In Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026), Eleni Sikelianos constructs a restless, hybrid archive of inheritance, refusing the false coherence of a linear narrative in favor of fragments, images, and a chorus of voices. The book presents characters who are at once historical and mythic, intimate and unknowable, staging what she calls a “rehearsal” of memory: an attempt to recall the past without resolving to fix it. Here, Sikelianos reflects on why no single genre could contain these lives, and how hybridity—what she refers to as “chimeric form”—allows more light to enter through the gaps between the shards of the past.
At the center of Memory Rehearsal lie two ancestral figures. Eva Palmer, Sikelianos’ great-grandmother, was an American socialite turned artist, weaver, and visionary who abandoned her privileged life to pursue an ecstatic reimagining of Sappho’s work and life. She appears in the book as a character of multiple roles who refuses to be defined by any of them: the lesbian lover, performer, director, fugitive, and, ultimately, a figure partially erased by history. Opposite and entangled with her is Angelos Sikelianos, the author’s great-grandfather, a Greek poet of cosmic ambition. Together, they staged a revival of the ancient Delphic Festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. As their marriage dissolved, Angelos remained in Greece where he was canonized as a national hero. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the last decades of her life in debt, but she never stopped pursuing her vision.
At the center of Memory Rehearsal lie two ancestral figures. Eva Palmer, Sikelianos’ great-grandmother, was an American socialite turned artist, weaver, and visionary who abandoned her privileged life to pursue an ecstatic reimagining of Sappho’s work and life. She appears in the book as a character of multiple roles who refuses to be defined by any of them: the lesbian lover, performer, director, fugitive, and, ultimately, a figure partially erased by history. Opposite and entangled with her is Angelos Sikelianos, the author’s great-grandfather, a Greek poet of cosmic ambition. Together, they staged a revival of the ancient Delphic Festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. As their marriage dissolved, Angelos remained in Greece where he was canonized as a national hero. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the last decades of her life in debt, but she never stopped pursuing her vision.
Amsterdam Review: Memory Rehearsal is a wonderful hybrid work, and deliberately so. Part memoir, part essay, part performance script, part verse, part photo album, they all seem to make up an implicit theory of form in it. Did you feel that a single genre would have falsified the story? What does hybridity allow you to do that biography or memoir would not?
Eleni Sikelianos: Since the first book in this trilogy, The Book of Jon (City Lights, 2004), I knew that a single genre would never do justice to the ragged and unclassifiable human about whom I was trying to capture some truth. That was my father. I had an instinct that poems would further break him, and he was already broken. Yet I felt that prose would over-narrativize a life made of ruptures, some beautiful and some less so—a jumble of temporal and personal anarchy. There are photos in that book, but not many. His life wasn’t documented that way, but there are some simple snapshots that hold part of the story.
In the next book, You Animal Machine (Coffee House, 2014), which takes up my mother’s mother, a burlesque dancer on the road with three daughters, the work began to form around the showgirl images in my grandmother’s scrapbook. I’d grown up looking at those, taped onto black paper. That scrapbook was central to my mother’s understanding of her childhood, some of the only “evidence” she had, and therefore central to my understanding of her life.
With Memory Rehearsal, I was working with an overwhelming wealth of archival photographs, so the book had to include those as a narrative element. Form, as Denise Levertov says, is never more than a revelation of content. How do you mold forms of writing around a human life? Any kind of formulaic narrative, or temporal movement from A to Z is a falsehood, a prison in which life cannot be kept. Because the human (the living) exceeds all attempt to describe or contain it, these lives have had to take shape in manifold approaches. We don’t know humans through our narratives about them, not most intimately. And despite the U.S. rage for so-called realism in writing, that’s not it either. It’s more shapes and colors and smells we hold in our minds. Narrative helps us carve out some territory in the chaos of being. It’s provisional. And has its value, too. But I tend toward more openly provisional forms.
