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Desperate Vitality
Now Let’s See What You’re Gonna Do: Poems
1978-2002 Katerina Gogou Translated by A.S. Introduction by Jack
Hirschman. FMSBW – Divers Collection, 2021
ISBN-13:978-1-736264-5-0
Poet and actress Katerina Gogou is a figure
better known in anarchist circles than in the literary world. This
collection of her poems (almost her entire poetic output) is the
first in English to appear since Jack Hirschman translated and
published her first collection back in 1983. The title of this
initial collection ‘Three Clicks Left’, referencing the technique of
aiming a machine gun, gives some indication as to the milieu that
Gogou belonged to. Born into Nazi occupation and living under the
Greek Junta she began writing poetry in the late 70s, a time that
saw an upsurge in university and factory occupations spurred on by
the Athens Polytechnic uprising of 1973. Yet, as many know,
anarchism is not just a matter of politics pure and simple, of
insidious party machinations and soppy paeons to an heroic working
class. It is not about didactic propaganda and objective conditions,
it is about a way of being, a way of life. And so, Gogou, on the
suspect list of the Greek Ministry of Public Order, was a prime
mover in the Greek counter-culture of squats and communal living
that centred on the Exarchia area of Athens. She frequented the
“hard luck dives”, hung out with the “damned of the metropolis” and
participated in a musical culture that included the underworld
soundtrack of rembetika (‘passion-drugs-jail-death’), the
‘concert riots’ of the 70s and benefit gigs for arrested anarchist
and transexual militants who had been exiled to island-gaols. Indeed, as an actress, starting out in the
comedy genre and often being cast as the ‘rascal pupil’, Gogou had a
leading role in a film with a strong musical theme. Parangelia,
a Greek cult classic, casts Gogou as a night club singer (more Nico
than Cleo Laine) who not so much transcendently narrates as
poeticises-over the unfolding of an underdog tragedy (the last night
of the outlaw Koemtzi brothers). Gogou’s role in the film is that of
a one-woman Greek chorus. Poems from her first collection are
impactfully recited direct to camera throughout the film. Her
opening lines are as follows: “I want to talk with you in a café where the
door would be wide open and there’d be no sea These latter lines reference the opening
sequence of the film. As the credits roll, Gogou applies her make-up
and we witness her preparing herself for the glamour of the
dressed-up night life. However, there soon flickers across her face
subtle looks of a rising despair and an implosive self-loathing
before she angrily smears-off her lipstick and rubs at her mascara
eyes as her tears begin to fall. In her acting of this sequence, as
with her poems, we are witness to what Pasolini has called a
“desperate vitality.” At times in the film Gogou’s recitation raises
to a crescendo of an un-affected, almost unacted, cry of anger that
brings to mind the punk vocalist style of the day as well as the
infamous recording of Artaud’s ‘To have done with the Judgement of
God’. Safe to say in Gogou’s poetic world there is no God,
apparatchiks or idealised revolutionary subjects. Maybe we could
venture to say there is no poetry here either!
Just as musicians from Charlie Mingus to Cecil
Taylor remarked: ‘What the fuck is jazz?’ We could similarly ask,
when confronted with these journal-like and at times utterly candid
pieces of writings: ‘What the shitting-hell is poetry?’ There is
thus an anti-literary tenor to much of her writing which she
directly refers to as “scribbling on papers.” (p.66): “Rotten / Rotten themes/ mouldy volumes devious
libraries Words and the various motivations in yielding
them are placed under a painful suspicion that only the sincerity of
affectable bodies can alleviate. Gogou, as a writer informed by
acting, is the non-discoursing body that Pasolini honours; a
revolting body mutating under the dictates of a consumer inducing
narcissism that, as in the opening sequence of Parangelia,
she both embodies and expels: “how harassed we’ve become by guilt,
shop windows and bald manikins/ but no longer with bowed heads”
(p.61). These links to the much-indicted Pasolini are not fortuitous
as Gogou, who rarely gives titles to her writings, does title one
piece, “Autopsy Report 2.11.75”. This is a reference to the
assassination of Pasolini and the multiple injuries he received in
the wastelands of the Ostia Basin. Here the foretold mutilated body
takes centre stage but Gogou is not rendered speechless. She does
not theorise but pens a sequence of barbs that reveal that there is
strength in her disenchantment, a strength to call-out the endless
historical compromises: “… the body lay face down in parallel
connection to the Vatican Another factor that sees Gogou linked to
Pasolini has been encapsulated by one commentor on the Blackout
website (see references below) who describes her writings as a
“cinematic record of reality”. This is akin to what Pasolini pursued
across his poems, novels, films and journalism as the “written
language of reality.”
