The night before I met with poet Eleni Sikelianos to discuss Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos stood at a podium in the warm and crowded Parish Hall of St. Mark’s Church. Writers had gathered to celebrate the life of Fanny Howe. Their tributes invoked the collective and praised Howe’s relational, communal thinking. Sikelianos remarked on the incredible egolessness of Howe’s writing, on the beloved poet’s unwavering attention not to her own discomforts but to what she observed. It was a fitting introduction to Sikelianos herself, whose work often faces outward, even beyond the human (environmental precarity is a critical thread in her work), and who is more interested in uncovering webs of connection than in personal discovery—though the biographical details of her life and work are deeply compelling.
Memory Rehearsal is Sikelianos’s thirteenth book and the third in a trilogy of hybrid works focusing on enigmatic figures in her family. The Book of Jon (City Lights, 2004) explored the life of Sikelianos’s brilliant but troubled father, and You Animal Machine (Coffee House Press, 2014) remembered her maternal grandmother, a Greek immigrant and burlesque dancer. Performance is also central to Memory Rehearsal, which centers on Sikelianos’s paternal great-grandmother Eva Palmer, an openly-lesbian New York socialite who, after becoming enchanted with Ancient Greek culture, dedicated her life to a revival of Delphic theatre and art. Together with her husband, the revered poet Angelos Sikelianos, Palmer put on two ambitious festivals in Delphi showcasing music, art, and a performance of Prometheus Bound in which the actors wore hand-woven costumes and used choreography recreated from ancient pottery.
The festivals, which took place in the interwar years and were meant to offer a path towards liberation and unity, left an indelible mark on modern Greek culture and on the Sikelianos family. Through a collage of poetry, imagined performances, and archival material—including Palmer’s Sapphic photography collection, personal correspondence, and unpublished autobiographical writing—Sikelianos puts her great-grandparents’ “Delphic dream” in conversation with the trajectory of her own family line. Angelos became a Greek household name, but Eva exhausted her fortune and returned to America in debt, though still in costume. Eleni herself grew up in poverty in California, surrounded by drug addiction and homelessness, disconnected from the grand vision of her ancestors. Part of the work of Memory Rehearsal is to reconcile the utopian aspirations of her forebears, not just with the tragedies of one family, but with the division, destruction, and “machine mind” that threaten life and culture today.
I met Sikelianos on Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, haunt of another sort of lineage—this one attached to ecopoetics, experimental poetry, the Outrider tradition, and the Naropa school, of which Sikelianos was a student. To speak with her is to feel for the edges of these connective tissues, the fabric of communal support that allows us to live and make art.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The Rumpus: Memory Rehearsal follows two other works focused on figures in your family. The Book of Jon, on your father, and You Animal Machine, on your maternal grandmother. The works contain poems, prose, photographs, fragments, ephemera, and other modes that defy categorization. I’ve seen the books referred to as a triptych and dubbed “hybrid memoir.” Is this the right way to frame them?
Eleni Sikelianos: I do hope these books will be read as a triptych, but I’ve struggled with what to call them. “Hybrid memoir” has been the easiest way to classify the works for others. I had initially wanted to have something like “poetry / fiction / nonfiction / memoir / antimemoir” on the back of The Book of Jon, which my editor shot down because of the question of where to put it in bookstores, and the publisher of You Animal Machine wanted to call it an essay. When I asked Anne Carson, who has been one of my great encouragers on these books, what she thought, she said, “Yes, ‘essay’ is okay, because it contains everything.” Nonetheless, they’re not quite essays either.
Rumpus: There’s something in Memory Rehearsal of the quest, too. It has the quality of an investigation.
Sikelianos: Yes. That’s a good way to talk about it. There’s a research element to many of my books, not just reading or looking into the archives, in the vein of investigative poetics, but also sensory investigation. Lately, I’ve been calling the books “ancestral encounters.” That seems to cover a lot. And there is something about saying that you’re writing a book about your mother or your grandmother that—well, it suddenly sounds like it’s going to be really boring. My friend, Phoebe Giannisi, a Greek poet, also works in hybrid forms. She calls her works “chimeric texts,” which I love. Chimera in Ancient Greek carries many meanings, one being the beast that’s put together of different parts.
