summering with the greeks

The past couple months I've been ferrying back and forth between projects, which is nice since it allows me to work without getting fatigued on one or the other, but also means they may be slower going and likely to be abandoned, at least temporarily, should I get distracted or mired in another bit of shiny. One was the swamp bird women poems, a shorter series, the second THE MIDNIGHT GARDEN, a prose-ish narrative project that will hopefully be more book-length when finished. The third of course, is another delve into mythology subject matter with CLOVEN. I've been sharing bits on IG and sending out individual poems this summer, including a couple of video poems (one of which you can catch this coming week as a Patreon subscriber.)  These pieces number close to 30, and have some attendant collages I started a couple years back.  It's almost a reverse of GRANATA, its companion book, which was composed poems first, art second. I am setting up a series of which I hop there will be more, so the books will be designed similar. (I may or may not already have a possible cover dreamed up during a design frenzy day last week.)

I've been tending to this project in particular the past two weeks, shooting out a few more submissions, penning some final pieces, and musing over collages. Its the second summer I have spent with the Greeks and their myths. While tis story is much less sensuous and more innocent, it still visits Iphigenia both as a dead girl who filled the sails of Greek soldiers, as the deer maiden, as the woman who was rescued, or perhaps, not rescued at all. Like the urban legends I've often written about, these myths are slippery and inexact, offering a lot of room to explore the end goals of each modification and version, as well as how they change over time. The myth-based books are perfect for these deeper research dives, even if this one has been created in bursts as I wander through other projects and gardens. 

I am hoping to have the entirely of the project in hand by the end of the summer, or at least by September, which would give me some more time to see if I can place a few bits in journals before turning my ship toward publication. The poems, when you see them on the page, are a lot more wandery and fragmented in nature, which may mean some layout challenges, but the wide margins of the squaree-ish layout I used for GRANATA should lend themselves well to its formatting. 

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