Rumena Bužarovska is a prominent writer living in North Macedonia and a friend of mine. She visited two years ago right before my new book, On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems, was released. Reading the book in manuscript got us talking, which is to say, me telling stories. That led to this interview, which Rumena translated into Greek and subsequently published in Yusra, a Greek literary magazine. I have a copy of it and although I can’t read a word of Greek, just looking at it thrills me no end. Still, the interview was conducted in English, and both Rumena and I wished to share it with readers here in the U.S. The Georgia Review agreed to publish an excerpt, for which we are both very grateful.
In my early forties I went to Greece alone—a duffle over my shoulder and new sneakers on my feet—back before many of you were born. 1977 and 1978. I went looking to find the place where so many of the things I loved not only mattered but reached great heights—drama, philosophy, poetry, art. Since then, what I found has stayed with me. I am ninety-two years old now, have published eight books of poetry, won prizes, been published in great places. But my time wandering Greece remains the shining time of my life that I hope is captured in this interview. I hope you enjoy it.
—Alice Friman
*
Rumena Bužarovska (RB): As someone with Greek heritage who has enjoyed Greece as a place of beautiful and gruesome stories, I wonder, can you tell me about your first visit to Greece? Why Greece?
Alice Friman (AF): I went to Greece to find out—if I could—where all the things I loved came from and if that impetus was still there. Drama. Art. Mythology. Beauty. And at the same time to examine myself. So it was an out-of-myself trip to find myself. I had just recently gotten a divorce, after being married for twenty years. I was very happy about the divorce. Going to Greece was always one of my goals in life. That might have come from looking at a picture book when I was in the fourth grade, from a little Greek girl who sat in front of me and one day brought this book in with Greek myths and the most wonderful pictures. I remember looking at that book over her shoulder and saying, “I want that.”
RB: You went on to study and teach Greek mythology.
AF: Other mythologies, too. Egyptian, Babylonian, Norse, et cetera.
RB: What drew you to mythology?
AF: I don’t know. I don’t know if I can answer that. I just was. And then I went to the public library in Indianapolis where I lived and found a copy of Heinrich Schliemann’s book [Troy and Its Ruins]. Schliemann was the first person who dug up Troy. Of course, he made a mess of it. But when he went to Argos, he wrote home, “Today I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon.” I sat there on the floor of the stacks and wept. So I decided to go to Greece. Alone. I knew nobody, I knew nothing. I prepared myself by learning the alphabet so I could read street signs. I figured: they eat, they sleep, they go to the bathroom. I’ll be fine.
RB: That’s a great slogan to keep in mind before traveling.
AF: [laughs] I had a reservation in a real cheap place on Kolokotroni Street. And that’s it! I bought a duffle and new sneakers. I was forty-one years old.
RB: You were my age. That’s a beautiful coincidence. And that was your first trip?
AF: I’d never been outside of the country. And I didn’t plan anything.
RB: Did you plan how long you would stay?
AF: I had to because of the airline schedule. I think I was gone about two weeks. That was the first time. Then I went back the next year and stayed for six weeks.
RB: Did you have a return ticket? I don’t know how it worked back then.
AF: Yes, I had a return ticket. And besides, I had children. The boys were old enough to be alone. My daughter stayed with my sister in Brooklyn who enrolled her in a day camp, which she enjoyed very much. So that was fine. I was off the hook.
RB: Can you share with us the expectation of Greece you had in your head versus the reality of it? I’m also referring not just to your everyday experiences with people, but also how the country functioned, knowing that the junta had been overturned not long before you arrived.
AF: Let me be clear, I knew nothing. I was a babe in the woods. And I did not study anything. I went like an idiot. I had no plans. I just went.
RB: And what did you find?
AF: Well, my room was on a roof. It was hot as hell. It was the hottest summer they ever had, I think. I slept naked with a wet washcloth over me. I went up to that room, I walked out on the roof, and I saw the Parthenon. And I was thrilled. I was thrilled with myself. I was like Robinson Crusoe in a new land. Dumb as hell and open to anything.
RB: Did it change your poetry?
AF: I hadn’t been writing that long. I really started writing poetry in my mid-forties. The little I had written, I had kept hidden in a drawer.
RB: Why?
