November, 1999
Elena Georgiou
by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
© 1999 Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

Gerry Gomez Pearlberg: O.K., Elena, let’s start with some background on the origins of your poem "A Week in the Life of the Ethnically Indeterminate." What were the circumstances under which it was written?

Elena Georgiou: I find that my writing usually explores themes that last approximately two years. This poem was written during the "race/identity" phase. I was a graduate student in Creative Writing at City College and one of my closest friends took me to see bell hooks read at Judith’s Room [a now defunct women’s bookstore in lower Manhattan]. After the reading, bell hooks invited us to dinner -- she used to be my friend’s professor at Oberlin and they had become friends. It was my first time meeting her. Within the first few minutes of dinner bell leaned toward me and asked me how I dealt with being ‘ethnically indeterminate.’ I thought, "Oh my god, there is label for the way I look! Ethnically Indeterminate!" It was just too good to let go. And it summed up everything that I wanted to write about in a way that was uniquely SERIOUS, HUMOROUS, PERSONAL and POLITICAL. I knew I was going to run home and use the phrase.

Pearlberg: Interestingly enough, in each of these seven encounters, the "ethnically indeterminate" narrator says little or nothing to her various "inquisitors" or accusers -- the poem is really a chorus of their voices. A more common approach might have included refutations or arguments within each of these scenarios. What informed your decision to avoid that kind of additional commentary?

Georgiou: Up until the time the poem was written, I had only heard work in which the poet tells her reader/audience who she is and where she is from–using the poem to give answers to the sometimes absurd and most often invasive inquiries of the onlooker. I wanted to write a poem that highlights the American obsession with asking the question, and how the question can get repeated in various ways with various emotions from a diverse selection of people. When people get asked the question, "Where are you from?" they are usually placed in a spotlight not of their own choosing. I wanted to reverse that scenario by putting a spotlight on the onlooker and in so doing, make my audience/readers think about themselves in relation to the poem rather than thinking about the poet.

Pearlberg: There’s a lot of walking away in this poem. Seems like at the end of most of these encounters, someone’s walking away from someone else. Tell me about that.

Georgiou: For me, ‘walking away’ is a significant image in the poem. I feel it working on many levels. First, walking away puts a spotlight on invasion–i.e., a complete stranger can waltz into your life for a minute, feel absolutely entitled to ask you an intimate question, and then leave. Second, it puts a spotlight on powerlessness–i.e., someone you barely know feels entitled to name you, to identify you racially and/or ethnically, and then to leave. I’ve been living in this country and in New York City for 11 years and that still blows my mind.

Pearlberg: On that very subject, "A Week in the Life…" strikes me as a quintessentially New York City poem -- strangers talking to (or at) strangers — everyone kind of getting in each other’s face and minding each other’s business. I really can’t see this kind of poem being set anywhere else on Earth. Can you?

Georgiou: No, I totally agree with you. In fact, so much so, that I often refer to it as my New York Poem. I have read it at conferences and readings in other States and it works, but there’s something about reading it in New York that takes it to another level. As you say, New Yorkers are up in each others faces and therefore the question does surface in the bold way that I have presented it in this poem.

However, I think that it is in the reading of this poem rather than in the writing that makes it the most powerful in New York. When I read out of State, the comments that I get come from people who I would label (and I feel it’s my prerogative to get to label in this instance!) as onlookers. They want to talk about the issues of identity, race, etc. But when I read the poem in New York the comments come from The Ethnically Indeterminate. They want to tell me how many times they have been bombarded or invaded with their own variations on the ‘where are you from?’ question and how it has made them feel and how they have responded to it.

Pearlberg: Beyond your different experiences with audiences, how does living in NYC shape or influence your poetry? Is there a contrast to be made, especially in comparison to living in London?

Georgiou: I started writing soon after I came to live in New York so I’m not sure how I would go about making a comparison with London. What I’m about to say feels hypothetical, but it is an important question, so here goes. Every time I go home I take my laptop and don’t write a word. Perhaps this is like writers who have to wait for their parents to pass on before they feel released to draw on images from their shared history. London feels like a parent to me, a parent with whom I have had a troubled relationship. I will write about London and my connection to it someday, but I’m not ready to do so just yet.

On the other hand, New York inspires me. I love its good, its bad and its ugly. For me, the culture, the environment in which I live in is inseparable from my art. I don’t feel that I will become one of those writers who can pick up and write anywhere just as long as they have their computer with them. At present, I need to be in constant conversation with the City, its artists, and its people. When I write I often take into consideration what New Yorkers are thinking, and feeling, and talking about. Often, I feel like I’m representing.

Pearlberg: "A Week in the Life…" is such a timely anthem with its critique of the hyper-vigilant "patrolling" of the borders of race, culture, and ethnicity as well as its exploration of the insidious ways racism plays out — like the place in your poem where the supervisor is more concerned with looking "unracist" on paper than rectifying the fact that "all the positions of power are white/and all the support staff are black." The poem also comments on all the arbitrary ways we use these categories to feel bonded with or separate from one another, all the ways in which these identities contain or fail to contain us. And then there’s the world of appearances — "looking like" this or that — and where does that ultimately lead us? This is a lot to take on in a relatively short poem! Did you know what you were getting yourself into when you started, or did these various meanings emerge as you went along?

