The New Yorker:

The poet Jack Spicer famously compared the poet to a radio: when the writer is really listening in, he or she simply receives transmissions at a certain frequency. Ultimately, Spicer implies, there’s little control over what comes across onto the page. This kind of thinking initially seems to concern the mystery of individual inspiration—where our ideas come from. But is there a frequency for public devastation that has grown too loud to ignore, signals that start to impinge on every part of life?

In Greece, for the past decade, the news has been grim, and there is a surplus of poets who have tuned in: “Poets writing graffiti on walls, poets reading in public squares, theaters, and empty lots, poets performing in slams, chanting slogans, and singing songs at rallies, poets blogging and posting on the internet, poets teaming up with artists and musicians, poets teaching workshops to schoolchildren and migrants,” as Karen Van Dyck writes in her introduction to “Austerity Measures,” an anthology that presents contemporary Greek-language poetry as a thriving community amid the turmoil.

After the world financial crisis, the Greek government’s inability to repay its massive public debt made the nation a conspicuous example of the fallout. The “solutions” proposed by the banks are now familiar: tighten the belt, slash public services and pensions, and insure that lenders are repaid in full. These actions have done little to create recovery: years after the shock, unemployment hovers around twenty-five per cent, the highest in Europe, and youth unemployment is at forty-five per cent. Despite the election of a left-wing government, serious change has proved elusive; Europe’s financial establishment has generated a gravity too strong to escape, despite recurring scares of a “Grexit” from the euro.

It’s become a cliché to say that we turn to poetry in times of trouble, or that we need the vibrant language of poets to console ourselves after disaster. Greece’s debt is a different kind of catastrophe, one that occurs in slow motion: its mechanisms are abstract and impersonal, although the consequences are very real for those who rely on government institutions. These strictures insinuate themselves into the ambience of everyday life and language, something that poets can observe with careful attention. Here, for instance, is the poet Elena Penga describing a menace in plain sight:

The cherry trees in the neighbor’s yard haven’t had fruit for years. Four men enter carrying sticks. They enter the neighbor’s yard along with the rain. They’ve come to discipline the trees and chop them down if they don’t blossom. I watch the men hit the trees. I watch the rain hit the men.

A few unadorned sentences weave together several ideas: the sense of failed growth, the coercion that upholds the rule of efficiency, the passivity of the onlooker. Are the men from the government or from a corporation? It seems appropriate that we don’t know. This ordinary violence doesn’t need to be spelled out, it seems to say—it’s right in front of us if we’re merely observant enough to record it. This is a signature of the poets in “Austerity Measures”: the subtle effacement of boundaries between the political and the everyday.

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