Recent Press (Part I): Stride Magazine / The Stinging Fly / Long Poem Magazine / 'The Greece That Hurts'

I'm grateful for attention my work continues to receive from other poets and writers, reviewers and editors, essayists and academics. I'm especially pleased when this is not confined to discussions of the most recent book, but extends to the broader arc of my practice, giving a multifaceted and cumulative reading of it.

This is Part One of a two-part post rounding up some commentary that appeared over the first half of 2024. It focuses on reviews and essays on my books or other published work. Part Two (coming soon now available here) will log coverage of activities of mine that extend beyond print publishing.

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On 11 January 2024, UK-based Stride Magazine published a review of Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document (Veer Books, 2023) which I was happy to note given the attention Stride gives to poetry from small presses and in broadly experimental modes, and especially since in the past the magazine published one of the most comprehensive reviews of my third book this is no longer entertainment (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). In 'Crowdsourcing Words,' Dominic Rivron observes of Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document that: "over the course of the book, many different voices assume ownership of the 'I' and when they do, they usually express themselves in relation to and in the impersonal argot of the net. As a result, the personal becomes so diluted at times as to virtually (in both senses) - but not completely - cease to exist." He quotes excerpts from several poems in the book, and homing in on the poem 'Strategy' - noting its relation with the title of the book - he writes that "the speaker is at once central to the poem and yet almost totally, chillingly, erased from it." Rivron reads the book as a comment on the nature of personal identity in the digital era, especially in light of the huge strides made in large language model Artificial Intelligence. "And it's happening now:" Rivron writes. "Makris' poetry is not a vision of the future, it's very much rooted in the present." His concluding paragraph focuses on what he reads as antecedents to my practice, reflected in the act of "crowdsourcing words, phrases, ideas and ways of looking" in the modernist canon, referencing examples from The Waste Land, The Waves and Finnegans Wake, as well as Ashbery writing on Rimbaud: "The self is obsolete: in Rimbaud’s famous formulation, "I is someone else" ("Je est un autre”)."

The full review is available on Stride Magazine. Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document is available to purchase directly from Veer, or from bookshops. Thanks to Dominic Rivron and Stride editor Rupert Loydell for the continued interest in my work.

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On 11 April 2024, The Stinging Fly - Ireland's highest profile literary magazine - published a review-essay with title 'Irish poetry 2023' in which Lily Ní Dhomhnaill considers four books that, she writes, are "my favourite. They are very different, but they speak to me, and to each other, about the relationship between words and the bodies that speak and write them; and about the distances that language succeeds and fails to close or cross." One of these books is my most recent, It Reeks of Radio (BLR Editions, 2023). Constituting the final section of her essay, Ní Dhomhnaill's discussion of my book begins with the note that "... Christodoulos Makris has been refuting the idea that poetry comes from a place of private interiority for several collections now," and that It Reeks of Radio offers an "exploration of authorship, voice, presence, personhood, and the weird always-already-shared quality of language." In a remarkable piece, particularly in the lines drawn across the four books under review, Ní Dhomhnail quotes a number of passages from It Reeks of Radio making several observations along the way, such as: "What assumptions are we making about the relationship between language and those that speak it when we value a poem for its capacity to create the impression of being spoken to by a specific, individual ‘someone’?"; "This is a wry, funny book. It's also, despite the workplace chatter, one that feels remarkably lonely. Amid the dross of professional speak, communication is limited"; and "I hear in the book’s sly, knowing tone a deeper dissatisfaction with the impossibility, and the urgency, of using language to speak to someone directly, in such a way that they will understand what it’s like to be you, to be alive in your particular body and at your particular moment in history; and to escape the trap of the private into something shared. Words never go the whole way to this impossible shared space."

The full essay is available on The Stinging Fly website under its 'criticism' strand. It Reeks of Radio is available from Museum of Literature Ireland and other outlets. Many thanks to Lily Ní Dhomhnaill and to The Stinging Fly reviews editor Gillian Moore.

