cloven, or revisiting the Greeks
The past couple of weeks, I've been pulling the final threads in the latest Greek-inspired project about Iphigenia titled "CLOVEN." It's a short series, about 15 fragments, constructed to go with an even smaller group of collages that are a couple years old. Considering the number of collage pieces I have that deal with other myths, we may be seeing the beginnings of a new book project, but I can't be sure until there are more. It's a much smaller bite-sized project than the unruliness of GRANATA, but it feels very similar. When I wrote that project, I had started with a desire to write a truly female epic in vein of The Odyssey, but upon completion, it both was and was not. Or at least perhaps not Persephone's journey alone, but also that of the sirens, punished with their monstrosity for allowing their friends abduction.
There are more collages that could form the backbone of a book--dealing with mythical figures like Calypso, the muses, Io, Philomela and they may become poems someday too. When I think about myth, I occasionally flash back to those first poems I wrote over two decades ago in my grad school apartment, many with similar origins in myth and literature. At the time and maybe even a little in hindsight, it seemed like good subject matter. They always say write what you know, but in your mid-20s, especially when you've spent the past two decades in the classroom, the stories are where you find your inspo good or bad. The first two poems I ever had accepted and published in a non-school journal? One about Paradise Lost and the other about Salem witches. The first chapbook I put together? Rooted in personal details but imagined though things like myth, fairytales, history. and lit. It's surfaced in other projects beyond the Persephone one. In books about other things than myth--like "no girls were harmed in the making of this poem in MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS and "beneath" in THE FEVER ALMANAC. TAURUS is basically a modern re-imagining of the minotaur myth, but set in the midwest. (The only thing I may get more mileage from is fairytales, urban folklore, and horror films...lol...) I felt the pull of it especially enticing when I was writing a lot of lessons on Greek art, myth, and literature the first year I was freelance writing for the online lessons, since that was how I spent my days amid research and refreshers on things I'd only studies in lit or theater history classes prior.
I think, or at least I hope, I can use myths more adeptly than those clumsy early poems. Maybe its a question of lived experience making them more grounded, however fantastical they are.
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