Poetry Reading: “Transhumance”

In her third collection recently published in English, Chimera, (New Directions: 2024, translated by Brian Sneeden, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics, poetics of assemblage that are both informed by the human and the non-human, where poetry blends with writing, myth, orality, field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of a community of Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans who speak their own language and practice transhumance. Through poetry and fieldwork, the mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form.

Phoebe Giannisi, born in Athens, is a poet, a professor at the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly. She is the author of eight books of poetry in Greek. Three of her books have been published in English translated by Brian Sneeden: Homerica, (World Poetry Books: 2017, selected by Anne Carson as a Favorite Book of 2017 in the Paris Review of Books), Cicada, (New Directions: 2022) and more recently, Chimera (New Directions: 2024). An architect, Phoebe Giannisi holds a PhD in Classics (Lyon II- Lumière), published as Récits des Voies. Chant et Cheminement en Grèce archaïque,(Grenoble: 2008). Her work, in the field of eco-poetics transverses the borders between various media, investigating the poetics of voice, body and place through writing, performances, video and sound-works, poetic installations.

Introduced by Kathleen Crown, Humanities Council
Respondent: Katie Farris, Program in Creative Writing, Lewis Center for the Arts
Discussant: Karen Emmerich, Comparative Literature

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