I’m not primarily setting out to tell family narratives, I’m just not wired that way, perhaps because I don’t believe in American forms of realism. I need look no further than U.S. history to understand those limits. And I also know the relationship between genre, gender, and forms of control. Instead, I’m setting out to unfold some essence and to pursue questions I have, often unformed, about these humans and my relationship to them. Then there is a dance that has to be danced: how to let story accrue through the shifting forms.
When I was writing about my dad, I was guided in part by something Dante was working out, which is that you can only know a small percentage of the human on earth. For him, the divine passage into heaven was the journey on which the 100% came into view. We start in the dark woods. We travel toward illumination, in whatever form. If we’re lucky, and can perceive the possibility of that journey. Hybrid, or, as my friend Phoebe Giannisi calls them, chimeric forms allow me to keep trying different angles of perception. They let in more light, not only through the shifting forms but through the gaps between forms.
Eleni Sikelianos: Since the first book in this trilogy, The Book of Jon (City Lights, 2004), I knew that a single genre would never do justice to the ragged and unclassifiable human about whom I was trying to capture some truth. That was my father. I had an instinct that poems would further break him, and he was already broken. Yet I felt that prose would over-narrativize a life made of ruptures, some beautiful and some less so—a jumble of temporal and personal anarchy. There are photos in that book, but not many. His life wasn’t documented that way, but there are some simple snapshots that hold part of the story.
In the next book, You Animal Machine (Coffee House, 2014), which takes up my mother’s mother, a burlesque dancer on the road with three daughters, the work began to form around the showgirl images in my grandmother’s scrapbook. I’d grown up looking at those, taped onto black paper. That scrapbook was central to my mother’s understanding of her childhood, some of the only “evidence” she had, and therefore central to my understanding of her life.
With Memory Rehearsal, I was working with an overwhelming wealth of archival photographs, so the book had to include those as a narrative element. Form, as Denise Levertov says, is never more than a revelation of content. How do you mold forms of writing around a human life? Any kind of formulaic narrative, or temporal movement from A to Z is a falsehood, a prison in which life cannot be kept. Because the human (the living) exceeds all attempt to describe or contain it, these lives have had to take shape in manifold approaches. We don’t know humans through our narratives about them, not most intimately. And despite the U.S. rage for so-called realism in writing, that’s not it either. It’s more shapes and colors and smells we hold in our minds. Narrative helps us carve out some territory in the chaos of being. It’s provisional. And has its value, too. But I tend toward more openly provisional forms.
I’m not primarily setting out to tell family narratives, I’m just not wired that way, perhaps because I don’t believe in American forms of realism. I need look no further than U.S. history to understand those limits. And I also know the relationship between genre, gender, and forms of control. Instead, I’m setting out to unfold some essence and to pursue questions I have, often unformed, about these humans and my relationship to them. Then there is a dance that has to be danced: how to let story accrue through the shifting forms.
When I was writing about my dad, I was guided in part by something Dante was working out, which is that you can only know a small percentage of the human on earth. For him, the divine passage into heaven was the journey on which the 100% came into view. We start in the dark woods. We travel toward illumination, in whatever form. If we’re lucky, and can perceive the possibility of that journey. Hybrid, or, as my friend Phoebe Giannisi calls them, chimeric forms allow me to keep trying different angles of perception. They let in more light, not only through the shifting forms but through the gaps between forms.
“I’m setting out to unfold some essence and to pursue questions I have, often unformed, about these humans and my relationship to them. Then there is a dance that has to be danced: how to let story accrue through the shifting forms.”
AR: The title of the work hinges, to my mind, on a rich subterfuge. Rehearsal is generally used for something that hasn’t happened yet—so how do you see memory as rehearsing the past? What future occurrences are the rehearsals preparing you (and us) for?
ES: We rehearse memory all the time. Our own memories, and cultural or collective memories. We also rehearse things in order to memorize them, so it absolutely can be rehearsing for future memory. Writing is a kind of memory rehearsal, and in the making of this book, I’m rehearsing how to be a human whose ancestral stories are known to herself.
