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Komninos Zervos, born 1950, Richmond, Melbourne,

Victoria; grew up in Richmond; has been performing his poetry

since the early 1980s in venues throughout Australia.

Komninos is currently one of the most popular of Australia's

performance poets. He has read and recited at all kinds of

venues, often to audiences who are relatively unfamiliar with

poetry. He has worked extensively with children. His

performances, unaided by music or dance or other theatricaldevices sometimes employed by performance poets, are

marked by great self-confldence, good humour and an abilityto reach a very wide range of people simultaneously.

Like other performance poets, his readings and recitations have

considerable dynamic range although unusual loudness and

swiftness of delivery are often-used devices. The poems on the

page can look like long columns of free verse but are usually

underpinned by some much more traditional rhythms. The use

of rhyme is also extensive, though it is sometimes reduced to

half rhymes or increased to a single reiterative rhyme for a

whole poem (as in his poem 'the bombay cafe' which uses the'ay' rhyme at least three or four times per line for two pages).

Komninos also believes in 'bringing poetry back to the people'

from whom, by implication, it was stolen by poets such as T.S.

Eliot, Ezra Pound and the academy some years back. He

proclaims loudly, 'I'm a poet / that's right / a poet / i write, i

read, i perform, i entertain / i earn my living / by poeting.'

When one reads Komninos' eponymous collection published in1991 without listening to the accompanying cassette, one might

be inclined to ask just what is actually being brought back to

the people. In his poem 'workplace poets tour' Komninos

catalogues the places he has performed in and defends poetry

generally as well as his own approach to it. He points out that

'poets have been around for a bloody long time' and associates

himself, in passing, with poets who 'defy prison, torture and

authority's curse. / like rendra and hikmet and ritsos and

brecht, / write words that their people will never forget'. Thereis no doubting Komninos' sincerity here, but whether he has yet

written 'words that (the) people will never forget' is debatable.

The quality of Komninos' work throughout the book as poetry

on the page steadily improves, but still stops well short of being

memorable compared to poems by the poets referred to.

Some poems are more or less memorable for their subject

matter and their overall technique (for example, the well-known

performance piece, 'the baby wrap') but others can be very

slight, particularly the two sets of haiku which are strikingly

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unmemorable. It's not likely that anyone who writes 'the sudsywater / splashing my naked body / reveals my nudity' or 'the

telephone ringing / renews my relationship / with the outside

world' has read Basho or Issa very closely.

What Komninos is good at, however, is the evocation of his

own background and social milieu. In 'childhood in richmond'

he gives a graphic and ultimately very moving picture of

growing up in a Greek takeaway and the bitter servitude of his

father 'who left greece / with a bag / full of dreams / but spent

the / rest of his life / as a slave /to a stove / till his dreams /

were all greasy / and his hope / had all gone'. In what amounts

to a kind of anapaestic tetrameter Komninos recalls with a

certain non-permanent resentment the bleak urban landscapeand the limited recreational options ('the lane / out the back /

where the kids / used to play') and at times reaches an almostlyrical-nostalgia vision of his father when he remembers 'the

scales / of the fishes / how they'd fly / like confetti / and my dad/ who'd be covered / from his head / to his toes / and his arms /

that would / glisten just / like the fishes .. ~

There is a similar sociological accuracy about his more recentpoem 'my friends', where he tellingly evokes their doublestandards and their pretensions as well as their real human

needs and at the end neatly identifies himself with them insteadof merely standing back and being satirical. On the other hand,

Komninos can be devastatingly satirical when he wants to be,as in his 'it's great to be mates with a koori', which continues 'to

know a gay man or two. / to have five lesbians for dinner, / andcook them a vegetable stew. The rest of the poem gives us a

brief but comprehensive coverage of middle-classpseudotolerance and offers a sharp ending which says: 'but

what do you see in the mirror, / when there's only yourself andyou. / and who really knows the truth, / of the fascist, that livesinside, you.'

There may be some paradox in printing a book of performance

poetry when it's really designed to be performed live, but thesame could be said of a Beethoven score. In some ways it may

be even dangerous since it gives the reader, as opposed to thehearer, the opportunity to look at the work more closely and

detect certain weaknesses in logic that might be passed over inperformance. In Komninos' more explicitly political poems,

such as 'fringe network anthology', the thinking can sometimesbe a bit woolly, as when he notes that the end of the first world

war, his father's arrival from Greece, the sacking of GoughWhitlam and a 1984 poetry reading all occurred on November11. His tribute to Shakespeare in 'monologues' is also a bit off-

course when he declares that the 'bard' speaks to us 'from 500

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years ago' rather than 400.

Lest this should seem like quibbling it is important to point outthat Komninos does have many real abilities. In addition to

those mentioned already one could also point to his feeling forthe movement of a conversation and his ear for colloquial

speech. In 'bustalk' he manages to give the impression of awhole conversation overheard while telling us absolutely

nothing of its content. The function of dialogue as areaffirmation of human contact rather than as a transmitter of

information is persuasively illustrated. In Wilhelm retch's masspsychology of fascism' he does something similar with a police

raid on a hapless marijuana smoker. Komninos may not be aheavyweight for those who sustain themselves on Frenchcritical theory but he does do what he does very well and there

is no denying he reaches a wide range of people. It is surelyhard not to like a poet who can describe himself as 'far away in

a footscray take-away / a modern day protege of rabelais / aufait with roget and wordplay / drink(ing) cafe au fait and

survey(ing)) the passing array / day after day after day.'

Websites: http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos/ http://live-

wirez.gu.edu.au/Staff/Komninos/Cyber/hscpoems/jukebox.html