Some day in the future, Eleni Sikelianos will need no introduction. Great-granddaughter of the five-time Nobel candidate Angelos Sikelianos and the choreographer and Delphic Festival revivalist Eva Palmer-Sikelianos and herself a recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Fulbright Program, Sikelianos’s artistic credentials should be clearly established from the start.
And yet she grew up in Section 8 housing in California, herself completely unaware of her own artistic lineage until she reached adulthood. In the meantime, she began studying cell biology before abandoning her studies to hitchhike across Europe and Africa. It wasn’t until she found success as a poet in her own right that she even discovered the world of her great-grandparents, a world she elucidates in her new hybrid poetry-memoir Memory Rehearsal, which completes a trilogy begun with 2004’s The Book of Jon (also published through City Lights) and continued in You Animal Machine (available from Coffee House Press). To celebrate the new book’s launch, her publisher City Lights hosted a reading at their San Francisco headquarters.
I’m in the Bay Area this week for my little brother’s graduation from Berkeley. He’s a philosophy/math double major, which will be useful whenever I need to prove I’m not the biggest dork in our family. Any time I travel I carry a big door-stopper of a book, so even if my trip affords a surplus of reading time I still don’t stand a chance of finishing it. In this particular, I’m reading the combined first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, which is long and boring. An offhand reference to Renan’s Vie de Jesus somewhere in the sea of In a Budding Grove led me to browsing his letters online as a distraction from falling further down Proust’s memory hole. “Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth,” Renan wrote his sister Henriette; “I am eager for mathematics.” Sikelianos seems almost to have followed a reverse course, beginning in the hard sciences and shifting focus to poetry. She’s fond of quoting Lewis Thomas’s “Living Language,” from The Lives of a Cell: “Language is simply alive, like an organism… Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny.” Those hybrid words and wild varieties appear regularly across a body of work which refuses any attempt at classification or genre taxonomy.
The poetry loft at City Lights was already nearly full and muggy with breath and sweat by the time I got upstairs. The reading was scheduled to start at 7:00, and as I took my spot the guy next to me asked for the time—6:57.
“Jesus,” he said. “This thing should have started by now.”
“They’ve still got three minutes,” I joked weakly.
“I’ve been waiting here all day.”
Truthfully, I couldn’t understand why you’d wait all day for an event slated for 7:00, but I also had no interest in listening to this guy any further. Not that my wishes mattered, since as a handful more people wandered upstairs he addressed each one to keep them apprised of the situation.
“Did you see the flyer?”
“There’s a reading tonight.”
“It was supposed to start at 7:00.”
“I don’t know who the poet is, or where she is.”
“This is like waiting for Oasis to come onstage.”
The reason behind his fidgety nature soon became at least somewhat clear when he flagged down an employee to ask about a restroom. They suggested he try Cafe Vesuvio next door. Naturally, our gracious hosts took the stage nearly the minute he left. (It was maybe 7:10.) He never came back, and I ended up with better company in his stead:
To call Sikelianos’s performance a “reading” is to pigeonhole what she’s actually doing in the same way as referring to her writing as simply “poetry.” Memory Rehearsal crosses genres from memoir to poetry to ekphrasis, and her performance incorporated just as many elements: archival photos and videos played on a screen throughout, at times she called on the audience to act as her chorus, and her brother Joe and his wife Kat White accompanied her on guitar and ukulele for a sung poem. Sikelianos’s particular blend of memoir, verse and translation along with her frequent allusions to Greek traditions in both theater and mythology calls to mind Anne Carson, a point of reference Sikelianos herself makes within the text of Memory Rehearsal.
Sikelanios’s great-grandmother Eva Palmer-Sikelianos shared a long and creatively fruitful relationship with the poet Natalie Barney, and much of her history as relayed in Memory Rehearsal came from love letters kept in an archive of Barney’s papers in Paris, though not all of those letters were to Barney herself, as Sikelianos discovered. “Soon it began to seem,” Sikelianos read that night, “that everywhere I went I encountered someone else whose mother or grandmother or great-grandmother had slept with mine.” If like me you, too, go wild for early 20th century sapphic throuple arts gossip, this part of the night was catnip.
Matthew Zapruder moderated the Q&A, during which Sikelianos took the opportunity to deliver a genuinely fascinating disquisition on the line break—the kind of thing that can only really fly at a reading like this to an audience mostly comprising other poets. Naturally, we ate it up.
Zapruder pointed out the particularly narrative nature of Sikelianos’s book, its engagement with multiple characters, narrators and points of view across time. “Poets don’t really know how to write about other people,” Sikelianos joked during the Q&A. “Or even talk to other people.” Case in point: after the reading I got to talk to Sikelianos for a quick second. I mentioned I’m sort of a poetry idiot—I read a lot of it but couldn’t say how deep my engagement really runs—and she took the moment to correct me with a truly excellent autograph:
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