YULITA HELIOPULOU
Elitis for children
ed.. Icarus, page 110

Can you somehow, I won’t say, teach (that’s another matter), attract organized female readers to poetry? A good friend says no. I see a lot of people lining up for him. Encountering poetry is, they say, a lonely road. From somewhere—it doesn’t matter where—you get the trigger. Then, if your soul is ready, you enter the adventure. I understand this position. Participation in emotions, how to convey it if it is not in the other person? At best, you just share information like a guide in a museum. But what if the target audience for initiation is children? Is something changing? Is the material more malleable? Are not the friends, in arguing the foregoing, simply defending themselves, turning away from the possibility that we may, in the name of poetry, portray the child, or anyone who temporarily takes his place? Dominate, of course, single routes. But is there room for a creative tour that, while accompanying art for a while, expands the field of the latter, testing its charm (also) on the uninitiated?

I read Iliopoulou’s book as a “road map”, a plan, a strategy for familiarizing myself with the work of the great poet. From the point of view of an adult, one could also consider a short, not simplified biography of Elitis, enriched with poems, paintings, photographs and other archival materials. The book is effective precisely because its purpose is to convey love and enthusiasm for the poet and his work. The urge to move on to what, in a more verbose approach, might be called private, offline reading or reading work comes naturally and, so to speak, endearingly. Iliopoulou feeds us Elitis like a confection. He seems to take it for granted that the main purpose for which we read and write is pleasure. This side of the matter is greatly underestimated in the critical-grammatical tradition, where seriousness and scholasticism prevail. Sometimes I applaud her: when, for example. he speaks of lamenting a sister who unfairly deprived the young Odysseus of a musical education, or when he diligently separates the position of a poet from specific practices (surrealism): “although he liked to give free rein to the imagination, he wanted to think carefully before he wrote. He wanted to be very, very careful in his choice of words and in the precise formulation of the sentence. He didn’t like automatic writing at all … “. Here you can simply talk about complex issues of biography and art. It is enough to have them well clarified in yourself. The only thing that I missed in the whole book was the name of the girl in the wonderful photograph next to the young Elitis at sea in 1936 (p. 97) The poet will then be 25. An attractive girl with a very interesting style of dress poses next to him with obvious joy.He leans eloquently towards her.

The whole book, however, is bright, cool, colorful, cheerful, like the poetry of Elitis. And sometimes, I think, even initiates need reinforcement and fellowship in order to maintain this worldview. The educational activities suggested at the end entice me to participate. I already started with the crossword.