Not only does this shed light on Gogou’s almost diarist style, it
places her in the realm of a new hybrid form that Pasolini was
outlining. The screenplay not simply needing completion by being
filmed but the screenplay as a written and embellished form in its
own right (Benjamin Fondane’s Cinepoems spring to mind in
this connection). One could say Gogou, an actress familiar with a
cinematic means of production, is under the influence of a filmic
aesthetic and rather than embroider screenplays she embellishes the
private ‘note-to-self’ form (an object of ridicule in poetry
circles) in which a deliberate unfinishedness articulates a
processual rather than reified approach to living. Above all else it
seems Gogou was not identifying herself as a poet: “What I’m afraid of most of all is lest I
become a ‘poet’ […] Form can be mediational, it can defuse the
offer of direct communication, leave unsaid what Pasolini calls the
“profound intimacy of the individual”. There is a ‘beyond’ of poetry
just as there is a cinema that can be inflected with the poetic
impulse. So, Gogou seems to owe a lot to a cinematic revisioning of
poetry; cinema as a refreshing means to approach language anew: her
extended lines are akin to long shots, her short two-to-three line
poems are like celluloid scraps gathered from the cutting-room
floor, her stuttering fracturing of images are akin to rapid
jump-cuts … a kind of holistic concatenation: “abortions
bottles mirrors movie programs my friends’ personal lives.” (p.63) So, montaged flows. Long shots telescoping
history and at the same time closing-in on memories of the nights
before. Revolutionary regret spliced with confessional soliloquies.
A redemptive abjection: “poetry has ceased madness slips out” (p.84)
A hatred of the system as virulent and deadly as that which the
Greek post-dictatorial democracy reserves for the conveniently
unrepresentable wretched of the earth: no party’s canvassing object.
Words all tangled-up (p.89)
In writing of Pasolini as he could have been
writing of Gogou, René Schérer offered that “to become revolutionary
is to enter life. By flashes. To have an intuition, beyond all
political logic and reason.” One could add that, as an anarchist to
the end, harassed by the police for her friendship with Athenian
extra-parliamentarians and ex-cons, Gogou, who suicided in 1993, was
one who knew that there would be a recomposition of class beyond the
“threadbare ideologies” (p.76) of anarchism and communism; a
recomposition that would entail the coming-into-being of what Walter
Benjamin, referencing Charles Fourier, named an ‘affective class’.
Above all, the recomposition of subjectivities not as individuals
but as singularities for whom poetry is not so much a con-trick
craft as a means of everyday intensification: “I am dreaming
freedom/ Through everyone’s/ all-beautiful uniqueness.” (Coda) The time of the oeuvre has
long-gone and, in order to not acknowledge this, to continue-on
deluded, countless prizes are dutifully handed out to those poets
who maintain the myth of a bygone tradition.
Howard Slater References The Blackout ((Poetry and Politics)) blog
features a sample of poems by Katerina Gogou and biographical
details.
https://my-blackout.com/2018/01/21/katerina-gogou-autopsy-report/ Pier Paolo Pasolini: Heretical Empiricism,
New Academia Publishing, 2005. René Schérer: Des modalités du ressentiment
dans les devenirs révolutionnaires, in Chimeres No.83, 2014
https://www.cairn.info/revue-chimeres-2014-2-page-71.htm
Taxikipali: Katerina Gogou Athens’ Anarchist
poetess, 1949-1993. This article mentions a biography of
Katerina Gogou by Agapi Virginia Spyratou entitled Katerina
Gogou: Death’s Love [Erotas Thanatou], Vivliopelagos, 2007. See:
https://libcom.org/article/gogou-katerina-athens-anarchist-poetess-1940-1993
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