AF: What I know now is that what you write comes from the deepest part of yourself that there is. I had a husband, three kids, my unhappiness, and a house to clean. What did I know about the deepest part of myself? I hid the poems in a drawer.
RB: Your poetry is very brave. It’s beyond its time, especially for women. My admiration comes from the fact that you write with such brutal honesty in terms of your womanhood. You’re fleshy, and there’s a lot of desire in it. It’s unabashed. It’s hard even nowadays to write that way, even after all feminism has done for us.
AF: The world is different now. Everybody is terrified. Children are terrified of saying “hello” to you. But I wasn’t brought up like that. And I didn’t suspect people, certainly not men. In Greece, they followed me on the street, saying “oraia, oraia.” I thought that was terrific. I still think it’s terrific.
RB: It didn’t frighten you.
AF: No.
RB: But it would frighten you here in the U.S.? On second thought, would they say that here? Would they say “beautiful, beautiful”?
AF: No, and I thought that was grand. I thought the best of people. And I was probably wrong. I also found Greece very, very beautiful in a classical sense.
RB: I agree, Greece is beautiful. And also very sensual.
AF: I was too. I didn’t realize it, I think, until maybe now, how sensual I was, how open I was, and how stupid I was. And I loved it.
RB: That’s quite obvious in your poetry. What I found in your Greek poems is that you have the mythological ones that are based mostly on the voice of one character who tells a different story of the myth. Even those are sensual, and frequently bloody, with murderous women who have the same flaws as men. Even when women are victims, you turn them into heroines. And when they have power, you give them even more of it. You also give them sexual power. There are those poems, and then there are the real stories from Greece, as with the poems about Alekos. Let’s call them “The Alekos Poems.” Tell us a little bit about that guy, seeing as you mythologized him.
AF: Well, one day in Greece I decided to just get on a train and explore, which meant leaving Athens. I was looking for Nestor’s Palace, because they say that Telemachus’s bathtub is there. The story is that when Telemachus went to look for his father, Odysseus, the first thing Nestor’s people did was give him a bath, due to Greek hospitality. It’s one of the tenets of ancient Greek culture. Nestor’s people didn’t ask, “Who the hell are you?” They bathed him and fed him and bedded him down, and only the next day did they ask him who he was and why he came.
Anyway, I’m sure it’s not his bathtub, but I wanted to see it anyway. It’s in Pylos. I ended up in this town called Kyparissia, which is on the west coast of the Peloponnese peninsula. I had no idea where I was. None. I got off the train and there are lots of men there. There are always men, and there have always been men in my life. One of them approached, introduced himself as Jimmy, who ran the little hotel by the train station, and his friend, Alekos. I’m afraid I can imagine now what they were thinking: “Here’s this lone woman . . .” but I didn’t want to know what they were thinking. They asked me if I wanted to see the sunset, because everyone goes up the hill to see the sunset. I said, “Sure, I want to see the sunset.” So they took me.
RB: How did you speak to them? How did you understand each other?
AF: Jimmy could speak English. But I’m very good at miming. And I’d picked up a couple of words. Efcharistó. But I could just mime things, it worked.
RB: It’s interesting for me how we can always communicate without the burden of language.
AF: If people are open, it works. And in Greece, they’re open. Anyway, they took me up a hill and there’s a little bar, and there are people sitting up there and watching the sunset. Isn’t that the most wonderful thing in the world?
RB: It is, and it happens in Greece in many places.
AF: Yes, it does! But to me, coming from America, I thought it was wonderful. And then on the way back down, here comes a woman on a donkey. Waving to me. She can’t speak a word of English. What I understand is that she was inviting me to her house the next day. So I said, okay, “This is what I wanted.” The next day, I made my way up into the hills. She lived in a ramshackle house, her donkey on the first floor. If a big wind ever hit that house, it would all be gone. The windows opened like casements and the smell was gorgeous. Like spearmint. I kept saying to myself: “This is it. This is why you came.” She and her husband were there. They were very, very poor. Her grandchild who was visiting from Athens was also there. Her name was Roula. She was smarter than me.
RB: Why do you say that?
