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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 22 AUGUST 2021 4 BOOKS While reading your poems from the poetic sequence SOUTH this verse "And the journey is unravelling not destination" (Passage 1) made me ponder on the idea whether indeed the journey is a point of arrival to our destination, if it is the end of our beginnings, or as this verse suggests, the journey is just a beginning to more openings. Travel in your writing deviates from its common understanding that of departing or arriving in a particular place. How does this "unravelling" unfolds itself in your poetry, in the context of the voyage? The poetic sequence, South is a twenty-page long poem in chapters in which I use the two Greek words, poros=passage and aporia=questioning (which is also a passage), as titles of the poems. The sequence, which de- scribes a journey through the landscape of the south of Greece, considers travel not as destination, which is a compo- sition of intentions, but rather as unravelling. Unravelling in English as in Greek also means narrating. Memory, perception of space, meeting and separa- tion, the idea of song (as sus- pension of speech), individu- al experience and history are some of the themes that trav- erse the writing and the land- scape. We are inside place and place is inside us. It gives birth to us and we give birth to it, it dreams of us and we dream of it and so it remains always new as long as we can develop with it a dialectic relationship, as long as we keep discovering it and in this process we also dis- cover ourselves. Your poems delve deep into the notions of memory, where individual experiences are related or opposed to history. The remnants of the past are transmitted to the present, without being lost to the past moment. At times, the reader also senses a struggle between the words, a sense of being stuck in time, with nowhere to go in these memorial spaces. How are the notions of memo- ry, time and history explored in your work? In my poetry, place is the car- rier of the body, history, mem- ory and imagination, where individual experience and col- lective experience merge. The central question is not who am I but where am I. In my work I try to bring forward the per- sonal, memorial, sensual, his- torical traces, and the ways in which they form a web. With every poetic work you begin all over again to teach yourself a new language. The language of poetry carries the idea of mul- tiplicity, of a plural body and a plural time of past and present. I try to deal with the complex theme of identity, historical, national, gender, etcetra, using the way of poetry, that is a way of doubt and questioning and exploring, which includes the body and its rebellion, which defends whatever exists and the uniqueness of experience of every human being in a world ruled by the totalitarianism of commerce. This sense of compressed time and the tension you are referring to, might be the result of the current historical mo- ment, I will not call it crisis, but a transformation of the world we live in. Although I don't think we write consciously to respond to current events, I think that in the work of an ac- tive artist the current times will be reflected anyway. And also a reflection of something else, even more important, will be there, that is the possibility of a different world which keeps on being saved or reinventing it- self, within the mayhem of the events of the present. Several of your poems allude to Greek mythology – your grandmother is Penelope unravelling a man's suit and there is a reference to Cape Tenaron and Hades. As a poet, how has the Greek mythology influenced your writing? Greek mythology is a col- lective heritage, is a common ground for dreams, projections and interpretations for poets of any nationality. It so hap- pens that I write in Greek but I am far from any notion of being representative of a na- tion or tradition. I would not know how to begin to define these words. Being a poet I am very careful about words and their weight and as the Greek nobelist Giorgos Seferis wrote "whoever carries the heavy stones will sink". I do not want to sink; I prefer to float. As an artist I try to move against the notion of a definitive tra- dition, or language or truth. I am afraid that our world is ex- tremely different from the an- cient world and its ideas, and I propose we form our relation- ship with antiquity in the light of this difference. Perhaps a look in the abyss of this "otherness" is more useful than the reassuring but fake notion of any continuity. Using myth in poetry needs cunning if you don't want to repeat ste- Katerina Iliopoulou on how Greek mythology Poet Katerina Iliopoulou speaks to Elena Cardona on the inspiration she draws from Greek mythology, and how her work delves deep into the notion of memory ahead of her appearnce at the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival on 28-29 August