Penny Milia is a poet, writer, performer and psychotherapist from Athens. Her poetry collection After the Fire is the first poetry book in Greece featuring digital augmented reality works by visual artist Anna Meli (in Greek and English, Kappa Publishing, 2022), as well as her play Spanish Summer (Kappa Publishing, 2019), which was staged at the Beep Theatre in Athens in 2019. Her poems are also included in the collective poetry collections In Favor of Dreaming (Gavriilidis, 2012) and A Group of Poetry (Gavriilidis, 2010) and have been published in various electronic and print literary magazines (Diasticho, Dekata, Mandragoras, 24 Grammata, Poeticanet, E-poema, Thessaloniki.info, Thraca, etc.).
She has been awarded by the Panhellenic Union of Writers and the Association of European Writers-Literature for her poetry, as well as by the Greek Writers’ Guild (2017) for her play Spanish Summer. Her short story “From the Forest” was published in the collective volume of the women writers’ network “Her Voice” (Kastaniotis, 2023) and she is one of the editors of a collection of poems A hundred and twenty voices (Kastaniotis, 2025). Her play Antigone, the Strangers, and the Fire was selected and presented as a staged reading at Vault Theatre (2023), at the WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT Festival of Contemporary Greek Plays in Oxford and London and at Analogio Festival Athens. Her monodrama “The Game” was presented as a staged reading at the Ataka 2025 drama festival.
In 2022, she participated as a speaker in the conference “Performance: Theoretical Approaches and Practical Applications” at the University of Patras on “Poetry as Performance”. As a performer, she participated in the new media exhibition “Inside the Image” with the performance “Into the Words,” with “Your Things / ARE NOT / Your Life” at the 12th International Poetry Festival in Athens and Kardamyli, with the performance “A Metamorphosis?” with the Animaterra group at rooms 2020, Kappatos Gallery, and as an actress in ancient drama (Oresteia, Trojans, Thesmophoriazousae), in theatrical monologues, devised performances and musical shows.
Her video poem “The Two” (co-dir. Evangelos Vlachakis) was screened in the official program at the International Book Fair Thessaloniki 2024, at the 12th Chania Film Festival, at the International Festival of Performance art, at International Experimental Film Festival, at Nafplio Bridges Festival, and at Agrinio film festival. She also organizes workshops on poetry.
Your collection After the Fire was the first poetry book in Greece to include digital augmented-reality pieces. What inspired you to combine poetry with technology, and what do you think such hybrid forms bring to the poetic experience?
I love ancient drama, dramatic poetry, and anonymous traditional songs, and I am just as deeply drawn to experimentation, innovation, and the element of surprise. I have always been attracted by those points where people, things, arts, and techniques meet, intersect, sometimes collide, or come together to form something new, something different. When I asked the artist and new-media researcher Anna Melí, who was just completing her doctoral thesis on writing, image, and the evolution of the substrate, to design the cover of the collection, she had already fallen in love with the poems and suggested that we experiment with something far more expansive: an illustration created through digital media.
We began an exhilarating dialogue, each of us setting out from her own art, and what emerged was a biotope, a habitat, an environment in which the poems could come alive and dwell. It does not merely frame meanings and words; it transforms them into beings that breathe, have pulse and voice, break the boundaries of convention, and escape the page. Within the six images that open and close the three parts of the collection, together with the cover also created by Anna, the “hidden” artworks are embedded like a parallel universe: works invisible to the naked eye, revealed only when the reader–viewer looks through a smartphone or tablet, after, of course, downloading the corresponding application from my website, pennymiliawriting.
The three-dimensional works, emerging from the two-dimensional logic of a book page or a photograph, extend into the space outside and around the book: like key annotations, like drawings cut from the same paper, like living word–image–symbols that acquire body and movement before our eyes, like dreams. We used both visual, cinematic elements and writing itself, treating each page as an autonomous scene, with great care to “visual” cinematic rhythm as well as to “visual” sound. The reader–viewer’s poetic experience is enriched and deepened because it is lived as a kind of digital mise-en-scène, a staging of linear and verbal forms that “perform a play” on the pages of the book’s form. A kind of pocket-scale direction, connected in a way to the idea of theatre and performance.