I love the notion that nonviolent peace activism, like MLK’s and Gandhi’s, are actually rehearsing for present and future peace and justice. My great grandmother and those around her were inspired by remembering an ancient past from their present vantage, and rehearsing new ways to encounter that past. One of the things I came to understand in writing this book is that rehearsal isn’t just for the future, it’s for now. People who participated in the rehearsals for the Delphic Festivals said it changed their lives. Just as the practice of artmaking is not really just about the product (our vehemently capitalist understanding of it), but about the making, the rehearsing. That’s the sacred space, the temenos, we carve out. Artmaking is always rehearsing utopia.
Rehearsal is a form of repetition (the French word for it, in fact), which means it exists in circular or returning time, and in that way it taps into our most fundamental external and internal rhythms—the repetition of dawn, midday, dusk, spring, winter. The blood pumped from the heart returns to the heart, and so on. And memory—it’s collective not just in the Jungian sense, but in the very basic chemical sense that every time you digest a piece of toast, your body is engaging in remembering and repeating the early chemical reactions of the Big Bang.
AR: At the beginning, you write “the dead do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us,” and yet “from the dead, my ancestors can’t see me.” What is it that remains unseen, even in the most intimate of looks, in this continuous play of seeing and not-seeing? If eros is, like Anne Carson says, the desire that arises from the space between the seeker and the object of desire, how would you describe the distance between you and the dead, which ultimately generates the book?
ES: As Fanny Howe once said to me on a walk through Mt. Auburn Cemetery, they’re here all around us. She called it “The Thinning.” We find different methods for bringing them closer or distancing ourselves.
AR: I love that rehearsal is at dawn, when “we know where the shadows will fall,” and sometimes at dusk, when forms begin to lose their edges. If you had to choose one of them as the true time of this book, which would it be? What is being rehearsed here: the past, or your own relation to the past?
ES: I wouldn’t want to choose between the opening and the closing of the day! Ecologist-activist Peter Warshall beautifully describes a revolving dawn around the globe, with a wave of birdsong greeting it. I draw on that in the passage you’re referring to. So I would never not choose dawn. But as a nightperson, I have always, always been partial to dusk, and its soundmate dust, where forms begin to melt into shadow.
What is being rehearsed: past, present, future possibilities of individual and collective self/selves in acts of kin-making.
AR: Early on, you invoke the Greek word syntrimma (wreckage, rubble) and describe your inheritance as “a pile of rubble. Loose facts,” but you keep returning to looms and wefts. The book visually recreates this fragmenting through letters, photographs, lists, papyrus scraps. How did you decide what to leave broken and what to connect through a tighter sense of narrative? Were you resisting the temptation to “repair” history?
ES: Syntrimma appears in Aristotle as a broken limb, and in Romans as the catastrophic wreckage in the wake of human “wickedness” which leaves a trail of destruction and social collapse. That seems to be where we are now: we’re witnessing that kind of ruination take place. Can we repair the present? (I ask that question even though I don’t believe the present can be disentangled from its river-mates, the past and the future.) The modernists saw a reflection of their shredded post-WWI psyches in the scraps of papyrus being unearthed at Oxyrhynchus (now Al-Bahnasa, in Egypt).
I don’t know that we should or can repair the tatters of history, but contemplating those tatters is how we find ways to repair our present and futures. Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, is a gorgeous, very readable metaphor for it. What is essential is to find a method to continue to live, and to live with each other, which means a method of repairing the daily rips in our psyches. For me, the most powerful method is art. Medicine and law are potentially potent forms of repair (and of harm, alas), but art is far beyond diagnostic repair.
AR: You describe yourself as “one of those people with ancestors lost in the years,” although as you write you become the one who calls them back. Do you see the text as an attempt to reverse the regular temporal flow, so that the descendant, if you will, produces the ancestors?
ES: It’s true that in this process I produce a new version of these ancestors. If we’re following the rules of math, time should be able to flow backward, yet we don’t experience it that way. Eva’s notion of the anadromic method—you move against the flow of time or a river to create something new—is really useful. It’s a motion essential to any form of resistance. We have so much to resist, starting with defying cognitive surrender.
