Friday, September 24, 2004

Thusfar Nameless

I've been playing around with a persona who's a minor Greek poet of 550 BC plus or minus, who wanders off and winds up in Zhou Dynasty China, or maybe it should be a Zhou Dynasty minor poet who wanders into Athens. Either way, he's probably very slightly mad, just as vigerish, you know. Or maybe just really lonely.

So I've been reading a lot of excellent very old things, Beowulf (the new Heaney translation) and the Upanishads, Gilgamesh (real good Herbert Mason trans.), Sappho, the Homeric Hymns, The Book of Songs, The Song of Songs, and, for some reason, all my old Green Lantern and Adventure Comics (note lines of surprise radiating from GL's head). All of the real old stuff is extremely cool because there's so many fewer nouns and almost no adjectives.

And been playing around with some poems in this persona. Here's one:

sitting under the tree sitting
under the tree nightfall
sitting under the tree

More later, maybe.

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