Yannis Livadas – Strictly Two

Yannis Livadas (1969) is a Greek experimental poet, writer, jazz scholar and translator who lives in Paris, France. His translations from English into Greek include works by Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara and Ezra Pound. Livadas’s highly individual poetry incorporates an idea of experimentalism that is based on ‘organic antimetathesis’: the scaling indeterminacy of meaning, of syntactic comparisons and structural contradistinction. Livadas’s poetry thus stretches beyond the limits of individual expression and aesthetics. While remaining firmly rooted in individual experience and thought, it opens up new perspectives and creates unforeseen vistas in the solid and carefully chosen images of the poet’s personal surroundings.

The Sea Urchin chapbook ‘Strictly Two’ brings together and at the same time opposes two of Livadas’s finest poems: ‘My bones in the soup of my grave’ and ‘A poem I once wrote’, both translated from Greek into English by Livadas himself. ‘Strictly Two’: two poems that run deep and carve their way through the basalts of truth.

30 copies of this beautiful chapbook were made by hand, only 15 of which are meant for retail.