ES: We rehearse memory all the time. Our own memories, and cultural or collective memories. We also rehearse things in order to memorize them, so it absolutely can be rehearsing for future memory. Writing is a kind of memory rehearsal, and in the making of this book, I’m rehearsing how to be a human whose ancestral stories are known to herself.
I love the notion that nonviolent peace activism, like MLK’s and Gandhi’s, are actually rehearsing for present and future peace and justice. My great grandmother and those around her were inspired by remembering an ancient past from their present vantage, and rehearsing new ways to encounter that past. One of the things I came to understand in writing this book is that rehearsal isn’t just for the future, it’s for now. People who participated in the rehearsals for the Delphic Festivals said it changed their lives. Just as the practice of artmaking is not really just about the product (our vehemently capitalist understanding of it), but about the making, the rehearsing. That’s the sacred space, the temenos, we carve out. Artmaking is always rehearsing utopia.
Rehearsal is a form of repetition (the French word for it, in fact), which means it exists in circular or returning time, and in that way it taps into our most fundamental external and internal rhythms—the repetition of dawn, midday, dusk, spring, winter. The blood pumped from the heart returns to the heart, and so on. And memory—it’s collective not just in the Jungian sense, but in the very basic chemical sense that every time you digest a piece of toast, your body is engaging in remembering and repeating the early chemical reactions of the Big Bang.
AR: At the beginning, you write “the dead do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us,” and yet “from the dead, my ancestors can’t see me.” What is it that remains unseen, even in the most intimate of looks, in this continuous play of seeing and not-seeing? If eros is, like Anne Carson says, the desire that arises from the space between the seeker and the object of desire, how would you describe the distance between you and the dead, which ultimately generates the book?
ES: As Fanny Howe once said to me on a walk through Mt. Auburn Cemetery, they’re here all around us. She called it “The Thinning.” We find different methods for bringing them closer or distancing ourselves.
AR: I love that rehearsal is at dawn, when “we know where the shadows will fall,” and sometimes at dusk, when forms begin to lose their edges. If you had to choose one of them as the true time of this book, which would it be? What is being rehearsed here: the past, or your own relation to the past?
ES: I wouldn’t want to choose between the opening and the closing of the day! Ecologist-activist Peter Warshall beautifully describes a revolving dawn around the globe, with a wave of birdsong greeting it. I draw on that in the passage you’re referring to. So I would never not choose dawn. But as a nightperson, I have always, always been partial to dusk, and its soundmate dust, where forms begin to melt into shadow.
What is being rehearsed: past, present, future possibilities of individual and collective self/selves in acts of kin-making.
AR: Early on, you invoke the Greek word syntrimma (wreckage, rubble) and describe your inheritance as “a pile of rubble. Loose facts,” but you keep returning to looms and wefts. The book visually recreates this fragmenting through letters, photographs, lists, papyrus scraps. How did you decide what to leave broken and what to connect through a tighter sense of narrative? Were you resisting the temptation to “repair” history?
ES: Syntrimma appears in Aristotle as a broken limb, and in Romans as the catastrophic wreckage in the wake of human “wickedness” which leaves a trail of destruction and social collapse. That seems to be where we are now: we’re witnessing that kind of ruination take place. Can we repair the present? (I ask that question even though I don’t believe the present can be disentangled from its river-mates, the past and the future.) The modernists saw a reflection of their shredded post-WWI psyches in the scraps of papyrus being unearthed at Oxyrhynchus (now Al-Bahnasa, in Egypt).
I don’t know that we should or can repair the tatters of history, but contemplating those tatters is how we find ways to repair our present and futures. Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, is a gorgeous, very readable metaphor for it. What is essential is to find a method to continue to live, and to live with each other, which means a method of repairing the daily rips in our psyches. For me, the most powerful method is art. Medicine and law are potentially potent forms of repair (and of harm, alas), but art is far beyond diagnostic repair.
