The Telling

The telling.

That's what I like best about anything: stories, essays, novels, plays, epics.  That's what I love.

How the makers create meaning sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word, and sometimes morpheme by morpheme.  There's a wonderfully erotic ee cummings poem about bodies that has the phrase "I like its hows" and I'd apply that to every story, every essay, ever offered up to its readers.

The hows.  The telling.

I only wish I'd figured out in grad school how to craft that focus into an appropriate project.

Some might find that a shallow approach to literature, but there's a world of interest in that surface interface between teller and told, between player and audience, between maker and you.  

If you want to dive deep, you have to start at the surface and return to the surface.  There's more there there than we are often taught to understand and appreciate.  (And, frankly, most misreadings arise from lack of attention to detail, to the foundation, to the surface interface I'm calling attention to, to the there.)

Luckily, teaching intro to literature and intro to non-fiction at a community college allows me to delve so much into the telling on a daily basis.

SAPPHO: Poetry

A few selections from the Greek poet Sappho (translated by Mary Barnard):


#39 He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes—
the man who is allowed
to sit beside you—he
 
who listens intimately
to the sweet murmur of
your voice, the enticing

laughter that makes my own
heart beat fast.  If I meet
you suddenly, I can’t

speak—my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,

hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body

and I turn paler than
dry grass.  At such times
death isn’t far from me.


#44 Without warning

as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart.


#45 If you will come

I shall put out
New pillows for
You to rest on.


#65 Persuasion

Aphrodite’s
daughter, you
cheat mortals.


#53 With his venom

Irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down.


#41 To an army wife, in Sardis:

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

This is easily proved: did
not Helen—she who had scanned
the flower of the world’s manhood—

choose as first among men one
who laid Troy’s honor in ruin?
warped to his will, forgetting

love due her own blood, her own
child, she wandered far from him.
So Anactoria, although you

being far away forget us,
the dear sound of your footstep
and light glancing in your eyes

would move me more than glitter
of Lydian horse or armored
tread of mainland infantry


#84 If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the
beach rubble.


*See Mary Barnard's translations of Sappho's poetry, introduced by Dudley Fitts, published by the University of California Press.

Moby Dick!

Sperm Whale: sculpture mix; unglazed.

Hail Herman Melville and your great American epic!