TASSOS PORPHYRIS, The endurance of dreams, Panopticon publications, Thessaloniki 2023, p. 252
The maenad of annihilation, particularly aggressive now through the constructed “rules” of artistic recognition, has not left poetry unaffected in the postmodern historical time we are going through: extortionate readings, “intelligence” of readers, intellectual consumption, poverty of historicism on which spiritual consumption is established, as well as a multitude of other, mainly historical, causes, nurtured and are nurturing the maenad of annihilation. Thus, grosso modo, two kinds of poets have now been formed: those who are forgotten because they are no longer read, although in their time they may have been read, and those who are forgotten because they are still read, in the sense that they are consumed through their reading , even though their work, in its critical compositional cores, excludes and/or denounces the spiritual consumption and poverty of its historicism.
In fact, the maenad of annihilation, in whatever form it takes, is nothing more than the discrediting of the labor of poetic consciousness, which was deposited by a soul, completely alien to the logic of commodification and the assimilation of poetic speech with the mass acceptance and approval of industry. of culture, in which it was necessarily included as textuality. In the end, the maenad of annihilation is well on its feet, invoking obvious criteria to forget or to remember, in order to assert its inalienable right to forget or to remember. These criteria always wear the objective judgment of experts, without even considering the poetic consciousness, which they completely ignore in the blindness of their objectivity.
Against this maenad of annihilation, against the “oxidations” which the devaluation of the toil of poetic consciousness has brought about, obscuring and ultimately plunging the poets and their poems into all kinds of obscurity, Tasos Porphyris puts forward his own argument: the poetic consciousness is the “endurance of dreams” that create it, and the “rules” of artistic recognition are incapable of canceling it, when the authenticity of reading becomes the blueprint for the enjoyment of poetic texts, regardless of whether poets and poems they are major or minor to them, regardless of whether they have earned any place in the formality of the objectivity of the constructed “history” of the genre.
In any case, what for Porphyry is the signpost of his readings is the connective tissue woven by the poetic consciousness and its dream function, to the extent that the “Primary Material” of poetry, to recall Dimitris Papaditsa, it is the shaping force of the poetic event, i.e. the ars poetica, which constitutes the poeticity of poetry par excellence, and only thus is the poem inscribed in poetry.
Behind marked poetry there is always the stored sky of poeticity and not at all the “orthopedic” poem. Paraphrasing Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos, I would say that in the end poetry does not fit into the systematic and organized cultivation of the supposed “objective” classification and ranking of poets, so “when diligent taxi drivers close their drawers with satisfaction, some “long leg” remains by heart”.
This “long leg” that is left over from the outside is collected with rare poetic sensitivity by Tasos Porphyris. Probably, sometimes, his passage through dreams and their endurance, through the pitfalls of poetic consciousness, is possessed by some impressionistic mood. But its core and signpost, traversing the road of faces and texts impressionistically, despite its heartbreaking perception, offer the recognition of the authenticity of the poetic event, doing justice to the discourse that finally speaks of the poets and their poems outside the drawers and taxi drivers.
*Stefanos Rozanis is a professor of philosophy
