Blood on the Rocks

You are invited in the presentation of the anglophone poetry collection of Mikhail Mavrotheris entitled “Blood on the Rocks”, hosting the writer’s drawings.

The presentation will take place in ARTos Cultural & Research Foundation on July, 10, at 19:30.

Poetry Collection - “Blood on the Rocks”

Sixty five poems that arose from remained images and emotions as reflections of various days and nights, “Endless fuckups in a messed up world” as the poet explains.

“Each poem jumped out of me like a awestruck cat from a trash can. Yea, that's what absolutely describes the way the poems came out of my mind and were put down on the paper […] My inspirations is myself, as an existence, you, and everyone that interacts with me in the space-time […] Poetry is our existence, our experimentation and actions as the time goes by; it's not something you get taught and it is not any philological theory. After all, poetry is something you live and sense. What's down on the paper is nothing but the scraps and remaining of a voracious clock on the top of a ramshackle building […] This publication was not written in English simply because it came out this way. It was written in English 'cause I owed to many people that helped me back in the States, friends from America, professors and writers that with their works or advise gave me courage to continue working the word […] This book will travel in the United States and will reach the hands of poets such as Paul Muldoon and Dan Fante, people that keep alive the true art of literature. Also it will spread as a ‘chap book’ in the writing circles of the country”.

The poet – Mikhail Mavrotheris

His passion for the psychoanalytic theories of Freud led him to study psychology and later English Literature in Pittsburgh, PA. There he discovered his love for literature and philology and realized that what he really wanted to do was to write, something that was -and still is- the only freedom he felt and feels.

“Probably I write 'cause if I don't, I'll go nuts. I write to write, wanting to put down on the paper a howl full of agony, pessimism, mania and perhaps existential grief, and a paradoxical exhilaration of joy […] Through writing I was always searching the logic in dull world, as if I'm searching god and the meaning behind the pessimism of our time and of my generation, behind the mask of pseudo-ideology of a post-modern liberal spirit that seems to be more conservative, fake and lymphatic that anything else... ‘conservative’ […] We're traveling a vigorous spiritual period—though asthenic at the same time—which is getting fabricated on the established decadence that the world of today has accepted and endures. All this, made me hit the road, for about seven months, trying to follow the steps of Kerouac and Cassady in America. I found nothing and saw nothing, I just got used with myself and consolidated him […] Coming back in Cyprus I really got... bored to death. I soon got tired with how predictable life was, with the pretentiousness, and generally with the over analysis of stupidity of either sociological or political nature. And my life ended up being an endless bar crawling, without any significant meaning, full of boredom. Nevertheless I've found the chance to study humans and their paradoxical behaviors, to wonder about the source of their stupidity and creativity”.