Greece and the Beat Generation: The Case of Lefteris Poulios

Abstract

Lefteris Poulios’s twenty-one line poem, “Roads” (1973), is a striking example of the global circulation of ideas in post-World War II poetry. While less overtly indebted to the Beats than his “An American Bar in Athens,” which will be the primary focus of this essay, “Roads” draws upon many of the essential Beat tropes—jazz, loneliness, travel, and the road itself—to construct an image that is simultaneously deeply nationalistic and unashamedly transnational in its location of the poetic voice. The opening line’s reference to “my land” immediately highlights this doubling (“Roads—lustrous dark octopuses of my land”), coupling a direct avowal of Greek identity with (as becomes increasingly apparent in what follows) a sense of alienation that is expressed through identification with Beat protagonists such as Sal Paradise and the “I” of “Howl.” As in On the Road, roads connect places and peoples but simultaneously remind them of an existential separation that mere travel is never able to transcend. The poem’s closing lines—“We are waiting each at our stop / We are waiting all in the zinc plated shelter”—confirm this isolation and also historicize it. The lines stand apart, separated by the only stanza break in the poem, and, in a formal feature that reinforces the impression of isolation, are written as two separate sentences, each with a full stop. Structure mirrors form, with each individual alone at his or her own “stop,” divided, possibly passive or indifferent, but certainly alienated, waiting in the shelter made of zinc. In the Greek original, Poulios uses the word υπόστεγο, a shelter to protect yourself from the elements or in which to stay, crowded or alone, until you are transported somewhere else, which in this context also appears to resonate with images of nuclear annihilation, connoting Bob Dylan’s “hard rain” and the inescapable fate that seems to await humanity, whichever road is taken.

Underneath, sub roads. On top,

airy tunnels playing jazz.

…

We are waiting each at our stop.

We are waiting all in the zinc plated shelter.

—From “Roads,” Lefteris Poulios¹