There's some good stuff here, but it keeps getting lost among self-conscious
verbiage. It needs great tightening up. Isn't this a better beginning:
alas for the towers of Ilium
vanished in the echoes on the plain
where grass fattens on tongues churned to rot
no syllables avail you here
mute as the dead are mute
language smashed still before its birth
[end beginning here, without dragging in Lethe at this point]
And the rest similarly could benefit by some pretty ruthless carving,
especially of rhetorical devices that call attention to themselves ("as if
one, as if one") [note: I know the poem I just posted myself was all one
big rhetorical device that called attention to itself but in that case that
was the point.] More generally, though much of the poem is quite
impressive, I thought it early on lost track of the really brilliant idea it
started out with: to use Cassandra as a metaphor for the role of denial in
war, the shrieking "This is real, these are human beings" which everyone
thinks is hysterical because they are literally incapable of believing it.
I found myself wishing the poem would have developed this idea in a more
concentrated and disciplined way. If this poem could be made as taut and
spare as, say, H.D., then it would really be sometihing. Rereading the
Agamemnon might help. Or rereading H.D.
(I was just rereading the beginning of the Iliad myself, and it dawned on
me how funny it is. There seems to be a definite subtext that among the
Achaean heroes we are basically in kindergarten: *ophra me oios Argeion
agerastos eo, epei oude eoike*: "Well I'm not going to be the only one
without a prize. It's not fair!")
==================================================
Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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