The Sources With & Against Which Ari Banias Wrote Anybody

In Bookmarked, a column at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Ari Banias "shares the works of literature, dance, and film that were influential or significant to his book of poetry, Anybody" (Norton, 2016). The works are great: Faye Driscoll, Abbas Kiarostami, Fred Moten, Pina Bausch, more, wow! Part of it:

Café Müeller - Pina Bausch. 1978.

I cry almost every time I watch the pair scene in Pina Bausch’s dance Café Müeller. Two seemingly dazed people encounter one another and embrace emphatically, an embrace soon interfered on and corrected by a figure in a grey suit who appears from offstage, who wordlessly instructs the “man” to carry the “woman” in a position the two cannot maintain; she falls to the floor. The two return to their original embrace, which is repetitively dismantled by Grey Suit into the gendered arrangement wherein the “man” carries then drops the “woman.” The three repeat the sequence with more and more violence and speed, until, worn down, resigned, and programmed, the pair internalizes the lesson and robotically cooperate in their own alienation from one another by performing and re-performing the entire routine on their own, fall included, dismantling of their own embrace included; Grey Suit exits. That grey-suited figure, and my relationship to it, haunts many poems in Anybody and is their subject; it represents one of the insidious forces I wrote against.

Diaries of Exile - Yiannis Ritsos tr. Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley. Archipelago, 2013.

I read these poems in the original Greek during the winter of 2011-12, while living in Provincetown. Ritsos wrote these in prison camps between 1948-50 on two different Greek islands, when many leftists were imprisoned, tortured, and executed, during and after the Greek Civil War; he scribbled them on cigarette papers, on whatever he could find. Mundane detail is not irrelevant; nothing is. Here more than anywhere, Ritsos clarifies the importance of observation that could otherwise be called minor, and the power inherent in refusal. Though, simile may be a luxury:

January 26

I want to compare a cloud

to a deer.

I can’t.

Over time the good lies

grow few.

(tr. Emmerich and Keeley)

In each observation, an assertion of life in the face of what tries to crush it. Ritsos, as others I admire, toggles between I and we: many of the poems’ energetic centers, for me, exist in the movement from one to the other—a psychic state produced by political conditions that here (as elsewhere) are unignorable. I feel in Ritsos how subjectivity can be furnished by one’s surroundings; in some of these poems the distance between I and we grows so small it becomes almost nonexistent.

Read the full "shadow biography" here. For kicks, here's the incredible Café Müeller:

Pina Bausch – Café Müller from Thomas Conway on Vimeo.