the land of gods and monsters
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| Bernini's THE RAPE OF PROSPERPINA |
I've been knee-deep the past few weeks in the GRANATA manuscript and the poems are looking pretty good, though there is still a bit of a ways to go in this female-driven epic. This has included making the final decision on the title, which not only references pomegranates, but the Italian word for grenade. after discovering that little fact, there really was nothing else the book could be called.
It's not of course the first time I've written about Greek mythology, of course, the beginning perhaps all those mythology poems in my very first chapbook, THE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S DAUGHTER. Then of course, there was TAURUS, a modern retelling of the minotaur myth that took place in the midwest. This is perhaps the first with a classical setting, though that may not exclusively be the case. Or more, maybe that takes place in the realm of gods and men and monsters. While my minotaur story is about a boy who thinks he's a monster, there are literal monsters, spells, and all sorts of spookies in my Persephone story.
Obviously, there are lots of Persephone poems out there in the world, and this almost made me pause and write about someone else. Io maybe, or Iphigenia. Daphne seemed too obvious, as did Leda. All adventures and epics must have a sense of journey and quest. Of movement. Persephone seemed rife for this sort of epic adventure.
Meanwhile, I've been consulting sources and reading other takes on her story (Rachel Zucker's Eating in the Underworld has always been a fave, as is dgp-er Shannon Ratliff's chapbook from a couple years back, Arch. It's too early to have sussed out all the themes that will be important in the book, but some are the idea of captivity and desire, mothers and daughters, death and sex. It's a little smutty so far, and I think this may be lingerings of my prose erotica experiments back in the spring when I wasn't sure what to do with my new expanses of creative time. (Idle hands and the devil's work and all..lol..)
I would like to complete a first draft by the end of the summer, so we shall see how it goes...
You can see a little inspo real on instagram I posted a couple days ago...
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