Rumpus: What was it like to move between these forms while writing? I’m guessing you didn’t write in a linear fashion.
Sikelianos: Not in a linear fashion, no, especially because I worked on the book for so long. In my poetry, I sometimes move into a line that I don’t think of as a verse line. There’s not a line break, and then it moves back into line breaks. For me, there is an aliveness when you make those turns. It enlivens attention, for myself, and I hope for a reader as well. It feels natural to me to do that in prose, too. There are places where I move between—it’s prose, then suddenly there are a few line breaks. I think you’re right to wonder where you are.
Rumpus: Maybe it’s a fool’s errand to fixate on those sorts of distinctions. It’s common to hear that the difference between prose and poetry is the line break, but I wonder if it’s something else, something more like a mode?
Sikelianos: Yes, absolutely. I love thinking about it that way because it reminds me of the Greek way of talking about music as modes. To extrapolate, it’s like you’re on pathways that might intertwine. So yes, it’s a little bit like that. I’m thinking of Turkish makams, too, like different roads.
Rumpus: In Memory Rehearsal, the Eva Palmer figure, your great-grandmother, is first drawn to Greece and Ancient Greek theatre when she hears a young woman singing, a woman who turns out to be Penelope Duncan, née Sikelianos, sister-in-law of the dancer Isadora Duncan. And there’s also the speaker of the book, who hears the voices of the ancestors singing.
Sikelianos: As a poet, sound was the first thing that drew me to writing—the melopoeia—the sound of the poem and how it affects the body in ways we don’t recognize. In fact, Eva describes that moment, hearing this woman, Penelope, singing, in her autobiography. She mentions it somewhat in passing, but I realized that it changed her whole life. Later, there is me, or the speaker, listening in a Byzantine church to an Easter song by Kassiani, who was a Byzantine woman composer. I don’t realize right away that Kassiani’s song is also a troparion, but when I’m looking at Kassiani’s lyrics later I suddenly think it might have been one of the songs Eva heard Penelope singing.
Rumpus: Echoes?
Sikelianos: There are so many ways that echoes are important, I think, to how I piece together the story. And there are the various “methods of transmission,” which trace the way other animals sound out and receive sound across time and space.
Rumpus: There are also these more embodied echoes in the text, like remembered gestures. Can you say more about posing and movement in the context of Eva’s work?
Sikelianos: Eva did hundreds and hundreds of sketches of ancient vases. She studied the positions of the bodies and tried to choreograph them. She was obsessed with the pelvis in relation to the upper body, and actually, it’s pretty strange. It doesn’t look weird at first glance, but when you start to think about what their bodies were actually doing, and this relationship between the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle, the diaphragm. That obsession of hers with that pose—
[Sikelianos rises, demonstrates pose.]
Rumpus: This is the “mythic pose”?
Sikelianos: Well, there are quite a few mythic poses, but this was an important one for Eva. And I thought about how Eva was always posing, in a way.
Rumpus: You include a letter from Eva’s lover, the American writer Natalie Barney. “Every day for you is a deliberate unfashionable performance of defiance,” Barney writes. Was it a type of staging, how Eva arranged herself to be seen?
Sikelianos: And arranged herself not to be seen. It’s both. You know, the mythic pose is also just the fact that she was wearing those gowns around New York City.
Rumpus: The Greek cloth, the period costumes? It’s so eccentric.
Sikelianos: It’s so eccentric. My uncle Mark told me it was just horrifying to walk around New York City holding your grandmother’s hand while she’s in her “ancient” robes and everybody’s staring.
Rumpus: She kept dressing like that?
Sikelianos: Oh, she just never stopped. She won’t take off the clothes, even though her mother’s begging her—when I write that in the book, that’s real, all real. It’s all part of the pose, the performance. Life truly is her performance. I think it was a way of working with the utopian vision she had—and it’s also a way to show what you want to have seen, what you’re allowing to be seen, while keeping other poses for your private life.
Rumpus: Was it strange to be in the archives of a person who has already self-edited?
Sikelianos: That’s what the archives always are, right? You might discover what wasn’t meant to be discovered. Even the way the archives are arranged tells us a lot. Eva’s archives are very specific because, as I mention in the book, Angelos’s second wife put moratoriums on parts of it. She didn’t want Eva’s lesbianism brought forward; she really suppressed it.
