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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!
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Thank you! I found them by luck and I am very glad I did.