Poet's Statement: The first time I went to Greece was in 1976. The junta and Georgios Papadopoulos’ regime was ousted two years earlier, but the country was still recovering from a brutal dictatorship. I ended up staying for over a year, living by my wits and out of a rucksack, sleeping on rooftops and at dirt-cheap hostels, and then went on the then so-called “Hippie Trail” heading to Afghanistan overland. Some twenty years later I went back to Greece, spending many consecutive summers on the island of Paros in the middle of the Cycladic Islands. I returned to reading the poems of Yannis Ritsos, whom I discovered in the mid 1970s, writing in my journal and sketching notes for numerous failed poems while spending my days naked under cypress trees, mesmerized by the sunlight on the Aegean Sea.

“Where the Sky Meets the Sea” is a poem attempting to reclaim some of those days. But like many of my poems over the years—and poems I’m most attracted to generally—have multiple frames of reference. On the one hand the speaker in this poem touches on the bare-bones or monastic accommodations while also alluding to incarceration. Here I might have been thinking about Ritsos’s years of exile and imprisonment on the islands of Samos and later Lemnos. I might have also simultaneously been thinking of the early paintings by the American artist Brice Marden, who has kept a studio on the island of Hydra for many years. Marden’s early oil and encaustic wax paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, some referring to the sea’s seemingly endless horizon line and shifts in color, remain as rigorous and contemplative meditations on structure and sustained observation.

Bio: Arthur Solway’s poetry and essays have appeared most recently in The London Magazine, Salmagundi, TriQuarterly, BOMB, The Antioch Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Tiferet, and The Shanghai Literary Review. He is also a regular contributor of reviews and cultural essays to Artforum, Frieze, and Art Asia Pacific magazines. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, he has been based in Shanghai since 2007 and has completed a first full-length manuscript of poems, Love Songs In Another Language.