Rumpus: This was Anna Karamani, who you spent time with in your travels, when you were very young?
Sikelianos: Yes. I loved her, but it was complicated.
Rumpus: What was it like to visit these publicly available archives—especially of Eva’s sapphic photography collections, or even her letters—and to encounter scholars who are experts on your relatives?
Sikelianos: I’m not a scholar; I’m not an archivist. I would randomly request a file, as part of my “investigation.” One of the first letters I read in Paris was addressed to Natalie, telling her (after she’d married Angelos) that she didn’t like sleeping with men. I fictionalize it in the book: “Chère Nat, I have discovered that I really don’t care for the male organ.”
Rumpus: And there’s the amazing list of Eva’s past lovers.
Sikelianos: There’s so much that’s known about my great-grandparents. It was very, very different from writing the book about my dad and the book about my grandmother. They’re ordinary people. They lived extraordinary lives; they weren’t “normal,” but there’s no archive, no outside knowledge, except from people who knew them personally. In Greece, many people are invested in telling this story a certain way.
Rumpus: Did it feel transgressive to write this book, to interpret your great-grandparents, considering so many others have their own versions?
Sikelianos: Yes, it does feel transgressive. Greeks will have things to say about this book, for sure.
Rumpus: Maybe we’re talking about whose story it is. In Memory Rehearsal, there’s this fuzziness around the “I” who’s speaking. Sometimes it might be Eva, but this text is also constructed in a speculative way. You can almost feel the source material beneath it, so that the first person never feels exactly like historical fact or completely imagined. The “I” is always shifting. Did you see it that way?
Sikelianos: There’s a distinct moment in the book where I shift from directly quoting Eva’s autobiography to an invented “I,” which could also be the speaker. You can’t tell who’s talking anymore, and I was really pleased with that.
Rumpus: There are only a couple of moments when the “I” feels directly tied to the speaker. One is in the “Milk Bar Interlude,” when you invoke Io.
Sikelianos: When I was writing the book about my dad, the “I” was hardly present in the first draft. I realized that I had to be there to make the book make sense or matter. It was a struggle for me to make myself present. It’s probably not unlike Eva’s tendency to recede. Allen Ginsberg, who was one of my teachers, was interested in those moments where we “lay bare the soul” (that’s how he used to put it), the risk-taking of presenting yourself in material that’s pretty hot to handle—because they’re the stories that surround us personally. The moment that you’re talking about is where I was asking myself why I kept thinking about Io. Of course, she’s an important character in Prometheus Bound, the first play Eva and Angelos staged at the Delphic Festivals. But why did I keep returning to her? Well, this is why. Like so many in these stories, she is raped by a god. Io is related to all of us, right? I mean women who’ve walked home alone in the dark, who’ve been scared, catcalled, who’ve been pursued, anyone who’s been sexually assaulted, who has fled in fear. It felt important to have my stakes at play.
Rumpus: That’s also quite a generous move because it’s towards the universal.
Sikelianos: I was thinking about the elements in the play and what makes us still read it after all these centuries. I kept going back to Io. There was the amazing cow mask for the performance.
Rumpus: Right after that photo with the cow mask, you have this directive: “‘Write what I tell you,’ says Prometheus, ‘in your book of memory.’” This book doesn’t do that at all, does it?
Sikelianos: No. I didn’t realize this until later, but, thinking of your mention of the universal, I’m not at all interested in writing a book that is about my personal trauma. I’m interested in my personal trauma, of course, but only if it’s connecting, if it’s towards a communal thinking through. I’m just not interested in solely privatized trauma, I guess.
Rumpus: You might say that’s a big part of the memoir publishing model today.
Sikelianos: I have an allergic reaction to it. I don’t think it’s helping us coinhabit the world. In my poetry work I often, not always, work with ecopoetic themes. When I was writing a long poem, The California Poem (Coffeehouse Press, 2004), flirting with the epic (this was at the same time I was writing the book about my dad), because I was writing an epic, I was thinking about who the hero was. And again I was trying to write an “I” into the poem, or at least to interrogate an “I.” It was my French translator who pointed out that the hero of the poem is actually the animals, the dinoflagellates and echinoderms. It took me a long time to recognize an impulse I was enacting in the poem—the hero could be all the other creatures that inhabit us, that we’re carrying evolutionarily, the hero is a collective living weave.
