I opened some big themes last week, but life is getting busy so I’m going to take a step back from what I started for a couple weeks. Plus it’s the kind of topic where slowing down doesn’t hurt.
Someone on Reddit asked for help finding poems / translations from Romantic era poets related to Greek mythology, and I decided to take a few minutes to poke around to see if I could provide some leads. Along the way, I found myself browsing a bunch of more recent poems with the “Myth” tag at poets.org. Here are, to me, the most interesting ones. In many of these, the references to myth are fleeting.
“Poem” by James Schuyler. From Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry: “Schuyler’s great gift as a poet is to mask the artistry with which his seemingly unhindered free-verse lines are bridged. This formal ease reflects his themes, musing about the ordinary jumble of life – friends, books, visiting, the stretch of the seasons. The anchor of Schuyler’s practice is his evenness of temper.” In this poem Schuyler writes: “Things / take the time they take.” It’s so easy to miss that that’s six words alliterated in a row. Perhaps a phonologist would say this isn’t alliteration due to the mix of t and th, but even in that case it’s still interesting as the sounds alternate. What’s also great is the provocative visual form in this one.
“Poem” by Alice Notley.
“How the Milky Way Was Made” by Natalie Diaz.
“The Woman with Jewels” by Lola Ridge, a new-to-me early 20th century poet who was born in Dublin, grew up in Australia and New Zealand, and later worked as a writer, editor, and activist in New York City.
“15¢ Futures” by Marilyn Nelson. The subtlety of the rhyme scheme is interesting in this one.
“Self-Portrait as Artemis” by Tarfia Faizullah.
“Calculations” by Brenda Cárdenas. A poem that mixes English and Spanish. I loved the complexity of its echoes, enhanced by the visual form.
This one was not tagged with “Myth,” but I think could fit in too: “Prayer to the Gods of the Night, II” by Roger Reeves.
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A famous essay by poet June Jordan that gets one to think harder about the achievement of Phillis Wheatley, the first black American poet: “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America.”
As should be obvious if you’ve been following along, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our increasingly digital world changes poetry. (As someone who came of age at the very end of the 90s, it’s profoundly changed my career path, my romantic history, my friendships, my best memories, and my vices – so how can it not have changed poetry?) I thought this essay brought up some new dimensions about the effect of social media. It’s not so much about Instapoetry, but how our newsfeeds show up in the more traditional poems we write, and the strange new reality that now “almost any poet we can mention, like most people, lives online.” (I was startled last week to realize Rita Dove has a Facebook account. But of course Rita Dove has a Facebook account.) Fun fact: the essay mentions how 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss is “the Whitmanian poet as Facebook friend.” When I started the Twitter account for this website (don’t bother to find it – there’s not much there), I was so surprised that she was my first real follower (ie, the first who wasn’t just trying to get me to their Only Fans account). So give her a follow. She’s still posting on Twitter, even though poets there are much quieter these days. You never know where it might lead, even if it’s only to other less-famous poets.
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