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Yannis Livadas is a contemporary Greek poet, born in 1969. In 1993 he invented the «fusion-sonnet». In 2008 he came up with the idea of «organic antimetathesis», the transpositional synthesis of poetry based on the scaling indeterminacy of meaning, of syntactic comparisons and structural contradistinction. He works as an editor, translator and independent scholar with a specialization in modernism, postmodernism, and haiku. He is also a columnist and freelance contributor to various literary magazines. His poems and essays have been translated into twelve languages. He lives in Paris, France.
MY BONES IN THE SOUP OF MY GRAVE - Yannis Livadas​
A new book of poetry by Yannis Livadas, published here in its first edition.
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“Certainty threatens me. Uncertainty nourishes me. The hope of communication will always be the pretext, yet authenticity remains the most serious irreverence in the interests of humanity.
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Poetry is not a theory about things, or a danger-free method for approaching things. It is a non-theory, a practice. Imagination rather than philosophy. Wisdom rather than morality. In enjoins without confusing and it distinguishes without dividing.
An actual address to what has escaped the notice.
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Sooner or later the marquee will be plunged into darkness; that is its one and only certitude. Man is the technology of death; life is his experiment. What is written is debited into his account for all eternity.”
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-Yannis Livadas, Paris
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"Readers will welcome this new collection of poems by Yannis Livadas. It is a minefield of fantastic images and poetic intelligence that is sure to take its place as a major contribution to 21th-century literature. Livadas never misses, he hits the mark every time"
Neeli Cherkovski
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A SUM OF HAIKU 1991-1997 - Yannis Livadas
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The poems are previously unpublished, read on by the late Lucien Stryk, and appear here for a first time.
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“Haiku, I would say, is something that is due while at the same time it does not exist, and if a nugget of its nature ends up to man, it is only its unconceivable meaning, which as such has nothing more to offer than a jolt to his feasibility and mortality.”
Yannis Livadas, Paris 2013
“Yannis Livadas has written a remarkable group of haiku. He is very close in spirit to Issa, one of haiku's Great Four, with the same humor, compassion, and tenderness, yet he is very much as writer his own man. His haiku would appeal, I’m confident, to all who care for the art, and he deserves a large readership. It takes a very special sensibility to create such a fine body of poetry, and at every turn in the group one finds evidence of just such a sensibility. It would be most difficult for me to single out favorite pieces, for I am impressed by all of the poems. Yannis Livadas is to be congratulated on his achievement, a very real one, and he should be read for the sheer pleasure of his work.”
Lucien Stryk 1997
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INTERVIEW: GREEK POET YANNIS LIVADAS – ‘THE INSTRUMENT OF POETRY IS NOT THE POEM; IT IS THE POET. IN TRUTH, POEMS ARE THE PARASITES OF THIS CONSUMMATION.’
'Yannis Livadas is a contemporary Greek poet, born in 1969. Both in his poems and essays, Livadas constitutes the idea of experimentalism based on organic antimetathesis- the scaling indeterminacy of meaning, of syntactic comparisons and structural contradistinction. He is also an editor, translator, and independent scholar with specialization on modernism, postmodernism and haiku. He is also a columnist and freelancer contributor to various literary magazines, both in Greece and other countries. His poems and essays have been translated into eight languages. His first book of poems in the United Kingdom is under publication by Ragged Lion Press. He lives in Paris, France.'
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To read the full Vendor Culture interview follow the link HERE
The Poetry of Antimetathesis: Essay — Yannis Livadas
'An adventure that you can neither embark on nor finish. You are, therefore, under duress, even within the illusion of a borderline, evergreen clearing. All you need do is work. Wanting to and, at the same time, not. By a causality that’s not a matter of will. It is a matter of principle. That principle instantaneously gives rise to a will by means of which you are liberated from the principle. You go up in the world, you gain faith, but you mainly take pleasure in losing more than you could possibly have lost.
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To stand before chaos “out of which everything emerges,” you need to live in the present, not simply to relate to the present as one aspect of a descriptive system. Poetry is not framed by a narrative but by the poetic capacity and, therefore, by the poetic nature. It does not make sense through the absorbing of the shock of some kind of rhetoric or schematic ploy (which is the exact opposite of the shock created by the content, irrespectively of form) nor with the citing of chosen stylistic consequences. Even, that is, if you stand before chaos, you are at a disadvantage in relation to the one who eventuates, who continually emerges out of chaos. The present which assimilates the future.
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Parthenogenesis does not exist, although “parthenophany,” the pretension of virginity, does. You go to sleep being the one and you wake up being the other. Nor will there be an outcome if you do not conceive why you went to sleep as well as why you opened your eyes again. You may close them once more.'
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READ MORE FROM NUMERO CINQ HERE