Patricia Kolaiti was born in Athens in 1976 and grew up in the island of Aegina.
Her first poetry book ‘Celesteia’ (Nefeli Publishings, 2007) was nominated for the 2008 Diavazo First Book Award. Her poems appear in various journals and anthologies.
Patricia is also an emerging philosopher of literature and art, participating actively in the international theoretical discussion. Between 2002 and 2009 she lived in London where she took postgraduate and doctorate studies and worked as a researcher and temporary lecturer at University College London and the University of Middlesex. Currently she is working on a study in which she develops a new model for the Philosophy of Literature and Art.

Poetry, and more generally Art, involves a certain way of ‘seeing’, a certain modality of thought, in which an object is not just mentally projected but conceived and constructed afresh as a new coined object during the very action of vision. What I refer to is essentially a special kind of creativity that I term perspectival thought and ‘hold responsible’ for the underlying sense during the entire 20th century that Poetry/Art makes visible the invisible, brings into being something that did not exist before by re-arranging and enriching an existing world of possibilities.

Based on: Patricia Kolaiti 2008, ‘The Poetic Mind: Literariness and Essence’.

*
More interesting than the question ‘where Reality is in Poetry’ is the question ‘where Poetry is in Reality’.

*
Poetry above all? No. Life above all.