforward metaphorical sketch of fulfilled desire. It consists of only three sentences, each exquisitely constructed and balanced against itself:

   Gold trimmed, gold without shine, pale rose silk from ancient Syria
   conceals their determined embrace and the passion they knew no slumber
   could still forever. Yet oblivion did overcome them and everything known to
   them--for a thousand years, perhaps more. Passion soothed, sleep bluffed
   their eyes in a starless fold of the night, their limbs still quivering in
   their sensual afterglow.