by phillipw | Apr 19, 2020 | AN
The Big Exceptions The women move in caged-in places both In life and plays. In poetry they are Curtailed to Sappho and Corinna. Troth Constricts Penelope. It hems. No spar To take her seas away, she tends a loom, Is trapped at night unpicking her trapped work, And...
by phillipw | Apr 17, 2020 | AE, AG, AN, BE, ES, PE
Peonies, Agamemnon, and the Iliad The peonies hold on in night-time dark. They fade and slacken to another kind Of loveliness. They do not know the stark Fate bearing down on them. Their pinks are blind, As blind as Homer in the palace of A king condemned by...
by phillipw | Apr 16, 2020 | AN
Masculine Rhythms and Forms How formal were the Greeks in ancient verse, The oldest voices most of all, the blind One, Homer, and then Hesiod. Disperse All thoughts of paltry freedom. Do not mind The strictest beauties of control. Since males Are almost always in the...
by phillipw | Apr 16, 2020 | AN, ME, SC
Medieval or Eternity The artist does not have a name. Severe With grace in stone, the sculptures look down on Us, masking his identity, a tear Not shed, a smile withheld. The brawn Of arm and shoulder, strength and talent of The hand can only be supposed. The man...
by phillipw | Apr 16, 2020 | AN, GR, PO
Daedalus and Icarus “The natural rhythms of Greek [poetry] tend ‘downward,’ falling” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 14 How strange it is to think that ancient Greek In poetry inclined to downward flow. We think that the trajectory was sleek In upward movement...
by phillipw | Apr 15, 2020 | AN, SA
Sappho Wrote about Twelve Thousand Lines of Poetry Twelve thousands lines of poetry were torched By time and Christians. Piety increased The ravages, all this because she scorched With love for girls. The bishops made a feast Of male disgust that Sappho caused by fire...