AR: You describe yourself as “one of those people with ancestors lost in the years,” although as you write you become the one who calls them back. Do you see the text as an attempt to reverse the regular temporal flow, so that the descendant, if you will, produces the ancestors?
ES: It’s true that in this process I produce a new version of these ancestors. If we’re following the rules of math, time should be able to flow backward, yet we don’t experience it that way. Eva’s notion of the anadromic method—you move against the flow of time or a river to create something new—is really useful. It’s a motion essential to any form of resistance. We have so much to resist, starting with defying cognitive surrender.
“What is essential is to find a method to continue to live, and to live with each other, which means a method of repairing the daily rips in our psyches. For me, the most powerful method is art.”
AR: You write that your great-grandfather “heard land, plants, snakes, wind, waves and time all cry out to him.” Reading this alongside your own work (thinking perhaps about Your Kingdom here, with its intense attention to plants, animals, and mineral time), I wonder: do you feel that, through your poetry, you are breathing new life in that ancestral way of perceiving and listening to the world? Is your ecological attunement a conscious inheritance, or did you discover with Memory Rehearsal that you had already been carrying forward your family’s vision?
ES: My earliest impulses were to listen to the winds and the waves and the snakes. Writing poems, when I started doing that, felt like a technology to tend to that listening. There are likely epigenetic or consciousness inheritances that I didn’t realize I was carrying. It was only later that I began to see those same impulses in my great grandfather’s work. Much of what has been translated (which is mostly how I am able to read his work), is stripped of his intense rhythmic force, and is, on the surface, pretty patriarchal and nationalistic. Let’s just say it didn’t instantly appeal to me. I had to dig past the existing English translations to find this other force in his work.
I don’t think I’m breathing new life into an ancestral way of perceiving in that I think we are all carrying that inheritance around and simply have to learn how to tap into it. It is abundantly clear that severing ourselves from this way of perceiving—of tending to the living—is fucking up our world.
AR: A recurring question in the book is: Who controls the story? Is it Eva erasing herself? Is it the State deciding who counts as legitimate family? To what extent is Memory Rehearsal an attempt to seize back narrative control, and where did you purposely choose not to control the story?
ES: I certainly had an impulse to seize back Eva’s story, since it had been so stamped out. She tended to obfuscate herself from view, which I think is a queer person’s impulse in a hostile world, but also a performative posture in which the self might transform into other selves. But the erasure of her labor goes far beyond her tendency to forfeit credit to others (especially to Angelos, but also to Natalie Barney). She was operating in a very male world that had no trouble bestowing the glory of her labor on a man. And then Angelos’s second wife wanted Eva’s lesbian life hidden and went to great lengths to do that. (Eva herself, who was very out in Paris, became fairly closeted in Greece, adjusting to the context.) All these elements cried out for repair. But “seize back” isn’t really the right gesture, nor is “control,” since that is answering force with like force, and I’m not trying to control anyone’s story, but to reroute and reveal.
AR: You repeatedly position yourself at borders: national frontiers and archival thresholds, chapel doors, the locked rooms of bureaucracies. From a structuralist standpoint, borders are where a system declares its difference. Do you think Memory Rehearsal reveals such a system and, if so, what is it?
ES: Hybrid forms themselves are a way of displaying and moving between borders, of setting them up to leap across them, to render them porous (which by nature they are, despite what the nationalists and fascists would like us to believe). If there is a system to be inferred from Memory Rehearsal, it is a system of porosity, whether it be in narrative flow, temporal flow or form. Rivers leak into their stone beds, their stone beds leak minerals into rivers. Ways of being are manifold, and so are the ways of perceiving. When we’re locked within a form, be it a nation or a narrative, we are locked within a knowledge form. Borders—the zones between them—tend to heighten the possibilities of perception.
AR: You lay out the archive as a locked, moldy, sometimes hostile space, yet you spend years chasing its contents. What do you think contemporary culture gets wrong about archives, about their emotional intensity and power of seduction?
