5/27/2014 Komninos Zervos

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Komninos Zervos, born 1950, Richmond, Melbourne,
Victoria; grew up in Richmond; has been performing his poetry
since the early 1980s in venues throughout Australia.
Komninos is currently one of the most popular of Australia's
performance poets. He has read and recited at all kinds of
venues, often to audiences who are relatively unfamiliar with
poetry. He has worked extensively with children. His
performances, unaided by music or dance or other theatrical
devices sometimes employed by performance poets, are
marked by great self-confldence, good humour and an ability
to reach a very wide range of people simultaneously.
Like other performance poets, his readings and recitations have
considerable dynamic range although unusual loudness and
swiftness of delivery are often-used devices. The poems on the
page can look like long columns of free verse but are usually
underpinned by some much more traditional rhythms. The use
of rhyme is also extensive, though it is sometimes reduced to
half rhymes or increased to a single reiterative rhyme for a
whole poem (as in his poem 'the bombay cafe' which uses the
'ay' rhyme at least three or four times per line for two pages).
Komninos also believes in 'bringing poetry back to the people'
from whom, by implication, it was stolen by poets such as T.S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound and the academy some years back. He
proclaims loudly, 'I'm a poet / that's right / a poet / i write, i
read, i perform, i entertain / i earn my living / by poeting.'
When one reads Komninos' eponymous collection published in
1991 without listening to the accompanying cassette, one might
be inclined to ask just what is actually being brought back to
the people. In his poem 'workplace poets tour' Komninos
catalogues the places he has performed in and defends poetry
generally as well as his own approach to it. He points out that
'poets have been around for a bloody long time' and associates
himself, in passing, with poets who 'defy prison, torture and
authority's curse. / like rendra and hikmet and ritsos and
brecht, / write words that their people will never forget'. There
is no doubting Komninos' sincerity here, but whether he has yet
written 'words that (the) people will never forget' is debatable.
The quality of Komninos' work throughout the book as poetry
on the page steadily improves, but still stops well short of being
memorable compared to poems by the poets referred to.
Some poems are more or less memorable for their subject
matter and their overall technique (for example, the well-known
performance piece, 'the baby wrap') but others can be very
slight, particularly the two sets of haiku which are strikingly
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unmemorable. It's not likely that anyone who writes 'the sudsy
water / splashing my naked body / reveals my nudity' or 'the
telephone ringing / renews my relationship / with the outside
world' has read Basho or Issa very closely.
What Komninos is good at, however, is the evocation of his
own background and social milieu. In 'childhood in richmond'
he gives a graphic and ultimately very moving picture of
growing up in a Greek takeaway and the bitter servitude of his
father 'who left greece / with a bag / full of dreams / but spent
the / rest of his life / as a slave /to a stove / till his dreams /
were all greasy / and his hope / had all gone'. In what amounts
to a kind of anapaestic tetrameter Komninos recalls with a
certain non-permanent resentment the bleak urban landscape
and the limited recreational options ('the lane / out the back /
where the kids / used to play') and at times reaches an almost
lyrical-nostalgia vision of his father when he remembers 'the
scales / of the fishes / how they'd fly / like confetti / and my dad
/ who'd be covered / from his head / to his toes / and his arms /
that would / glisten just / like the fishes .. ~
There is a similar sociological accuracy about his more recent
poem 'my friends', where he tellingly evokes their double
standards and their pretensions as well as their real human
needs and at the end neatly identifies himself with them instead
of merely standing back and being satirical. On the other hand,
Komninos can be devastatingly satirical when he wants to be,
as in his 'it's great to be mates with a koori', which continues 'to
know a gay man or two. / to have five lesbians for dinner, / and
cook them a vegetable stew. The rest of the poem gives us a
brief but comprehensive coverage of middle-class
pseudotolerance and offers a sharp ending which says: 'but
what do you see in the mirror, / when there's only yourself and
you. / and who really knows the truth, / of the fascist, that lives
inside, you.'
There may be some paradox in printing a book of performance
poetry when it's really designed to be performed live, but the
same could be said of a Beethoven score. In some ways it may
be even dangerous since it gives the reader, as opposed to the
hearer, the opportunity to look at the work more closely and
detect certain weaknesses in logic that might be passed over in
performance. In Komninos' more explicitly political poems,
such as 'fringe network anthology', the thinking can sometimes
be a bit woolly, as when he notes that the end of the first world
war, his father's arrival from Greece, the sacking of Gough
Whitlam and a 1984 poetry reading all occurred on November
11. His tribute to Shakespeare in 'monologues' is also a bit off-
course when he declares that the 'bard' speaks to us 'from 500
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years ago' rather than 400.
Lest this should seem like quibbling it is important to point out
that Komninos does have many real abilities. In addition to
those mentioned already one could also point to his feeling for
the movement of a conversation and his ear for colloquial
speech. In 'bustalk' he manages to give the impression of a
whole conversation overheard while telling us absolutely
nothing of its content. The function of dialogue as a
reaffirmation of human contact rather than as a transmitter of
information is persuasively illustrated. In Wilhelm retch's mass
psychology of fascism' he does something similar with a police
raid on a hapless marijuana smoker. Komninos may not be a
heavyweight for those who sustain themselves on French
critical theory but he does do what he does very well and there
is no denying he reaches a wide range of people. It is surely
hard not to like a poet who can describe himself as 'far away in
a footscray take-away / a modern day protege of rabelais / au
fait with roget and wordplay / drink(ing) cafe au fait and
survey(ing)) the passing array / day after day after day.'
Websites: http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos/
http://live-
wirez.gu.edu.au/Staff/Komninos/Cyber/hscpoems/jukebox.html