AF: She was teaching me Greek. She was teaching me how to count to ten in Greek, and I was teaching her how to count to ten in English, and she was smarter than me. She was around eight years old, a beautiful child—she would sit on my lap and hug me and I said to her, “You want to come home with me?” Of course, I don’t know how she understood me. But she did. She said yes. And then the elderly woman I called giagiá, which means grandma, fed me. She got this big loaf of bread which she had obviously made, and she made me eggs, and the whole family came. It was wonderful.
But you asked about Alekos. I had told him that I wanted to go to Nestor’s Palace in Pylos, and he said he’d take me. He met me down the hill in his red truck. He was, of course, as we would say in America, coming on to me, and I’d say, “Don’t be ridiculous!” But he took me to Nestor’s Palace.
RB: How old was he? I want to imagine this guy.
AF: I imagine he was in his late twenties. He was chubby. He had black curly hair and the most gorgeous green eyes you ever saw. He kept pointing to his pants, showing me that he was having an erection. I thought this was funny. There was something sweet about him and absolutely unthreatening. We were teaching each other words. He went like this [pointing to the groin area] and said, “petra, petra!” which means rock. This was our first joke. He would say “petra, petra,” and I would pick up a stone as if I was going to hit it. And he laughed and our relationship grew like that—miming and laughing without language! But we taught each other words. Giatí, giatí! Doesn’t that mean “Why”? After a while, we had a whole vocabulary. When I came back to the States, I sent him a tee shirt that had PETRA on it in Greek letters.
[we laugh]
Anyway, he took me to Nestor’s Palace, and I saw the bathtub. We drove around, and we parked the truck and fed each other grapes from the grape vines on the side of the road. Even though he kept bothering me about going to bed with him, which I brushed off, we still got close. A couple of days went by, and I had to go back to Athens, which meant catching a bus to Pergos. I wrote a poem about that too, “The Peach.”
What happened was, he put me on the bus. It was night. We said goodbye. And when I got off the bus in Pergos, he was there. He had driven and beat the bus. That was the beginning.
The Peach
I stood on a corner eating a peach,
the juice running down my arm.
A corner in Pergos where he left me,
Pergos where I could catch a bus.
What was I supposed to do now
alone, my hands sticky with it
standing on the corner where he
left me a Greek peach, big as a softball,
big as an orange from Spain, but it
wasn’t from Spain but from Pergos,
where I could see his red truck
disappear around a corner, not
my corner but farther up the street,
and only later, months later, back
home when the trees were slick
with ice, their topmost branches
shiny as swords stabbing the heart
out of the sky, the earth chilled under
snowdrifts or as we tend to say, sleeping.
But I don’t know, frozen maybe, numb?
RB: Do you know if he’s still alive?
AF: No, I don’t.
RB: But he’s been immortalized, like a male muse. You have other poems about him.
AF: That’s because I went back. We swore I would come back, and I did. And he was married.
RB: You say in a poem called “Watermelon,” “And you, gone on with your life, opening your big dumb arms.”
AF: Yes. The turnaround of that poem was that he had gone on with his life. I hadn’t.
RB: Let’s talk about the poem “True Story.” I found this one very sensual. When you say “Athena, korítsi mou, give me that,” you’re asking Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to give you Diomedes. Why not ask Aphrodite, the goddess of love?
AF: Because I felt very close to Athena. When I was in Athens, I spent a lot of time in the museum and I would see her statue, and that’s what I’d call her: “korítsi mou. My girl.”
RB: Korítsi mou also feels like how you address people as a form of intimacy. You called me sweetheart and asked me if that was okay as soon as you met me. I really liked it, actually. Nowadays, though, people get offended.
AF: Oh, everyone gets offended about everything nowadays. It’s very tiring.
RB: Back to “True Story.” It’s sensual and then it turns into horror. Tell me a little bit about this. Did you feel any of this darkness when you were in Greece?
AF: I wrote this many years after my trip to Greece. Maybe two years ago.
RB: Can you give us the background to this poem?
