Still on their Way: A Review of John Tripoulas’s Polytropos and Scott Cairns’s Correspondence with My Greeks

by Anastasios Mihalopoulos

A professor of mine attributed to the poet Richard Howard a phrase he repeated all the time: “There is no such thing as reading in poetry, only re-reading.” I have since found the statement to be utterly true, especiallly when the poems at hand warrant such care. Poems should be handled slowly to track the sinews of form, to observe their aural topography on the tongue, and then one should step away, reflect, only to return to see them anew, to see how each line builds upon previous lines, and how whole poems work in conversation with other poems, and with preceding histories and myths. In a poem I often re-read, that I am in fact still learning to read, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats writes:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both…

Keats addresses and re-address the urn in a kind of unending apostrophe, a form of ekphrastic re-reading that draws the reader into the poem, creating an innate tension between the art-work Keats aims to describe and the undercurrent of grief he feels regarding his own mortality, but also after the loss of his mother and brother. In a sense, the urn becomes a kind of stand-in for art itself, and the work of a poet specifically. Every object, material or imaginary, we write and rewrite again, our words aiming to a to “haunt about the shape of” what came before us, what we re-inscribe with each artistic act.

This re-inscription is perhaps even more urgent for a diasporic writer, to the Greek-American, Greek/American, or even Hellenized American poet. Robin Cohen defines diaspora as

the communities of peoples living together in one country who acknowledge that the old country—a nation often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore—always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions.

Diasporic identity is not necessarily dependent on ancestral descent, but might apply to anyone for whom the pull of a country becomes inseparable from what defines their sense of personal history. Such an identity might readily apply to someone who feels a connection to one place while living in another. In his essay, Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes that, “when the [diasporic] writer tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.” As the child of Greek and Italian immigrant parents, this idea feels especially poignant. I grew up with echoes of Greek culture in my day-to-day life, even though it was not until I was in my twenties that I traveled to Europe and began the work of reconnecting with my father’s homeland in Greece, and my mother’s in Italy. My experience, I have come to understand, was not dissimilar to so many who have returned, albeit belatedly, by way of an actual first encounter with home.

As Artemis Leontis describes in her essay, “George Economou’s Invented Greek American Ethnicity”:

The immigrant descendants’ return, in contrast, is a retracing of the ancestor’s footsteps back to a world never of their making, which has not stood still. The ancestor’s record of the forsaken world—the names, toponyms, stories, myths, songs, photographs, letters, and emotions—now decades old, are what they have; and these cannot fit the world returned to after so many years.

As I think about my own creative work, this passage helps me broaden my sense of poetic ancestry to include those works that shape the landscape I read my way into, even if I can only fully access that world through art and imagination. Leontis goes on to say that diasporic writers like George Economou:

[They] have found creative ways out of the stale middle ground between two identity markers by recombining and recontextualizing inherited, found, or invented pieces from the old world.

This project of re-contextualizing or re-seeing is the heart of two new poetry collections, John Tripoulas’s Polytropos (Dos Madres Books) and Scott Cairns’s Correspondence with My Greeks (Slant Books). By braiding together the ancient and contemporary, and by tracing their inheritances in very different ways, both Cairns and Tripoulas record artistic responses borne out of diasporic concerns. Myth and mortality, those other engines of poetic making, also drive both poets in the direction of an imaginative home that is Greece.