Hybrid forms coalesce into a new poetic body, multiform and alive; an artwork that mediates and offers itself as both field and object of art to the reader–viewer. Α space for navigation, for active interaction that multiplies the poetic body. In this way, we move together with a new “language,” with new media, into new fields.
In After the Fire, there’s a palpable sense of aftermath, of what remains once something has burned, literally or metaphorically. What thematic threads did you find yourself returning to as you wrote this collection? Are fire, loss, and transformation part of a larger poetic inquiry in your work?
My relationship with writing and poetry is continuous. I cannot separate it from life and experience. From an early age till today, I write almost daily, keeping notes, verses, impressions, comments, moments, sensations for future poems and projects. As a member of “Α Group of Poetry”, I already had poems published in two collective volumes published by Gavriilidis, some of which were awarded by the Panhellenic Union of Writers and the Union of Writers-Novelists of Europe. Yet I hesitated to publish a personal collection. Another book? Another poem? What could I possibly say? So many have said it already in Greek; we even have Nobel laureates. Moreover, Adorno’s claim, that “to write even one poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”, haunted me. “In the end, I wrote too”, as I say in the poem “Breaking News” from the collection; I managed it somehow (as Adorno, who later revised his statement) by writing the poem “To Adorno”, since, as Neruda says, “poems belong to those who need them”. If that is so, I thought, do we even have the right to remain silent?
The motto of the collection – “Books do not contain life, but its ashes,” as Marguerite Yourcenar writes in Alexis – set the tone and provided the foundation for the theme of After the Fire. The roughly forty poems that ultimately made it into the book were written over the past ten years and more, so choosing which to include and seeing what remained from such a period was, in itself, a personal feat – a kind of personal retrospective. Those that were rejected in the process, the “exiled” poems, are far more numerous, which makes the title After the Fire true not only thematically but also procedurally. After the Fire is what has passed “through fire and water,” what has survived and endured this refining – through time, through losses, through experiences – relative to words, poetry, and life itself. Things must be done while on fire; that is what produces poetic events. Reflection on them, around them, through them, occurs simultaneously. Their imprint – the words, the feelings, the sensations – is what remains.
Poetry is the most complex and the most natural thing. “For a single word, you melt thousands of tons of linguistic ore”, said Mayakovsky, and “Mother, your son is exquisitely ill. Mother! He suffers from a heart of fire”*. Fire carries formidable connotations, and for this particular book, Promethean fire, in a sense, symbolizes new knowledge, new media, the tool of augmented reality. Fire, beyond its destructive power, as a kind of sacred flame, also purifies, sanctifies, regenerates. It is one of the primordial elements of the world, symbolizing, together with air, the spirit for the Stoic philosophers. The one who brings fire, the sacred light, the fallen angel, but also the sun god, is a fiery mass. The maintenance of fire, of the hearth, is among the first acts of civilization; they say it is even responsible for language itself, since having tamed and cooked our food, more time remained for conversation and light for night vigils. Fire embodies speed, urgency, but also the sacred, the ceremonial, and, when under our control, power. After the fire, after civilization—what is the reckoning of our culture? This phrase encompasses all these themes, which the collection touches upon: it is not monothematic, neither in form nor in content. What endures? From the fire? What remains? Who remains? All these questions arise. The ancient sphinxes still deliver oracles through spirals that move slowly and ritually. Cycladic figurines, the most mysterious artifacts, hold a Promethean torch. Are they avengers? Are they initiates? Are they saviors? The word voice is whole, and around it, the word bo-di-es, dismembered, inhabits a parallel, poetic augmented reality.
(*From A Talk with a Tax Collector, and A Cloud in Trousers respectively)
Your language often feels both intimate and incantatory—at once grounded in emotion and reaching for something beyond it. How do you approach the crafting of poetic language? Do you see language as a tool, a material, or almost as a character in itself?