ES: I guess it depends on what part of contemporary culture we mean. Because in the artistic and academic realms, there has been tons of fruitful work in the archives. But if we’re talking about contemporary political culture and how that is reported on, one need look no further than the Epstein files or Cambridge Analytica to see how the violence of archives is still suppressed and ignored.
Archives are about control of narrative (coming back to that word “control”), and what is placed in them and what is allowed out of them or who is allowed into them reveal to us whose stories are deemed worthy of attention as well as whose attention is deemed worthy. Because archives are about control of, but also access to, cultural and political narrative—who is allowed into the archive? Not just who is given the literal keys, but who is given the keys to know how to unlock and read the archive? I do not have those keys, in the sense that I’m a high school dropout who forged a bizarre, untrained path through academia. (I would never consider myself an academic, despite my day job.) But sometimes accessing the archives without the keys, or with different keys, results in new, strange views.
AR: The long travel sequence, from Greece to Turkey to Cairo to Khartoum to Kigali, reads almost like a periplus. How did those movements across borders and war zones change the way you approached your “Delphi,” your own sacred theater of family?
ES: I don’t know if they changed my approach but that voyage changed me, and more or less began with my first visit to Greece. I wanted to acknowledge the long journey that that first encounter with Greece was a part of—the wildness of a foolhardy young woman, willing to travel with the wind. My editor, Elaine Katzenberger, made the observation that that journey probably wouldn’t have happened for someone who’d grown up in a more structured, attentive family environment. If there’s no clear refuge, it’s easy to roam. At the same time, that wandering was how I first made contact with a kind of anchor—an ancestral past. The voyage and the work reflect each other in that they are expressions of my restlessness, something I’ve come to recognize as a part of my poetics.
AR: You steal a fork and spoon, carry a clay oil lamp across the ocean, seek a passport. How do these objects function as stories themselves? Are they proofs, symbols of belonging, or just stage props in your own identity rehearsal?
ES: There is a reason we love the materials of archaeology, why museums and their many objects are enticing, despite the glass that divides us from their glory and plunder. Why Diego Rivera started collecting pre-Hispanic art at the age of eight, scoured the site of Tenochtitlán on weekends, and amassed tens of thousands of clay pieces, which were central to his own work and sense of self. Eva was also piecing together a sense of identity from artefacts. They are neither proofs or props. They are potential signposts. Objects carry their own telepathy. Susan Howe speaks of this brilliantly, and understands that archives too offer this kind of materiality, if we can access them. What we make of these objects and archives, how we transform them, can become its own luminous, telepathic material.
AR: At one point you say: “Still, every visionary has her blind spot.” What’s the blind spot of your visionary ancestor as you came to know her, and, hypothetically, could there be a blind spot of your own that the book has exposed?
ES: One of her blind spots was her inability to compromise. She broke off collaborating with the choreographer Ted Shawn because he couldn’t roll his R’s (that wouldn’t do for ancient Greek texts, she said). She argued with another collaborator over how to weave costumes (she didn’t like designs that were done quickly, and had a “backside,” rather than the more complicated process of weaving patterns into the fabric). She rejected generous funding from the Benaki family for a third festival, because she wanted full artistic control of her project. She refused a position at Yale’s new drama school because she couldn’t stomach working with students who didn’t know ancient Greek. Without this strong will, though, she wouldn’t have created the festivals at all. In the aftermath of WWII, she felt compelled to write vehemently anti-imperialist letters to government officials, which got her blacklisted and kept her from returning to Greece for many years, but her hardheadedness becomes heroic. Weaknesses, blind spots, can also be strengths. We see that in how artists’ tics and obsessions become style and method.
From a family point of view, you could say she had some blind spots in her approach to childrearing. My grandfather and his cousin, Menalkas, dropped out of school before the age of eight, and were clothed in ancient robes and sandals. There’s pretty funny (and also heartrending) news coverage of Menalkas’ attempt to run away at 15, eat steak, and wear regular clothes. They were raised in a way that kept them outside the mainstream, and that has been passed down for generations. Not sure that’s a bad thing, but it definitely caused some family problems along the way.