AF: This was when I first came to Athens. It was during the time when sensible people were taking a siesta, but I didn’t want to waste a minute. And I thought, you know, I could go to Argos! This is how stupid I was, thinking I could go without any planning. So I went to this travel agency office that was open. I walked in and here’s this guy, sitting at his desk. Black hair. Blue-green eyes. Wearing a silly plaid little shirt. He was busting out of it. There was black curly hair curling up outside of his shirt. I swear, it was Diomedes, Breaker of Horses! Straight from The Iliad. He was sitting right in front of me. I was speechless. And when he said “Yes?” I couldn’t speak. It felt like the ancient Greek genes were still there in him.
RB: I have to say this happens in Greece. Some of my relatives look like that. And I can also see the little stinky hot office with a fan blowing at him as he’s having Greek coffee.
AF: Yes! And I thought, what the hell are you doing in your silly little plaid shirt? He said, “Can I help you?” And I said to myself, korítsi mou, give me that.
RB: But then you contrast it with this horrible part that is also part of your personal history. How much does the tragedy of the Holocaust haunt you now?
AF: I was at this place in Northern Georgia where I go to write, and one of the books I took with me was a biography of Primo Levi, who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz. The book I was reading was his biography, Tragedy of an Optimist. It’s a wonderful book. When you write a poem, you never know where you’re going to go. If you know where you’re going to go, that’s an essay. The idea for the end came to me as I was writing. A poem should move. It’s not a static thing. Things need to be turned around.
RB: Just like in many of your other poems, this one delivers a punch with the turnaround.
AF: Primo Levi tells this story in the book. Then, as writer, your job is to tie it together at the end. Here it is.
True Stories
When I was forty-two
I slung a duffle over my shoulder
and went to Greece alone.
You know what happened.
You read the book, saw the movie.
I opened the door, walked in
and there he was—
Diomedes, Breaker of Horses.
No plumed helmet, no horses.
No wine-dark sea, no sword,
no chariot, but, yes, in the flesh—
stuck at a desk in an office.
I stopped in my tracks.
Athena, koritsi mou, give me that.
You could write this poem yourself.
*
But that poem isn’t this poem.
This is about 435 Greek men, Jews,
from Corfu. Big men, strong men.
Iron workers, mill workers, construction
workers, dock workers, ditch diggers,
furniture movers. Lifters and haulers.
And how when they were rounded up
and sent to the death camps, they were
singled out for their size and strength
and assigned to be Sonderkommandos—
those who under SS whips and clubs
struggled with iron hooks to drag
the dead from the gas chambers,
tear apart the knot of tangled bodies,
yank the gold teeth and feed the flesh
to the ovens. Twenty thousand a day.
This is a story about 435 Greek men
who refused. Which means they were shot,
burned, and up the chimney with everyone else.
If you believe in heaven, they entered clean.
If you don’t, well, no good deed goes unpunished.
This is a story about heroes,
and I wonder what my Demetrios—
for that was his real name—Demetrios
whose muscles strained the seams of his shirt,
whose upper arm I couldn’t fit two hands around,
whose black chest hair warmed my neck, my breasts,
who never knew I was Jewish, and if he had
with all his masculinity and Greek pride, what
would he have done? Diomedes, Breaker of Horses.
RB: I want to talk a bit about one of your mythological poems. How about “Taking a Turn with Sappho.” What does the title mean?
AF: I was reading Sappho. “Taking a turn with someone” means you are going with them perhaps for a walk. But also, like right now, I’m taking a turn with you.
RB: Aha. So it can be both literal and metaphorical.
AF: Right.
RB: I enjoy this poem and its idea of desire and imprisonment in marriage.
AF: I had just read a book that describes what an ancient Greek wedding was like. The groom would be followed by his guy friends, and they would be shouting outside the bedroom door. God knows what they were shouting. The bride would also have her entourage. Maybe her mother-in-law? I imagine that maybe she wasn’t so thrilled with this. Here’s the poem.
Taking a Turn with Sappho
Peitho of the white doves, child of Aphrodite, was the goddess
of persuasion sung to at bridal feasts by the maidens
and mother-in-law as they pushed the bride into the chamber
where he waited. And maybe there were cushions and a couch
and a little weeping to be done before he lifted her veil
and eased her down onto the sheets perfumed with flowers.
All night her companions sang outside the locked door
while his entourage shouted encouragement. I imagine
it was early February, the wedding time in Greece when
trees were fit to bursting—groaning with sap—while leaves
and blossoms, still dormant, lay rigid in their overcoat of bark.
