Week 3 - February 19
That's
someone else's story
Longley: "According to Pythagoras" (After
Ovid page 51)
Calvino:
The Metamorphoses are above all the poem of rapidity. Everything
has to happen at high speed, strike
the imagination; every image has to overlap another image, come
into focus, and then vanish. This is the principle of the cinema:
each line, like each frame, must be full of visual stimuli in
motion. The abhorrence of vacuum dominates both time and space.
For page after page all verbs are in the present, so that everything
is happening before our eyes; events pursue each other, and anything
distant is rejected. (qtd. in After Ovid xi-xii)
Fulton: "newness/being
not so much a truth//as it is an emotion" (AO page 14)
Miranda"s "Narcissus":
And
as the poem - even the word -
is a fracturing of one will into two the writer and the
one writing
so that the two may contemplate each
other with benign hostility, like two
magnets with their backs turned…" (Orpheus and
Company page 1)
What shape
does the story take? How does the story shape the voice, how does
the voice shape the shape
look at beginnings:
Koch: "Io"(AO
pages 29-32) "Look at the lovely rivermaid…"
Maxwell: Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun: Fragments…"
(AO pages 32-39)
*Armitage: "Jupiter and Europa" - How very like him,
Jove…" (AO 40-41)
Paulin: "Cadmus and the Dragon" - If Cadmus is the
Age of Reason/-- and he is"(AO page 41
*Boland "The Pomegranate" - "The only legend
I have ever loved…" (AO page 43)
*Gunn: "Arachne" -And then again the thread invents
the light" (AO page 44)
*Hoffman: "Scylla and Minos" - "I knew about
Helen, they kept selling me Helen") (AO 45-46)
Williams: "Hercules." There was absolutely no reason
after the centaur had pawed her…" (47-48)
Redgrove: "Orpheus Dies and…" - "It is sweet
and decorous. To light the fire.. (AO pages 49-50)
Read whole
poem
Hughes: Now
I am ready to tell you how bodies are changed/Into different bodies'
(AO page 3)
Small workshops: 3 tasks: do in the order given
Group tasks: create your own
1. Read beginnings
of
Hughes:
"Creation/Four Ages/Flood" (AO pages 3-6)
Pinsky: "Creation According to Ovid" (AO 42)
create your own creation(story)
but just the first 10 lines - but consider what "shape"
these lines will take
2. Inspired
by Armitage's verbs ("allocked..bezeled,,ligged..sammed…plodged..")
pump up the volume of your verbs, turn them into gymnasts
3. What gets
seen depends upon who does the seeing ALTERNATE ENDI NGS
Stewart:
…"and they walk home together, safe beyond the shade
of willows…"
(Orpheus and Company page 3)
Howes: "Suppose I gave my case a different spin"
(O and C page 4)
Stowell: " Contrary to what poets say" (O and C
5-6)
Question is
poet trying to each group is assigned a different point of view
for the cast
Understand the myth or/and the cast of Homer's characters using
myth to understand him/herself
Read: "Simic's
"My Weariness of Epic Proportions(pink page & Roberts
Young's "Her Story" (pink page 6)
(That's someone else's story")
1. Circe
(Atwood pink pages 7-8) - compare Blakely's Circe page 10
& Gluck's page 13
2. Polyphermus (Blakely pink pages 9-10) compare Howes; page
16
3. Penelope (Christie pink page 11)
4. Telemachus (Gluck pink page 14) compare Howard's Telemachus
page 15-16
5. Paris (Iles page 24)
6. Cassandra ( Kossman page 25) compare Szymborska's pages
25-26 & Bogan's page 26)
7. Helen (Valery page 27 9. Priam (51 Longley_compare Riding's
page 28) &Espaillat's page 30
8. Iphigenia - (Wilner page 32)
Herbert's
"The Sacrifice of Iphigenia" page 31
"The view is superb, with the help of the proper perspective"
PERSONA
PLAY: update the story --- give the first 5 lines
of a poem that updates the story
let the mythical figure you have been assigned speak
BUT DO NOT GIVE HIS OR HER NAME
WE WILL GUESS FROM YOUR 5 LINES
Adopt a myth - and look at from an overlooked point of view
(for example the water's point of view - in which Narcissus downs
himself or the discus with which Apollo struck Hyacinth) or Paris's
mom -- or Helen's cousin or the sirens whose song Odysseus wouldn't
let himself hear by stopping his ears with wax)
Read
excerpts from Orr's Orpheus and Eurydice