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Kimberly Campanello's essay 'The Irish Long Poem | The Long Poem in Ireland' published in issue 31 of the London-based Long Poem Magazine (May 2024) offers a reading of work by Dimitra Xidous, Ailbhe Darcy and myself. Beginning with an epigraph taken from 'Translations,' a sequence from my first book Spitting Out the Mother Tongue (Wurm Press, 2011), Campanello situates her essay in "juxtapositions of conflicted and conflicting national commemorations, recent recognition of artists not born in Ireland by the state and arts institutions, and scenes of violent xenophobia and racism following an attack on a Gaelscoil on a square named Parnell," with the three works under discussion "push[ing] and pull[ing] at the contours of Irishness and poetry." The central section of the essay focuses on my book this is no longer entertainment. Campanello's clear-eyed study of the poem, which is considered in conjunction with the totality of my writing including relevant essayistic work as well as social media posts, is best read in full, but some fragments are worth quoting: "Sometimes, most times, our tastes don't coincide with those of these internet authors (the source material). This poem, the result of Makris' processing according to his 'interests and emotional temperature', functions like a mathematical proof, demonstrating the powerful workings of poetic language, which is everyday language, too."... "This processed material, now a poem, leaves the reader processing and begging the question: Are authors of internet comments lyric poets?"... "Following the events in Dublin in November 2023 and their aftermath, Makris' poem from 2019 is even more harrowing and prescient. This is what the voices he has processed and invited us to process have been saying. It is difficult to imagine an Irish lyric poem addressing this subject as explicitly or effectively."

Issue 31 of Long Poem Magazine can be purchased directly from the magazine's website. this is no longer entertainment is available from Amazon and from selected bookshops, while Spitting Out the Mother Tongue is available to purchase here. My thanks to Kimberly for writing this essay for print, and to the Long Poem Magazine editors.

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Last month I received notification that my poem 'Civilisation's Golden Dawn: A Slide Show' from my second book The Architecture of Chance (Wurm Press, 2015) is the subject of an entire chapter in La Grecia que duele. Poesía griega de la crisis (The Greece that hurts. Greek poetry of the crisis) by Helena González-Vaquerizo (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, May 2024). This book, written in Spanish, is a study of contemporary Greek poetry taking in the work of around 40 Greek or Greek-adjacent poets and focusing "on the contested legacy of Antiquity in poems written mostly from 2010 onwards, examining notions of continuity, heritage and crypto-colonialism in the context of the financial and migration crisis in Greece" (from an email to me by the author). González-Vaquerizo analyses and comments on  'Civilisation's Golden Dawn: A Slide Show' - as well as translating it into Spanish - for the chapter 'El Amanecer Dorado de la civilización' (The Golden Dawn of Civilisation), part of the section 'Dondequiera que viaje' (Wherever I travel).

González-Vaquerizo acknowledges my rather tangential connection to Greece, also noting that "the poem is written in English by an author who composes all his work in his second language." Her analysis (as translated into English for me by Raquel Murillo Diestro) begins by recognising that the poem "alludes in its title to the far-right party Golden Dawn, which during the crisis years gained significant parliamentary representation, driven by uncertainty and precariousness, supported by a harsh anti-immigration discourse;" and that it is "complex, given the variety of registers it presents and the many references it contains, but this is also what makes it worthy of analysis. The poem reviews some of the most fundamental issues pertaining to modern Greek identity, such as language, in a diachronic journey made up of those slides that, like snapshots, display moments, monuments, and features of Greek civilization, contrasting the glories of the past with the ruins of the present." A little later in her introduction, González-Vaquerizo writes that "the text is rich in commentary on the Greek language and plays with its variants. In addition to referring to katharévousa, the 'pure' language variety, Makris uses expressions in Ancient Greek, exposes the differences between reconstructed ancient pronunciation and modern  pronunciation, and intersperses Greeklish words in verses written in obscene and vulgar language, where expressions in Greek slang, transliterated into English, mimic that 'impure' language of immigration and the underworld."

The translation of the full text of González-Vaquerizo's commentary is reproduced with permission on the page on this site dedicated to The Architecture of Chance (click here and scroll to the bottom).

Thanks to Helena González-Vaquerizo for making this poem the subject of a full chapter in her book. Thanks also to Raquel Murillo Diestro for her translation. The Architecture of Chance is available to purchase here or from bookshops. Full details on La Grecia que duele and a purchasing option are available on the publisher's website.