For John Tripoulas, the project begins with language itself, with the word, Πολύτροπος. In the preface, he reminds us that “polytropos” is an archaic Greek word from the first line of Homer’s Odyssey, a prismatic epithet for our hero: “There have been over sixty attempts in English; Robert Fagles calls Odysseus a man ‘of twists and turns’ and in Emily Wilson’s version he is ‘complicated’.” Tripoulas goes on to state that the word “polytropos” is even “somewhat of an anagram for [his name].” Readers of his new book are meant to understand that he too is a man of twists and turns, a person wandering in search of home. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Tripoulas worked a stint as an elephant driver with the Ringling Brothers Circus before eventually moving to Greece to attend medical school at the University of Athens. For years, he served as a general surgeon on the island of Ikaria. Though we know that biography does not make poetry, that’s a pretty fascinating series of twists and turns. No surprise that Tripoulas’s poems contort and complicate in fascinating and elegant ways. The poems of this collection shimmer between operating rooms and Delphic oracles, from “the oculus/of Rome’s Pantheon” to the incision along a patient’s belly, and from visions of Hercules and Atlas to the poet himself enduring the humbling trials of the weight room. Tripoulas’s poems are constantly leaning towards an old world, one that is simultaneously distant and omnipresent throughout this collection.

In the title poem Tripoulas asserts that the word “polytropos” is “Protean,” so the poem itself changes shape many times, applying the idea of polytropos from Proteus to Inky the Octopus, a cephalopodic Odysseus who, like language itself, finds its way “to a drainpipe that dropped him/ down into the open sea,/ to swim and reach his Penelope.” Over and over, the poems of this collection transform and augment as Tripoulas revisits the tethers of his heritage, and the myths and histories that have come to surround it. In “Prometheus” he writes,

The surgical field stretched
with retractors that look
like the talons of an eagle.
As I work with an instrument
that can cut and sear,
a figure from ancient times
rises in my mind.

Even in the surgical theater, a place of intense focus and consequence, the poet imagines the retractors as “the talons of an eagle,” leading his mind back to the myth of Prometheus and the eagle that would feed upon his liver each day. The poem moves from the operating room to the story of “this cousin of Zeus” and its many retellings from Aeschylus to Byron and Shelley. Having taken such an inventory, the poem concludes with Tripoulas’s own interpretation:

All of the above, all are gifts
of the forethinker, giver of the font
of fire, and of every art,
to all of us—not least to the doctors
who of late discovered anew
that the essence of livers
like the essence of the arts
is their regenerative power.

As in many of Tripoulas’s poems, here we experience a kind of aberration as the seams of the poem loosen and allow its contents to eke out towards other venues. What I mean by this is that Tripoulas deftly guides us from the operating room, to the story of Prometheus, to his own understanding of the myth, alongside his medical understanding of the liver—all of it speaking to the profundity of art.

This kind of improvisatory thinking—from operating room, to talons, to myth—springs from diasporic Greek mind; even the subtlest observations quickly send him throttling back to the homeland, or consciousness of it. Tripoulas suggests that the beauty of art is not only its regenerative power to the user, but that like Prometheus’ liver and like the story of Prometheus itself, art is repeatedly addressed and readdressed. There is beauty and perhaps a kind of torment in the need to return and re-see ideas over and over again. Readers experience a sense of this torment colluding with beauty in “Insomnia,” where Tripoulas writes,s

My grandfather, a rich man
would smoke his cigarettes
down to the filter, each flame tip
singing the skin of his two fingers
and turning them yellow.

Once I asked him
“since you’re a rich man
Why not light up a fresh smoke?”
—and after exhaling a long drag,
Smoke swirling as he spoke,
he replied “because it’s at the stub
end that the sweetness lies.”
That was his favorite moment—
When tobacco balms converged.

It’s like that with night
as it nears its end,
the sleepless wait for sleep,
silence and solitude mingle
to bring forth memories,
sweet and sad, that rise
from some deep recess like smoke.

Through both content and rhythm this poem urges readers towards a kind of reckoning. The recurring use of caesura serves to control our breath as we feel the shallow inhalations of a smoke “down to the filter,” then we pause to breathe before going on “each flame tip/ singing the skin.” As the poet reckons with his grandfather’s medically ill-advised choice, we experience a turn towards a greater wisdom or agony, something that rises “from some deep recess like smoke” as “balms converged.” Such moments of subtle epiphany recur throughout Polytropos, as Tripoulas constantly seeks to extract something from the eternal past in his everyday life, whether it be through conversations with his grandfather, observations in the streets of Athens, or brutal realities of the refugee crisis. Tripoulas is a poet who works to master the art of careful seeing.

