Fitzcarraldo Poet Phoebe Giannisi

Poet Phoebe Giannisi on Goatsong

We are delighted to be joined by Fitzcarraldo Poet Phoebe Giannisi and the translator Brian Sneeden.

In Giannisi's language, life obeys myth. A man places a screaming cicada in his mouth, reminding us of a scene from Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates claims cicadas to have been humans who became entranced by the invention of singing, and didn't stop to eat or drink. When the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips, we're told 'the place of the mother's grip / is the mark of death.' In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still.

'An intimate and utterly feminine perspective on language and regeneration.'

-- Jessica Gigot, The New York Times

Phoebe Giannisi is the author of eight collections of poetry. A 2016 Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi is a professor of architecture at the University of Thessaly, and co-editor of the literary journal FRMK. She has translated Ancient Greek lyric poetry as well as the poetry of Barbara Koehler, Gregor Laschen, Jesper Svenbro and Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. She lives in Volos, Greece.

Brian Sneeden is the author of Last City (Carnegie Mellon, 2018). His poetry and translations have received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and other recognitions. He is a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.