![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
And maybe just, baby, you can help me sing this song
My poem "Vocatio" is now online in the premiere issue of Twisted Moon, an Australian-based magazine of speculative erotic poetry.
In the last hours of October in this time zone, it is appropriately a ghost poem, addressed to one of the first Latin poets I ever read in the original. The next-to-last two lines are riffing on Catullus 70 (sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua: but what a woman says to her passionate lover / one should write in wind and swift water) with a bonus hit of Horace Odes 3.30 (exegi monumentum aere perennius: I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze); the last two are an elegiac couplet. I am justifying the spondaic fifth foot in the hexameter as a popular trick of the Neoterics, as Cicero once snarked to Atticus:
Brundisium venimus vii Kalend. Decembr. usi tua felicitate navigandi; ita belle nobis
flavit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites.
hunc σπονδειάζοντα si cui voles τῶν νεωτέρων pro tuo vendito.
—Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 7.2.1
I arrived in Brundisium on the seventh day from the Kalends of December, and I had your own luck sailing; so fairly for me
did blow from Epirus the gentlest Onchesmites.
That spondaizing you may pass off as your own to whichever of the newer poets you feel like.
The verb futuo is surprisingly difficult to fit into Latin lyric. It is the best-known Latin verb for sexual intercourse; its technical meaning is male-to-female penetration; I wanted to genderbend with it. The poet himself had better appreciate how long the scansion took me.
The market is a new one for me; I am delighted by the theme and the company. There are Norse and Greek myths in this table of contents, sea-sex and shifting tongues and science fiction and paranormal deconstruction. A good crop of masks and shivers. Happy Halloween!
In the last hours of October in this time zone, it is appropriately a ghost poem, addressed to one of the first Latin poets I ever read in the original. The next-to-last two lines are riffing on Catullus 70 (sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua: but what a woman says to her passionate lover / one should write in wind and swift water) with a bonus hit of Horace Odes 3.30 (exegi monumentum aere perennius: I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze); the last two are an elegiac couplet. I am justifying the spondaic fifth foot in the hexameter as a popular trick of the Neoterics, as Cicero once snarked to Atticus:
Brundisium venimus vii Kalend. Decembr. usi tua felicitate navigandi; ita belle nobis
flavit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites.
hunc σπονδειάζοντα si cui voles τῶν νεωτέρων pro tuo vendito.
—Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 7.2.1
I arrived in Brundisium on the seventh day from the Kalends of December, and I had your own luck sailing; so fairly for me
did blow from Epirus the gentlest Onchesmites.
That spondaizing you may pass off as your own to whichever of the newer poets you feel like.
The verb futuo is surprisingly difficult to fit into Latin lyric. It is the best-known Latin verb for sexual intercourse; its technical meaning is male-to-female penetration; I wanted to genderbend with it. The poet himself had better appreciate how long the scansion took me.
The market is a new one for me; I am delighted by the theme and the company. There are Norse and Greek myths in this table of contents, sea-sex and shifting tongues and science fiction and paranormal deconstruction. A good crop of masks and shivers. Happy Halloween!
no subject
Apropos of nothing, I saw a man walking down the street dressed as Groucho Marx, gesticulating and complaining loudly to his companion "I swear I thought this was still in the cultural consciousness!" I am apparently a throwback.
no subject
Thank you. I didn't realize it was going live tonight until I got the e-mail (while in the middle of another post entirely), but I am not complaining.
Apropos of nothing, I saw a man walking down the street dressed as Groucho Marx, gesticulating and complaining loudly to his companion "I swear I thought this was still in the cultural consciousness!" I am apparently a throwback.
I am stricken at the thought that people don't still recognize Groucho Marx. I can see there being confusion if you dressed as Zeppo, who was distinguished from his brothers primarily by not having a greasepaint moustache, an unbelievable Italian accent, or a case of silent comedy. But Groucho! Maybe they just got an out-of-it household. I hope so.
no subject
no subject
I am glad to hear it!
(It was originally my older daughter's idea; she turned out to look quite remarkably like him. She did decide, with some regret, that Harold Lloyd was too obscure.)
I got my most unrecognizable Halloween costume over with in third grade when I went to a party as the umbrella from Singin' in the Rain (1952).
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I found them by luck and I am very glad I did.
no subject
no subject
Thank you.
no subject
Congratulations!
no subject
Feel free to link far and wide! They could probably use the publicity!
Congratulations!
Thank you!