In the first poem of the collection, “Fish Hooks,” Tripoulas writes of the ancient fish hooks on display in the Piraeus Archeological Museum,

Yet they still seduce
somehow drawn to timeworn gear—
these small implements of deceit
to fool a famished fish
or lure a soul adrift.

Again, here we feel the careful cadence of Tripoulas’s lines alongside his movement in and out of time. In fact, this collection is deeply interested in time as a whole, as underscored by the book sections, titled “Time Present and Time Past,” “Temps Perdu” from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, “The Profession,” and finally “The Eternal Past.” The fish hooks, the form of which has been relatively unchanged over the centuries, reside in both the modern and ancient worlds. Bearing “J-hooks with barbs and bends,” Tripoulas tells us that they are “the same shape you’ll find/ at tackle shops today;” and yet we are invited to marvel at this ordinary object “Hidden in a small nook/ behind museum glass.” Tripoulas’s language is often sparse, but crystalline. He employs enjambment and line breaks deftly to control breath and as a platform for surprise, so the image of “a small nook” is delightfully contorted by the modifier in the following line, “behind museum glass.” Already, in these first two lines of the collection, Tripoulas has transported readers from one place, to another, and thus set the mold for how to read the poems that follow. Tripoulas’s use of double-images (both contemporary and ancient) such as that of the fish hooks, establishes a sense of oscillation in time and culture. With each poem, and each line, we experience a reality that keeps one foot in the present and one in the past. While this movement speaks to anyone who grapples with an understanding of heritage, place, and purpose, it is especially important to a poet who feels the pull of both the ancient and contemporary on a day-to-day basis.

Not unlike Tripoulas, each of Scott Cairns’s correspondences are built out of or upon a previous poem, perhaps with “the same shape,” though often with different barbs and hooks. Cairns’s Correspondence with My Greeks is composed of a series of poems written after, out of, or very loosely translated from poems written by modern and contemporary Greek poets. Each poem in the collection identifies a partner poem in Greek that inspired his own, with choices ranging across over a century of modern Greek poetry, beginning with Cavafy and ending with Adrianne Kalfopoulou. These duets offer Cairns a change to contemplate his own sense of Greekness as a Hellenized American, as a practitioner of Greek Orthodoxy, and as a poet coming to understand that the work of correspondence—indeed, both conversation and connection—is at the heart of his poetic project. Each poem of Correspondence with my Greeks acknowledges—in Greek—the poet and the specific Greek poem he is writing alongside. The terms of dialogue are at times obvious, when Cairns echoes the source poem directly, and are at times delightfully oblique. It is a great joy to read Cairns’s book alongside the anthology, A Century of Greek Poetry 1900–2000: Bilingual Edition, which Cairns credits in his acknowledgments as the primary source of inspiration for the whole collection. A lovely elision occurs when you read the two books in tandem, in part because one feels rather viscerally the sense that Cairns’s own poems have sprung from this reading movement back and forth.

Long known for his sense of humor, at times Cairns’s poems are rather cheeky in their acts of correspondence: a poem called “The Saint” by Miltos Sachtouris becomes “No Saint” by Cairns; Yorgos Pavlopoulos’s “Quintessence” becomes “Distillate,” and the book’s opening poem, “Still Waiting” contains his response to Cavafy’s famous “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which he uses to introduce the way his poems will converse with, but also continue from their corresponding Greek poem:

Yes, and after all of this we stand, still waiting
for those quaint people to arrive, and to accomplish
their famous work among us. And isn’t it just like
barbarians to make us wait. It’s been so long since

we first made ready that the town could use another
coat of paint…

Cairns’s poem begins after the conclusion of Cavafy’s poem—no surprise, we are still waiting— but that is a good enough reason to continue on with the business of making art. That process, borne from reading and admiration, is itself a source of joy, as is clear when we notice the playful syntax and aural acrobatics of the poem, with a steady internal rhyme weaving from the beginning stanza to the poem’s conclusion. Each poem is a Scott Cairns poem, in a manner he has made his own over dozens of books, as well as an homage to the Greek poem, in whose image the new poem has been generated.

