Listen Carefully: Olga Broumas, Poet-in-Residence
For Olga Broumas, sound is of utmost importance, as is silence. Her voice, modulation, and tone carry a kaleidoscope of emotion. She has absolutely no accent when speaking English, although she grew up in Greece. As a poet, she explains, she pays particular attention to enunciation. A small, delicately colored scarf is neatly tied at her neck, punctuating her gamine presence. In her soft-spoken, deliberate voice, she describes a quiet appreciation of observation, rhythms, and, above all, words as they reach the ear.
Broumas began her career by winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1977 for Beginning with O, the first non-native speaker to capture the prestigious honor. Judge Stanley Kunitz described her work as “of letting go, of wild avowals, unabashed eroticism: At the same time it is a work of integral imagination, steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet’s heritage, and imbued with an intuitive sense of dramatic conflicts and resolutions, high style, and musical form.”
In subsequent years, Broumas has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Witter Bynner fellowships. She has published seven major collections of poetry, recently published in RAVE: Poems, 1975–1999, and three volumes of translation from the Greek of Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis, collected in EROS, EROS, EROS: Poems, Selected and Last. In 2000, Copper Canyon Press issued a compact disc of her reciting from both these books, titled Olga Broumas: A Reader’s Companion.
With a background reminiscent of a romance novel, it is no wonder Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late-twentieth-century idiom. Her father was orphaned at age 2 in southern Greece and raised by residents of a seaside village. Fighting in World War II in Africa, he was wounded and woke up in a hospital in Alexandria, Egypt, where her mother was a 16-year-old nurse’s aide—a third generation Greek from the Cycladic island of Andros. They married within a year. Broumas was born in Syros, Greece, a few years later, and began a vagabond life.
With her mother, father, grandmother, and a rescued orphaned teen living in one room until she was 9, Broumas relished the escape that reading provided. “And everyone chainsmoked, but not me, and so when I read …” She laughs with a catching lilt, gentle mirth thoroughly enjoyed. Her hands draw the space around her, and her voice changes, up high in a childlike whisper, full of wonder, soft and peaceful. “I could just be in my world.”
She attended elementary school in Washington, D.C., for two years, and laughs at the memory. “Everything got blamed on me, because I didn’t quite understand what was being said, and I had the very obedient Greek child’s school habit of saying, ‘Yes ma’am’ to everything. ‘Did you hit Jo Jo on the head?’ ‘Yes ma’am.’ I learned very quickly.” Then her expressive voice increases in intensity, projecting delight and awe: “And I discovered that they had libraries here.”
After returning to Greece, she came back to the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship as an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she practically moved into the library. “They were open until three a.m. I was happy.” Why architecture? “A nicely brought up young Greek woman studies architecture, dentistry, or law, because she can practice all three from home, while she raises her children,” explains Broumas, noting that she had no idea she could study writing, which she had been doing since childhood, having published her fi rst collection the year she left Greece for college. Architecture gave her tools that she is very glad to have. “I learned that something not only has to look lovely, but it also has to function. The drawer has to open, the roof has to drain. And it was a way of learning about grammar and syntax without being told how to do it in language, for which I would have been very resistant,” she says.
After earning a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Oregon in 1973 and teaching in various places, Broumas realized that she had never lived anywhere for more than three years. She decided to move somewhere to stay. “It had to be by the water, it had to be non-urban, and it had to have artists.” She chose Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod, where she and some friends established Freehand, Inc., a school for female writers and photographers. At the same time, she learned to play jazz saxophone and developed massage skills as a tool for healing and self-expression.
Teaching at Brandeis since 1990, Broumas has been the University poet-in-residence and director of creative writing since 1995. She loves to teach, noting that Brandeis students are unique because “they are particularly concerned with ethics founded on principles of service and compassion. So I’m very happy to be here,” she emphasizes.
Broumas tries to spend part of each day listening for a poem. “If you don’t make space for it, it won’t happen,” she explains. She encourages her students to do the same. And why does she write poems? She quotes poet, teacher, and writer Adrienne Rich: “I write because I can trust no one else to say these things for me.” And because, she says, “I have to.”