more on myth and horror
When I was in college, and for a long time after, if you'd asked me what my favorite book was I might have said Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I am pretty sure the copy I originally had came to me courtesy of my avid reader aunt, the one who introduced me to most of the horror novels I ever read in some way. She would show up to see my mom with brown paper bags full of magazines and books. I'm pretty sure I read it the winter of my first year of school, a time when I was taking lit classes at the community college and planning to enroll at RC after that career shift from marine bio to English. It was a weird time, and I don't remember much beyond that book and listening to NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, which I had ripped from my NC roommate's CD collection, in my old room. I am pretty sure I reread the book again after I finished it.
At the time, the idea that a wine-fueled orgiastic gathering of classics students was delightfully horrific, but as I studied bits of mythology over the next few years, some gleaned from my theater history and lit classes, others through a seminar I took devoted entirely to myth, others through random reading, the bloodiness of the Greeks became apparent. Until then, most of my acquaintance with myth was taken from childhood repeated viewings of Clash of the Titans and Xanadu. But it steadily became an obsession, and by the time I was in grad school, Greek myths and characters began showing up more and more.
My sister would later go on to study myth, civilization, and the classical languages in college, but my interest was more in the stories and myth framework and how they could be harnessed to tell our our own stories. It was their horror and bloodiness that made them perhaps even more appealing given my other interests in darker matters. The first book mss. I compiled, a terrible bit of nonsense, was laden with mythic subject matter and built around the idea of male and female approaches to the magical--ie something to be slayed/vanquished or something to be celebrated. It was a terrible book, though a few of its poems later landed in the first chapbook I put together, The Archaeologist's Daughter.
There are still, of course, many poems to be written about the horrors of ancient Greek stories. Persephone got off rather easy when it came to transgressions, real or alleged. The best monsters are Greeks, whether its the sirens or Medusa, which terrified me as a kid in Clash of the Titans. But perhaps the most horrific was the Andromeda plot point. The girl chained to the rocks and used as sacrifice to the sea. Or the mother sent away on a small boat with her child in punishment for something not her doing. The tribunal of gods and their petty jealousies and slights. When I wrote TAURUS, the retelling of the minotaur story, the beast is just a boy and the labyrinth, just a cornfield. Ariadne just a girl caught in the middle of an unhappy family.
These newer myth poems are bloodier, gorier, than those that came before and I am liking it. There is lots of carrion and war, both real and imagined that is adding a greater sense of weight and disturbingness that I hope translates well.
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