I will admit that after a while I become dizzy while trying to take stock of so much intertext and allusion, but to Cairns’s credit he weaves his correspondences so artfully, and with such somber joy, that I was left in awe of this accomplished poet’s sprezzatura. He makes it look easy, even if poems this finely crafted are clearly the product of a lifetime of practice. Each poem in the collection rewards re-reading. We recall Cavafy, but through the words of Cairns, who is working his own way back to Greece with every line—leaving a trail of new resonances, new connections, and a new way of thinking about influence. There’s not a whiff of what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence” here; instead, we see a whole-hearted embrace of influence: the many ways that Greece, the Greek language, and Greek poets have influenced Cairns’s sense of himself in the world and on the page.

A kind of oracular quality is at work in this new collection too, as Cairns summons the voices and poetic movements of his predecessors. Cairns speaks almost directly to this sentiment in “Inclination,” beginning “I am not so much inclined/ to play with the dead as I am/ inclined to visit them…” and ending the poem with this hope for the future:

I pray that my poems, also,
become ridden with erasure,
and that those lacunae prove
provocation for a visit.

A clear sense of responsibility threads throughout Cairns’s work. He makes clear that these poems are not meant to be gimmicks or mere echoes, but an archive of his most fertile literary conversations. For almost his entire career, poetry and prayer have gone hand in hand, and Cairns has articulated an urgent desire to both listen and be heard. That urgency is no less poignant in this collection, though the author’s confession in his introduction that he has recently received “an untoward diagnosis” of an incurable blood cancer, adds a new layer of ache to the proceedings. Those notes of reflection are evident in “My language,” in which Cairns corresponds to the Titos Patrikios’s poem which bears the same title. It is helpful to first consider Peter Mackridge’s translation of the Patrikios poem, since that is the translation found in the Century of Greek Poetry anthology:

It wasn’t easy to preserve my language
Amid languages that tried to devour it
But I went on counting in my language
I reduced time to the dimensions of the body of my language
I multiplied pleasure to infinity with my language
With it I brought back to mind a child
With a white scar on his cropped head where a stone had hit it
I strove so to lose even a word of it
For it this language the dead spoke to me.

Written in 1992, the poem still bears the agonized weight of post-war Greece and Patrikios’s reluctant dependence on language and art for survival. His language is Greek, of course, the language of his home country, the language through which the dead speak. Cairns’s poem in English, and in response, is quoted here in its entirety:

No, not so easy, not easy at all, to preserve
my language when my language owes so much
to the languages that haunt its every syllable,
and grows so restless regarding that debt, that wealth.
I am pleased to have inherited both. I am pleased
judiciously to spend the wealth, to honor the debt.
So I continue to guard against erosion—what has become
of the intelligent, past perfect tense? the subtleties
between less and fewer? further and farther?—
and continue to welcome new accretions acquired
from the world’s fabulous tongues. I remain
the child I was, wounded by inconsiderate
cruelties, blessed by these expansive terms,
these welcomed visitations of the dead.

The English language’s debt to the other “languages that haunt its every syllable” do not cause Cairns much anxiety at all, and unlike Patrikios, Cairns does not resent “the languages that tried devour” his, but rather welcomes “new accretions acquired/ from the world’s fabulous tongues.” In this way Cairns welcomes his own dissolution into language and into correspondence, inviting into his poetry “these welcomed visitations of the dead.”

