by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | EN, SE
Fade We try to make our mark and leave a scar Or stain the color of a would-be ghost. We leave a remnant like a moon or a star In galaxies spluttered, their only boast Smooth blackness stretched. We are the light of moons Forgotten, or of stars...
by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | AN, GR
Also Sprach Nietzsche “ ‘Why did the whole Greek world exult over the combat scenes in the Iliad?’ asks Friedrich Nietzsche. We modern readers do not even begin to understand them ‘in a sufficiently “Greek” manner’. If we understood them in Greek, ‘we should...
by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | SA
The Most Secret Poetry “Haydn whose decidedly un-musical wife apparently used his manuscripts as hair curlers” Try not to think of all the poems lost In time. Eternity must hold them in Some hidden and immortal bank, not tossed Away completely. Yet for us the twin Of...
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 11, 2020 | LE
Sappho and Lesbian Sex Films for Men to Perv Over “And when we come across the ‘I’ in early poetry . . . we have to read that pronoun warily. What the ‘I’ says belongs to the performer [means what the performer wants it to be]; it may have been factually true for the...
by phillipw | Apr 10, 2020 | AE, ES
The Poetic Kind of True “The stories begin in kinds of truth. As events recede in time, they grow not smaller but larger in language. The ancestor who fought locally becomes a hero in a battle which assumes the scale of the epic.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First...
by phillipw | Apr 10, 2020 | EP
Epicinian: Poetry Is a Victory if We Do Not Bastardize It “The continuous efforts of English poets in every generation to rediscover a ‘language really used by men’ would have been incomprehensible to a[n ancient] Greek.’” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 15,...
by phillipw | Apr 10, 2020 | SA
Sappho of Eressus: Where Poetry Comes From “There is a variety of dialects, and this is one reason it was always considered important to give a poet, almost as a patronymic, his or her town of origin, and why Didymus’ pedantries in seeking the actual birthplaces of...
