Last summer I had a love affair with Greek literature and some of its spin-offs. I had happened to read Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (and loved that so much I also read Circe, which I’d heard about for years and highly recommend), which reminded me that I hadn’t read The Iliad since high school and it was probably worth a second round. A friend was doing a one-man production of Iliad (and he’s bringing it back for 2 nights next week! Info here. So worth seeing!), so the timing felt like it was all lining up. I was being beckoned to this land. Robert Fagles’ translation was suggested to me, and I just decided to go for it. That book read like a suspense novel and an opera put together—so lyrical, so gorgeous, and so on-the-edge-of-my-seat active. After that, I was interested in how Madeline Miller had come to write her take on Achilles, so I watched an interview with her, and in it she mentioned Sappho, and this Anne Carson translation that she loves. Sappho—another one I hadn’t read in decades. I ordered that book and sat on the edge of my bed unable to will myself to get up. I kept reading fragment after fragment after fragment, wanting to clutch the threads of the images and emotions they held and climb them to their origin.
As I think it true for many of us, when I’m reading a particular author or style I can’t help but take it on. So in my own poetry meanderings I, naturally, played with fragments. I was thinking about them yesterday because I want to start reading The Odyssey (and from there Ulysses and A Room of One’s Own); I was thinking about all the Greek from last summer and those poems….I found writing poems in short can be surprisingly satisfying—a completely different way of wrapping my heart around a thought or image, and I don’t tend to overthink them. Here are two I wrote which I still like…Go write some. It’s really fun.
Starlight off his skin
The dawn I dreamed
Rider of white stallions
All that you are to me
Come home
I’ll let you know when the Odyssey adventure begins:) I’m in a Maggie O’Farrell phase right now.