Rumpus: There’s a very haunted “I” in this book. Now I’m thinking about the recurring sections here titled “Methods of Transmission.” I know that you have an interest in biological processes and systems. I wondered if these sections also did something very particular in this book. They are like subtle reminders that this story is not just about this particular family. The effect is this widening out to the rest of the living world—
Sikelianos: These methods of transmission, whether it’s the transmission of the family story or trauma, or the whale trying to talk to another whale, it’s this constant fabric of communication.
Rumpus: The ancestors try to come back up into the present—but can the landscape do that?
Sikelianos: Absolutely.
Rumpus: Can a rock haunt?
Sikelianos: I think it can, actually. I do. I mean, we’re carrying lithic minerals in our blood.
Rumpus: Did you feel that you were engaging with, maybe not Greece as a nation, necessarily, but the actual land?
Sikelianos: Yes, and I feel very connected to that land, and I did almost immediately. It’s not totally unlike the landscape I grew up in. I think that’s one reason why Glafkos, my grandfather, ended up settling in California. But I also think about Angelos and Eva’s project, the Delphic Project, as an early site-specific happening. There’s work to be done on this that is maybe even being done now in Greece, this thinking of the Festivals as ecological site-specific events.
Rumpus: You write, “Weaving is resistance to machine-mind.” It was easy for me to perhaps heavy-handedly connect this to the present. What did “machine mind” mean to Eva and Angelos in the interwar period, and what does it mean to us now? I wondered if what they were working against was really so different from what we’re facing today.
Sikelianos: That’s something Eva wrote in her autobiography (which is not exactly an autobiography, by the way). She was talking about industrialization, and the move away from handmade things toward things made by machines, from things in which you could sense the trace of a human body to things made in repetitive motions by a machine or machine-like gestures. Weaving was a way to overthrow the machine and industrial, and by extension colonial power. Eva was really thinking about that. Her lover Khurshed [Naorji] went back to India and joined Gandhi’s Ashram where they were making khadi cloth, which was this symbol and method for overthrowing colonialism. Eva was thinking about these things.
I think it’s very similar actually, to what we’re facing now. I recently learned the term “cognitive surrender,” which is a really useful label for what is happening to us in relation to the machines of our moment, and the colonizing power of money. I’m glad you’re thinking that way.
Rumpus: Eva and Khurshed stayed in touch through that?
Sikelianos: They did. She wanted Khurshed to send her a piece of khadi cloth and she wanted the actor playing Prometheus, who is a symbol of defiance and resistance, to wear it. Nobody would necessarily know what it meant, but she would, or people who knew he was wearing khadi cloth would know.
Rumpus: You write, “For many years, I considered this Delphic dream a failure, a curdled dreg of milk at the bottom of the family cup. It was the bitter taste my great grandfather left in his son’s mouth.” But then you turn. “Why did people love first Angelos and then Eva so? Because their vision and their commitment to it was so totally outrageous it defied the State’s efforts to abandon the living—to abandon love.” I detected at the end of the book a turning upwards. Is that right?
Sikelianos: In her autobiography, Eva talks about “upward panic.” That’s what she calls the book, in fact. She had this notion that panic happens—like wars as she knew them, different from how we know them, as now they never end—these are moments of personal and social and collective panic that move consciousness downward. How do you move up from that? For her, the Delphic Festivals were an effort of upward panic, a way to funnel energy up, collectively, through art.
Rumpus: But there was no protection against future dissolution?
Sikelianos: There’s never any shoring up against future disaster, right? It’s a delusion. Look at where we are. But these moments—like the Delphic Festivals—they’re temporary autonomous zones, as Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey called them. They create utopian moments that still exist for us. We can still dwell in that in memory.
Rumpus: We still have the space she made.
Sikelianos: It’s something we can hold in this present, which is also a future. And we learn from them how to make our own temporary utopias. There’s this jumping back and forth. You can’t quite find time.
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