If we knew what our own blind spots were would they still be blind spots? I can say that, if I were a different writer, I would have pulled the political aspects of this story further into the foreground. Why didn’t I? I’m uncomfortable foreclosing meaning-making in that way. I’d rather feel through the cracks than draw a conclusion.
Or perhaps I might have meandered less…
ES: My earliest impulses were to listen to the winds and the waves and the snakes. Writing poems, when I started doing that, felt like a technology to tend to that listening. There are likely epigenetic or consciousness inheritances that I didn’t realize I was carrying. It was only later that I began to see those same impulses in my great grandfather’s work. Much of what has been translated (which is mostly how I am able to read his work), is stripped of his intense rhythmic force, and is, on the surface, pretty patriarchal and nationalistic. Let’s just say it didn’t instantly appeal to me. I had to dig past the existing English translations to find this other force in his work.
I don’t think I’m breathing new life into an ancestral way of perceiving in that I think we are all carrying that inheritance around and simply have to learn how to tap into it. It is abundantly clear that severing ourselves from this way of perceiving—of tending to the living—is fucking up our world.
AR: A recurring question in the book is: Who controls the story? Is it Eva erasing herself? Is it the State deciding who counts as legitimate family? To what extent is Memory Rehearsal an attempt to seize back narrative control, and where did you purposely choose not to control the story?
ES: I certainly had an impulse to seize back Eva’s story, since it had been so stamped out. She tended to obfuscate herself from view, which I think is a queer person’s impulse in a hostile world, but also a performative posture in which the self might transform into other selves. But the erasure of her labor goes far beyond her tendency to forfeit credit to others (especially to Angelos, but also to Natalie Barney). She was operating in a very male world that had no trouble bestowing the glory of her labor on a man. And then Angelos’s second wife wanted Eva’s lesbian life hidden and went to great lengths to do that. (Eva herself, who was very out in Paris, became fairly closeted in Greece, adjusting to the context.) All these elements cried out for repair. But “seize back” isn’t really the right gesture, nor is “control,” since that is answering force with like force, and I’m not trying to control anyone’s story, but to reroute and reveal.
AR: You repeatedly position yourself at borders: national frontiers and archival thresholds, chapel doors, the locked rooms of bureaucracies. From a structuralist standpoint, borders are where a system declares its difference. Do you think Memory Rehearsal reveals such a system and, if so, what is it?
ES: Hybrid forms themselves are a way of displaying and moving between borders, of setting them up to leap across them, to render them porous (which by nature they are, despite what the nationalists and fascists would like us to believe). If there is a system to be inferred from Memory Rehearsal, it is a system of porosity, whether it be in narrative flow, temporal flow or form. Rivers leak into their stone beds, their stone beds leak minerals into rivers. Ways of being are manifold, and so are the ways of perceiving. When we’re locked within a form, be it a nation or a narrative, we are locked within a knowledge form. Borders—the zones between them—tend to heighten the possibilities of perception.
AR: You lay out the archive as a locked, moldy, sometimes hostile space, yet you spend years chasing its contents. What do you think contemporary culture gets wrong about archives, about their emotional intensity and power of seduction?
ES: I guess it depends on what part of contemporary culture we mean. Because in the artistic and academic realms, there has been tons of fruitful work in the archives. But if we’re talking about contemporary political culture and how that is reported on, one need look no further than the Epstein files or Cambridge Analytica to see how the violence of archives is still suppressed and ignored.
Archives are about control of narrative (coming back to that word “control”), and what is placed in them and what is allowed out of them or who is allowed into them reveal to us whose stories are deemed worthy of attention as well as whose attention is deemed worthy. Because archives are about control of, but also access to, cultural and political narrative—who is allowed into the archive? Not just who is given the literal keys, but who is given the keys to know how to unlock and read the archive? I do not have those keys, in the sense that I’m a high school dropout who forged a bizarre, untrained path through academia. (I would never consider myself an academic, despite my day job.) But sometimes accessing the archives without the keys, or with different keys, results in new, strange views.