RB: Who’s “groaning with sap”?
AF: That’s him. And she’s the leaves, “rigid in their overcoat of bark.”
RB: The blooming for the woman comes later.
AF: Yeah, when she’s around forty.
[laughs]
RB: I also loved “Clytemnestra Unleashed.”
AF: Didn’t I tell you why I wrote that?
RB: No. Please do.
AF: After Trump was elected, I found myself writing three murder poems. “Clytemnestra, Unleashed” was the first one. I seem to be on her side all the way, and I love Aeschylus’s play that I’ve taught so many times. The character of Clytemnestra is so right on. It’s as if one took all the anger in the world and all the injustice in the world against women and you boiled it down. That’s her. Here’s the poem:
Clytemnestra, Unleashed
Lovingly, she poured the scented
water into his bath, helped him off
with his robe, planting little kisses
across his back, then shot the bolt home
and went at him with an axe. His left foot
she grabbed first, then sloshing forward
on her knees, crawled over the fallen
mountain of his body, hacking away.
When the job was done, she stood before
the palace doors, dripping righteous
in the red evidence of her vengeance.
Always the simmering question—
what to do with her life, the endless
waiting for what the oracle promised,
what the stars writ large. One thing
she knew: the jailhouse pacing
on the parapets would stop, the dry
winds from the east that brought no news
would stop. For now at last, the giddy
joy of action: breathing hard, the sticky
handle of the chopper she’ll not put down.
Curse by curse, rattle by rattle,
the press of bones piled up behind her,
scraping and jostling for attention.
Time to clean out this house.
Sacrifice for sacrifice, murder for murder.
Her lover hid in the closet. The deed,
he said, being woman’s work.
Who could blame her?
Even the Grand Coulee Dam—
holding back and filled to choking—
would crack, groan, and yawn open.
It’s anger that leaps and rages foaming
through the rift, churning the carcass
of a life into a high, red boil of blood.
Woman’s blood. Unclenched, unyielding,
and unbuttoned. You better believe it.
RB: I found the anger liberating. Especially from the perspective of a woman. So let’s end on a similar note. As a writer, I find myself censoring myself because of what society or my family would say. How did you deal with that, especially since you have children?
AF: This is my speech to you as a writer. What you write comes from the deepest part of you, and you are free to write what’s in you. Do it. I would also tell this to my students. They would say, “What if my mother sees this?” I’d say, “You do not share your work with your mother. It’s too hard on her. Not you. Her.” You have to write what you have to write. When Bruce and I first got married, I said to him, “I had a life long before I met you.” I’m twenty years older than he is. “I have to write what I have to write. And you have to let me.”
RB: Maybe that’s why you’re still together.
AF: That’s right. As far as my children, though—my kids are my champions. Also, my daughter is an artist. She understands. The boys graduated and left, and she and I were living alone. I was going out with people after the divorce. Then my ex-husband died. And then there were always men hanging around. What are you going to do? You have to write it. You have to do something with them.
[laughter]
RB: It’s definitely better than not having them hang around.
AF: I had a friend who had had an affair. It was a big deal in her life. She wanted to write about it, and of course she would have changed all the names and circumstances. Still, she said, “I just can’t. What will my husband say? What will my children say?” Just write it! I thought. I didn’t say this, but what I thought was, you’re going to die, your husband’s going to die, but this isn’t going to die. And it has to be the truth. The truth of your feelings. The truth of your thoughts.
RB: I think a lot of male writers don’t have this problem. They’ll write an autobiographical book about their affairs and they’ll be thought of as big shots.
AF: Women have a different perspective about those things. Me, I believe in love, I believe in all those stupid romantic songs that made up my life.
RB: Your poems do revolve around love and desire. And death.
AF: A friend of mine, a novelist, who was visiting me said, “Everything you write is about desire and death.” And I said, “Is there anything else?” “Well, some people are about dogs,” she said.
*
All poems in this interview can be found in On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems by Alice Friman (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). “The Peach” was first published in The Georgia Review. “True Stories” was first published in North American Review. “Taking a Turn with Sappho” was first published in Spillway. “Clytemnestra, Unleashed” was first published in Plume. The poems appear here courtesy of Alice Friman.
