Eleni Sikelianos
Encyclopedia
Life
She was raised in California. She graduated from the Naropa Institute with an M.F.A.She taught at Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Teachers & Writers Collaborative is a New York City-based organization that sends writers and other artists into schools. It was founded in 1967 by a group of writers and educators including Herbert Kohl, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Grace Paley, and Anne Sexton, who believed that writers could...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and teaches Literature and Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...
's Clemente Program. She co-ran the Wednesday Night Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in St. Mark's Church. She lived in New York City.
She currently lives in Colorado with her husband, Laird Hunt, and daughter Eva Grace. She teaches at Naropa
Naropa
thumb|right|NaropaNāropā was an Indian Buddhist yogi, mystic and monk. He was the disciple of Tilopa and brother, or some sources say partner and pupil, of Niguma. Naropa was the main teacher of Marpa, the founder of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism...
, and the University of Denver
University of Denver
The University of Denver is currently ranked 82nd among all public and private "National Universities" by U.S. News & World Report in the 2012 rankings....
.
Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Rattapallax, Sulfur, Chicago Review, and Fence.
She is the great-granddaughter of the renowned Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos
Angelos Sikelianos
Angelos Sikelianos was a Greek lyric poet and playwright. He wrote on national history, religious symbolism, and universal harmony in poems such as The Light-Shadowed, Prologue to Life, Mother of God, and Delphic Utterance...
, a former candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
.
Awards
- 2002 National Poetry SeriesNational Poetry SeriesThe National Poetry Series is an American literary awards program.Every year since 1979 it has sponsored the publication of five books of poetry...
(for The Monster Lives) - Seeger Fellow Princeton University
- Yaddo residency
- Maison des écrivains étrangers residency in Brittany,
- Fulbright Writer's Fellowship in Greece
- New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature
- National Endowment for the ArtsNational Endowment for the ArtsThe National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
fellowship - two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing
- New York Council for the Arts Translation Award
- James D. Phelan Award for Blue Guide
Works
- Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008)
- Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, 2001)
- The Book of Tendons 1997
- The Lover's Numbers
- To Speak While Dreaming 1993
Memoir
- The Book of Jon (Nonfiction; City Lights, 2004).
Reviews
This fall Eleni Sikelianos has come out with two new books, The California Poem (Coffee House Press) and The Book of Jon (City Lights). Sikelianos’s capacity to tune her writing instrument to greatly different projects is attested to not only by the genre of each work (The California Poem is a book-length poem and The Book of Jon is a (mostly) prose memoir), but also by the way that the two books look. The California Poem is, like its namesake states, large; it is 7 x 8 ½ inches in dimension, 200 pages in length. The Book of Jon, on the other hand, is quite small; it fits nicely into the back pocket of a pair of jeans. These differences are telling, for The California Poem is a great big epic, The Book of Jon an intimate family history.
Eleni Sikelianos declares her collage poetics a third of the way into her patchwork memoir The Book of Jon: “None of these stories will stitch up into a seamless blanket to cover this family’s tracks. In this story, all the fissures show, they bulge scarlike, they come apart at the seams or they were never sewn up in the first place.” Toward the end of the next expansive sentence, she describes “the snaking lines of those beautifully colored cartographer’s maps coming unhinged from their borders and uncoiling away off the page, disappearing into the aethers.” Even her (mixed) metaphors appear pasted together from various texts, incorporating verbs of stitching, bulging, coming apart, snaking, unhinging, uncoiling and disappearing, while the nouns they move include a blanket, fissures, scars, seams, maps and pages. But what is oddest about this passage is Sikelianos’s definition of her family story as a narrative that might “cover this family’s tracks”—a history that conceals rather than reveals. This odd and troubling idea is the engine that drives her poetic memoir from ignorance to an untotalizing knowledge of kin and kind.
Earliest Worlds contains not one, but two ambitious volumes of poems: Blue Guide, and Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing. Although the books share the balance of concentration and abandon necessary for their slightly increased speed of travel, the boundary between them is clearly defined, and either can be appreciated on its own. Together, they cover more ground than some careers.