Whether visited by figures of history, or myths, or the remembered Greek landscape itself, both Tripoulas and Cairns search for and welcome each resonance between the old world and the current one. When I reflect on both of their books, it is clear that the central muse for both is Cavafy, from whose work they inherited this sense of history as an abiding presence. In his poem “Cavafy’s Guest,” Tripoulas considers the possibility that his grandfather, Demetrios Golemis, a medical doctor and poet, may have crossed paths with Cavafy himself, yet “No one knows if the two poets/ met and talked about their work–.” With this poem, the Greek-American Tripoulas is able to draw a tentative line between his familial and poetic lineage—both kinds of his ancestors, as Leontis might put it. Cairns answers to Cavafy are never genealogical, since he is not of Greek heritage, and yet they feel no less familial. The Greek poets offer him a kind of bridge to those “foundational narratives” absorbed so intimately by the poets of Greece. In his introduction, Cairns writes,

I have discovered that it is one thing for a poet from another country to employ these foundational narratives in modern and contemporary work; it is something altogether more moving to witness those myths being visited again by a modern Greek poet, witnessing—as it were—the correspondences of a modern poet responding to a text received from his or her originating mother or father. (Cairns xii)

Cairns has spent a great deal of time thinking about the state of Greek poetry and what it means for the various peoples it touches. His previous collections, Lacuna, Anaphora, and Slow Pilgrim are all testaments to this pursuit. Cairns wonders whether a non-Greek poet can respond to these texts in a similar way. Certainly, his correspondences in this new book offer further evidence they can, in ways that result in beautiful poems. In one such poem, “They Open Us,” he answers the question this way, praising:

poetry’s vertiginous capacity
to center one’s attention on what might make us
whole, and what might break us, spanning the desolate
hours as well as the blessed

As Cairns exhibits a clear sense of his positioning as a non-Greek poet writing into the Greek tradition, the case is not so clear for Tripoulas. Having been born in the U.S. and then undertaking the hard work of returning, Tripoulas writes from a position halfway between return and exile. This place of ambiguity is beautifully captured by Joanna Eleftheriou in her memoir, This Way Back, which navigates her complicated identity as Greek-Cypriot-American. In regard to feeling both “of and not of” a place, Eleftheriou writes,

Immigrants from all parts of the world tell stories of their old countries’ perfection, but diaspora Greeks hold onto their homeland with a special tenacity. You can’t live very long in Greece without hearing songs of the bitter bread and hard, cold beds of xenitiá (ξενιτιά), which means exile, or being far away from Greece. When I had learned enough Greek to understand these songs, I wondered at the pleasure Greeks seemed to take in singing about exile’s pain. Like the bite of retsina in their wine, like the moan of bagpipes in their music, longing for an Ithaca from the distance of Calypso’s island still moves Greeks to sing. And While Odysseus, archetype and father of all homeward wanderers, finally got home and stayed, most Greek émigrés take up residence abroad, making xenitiá, and distance from Ithaca, their fate. (Eleftheriou 59)

While many of Tripoulas’s poems take place and were written in Greece, there is still a sense of xenitiá. Over the course of Tripoulas’s book we understand that while speaking Greek, and tracing his heritage, and even inhabiting his own place on Greek soil, there is still a sense of loss, a need to reach towards a connection that is never quite fulfilled

Both Tripoulas and Cairns write towards a kind of solution to what Cairns calls the “unremitting thirst for the inexhaustible urn.” For both poets, writing and reading Greece, re-writing and re-reading Greece, are driven by the thirst to return, and yet their urns fill with poetry.

September 22, 2024

Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from the Northeast Ohio M.F.A. program and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Fairy Tale Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature and a Masters of Chemistry at the University of New Brunswick.

September 21, 2024

Works Cited

Bien, Peter, Keeley, Edmund, Van Dyck, Karen, Constantine, Peter. A Century of Greek Poetry 1900–2000: Bilingual Edition. Attica Editions, 2004.

Cairns, Scott. Correspondence with My Greeks. Slant Books, 2024.

Cairns, Scott. Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems. Paraclette Press, 2015.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Taylor & Francis Group, 1997.

Leontis, Artemis. “George Economou’s Invented Greek American Ethnicity.” ERGON: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters, 2020.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. Granta, 1991.

Tripoulas, John. Polytropos. Dos Madres Books, 2024.