Assignment 5 – Mid-Point Review
1. Overview of Work So Far
- I’ve explored a range of practices: writing experimental, sound, and found poetry; working with image-text relationships; testing visual/romantic imagery and then subverting it with irony.
- My Negotiated Project has evolved around the theme of romanticis ed imagery and its disruption : looking at how personal memory, nostalgia, and longing can be reinterpreted through playful, ironic, or critical layers.
- I’ve begun connecting these ideas with contemporary artists (Banksy, Warhol, Basquiat), and also referencing cultural materials like Asterix & Obelix comics and found English phrases in China.
2. Key Learning Points
- Experimentation: Sound and concrete poetry exercises pushed me outside my comfort zone. I discovered I’m more drawn to blending experimental play with meaning than to “pure sound.”
- Visual-text relationship: Combining romantic photos with ironic text in Canva has been productive — I see possibilities for series-based work here (posters, digital prints, maybe even a book).
- Contextual research: Exploring Banksy’s irony, Warhol’s pop detachment, and Basquiat’s layering has helped me think about how my own work can merge seriousness with humour.
- Personal voice: Writing from memory (China,UK, Greece, Isle of Man, family) has made me aware that I don’t want to just “document” — I want to transform lived experience into something metaphorical, accessible, and resonant for others.
3. Challenges
- Balancing the personal with the universal, avoiding self-indulgence while keeping emotional authenticity.
- Time management between work, life, and study. Sometimes the creative energy feels drained.
- Finding ways to integrate text and image in a way that feels coherent, not forced.
- I was encouraged by my tutor to use more of my native tongue. So it is a great challenge to try to explore a fusion of Greek/English, and find a common ground. The following practice is a study to explore myself using as vehicle words that themselves carry their own story through the centuries.
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The Sycophant and the Star
I have always loved words with roots.
Philosophía: the love of wisdom.
Eros: the ache behind beauty.
Metamorphosis: the becoming, the undoing, the redoing.
Even sycophant, which they now use as an insult,
once meant something sacred:
a watcher of figs,
the fruit dried for warriors
who would go and not return.
In Athens,
to guard the fig was to guard the body of the city.
To name the theft was noble.
But later, those same guardians
began to falsely accuse,
to whisper in shadows.
And so, from fig-watcher to flatterer,
the word twisted.
I wonder:
How many of us become
the opposite of what we began as?
How many icons fade
not because they changed,
but because we saw them differently?
I’ve idolized people.
Not for who they were,
but for who I needed them to be.
And sometimes, I think they left
because they could not bear
the weight of being a fantasy.
Or maybe they were
never really there,
just reflections on a still surface,
ripples mistaken for roots.
Still, I walk.
Still, I write.
Still, I believe in logos,
even when silence speaks louder.
Notes / Ετυμολογία & Σύμβολα
- Philosophía (φιλοσοφία): Love (philo) of wisdom (sophia).
- Sycophant (συκοφάντης): Originally from sýkon (fig) + phaínein (to observe). A fig-shower — informer or fig-accuser.
- Eros (ἔρως): Passion, desire, love.
- Metamorphosis (μεταμόρφωσις): Change of form, transformation.
- Phantasia (φαντασία): Appearance, imagination — root of “fantasy.”
- Logos (λόγος): Word, reason, meaning — a core concept in both ancient philosophy and theology.
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Pandemonion, or the Orchestra of My Mind
Inside me there is a πανδαιμόνιον (pandemonium)
all demons gathered in my skull’s theatre,
each one whispering its own aria,
each one echoing louder than the last.
There is Πανικός (panic) stirred by Pan the god with hooves,
sprinting through my chest at dawn,
waking me with breathless dread,
a shepherd of chaos, unseen but sensed.
There is Μελαγχολία (Melancholy)
not sadness, but bile, the ancient humours gone bitter.
It curls in my gut like a serpent of dusk,
silent but always present.
And Καταστροφή (catastrophe)
a bad star, a dis-aster.
My fate once aligned with Venus,
now seems bent under disionos astyr (disaster),
the bad omen star that crashes futures.
But among these shadows walks Νοσταλγία (nostalgia)
not longing, but the wound of return
νόστος-nostos (homecoming) + ἄλγος algos (pain).
She wears the face of my children.
She tastes like Sunday’s cooking
and missed phone calls
and the sweet smell from a country I left too soon.
I call upon Πάθος (pathos)
for he teaches me to feel without απολογία (apology)
to suffer and still speak.
And then Αλήθεια (alithea) arrives quietly.
Not as fact, but as unveiling
when illusion lifts,
and I see not what I want to see,
but what is.
My δαίμων (demon) is not a devil.
He is the quiet companion,
the inner force that nudges me
to write this down,
to speak the unspeakable,
to make from pain
a small and holy pyre (fire).
And when I do,
when I breathe it out,
comes Κάθαρσις (catharsis)
like rain over the mountain,
like tears I no longer fear.
