Poetry in Ergon

As poetry editor of ERGON, I will endeavor to find poems at work along the fault-line where Greek and American worlds overlap and collide. This will certainly include poems written by Greek/Americans about the Greek/American experience—like Peter Jeffrey’s polyphonic “Arrangement in Black and Gray,” published here in our inaugural poetry posting.

But I will also be on the lookout for poems in which a consciousness of Greece informs American experience, or poems in which an American consciousness informs Greek experience. 

What kinds of belonging or instability will these poems record? What happens when poems are inscribed in two countries, or navigate two languages simultaneously? What’s at stake in moments of border dwelling or border crossing, in imaginative movement or the conditions of migration? How might Greek/American poetry speak to what is gained or lost in the diaspora?

I invite submissions of previously unpublished poems that seek to answer or deepen these questions while working through such fertile predicaments.  

Christopher Bakken, Poetry Editor
cbakken@allegheny.edu

Christopher Bakken is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Eternity & Oranges, and the culinary memoir, Honey, Olives, Octopus. Along with Roula Konsolaki, he co-translated The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems Of Titos Patrikios. Bakken serves each summer as the director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki & Thasos and he is Frederick F. Seely Professor of English at Allegheny College.