throwback thursday | taurus
Since I am revisiting the Greeks again this summer, I spent a little time this week with taurus, which is basically a minotaur tale but set in the contemporary midwest. It was a project that did not necessarily start out with an intention toward myth, but slowly oriented itself in that way, both in the poetic fragments that came first and were initially released in installments over at Chanillo after they invited me to post some content there.in 2018 I later created a zine version with collages that I issued together in one place. The beginnings of the series was started in 2017, though I didn't put the pedal to the metal until I was writing poems more regularly in 2018.
It was not my first time writing about Ariadne, and may not even be my last...but it still felt like a very contemporary story. It hinged on the idea that there are different kinds of monsters that may not even be monsters after all but become monstrous in context. A lonely teenage girl with a brooding and violent brother. A family encased in a house in the middle of labyrinthian corn fields. The house even, itself, a maze of memory and trauma and isolation for those who live within it. Unlike the projects I've written since with their roots in myth, this one could probably just exist without much knowledge of the original tale.
I wound up putting it within my DARK COUNTRY manuscript, a book that centered around a bunch of smaller groups of poems that spoke to in a midwest gothic tone tucked amidst others in a similar vein. In fact, he title for that collection owes its existence to a line in this series:
"Dark country, if you can survive there.
Can thrive under the hot lights of the hatchery. "
Unlike GRANATA, which sets itself more in a vacuum of time that may or may not be ancient Greece, a similar approach I am taking for CLOVEN, this one has more definable roots. While those two are modeled more closely on traditional epics and revel in classical details, this one just takes inspo from some of the central ideas of the minotaur tale. It's not really Theseus' story, but Ariadne's before he showed up at all. Nevertheless, its a longish project, over 40 pages in whole with the accompanying artwork.
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