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Knopf Poetry returns to your inbox with a Greek festival of poetry. Included in this July's email is a brief excerpt from Michael Schmidt's masterful new book, THE FIRST POETS: LIVES OF THE ANCIENT GREEK POETS, along with a link to the first chapter. Then, we present you with a portion of Kenneth Koch's poem "On the Acropolis" from his collection A POSSIBLE WORLD along with a poem from Jack Gilbert's new collection, REFUSING HEAVEN. A link to audio and video of Gilbert reading from REFUSING HEAVEN follows. All copyright info can be found at the end of the email. *************************************** . |
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In THE FIRST POETS, Michael Schmidt brings the poets and poems of ancient Greek to life. Beginning with poets shrouded in myth, such as Orpheus, Schmidt explores the work of famous poets Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, and Pindar along with less well known writers such as Mimnermus of Colophon, Stesichorus of Himera, Corinna of Tanagra, and Anacreon of Teos— twenty-five poets in all. Michael Dirda in the Washington Post writes: "It would be difficult to imagine a better introduction to the topic."
A brief excerpt from Chapter XVII, "Anacreon of Teos": There is a beguiling theory that Eros' ball preceded Eros' arrow. Love was something unexpectedly tossed to you which you caught as a reflex and then couldn't dispose of. Later, this was replaced by the bow and arrow, the sense that love begins with an unexpected, inextricable penetration. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry VIII fell in love with the same woman, Anne Boleyn. Both Athenaeus and Aelian record how Anacreon and the tyrant Polycrates of Samos fell in love with the same Thracian lad, one Smerdies. Anacreon had come to Samos from Thrace, where boys wore their hair long. Did Polycrates cut off the boy's hair in a spate of jealousy or to make him more Samian in aspect? Certainly Anacreon in several fragments laments the shearing of the lad, but being politic does not blame the tyrant but Smerdies himself for thus marring his charms. The contest for Smerdies' locks is hyperbolic, suggesting (not insisting on) a struggle for Thrace itself, and Smerdies' own loss of cultural identity. Was boy-love something Polycrates promoted at Samos and was Anacreon, who until that time seems to have chosen his imagery in a more heterosexual spirit— writing about fillies, for example--conforming to his patron's proclivities in writing poems of intense desire and gentle contest? The second-century rhetorician Maximus of Tyre saw it the other way around: ". . . Anacreon made Polycrates more gentle to the Samians by mingling love with tyranny— the hair of Smerdies and Cleobulus, the beauty of Bathyllus, and Ionian song." Though he is profligate of loves, Anacreon is not profligate with language. There is a generally direct, colloquial quality to his diction, a precise economy of image. "Love's dice, one is madness, one is frenzy." "I am borne over hidden shoals." "Once more bald-pate Alexis goes awooing." Set beside the abundance of Apollonius, for example, where the sheer amount of language far outweighs the occasion, Anacreon's thrift is exemplary. He "has left the formulaic style of the epic far behind him and chooses his words individually for their special merits." A refusal to be solemn does not make him any less serious as a poet. Love is not something to be endured: it is to be played and boxed with, to be knocked down by, to be pondered in its aftermath.
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From A POSSIBLE WORLD by Kenneth Koch,
It doesn't seem as though we could die up here, does it? *************************************** From Jack Gilbert's REFUSING HEAVEN Happening Apart from What's Happening Around It
There is a vividness to eleven years of love
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*************************************** "Anacreon of Teos" from THE FIRST POETS by Michael Schmidt. Copyright © 2004 by Michael Schmidt. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. "On the Acropolis" from A POSSIBLE WORLD by Kenneth Koch. Copyright © 2002 by Kenneth Koch. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. "Happening Apart from What's Happening Around It" from REFUSING HEAVEN by Jack Gilbert. Copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. *************************************** You received this issue because your email address is in Knopf's Poem-a-Day mailing list. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to unsub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. Or if you received this poem as a forward and wish to subscribe, send a blank email to sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. We welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts or questions to knopfwebmaster@randomhouse.com |
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Read the first chapter of THE FIRST POETS, "Orpheus of Thrace":
Jack Gilbert has spent many years living on the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea. You can listen to him read a selection of his poems at the following link (after the catalogue page loads, scroll down to the bottom of the page for the audio links):
Join us at the Knopf Poetry Center Online: 
Join the discussion in the Knopf Poetry Forum: