#dimoula

[mariekotro]

Λάθος πίκρα σκότωσες αυτή που σε φαρμάκωνε ζεί.

Κική Δημουλά.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Reading Greece Pays Tribute to Acclaimed Greek Poet Kiki Dimoula

An edition of selected poems by Dimoula was published by Yale University Press, on October 2012, under the title The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected Poems bringing the first full volume of her work into English for the first time in nearly two decades. In the words of Yves Bonnefoy, “these beautiful poems are reflections of a cloudy sky in earthly words. Their rays of light, also, their reasons for hope”.

A full member of the Academy of Athens, Dimoula’s honors include the European Prize for Literature, Greece’s Grand National Prize for lifetime achievement, two Greek National Poetry Prizes, and the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize as well as its Aristeion of Letters. In a 2011 speech when she received Greece’s most prestigious literary award, the Grand National Prize for lifetime achievement, Dimoula talked about the role of culture during the crisis. “How society perceives matters of art in general depends on how far its soul has accepted the belief that art, poetry in this case, will not impose cutbacks on the escape it provides,” she said then.

Kiki Dimoula’s poetry—the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature—is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, conflating concrete and abstract, literal and metaphorical, physical and metaphysical.  Exacting and oracular at once, Dimoula superimposes absurdity on rationality, caustic irony on dark melancholy. Her poetry — spare, profound, unsentimental, effortlessly transforming the quotidian into the metaphysical, drawing on the powerful themes of time, fate and destiny, yet making them entirely her own — has earned her a near-cult following in Greece. Through her poems, Dimoula explores both syntax and memory, restlessly searching for forms to contain grief, intimacy, and uncertainty.

[tafkey]

Ars gratiae artis, Κική Δημουλά

[zaxarozymomenh]

[elladastinkardiamou]

Parliament Library holds exhibition commemorating poet Kiki Dimoula

Commemorating two years since the death of the trailblazing existentialist Greek poet Kiki Dimoula at the age of 88 on February 22, 2020, Parliament is presenting an exhibition dedicated to her life and work.

Hosted in the south hall on the ground floor, the exhibition will comprise, among others, photographs, awards and correspondence between Dimoula and other important figures of the Greek arts and letters, but the highlight of the show is an unpublished poem by the multi-award-winning artist and academic.

The exhibits come from the archives of the Parliament Library and from her family’s own private collection of memorabilia.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Inside a Greek Poet’s Work, a Reflection of Her Country’s Hard Times

Article from 2013.

KIKI DIMOULA, Greece’s feisty, 81-year-old national poet, was holding court on a recent afternoon, musing about her work and the fate of her country. Asked to describe the mood in Greece today, she did not mince words. “Darkness and chaos,” she said, drawing on a cigarette.

Ms. Dimoula may have a flair for the dramatic, but her words are always chosen carefully. Her poetry — spare, profound, unsentimental, effortlessly transforming the quotidian into the metaphysical, drawing on the powerful themes of time, fate and destiny, yet making them entirely her own — has earned her a near-cult following in Greece.

One of her Greek writer contemporaries, Nikos Dimou, has called Ms. Dimoula “the best Greek woman poet since Sappho,” and she is the first living female poet ever to be included in the prestigious French publisher Gallimard’s poetry series. But her work has rarely been translated into English.

Last fall, a new collection of her selected poems, “The Brazen Plagiarist,” appeared from Yale University Press, translated by Cecile I. Margellos and Rika Lesser, bringing the first full volume of her work into English for the first time in nearly two decades.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Great Greek poet, Kiki Dimoula, passed away at 89

Great Greek poet, Kiki Dimoula, passed away on Saturday afternoon, following days in intensive care unit of a private hospital in Athens. She had reportedly suffered heart problems following respiratory infection.

In one of her speeches about poetry, Dimoula had said:

In a speech on poetry Dimula defined the poem as follows:

“You are walking in a desert. You hear a bird singing. As unlikely as a bird is in the desert, you have to make a tree for him. That’s the poem.”

She is the first living female poet ever to be included in the prestigious French publisher Gallimard’s poetry series.

Dimoula’s work is haunted by the existential dissolution of the post-war era.

Her central themes are hopelessness, insecurity, absence and oblivion.

Using diverse subjects (from a “Marlboro boy” to mobile phones) and twisting grammar in unconventional ways, she accentuates the power of the words through astonishment and surprise, but always manages to retain a sense of hope.

Her poetry has been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Italian and many other languages.

[elladastinkardiamou]

R.I.P  Kiki Dimoula

Έφυγε σήμερα το απόγευμα από τη ζωή η κορυφαία Ελληνίδα ποιήτρια Κική Δημουλά σε ηλικία 89 ετών, ύστερα από σύντομη νοσηλεία, κατά την οποία είχε υποστεί ανακοπή καρδιάς.