You have read my relationship with language very accurately. “Poetry is the refuge we envy”, the place we struggle to enter and the place we envy in others; those who enter, those
“outcast”. It is the wild bull we try to tame in a sacred bull-leaping ritual. We are born into language. It is “our oldest mother”, our all-golden goddess. Language has always been there: my imaginary friend, the horse that ran through my imagination, the magic key to a world that consoles and enlivens, the spell. The lover we tremble before. Our childhood companion. “The antidote”, as I call it in the poem that bears the same title. I cannot describe it otherwise. It is the holy spirit. “O golden eyelid of the day,” says Sophocles. I enjoy playing with the level of intimacy. A poem may emerge as a declarative oracle, a lyrical sonnet, an associative poem, or a poem in the form of a dialogue.
Language and poetry, and my relationship with them, are the subject of many of my poems. I am thrilled by this mixture, as in the book, of the primordial and the familiar alongside the contemporary and the modern: in form, content, theme, medium, and more. Language is a central theme of the book. “Everyone asks him. He knows nothing. Why should he speak of these things?” the poet says in the poem “The Dream”. How do we speak, and thus how do we write, after all this? After the Fire? After language? Postmodern? Poe did not write The Raven, he did not “make” the raven when asked; he was the raven.
We live within language; we are language. It intoxicates us, as wine does others. I have always had an aversion to wooden language, dead language that has no sap, that merely reflects its capacity to produce and consume grammar and syntax, rather than poetry. A message, an idea, a distillation of wisdom, or an academic philology or elegance. These are for a brilliant mind constructing logical edifices and arguments: write an article, an essay, conduct research, radiate intellect. For me, language that does not burn or spark from friction is a twisted language, a crippled, passive language; like the feet of the lotus, which for centuries forced the toes of young Chinese girls to remain small, never to run freely. Of course, this is also a matter of taste, and of how each poet experiences it.
Many of your works include performative or multimedia dimension (performances, video-poems). What does performance add to the written word for you, especially in terms of presence, embodiment, or space?
In this, I am perhaps a child of my time. To me, these things are interconnected, inseparable. Like the island houses, where one balcony is the ceiling of the house below. Facets, reflections, mirrors, desires, and their material representations – technology, media, tools – evolve, and people will always make art with new instruments, with ever-renewing forms and techniques. Written language and poetry confined exclusively to paper, have enjoyed far fewer years of dominance, historically speaking. Poetry, theatre, anything connected to language, has always been performative, related to other functions, and never just an art form. If the starting point of poetry is speech, the magical, healing word of the shaman, the ambiguous oracles, the hieroglyphs long before that, the songs repeated by every mother or carer to soothe and comfort the child, then poetry is inherently presence, embodiment, enactment, action. Take epitaphs, for example – they carry the body, in place of the missing body, in the presence of the face.
Performance and video poetry are not new phenomena. To consider poetry solely as words on a page, unspoken, unheard, unuttered, is, in historical terms, a novelty. In this sense, they reconnect us to the primordial root of poetry, and that is why they can be so powerful, especially when combined with contemporary technology and new media. Performance is in our nature, in our origin. Western humans rediscover it, or unearth it, from the places where it has been confined and exiled: religion, music, theatre, as well as gender stereotypes, roles within the family or couple, rhetoric, and so on. Performance brings the dynamism of enactment, theatricality, and active participation to the forefront: embodiment, presence, the creator on stage. For example, the augmented works in After the Fire, which the reader–viewer can experience in three dimensions, are essentially small-scale stagings that presuppose the viewer’s active participation – as the operator of the mobile camera used to read or watch them. Similarly, the video poem The Two from the collection is created with a cinematic logic, which is why I believe it succeeds. Vlahakis does not depict the poem literally. Instead, he constructs a parallel story in dialogue with the poem; one that the poem itself might have produced under a different logic, in a far more unexpected way.
The performances in which I participate presuppose a technique and presentation training that I have acquired from actors training, and so it feels entirely natural to me. Some might find this natural ease, this seamless linking of the arts, strange, but for me, the relationship and the proportion are utterly real. For centuries, the arts were a bodily enactment, with the entire community as one: no separation between audience, spectators, readers, and performers; everyone and everything were co-performers. Then came specialization, the split from the sciences, deepening, categorization, demystification, and disenchantment. The sun is not a god. God is dead. Far from caring about our performances, our prayers, and our offerings. Having been fragmented down to molecules and atoms, having mastered nuclear energy and walked on the moon, now Art gathers itself again and examines its joints: interdisciplinary and cross-artistic fields open before us and reunite us. Performance, enactment, events, interaction, and the audience once more as “content creator”, equipped with astonishingly godlike tools such as AI, the new Talos. For me, in art, the continuum is not fixed; it flows and transforms.