Georgiou: Yes, I knew what I was taking on. I knew who I was going to look at and how I was going to do it. That’s why I love poetry–the condensation of language, the condensation of life. This poem is seven stanzas that condense five years of experience. I wanted to grab the readers by the throat and not let them exhale or avert their eyes until I had finished with them. I remember reading this poem in Barnes & Noble and a man who was browsing for books stopped to listen. When I finished reading the poem, I heard the word "Damn!" come out of his mouth. I was overjoyed. I wanted to say, "You’re Damn Right, Damn," but instead I said, "…and the next poem is called…"

Pearlberg: Given the complexities and contradictions this poem explores, your choice of structure — the seven days in the life — is a really helpful device. It’s episodic, and one by one the stories accumulate to make a sort of kaleidoscopic picture. How did you come up with the idea of framing the poem in this way?

Georgiou:Since finishing the poem in 1994, I’ve often said to friends that I could turn this poem into something that could be my version of Pound’s Cantos, and keep adding stanzas for each day that some new race- or identity-related comment implants itself in my consciousness and screams, write about this. Interestingly, the seven-day structure is what came to me first. When I came to live in this City it didn’t take me long to find out that the most interesting thing about me (from the onlookers’ perspective) was where I was from. I knew I had to write about this. So, I did what I always do to write a poem. I make the decision to write about a certain subject and my body goes into automatic pilot collecting images and storing them away until they are ripe and then I sit down to create it. This poem took five years of image collecting and a month or so to write. I knew the poem couldn’t wait any longer when the man screamed at me: "nigger from Harlem passing for white with a phony accent." It was such a precise and detailed slanderous list of observances from someone to whom I had uttered two words – "Go away."

Pearlberg: We’ve talked about this before -- the fact that overtly political poetry poses special challenges in terms of maintaining the integrity of the poem itself and not allowing the politics or "message" to swallow the poem whole. What do you see as the pitfalls and hazards when you write political poetry? What kinds of things do you try to do to help the poem succeed as a poem, on its own terms?

Georgiou: Well, I always keep in mind and take very seriously the 70’s feminist adage that "the personal is political." "A Week In The Life…" might be more overtly political than other poems I’ve written, but to be honest, I feel like everything I write has to be two things: beautiful and political. Whenever I write the pronoun "I" it is used as a "public I". It is not a case of I = me, but I = us.

I think the things I avoid are obvious–but here they are spelled out: my mantras for writing overtly political poetry:

• I am not writing a speech. I am writing a poem
• I am not writing rhetoric. I am writing a poem
• I am not writing slogans. I am writing a poem.
• Replace the use of generic words for specific images–e.g. never use the word oppression, but replace it with an image of oppression. You get the idea, right?

My philosophy on writing can be summed up in three words: universality through specificity.

Pearlberg: Speaking of the difficulty of writing overtly political poetry — who do you think does it well and why? Particular U.S. poets? Particular poems? This would be the inevitable "influences and inspirations" question.

Georgiou: This is a hard question. The answer is so fluid. Some of the poets whose work I have been consistently moved by include Joan Larkin, Sapphire, Letta Neely, Melinda Goodman, Michael Lassell, Rafael Campo, Chrystos, Mark Doty, Eileen Myles, Robyn Selman, Adrienne Rich, Molly Peacock, Bill Mathews, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Kizer and Walt Whitman.

Some "overtly political" poems to check out include: Kizer’s "The Erotic Philosophers," Campo’s "What The Body Told," Neely’s "Multiple Assaults," Sapphire’s "American Dream," Goodman’s "Open Poem," Lassell’s "How To Watch Your Brother Die," Chrystos’s "The Okeydokey Tribe," Doty’s "Homo Will Not Inherit," Larkin’s "Inventory," Pratt’s "Red String," and Selman’s "Exodus."

Pearlberg: That’s an excellent reading list! In winding up this conversation, I guess it makes sense to talk about the ending of your poem which concludes with the woman commenting about the "colonized or the colonizer" and then walking away. I like it that you chose to end the poem with such deliberate ambiguity — the idea of simultaneity and contradiction in any given identity in any given situation. Tell me about the decision to end there -- about how and on what note you chose to end the poem.

Georgiou: One of the things I tell my students is that it took me four years to learn to end a poem. I learned this lesson in Bill Mathew’s workshop with this particular poem. In its early drafts, this poem had a prologue and an epilogue. Can you imagine? At the time I was convinced I needed to hammer the point home. Bill offered the suggestion that my poem didn’t need the pro- and epilogues and I should try removing them. I can’t explain what happened, but something clicked inside and has never unclicked. I guess it boils down to having faith in your words and faith in your readers. I wanted this open ending to say to the reader/audience: I have the last word and the last word is that I refuse to tell you what to think. Read/listen to the poem and when you leave the page or leave the reading, carry the poem inside you, and think about it.