by phillipw | Apr 13, 2020 | PO, PR
Earliest Poetry The sunlight, bright as gods could ever hope To be, fell down on isthmus, valley, sea, On life and death, and limestone mountain slope Before mere humans. Greece, as it would be, Was meant for poetry but did not know It. Men and women and their...
by phillipw | Apr 12, 2020 | OR, PO
Victim of Women Perhaps the chest of Orpheus alone, Or half a shoulder, half a curled head Would be enough for man. They might atone Among the rocks and olives where the dead Bereaved lie torn to shreds because of love By women. There a man might pick him...
by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | AN, PO
Before the Internet in the Ancient World “Hellenistic culture was of necessity a culture of the book . . . : the age of the reader had arrived, and a poet was often a man speaking to a man, not to men.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 13...
by phillipw | Apr 10, 2020 | PO
Transmigration for the Spirit “poetry—that most portable of arts” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 13 The most portable of arts, a poem rides The waves and centuries, right across our hearts And in them, through them. The oceanic tides Are what they sometimes feel...
by phillipw | Apr 10, 2020 | AN, PO
Heroes, Victims, and Poseidon The metre of ancient Greek poetry succeeds in “achieving a length and complexity that are unusual in the heroic verse of other literature.” ~ Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks, 325, as quoted in Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 16....
by phillipw | Apr 9, 2020 | DE, MO, PO
Centuries before Sappho Praised Men and Women Pre-echoes of that verse, ancient Greek In poetry, go back so far that lost Verbs, Indo-European ones, can almost squeak Through Sappho. It is like they are embossed Behind her blond papyrus. Her inked lines Were written...
