Ecophenomenology in Croatian and Modern Greek Poetry: Janko Polić Kamov and Angelos Sikelianos

Abstract

The aim of this study case is to examine Ecophenomenology in Janko Polić Kamov and Angelos Sikelianos’ works and specifically in some poems from Ištipana hartija and Lyrikos Vios respectively. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions about flesh and chiasm are the main keys in our analysis and interpretation of nature and body in both Kamov and Sikelianos’ poems. The complex nature of chiasm is represented through different ontological connotations such as the death zones and landscape sceneries including flora and fauna, based on individual senses and cognitive state in order to perceive the inner nature of flesh and consider them as somaesthetical bodies. Here the death zones tend to be considered as a remapping of death, not in terms of a biological end, but as a continuous - in time and space - chiasm with life. Through this continuity, the death zones are eutopias where death is a symbiotic chiasm of life and enlighten more its impact on subject’s ecopsychology. To conclude, the perception of an existing universal flesh considered as an upper hierarchically, never ending and dynamic becoming, defines the two poets’ biocosmic perception which has an ontological remark.