About Me
[oblation] Kiki Dimoula (Greek: Κική Δημουλά) (b. Athens 1931) is an acclaimed Greek poet. She worked as a clerk for the Bank of Greece. She was married to the poet Athos Dimoulas (1921-1985), with whom she had two children. Since 2002 she is a member of the Academy of Athens.[1]She has been awarded the State Prize twice (1971, 1988), as well as the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Prize (1994) and the ΑÏιστείο ΓÏαμμάτων of the Academy of Athens (2001)[2]. Her poetry has been translated into English, French, Swedish and Spanish.Kiki Dimoula’s mature poetry added an altogether new dimension to Modern Greek poetry. Having experienced the drama of the existential dissolution of post-war humanity and at the same time the dead ends in a world that has lost the gift of faith, her poetry mapped a world that’s both ‘homeless’ and insecure; a world in which the poet, in order to survive, had to plunge into the fundamental dynamics of the creative process and interfere decisively with their logic.Her writing turned the grammar of the Greek language against the meaning of words, attempting, thus, to strengthen the emotive power of verse through astonishment and surprise. All her lines suggest the stability of a world that eyes can’t see, but which becomes whole through its imaginary reconstruction within the poem as an organic whole. This dimension of astonishment and surprise has become an active emotive factor in contemporary Greek poetry.Dimoula’s poetry treats the themes of absence and oblivion as in a kaleidoscope, where colours and shapes dissolve and mix in order to be reconstructed into a hidden harmony and order.Her poetry turns fluidity into a transubstantiating process: the universe becomes world once again, agony becomes longing, absence appears as time redemption. The poet’s language breaks through habits and negates the certitudes of a romantic tradition which lacks to see lost time as a continuous and active presence. Through her lines, personal time is born anew and is accomplished for ever as collective experience and prismatic image. Her poetry, through the siftings of Heracleitus, presents the best world of a personal ontology and establishes it as sensetional material and aesthetic phenomenon.For Dimoula, silence, migration, and minimalisation enter language in order to dissolve the coherence of a logic that is unable to decipher their message. In them, the poet discovers existential dimensions that err in experience but which the brain, darkened as it is from rationalistic dizziness, refuses to accept them. This is precisely the purpose of Dimoula’s poetry: to create the space for the realisation of the best world. Every one of her poems locates and records dimensions of this expected multidimensional and orderly world.It is for this reason that each of her poems undermines the dominance of silence, each word abolishes the power of obscurity and darkness. The poet wishes to shed light on those mobilizing forces of the psyche – not the Freudian subconscious of repressed desires, but the area of the id, the dark Persephone which belongs to each of the mortals and reigns within our personal Hades: a personal spring, a way to multifariousness. Hence, each of Dimoula’s poems is a Homeric death ritual, a recalling of the dead through the submission of the absent sense they left behind; and each one submission gives essence to her lines, moulds essence and energy, body, language and human warmth.For Dimoula, everything lives on a multi-leveled simultaneity, within memory time where there is no distinction between moments and everything is identified absolutely and is freed to salvation through the awe of memory. Because this initial emotion dominates in her work: awe at loss and dissolution, at time and distance, awe at the power of language that resurrects and replaces wholly all those things that have disappeared and have become forgotten.In short, Dimoula’s poetry illustrates the re-establishment of symmetrical analogies between memory and reality, between humans and their space; finally, it sees the possibility of transubstantiation out of decay, the endurance granted to chaos and the confusion of history by the power of language.Span style="text-align:center;position:absolute; background-repeat:no-repeat; height:32px; width:100%;left:0px;top:200px; background-image:url