Etymology & Notes
| Word | Greek Origin | Meaning in Context |
| Pandemonium- πανδαιμόνιον | pan = all + daimones = spirits/demons | The crowded inner world of thoughts, fears, and impulses. |
| Panic-Πανικός | From god Pan; the stirrer. A sudden, irrational fear. | Represents anxiety, fear that comes without clear reason. |
| Melancholia -Μελαγχολία | melas = black + chole = bile | Historically thought to be caused by physical and emotional heaviness. |
| Catastrophe-Καταστροφή + Disaster- | kata = down + strophe = turning; later linked to aster (star) | A reversal of fate, guided by an unlucky star. |
| Nostalgia-Νοσταλγία | nostos = return home + algos = pain | The ache of missing, of longing for a home or time you cannot reclaim. |
| Pathos-Πάθος | Root of sympathy, empathy, and passion. | The deep emotional suffering or feeling. |
| Daemon-δαίμων | Ancient inner spirit or guiding force, not evil. | Your inner driver, the voice that pushes creation. |
| Aletheia-Αλήθεια | a- (not) + lethe (forgetfulness) = un-forgetting, truth | The process of uncovering, of seeing clearly. |
| Catharsis-Κάθαρσις | katharos = clean, pure | Emotional release, purification through expression. |
Finding Poetic Voice and Poetic View through Creative Arts, Etymology, and Personal Truth
There are words that do not merely describe the world.; they shape it.
And many of those words come from my native language: Greek.
They are ancient, but still pulse with meaning in modern English:
Eros, pathos, nostalgia, panic, catharsis, disaster.
These are not just words.
They are emotional instruments.
They are keys to the inner self.
They are bridges between memory and metaphor.
For a long time, I tried to separate my emotional life from my creative one.
But I’ve come to realise: they are one and the same.
What I feel, I write.
What I write, I become.
And now, after years of silence, noise, distance I’m slowly finding my voice again.
A voice that speaks from the middle of the storm, not from the calm after it.
I write not just to express, but to translate; To translate the invisible into the felt.
The internal into the external. Because I know I’m not alone.
There are others like me, trying to make meaning in the dark.
The Power of Etymology: Words as Mirrors
So many of the words I now use to express myself come from my roots.
Greek words that survived time, empire, loss and still speak with clarity.
Let me name a few:
- Eros (ἔρως) – not just desire, but the primal force of yearning that moves us.
- Pathos (πάθος) – suffering, yes, but noble, resonant, transformative.
- Panic (Πανικός) – from Pan, the wild god of the forests. Fear as myth.
- Daimon (δαίμων) – not evil spirit, but an inner genius. Our fire. Our shadow.
- Nostalgia (νόστος + ἄλγος) – the pain of wanting to return to something that no longer exists.
- Catharsis (κάθαρσις) – emotional purification. The purging that leaves clarity.
- Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) – truth, not as fact, but as unveiling.
- Disaster (δυσ + ἀστήρ) – a bad star. A cosmic misalignment.
- Idol (εἴδωλον) – the image we project onto others. The fantasy we build — and eventually destroy.
- Sycophant (συκοφάντης) – once a guardian of sacred fig trees, now a false flatterer. A noble role turned toxic.
- Pandemonium – all demons gathered. Not outside, but within the mind.
- Melancholy (μελαγχολία) – dark bile. The sadness that lives in the body.
- Orchestra (ὀρχήστρα) – not only music, but the stage where emotion dances and performs.
Each of these words is a world in itself.
Each is a mirror to my experience — as a migrant, a father, a worker, a dreamer.
Personal Mythology: A Greek Between Lands
Sometimes I feel like Odysseus, navigating stormy waters.
Not only seeking to return home but asking: what is home now?
Is it a place? A person? A memory? A self?
I live between countries, between identities, between languages.
I use my work in art, in craft, in poetry as a form of survival.
To create meaning from repetition. To turn fabric into form.
Even the material I work with (yarn) soft, structured, transforming becomes metaphor.
In my mind, I walk between lands pausing on each one long enough to feel, to reflect, to write,before setting sail again.
The Orchestra of the Mind
In one of my poems, I wrote about the Orchestra of My Mind:
a stage not of music, but of thought, memory, myth, and madness.
The Greek orchestra was the place where the chorus danced.
Now, it is the space inside me where voices rise and fall,
where language and silence alternate in rhythm.
And sometimes, the mind becomes pandemonium:
a gathering of inner demons, of doubt, of longing, of loss.
But even there, even in chaos, something can sing.
Creative Arts as Catharsis
I do not want to write poetry that is detached or decorative.
I want it to carry pathos, aletheia, and the messiness of eros.
I want it to clean wounds, not hide them. I want it to reflect the truth of being human.
Being a foreigner in an English land a Greek speaker in an English world
gives me not a disadvantage, but an angle.
An ankle, perhaps or better, a foot to stand on, a place to walk from.
Because I bring with me a vocabulary of depth, of myth, of memory.
I am not here to fit in. I am here to merge what I know with what I feel,
to translate one world into another and to give voice to the unspoken.
Final Words
No one can carry the weight of being a fantasy.
Even the most beautiful idols will shatter.
Even the stars can mislead. That is the root of disaster a bad omen, star.
But still, we look up. We wish. We write.
And sometimes, that is enough.
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