AR: The long travel sequence, from Greece to Turkey to Cairo to Khartoum to Kigali, reads almost like a periplus. How did those movements across borders and war zones change the way you approached your “Delphi,” your own sacred theater of family?
ES: I don’t know if they changed my approach but that voyage changed me, and more or less began with my first visit to Greece. I wanted to acknowledge the long journey that that first encounter with Greece was a part of—the wildness of a foolhardy young woman, willing to travel with the wind. My editor, Elaine Katzenberger, made the observation that that journey probably wouldn’t have happened for someone who’d grown up in a more structured, attentive family environment. If there’s no clear refuge, it’s easy to roam. At the same time, that wandering was how I first made contact with a kind of anchor—an ancestral past. The voyage and the work reflect each other in that they are expressions of my restlessness, something I’ve come to recognize as a part of my poetics.
AR: You steal a fork and spoon, carry a clay oil lamp across the ocean, seek a passport. How do these objects function as stories themselves? Are they proofs, symbols of belonging, or just stage props in your own identity rehearsal?
ES: There is a reason we love the materials of archaeology, why museums and their many objects are enticing, despite the glass that divides us from their glory and plunder. Why Diego Rivera started collecting pre-Hispanic art at the age of eight, scoured the site of Tenochtitlán on weekends, and amassed tens of thousands of clay pieces, which were central to his own work and sense of self. Eva was also piecing together a sense of identity from artefacts. They are neither proofs or props. They are potential signposts. Objects carry their own telepathy. Susan Howe speaks of this brilliantly, and understands that archives too offer this kind of materiality, if we can access them. What we make of these objects and archives, how we transform them, can become its own luminous, telepathic material.
AR: At one point you say: “Still, every visionary has her blind spot.” What’s the blind spot of your visionary ancestor as you came to know her, and, hypothetically, could there be a blind spot of your own that the book has exposed?
ES: One of her blind spots was her inability to compromise. She broke off collaborating with the choreographer Ted Shawn because he couldn’t roll his R’s (that wouldn’t do for ancient Greek texts, she said). She argued with another collaborator over how to weave costumes (she didn’t like designs that were done quickly, and had a “backside,” rather than the more complicated process of weaving patterns into the fabric). She rejected generous funding from the Benaki family for a third festival, because she wanted full artistic control of her project. She refused a position at Yale’s new drama school because she couldn’t stomach working with students who didn’t know ancient Greek. Without this strong will, though, she wouldn’t have created the festivals at all. In the aftermath of WWII, she felt compelled to write vehemently anti-imperialist letters to government officials, which got her blacklisted and kept her from returning to Greece for many years, but her hardheadedness becomes heroic. Weaknesses, blind spots, can also be strengths. We see that in how artists’ tics and obsessions become style and method.
From a family point of view, you could say she had some blind spots in her approach to childrearing. My grandfather and his cousin, Menalkas, dropped out of school before the age of eight, and were clothed in ancient robes and sandals. There’s pretty funny (and also heartrending) news coverage of Menalkas’ attempt to run away at 15, eat steak, and wear regular clothes. They were raised in a way that kept them outside the mainstream, and that has been passed down for generations. Not sure that’s a bad thing, but it definitely caused some family problems along the way.
If we knew what our own blind spots were would they still be blind spots? I can say that, if I were a different writer, I would have pulled the political aspects of this story further into the foreground. Why didn’t I? I’m uncomfortable foreclosing meaning-making in that way. I’d rather feel through the cracks than draw a conclusion.
Or perhaps I might have meandered less…
Read "In Endeavor's Angle" and "Methods of Transmission," two excerpts from Memory Rehearsal, and watch Eleni Sikelianos talk about her great-grandparents at the Museum of Delphi, 2019:
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Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Eleni Sikelianos, Memory Rehearsal (City Lights Books, 2026)
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