Poet, playwright, performer, psychotherapist. How do these roles feed into one another in your creative work?
At first glance, everything seems to begin with the letter P, just like my name. I’m joking, of course; that only works in English. Still, it may be telling of my interests, where the dominant connecting thread appears to be my relationship with Language. In Greece, it is difficult to make a living from art, especially from poetry or theatre, and so I earn my livelihood from something I love just as much as poetry. Psychotherapy has been called the talking cure by one of Freud’s patients, the famous Anna O., and they held therapeutic sessions in the forests of Vienna, much as in Aristotle’s peripatetic philosophical school. I also have two years of training in Translation, a strong command of English and a good knowledge of Italian. Since a young age, I have sung and played the guitar.
Humanities, and their conjunction with the arts, I suppose, call for a mind preoccupied with, and captivated by, the human being: by faces, senses, their modes of expression, their relationships and behaviors, as close as possible to their authentic form, yet also to their play with form and with the joy it brings, its capacity for delight. Art is the play, the recreation, and the joy of adults. In psychotherapy today, and in neurobiology as well, we speak of the psychosomatic: the unified, indivisible self, the whole, the person. That old division no longer holds – between soul and feelings, mind and thoughts, body and acts or actions. Lacan, opaque to most of my fellow students, was my favorite, precisely because he spoke so much about language. Karouzos wrote that “the poet seeks to dam the sources of madness,” and perhaps he is speaking of that unimpeded access artists have to the unconscious, that passport to what lies within us.
The word art is etymologically kin to the act of bringing forth – to beget, to give birth, to create. It’s within our fissures, our invisible seams, in wounds and in their healing, that ruptures, earthquakes, take place. It is there that the greatest energy is released; the rift-born force that gives rise to new ground, new foundations, new balances, harmonies, and positions.
How does Greek art converse with world artistic trends? Where do you see the intersection between the global and the local in your work?
Greece today produces art against the odds. In defiance of the times, what is being written and materialized by Greek poets, writers, playwrights, and performers is in no way inferior to the celebrated names we import at great cost as cultural totems from abroad. What is lacking are infrastructures, institutions, cultural literacy, and above all funding, while there exists an immense reservoir of cultural capital for the country to invest in. With the cultural heritage we possess, I do not know why we are not among the leading forces. Is it impoverishment and the economic crisis, coupled with the hemorrhaging of human artistic potential abroad? The difficult fate of small languages, despite two Nobel Prizes in poetry? Language in particular – the environment, the very material of poetry – is in decline. Greek is an ancestral language, enslaved, neutralized. It is undergoing the same cultural crisis that is, of course, global. All-powerful American culture, cultural colonization, is worldwide. People resist, poets resist, each one struggling to hold their ground, as best they can.
One of my favorite poetry books, to which I often return, is Indian Songs, translated, of course, in 1988. Today, the title is “wrong”. Rightly and justly so; it would now be called Indigenous Peoples’ Songs, or something of the kind. In much the same way, I believe our poems, those written in Greek, will be read in the future; if they are read at all. If they survive. On the other hand, our shared language, English, has brought us together, connected us as never before. We enjoy art and workshops from all cultures, all over the world. In theory, we can reach an audience everywhere. And yet, even as we consume more art than ever, we grow increasingly hungry. Language is the most living, the most flexible thing in the world, and while arts may change with the rise and fall of civilizations, the need for art does not change. It fulfills fundamental, irreplaceable human functions.
In our time, a vast transition is underway, comparable in scale to the Industrial Revolution, affecting all fields: the arts, the sciences, and human civilization as a whole, driven by AI. It will bring correspondingly profound structural changes. Experiences, relationships, proportions, and materials are all shifting. These are precisely the concerns that occupy me, and the same goes for my fellow artists around the world; they will always find their place in my work and in my writing.
*Interview by Athina Rossoglou
TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE
