What I Knew

“How we strive to be genuine in a world where duplicity is everywhere and manipulation is constant: a dilemma we all face. Writing poetry does not guarantee you’ll find a way around these issues but as Sikelianos demonstrates writing poetry is an avenue by which to attempt to circumvent at least some of the larger, noisier threats and hassles. If, that is, you deploy it as a strategy opposed to the hegemonies at work in and against our lives, reclaiming the ground of our inner worlds.”

“What I Knew composes a collage counter to the isolation that emerges from a wealth of data, but little in the way of knowledge, instead composing a wealth of knowledge that comes from an engaged curiosity and open attention. “Now I tell everything / I heard & knew,” she writes, early on, setting the scene for the purpose of the collection. What I Knew is a poem that has returned home, wishing to impart the wisdoms gathered along the way, as Sikelianos writes a body, a house, a poem and a perspective that is engaged with the world, one that refuses to isolate for any of the short-sighted arguments that might be presented.”

“In this house, everything is said.” What I Knew by Eleni Sikelianos. Eleventh book, ninth poetry collection.

“What I Knew by Eleni Sikelianos is a book of poetry aiming to bear and make bearable innumerable realities of a global sense of knowing. It is a book about technology versus humanity. It is an uproarious linking by word rather than code language places and peoples and cultures and love. It is an indefatigable sequence of lessons and time-escaped experiences, documented but anti-documented in the confines and constrictive pressures of this century. It is the interlocking medley born out of a saga that has as many beginnings as endings for the poet and the poet’s broad family of characters. What I Knew is a book (and book-length poem) capable of being as much about documentation as it is about a simpler, crisper, approach to the joy of a lived independence. It is also political and seeks to sink its teeth into the rapacious principles of the deadening tech empire’s falsehoods.”

Entangling the personal with worlding language, this book explores the dreamy, private, and mysterious shelters of poetry from public bombardments, search engine algorithms, violent news headlines, and mass media… This isn’t a book, however, about the staged overlapping of familial and public worlds… Rather, in What I Knew, the poem is a protected space, and not a sacrificial one, for meditation, dreaming, and nondisclosure. This quietude against the sheer bombardment of gender violence and global conflict is a rejection of poetry’s slippages into commodification. And despite the corruption of the world, there is too a quiet optimism for poetry’s protected data.