heart, speech, this--introduction

There are stories within stories in this book, myths and memories and might-have-beens. Love stories, ruptures, alienations. And like all poetry, what the reader brings to the work creates a different poem with each scanning of a line, each taking apart and putting together of images and sounds.

In these essays, I will think and feel through some of what occurs to me as I reinsert myself in this work that in some ways is no longer mine as if I were reinserting myself in a life I no longer own.

Here is what the book came to be: seven series of poems exploring women of Greek myth, each series with its own poetic form and voice, interrupted and conversing with poems more contemporary, less narrative, in both traditional and nonce forms. These women, some goddesses, some mortal, some half-mortal, half-divine, are more often described than given voices in the myths. And I wondered, still wonder, what they might say, how they might understand the fear and violence and brokenness in which they found themselves, and I wondered, still wonder, what it would mean to interpret these stories as experiences of ambiguous loss (see Pauline Boss’ work), of knowing and not knowing the presence of those they loved.

Although the myths explored are Greek with Roman additions, many of the poems evoke other parts of the globe. Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Italy, England, Arizona, New Mexico, New York, Japan—the poems wander and tangle themselves in places and times of earth and sea and fire. Exile is as strong a theme of love fractured and made more than it was.

“Scheherazade” opens “heart”, the first half of the book, with warring desires between words and sense—hunger, thirst, and affection grabbing for the space that wanted to be a story. And the story becomes the “fleet desire” of Diana chased by Actaeon, Orion, and the dogs with which they hunt.

Diana is followed by Persephone, confused by her own violent responses to desire, and Persephone gives way to Psyche and the desperate, impossible work of rescuing the disappeared. Athena finds desire within herself and the development of strength in isolation, refusing just as her half-sister Diana to be caught.  

“Speech”, the book’s second half, goes deeper into ambiguous loss with the experiences of women at war—Leda’s rape, Penelope’s wait for Odysseus, Helen’s infidelity and return, Athena’s anger, Athena’s peace. They are women connected by blood as well as conflict, and my retellings of their myths imagine greater independence, justice questioned and applied, resolutions that sustain the impossibility of solutions.

At times, these essays will explore the series and at times, the individual poems interspersed in each section. Feel free to comment, question, add more information, and post your own poems, stories, reinterpretations in response.