Pi O

П. O. (or Pi O, born 1951) is a Greek-Australian, working class, anarchist poet.^[1]

Biography

Born in Katerini, Greece, in 1951, П. O.'s family moved to Australia around 1955. They settled in Fitzroy after several months in a Bonegilla migrant camp.^[1]

П. O. was inspired to start writing poetry in 1973 when he heard Johnny Cash reciting (religious) poetry while tuning his guitar. П. O. thought he could do as well or better. His work ranges from standup-type rants to 'conceptual' page poetry and concrete poetry, with a heavy emphasis on wordplay and capturing the vitality of everyday speech. Thematically, he commonly portrays the issues of non-Anglo-Celtic working class life.^[2]

П. O. won the 2020 Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry for Heide at the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards.^[3] He is a finalist for the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature.^[4] In 2024 he won the Patrick White Literary Award.^[5]

Works

• Fitzroy brothel: Poems (1974)
• Emotions in concrete (1975)
• street singer (1976)
• л. 0. Revisited (Wild & Woolley, 1976) ISBN 0-909331-23-5
• Panash (Collective Effort, 1978)
• Missing Form: Concrete, visual and experimental poems (Collective Effort, 1981)
• The Fitzroy poems (Collective Effort, 1989)
• 24 hrs: The day the language stood still (Collective Effort, 1996) ISBN 0-646-26903-8
• The Number Poems and Other Equations (Collective Effort, 2000)
• Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems (Collective Effort, 2008) ISBN 978-0-9587726-6-2
• Fitzroy: The Biography (Collective Effort, 2015)
• Heide (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) ISBN 978-1925818208
• The Tour (Giramondo Publishing, 2023) ISBN 978-1922725769

Edited

• Missing Forms with Peter Murphy and Alex Selenitsch (Collective Effort, 1981)
• Off the Record (Penguin, 1985)

See also

• Anarchism in Australia