Receivers of the Gods: A Conversation with The Classical Outlook

Soundtrack to this episode

Link to poems!

Read the Classical Outlook poetry issue here!

NEW MERCH HERE

To receive a link to the Critical Path Symposium, follow the email link at the bottom right of this page

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Philip Walsh and Rachel Hadas!

-The Classical Outlook!

-Classical Reception Studies

-"44 Pastorals" by Rachel Hadas

-Prosimetra/Haibun

-"Prose of Departure" by James Merrill

-"Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms" ed. by David Lehman

-"Personal Best: Makers On Their Poems That Matter Most"

-In praise of postludes

-Rachel’s Euripides and Dionysiaca

-"Achilles and Odysseus” by Susan McLean

-“Mimesis” by Erich Auerbach

-“Imaginary Conversations” by Walter Savage Landor

-“The Songs of the Kings” by Barry Unsworth

-“Circe” by Madeleine Miller

-“The King Must Die” by Mary Renault

-“Iphigenia” dir. Michael Cacoyannis

-“The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker

-The Feminist re-telling of Classical myths trend

-“Liber Tertius Decimus” by Julia Griffin

-“After the Fall” by David Katz

-“The Mazemaker” by Michael Ayrton

-“Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths” by Charlotte Higgins

-“Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In” by Henry Eliot

-“The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges

-“The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

-“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

-D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths

-“Theseus and the Minotaur” by Edwin Muir

-“Megalopolis” dir. Francis Ford Coppola

-The Classical Outlook takes Princeton!

Transcript

Elijah: Hey, everyone, I have a really excellent episode of Versecraft for you coming up, but before we get to that, I just have three short announcements. Firstly, the poetry issue of the classical outlook that we will be discussing today is now live, so you can go find that at my link in the show notes. Please do check it out. You can find a poem by yours truly in there, the poems that we've discussed today on this episode, and lots of other really great stuff. So please do check that out. Second of all, the versecraft merch store now has new merch. I finally have a logo in white as well as merchandise that has the put some verse in your universe catchphrase on it, which is very exciting. And finally, my good friend David, who's good enough to design all of this, has also designed a new logo for the show as well, which can be seen on the shirts. So please do check that out. Finally, on October 24 at 03:00 p.m. eastern daylight time, I will be giving a talk on Herman Melville's relationship to gnosticism at the think journal critical path symposium. It's an online symposium, so anyone can tune in. It's via Zoom, and you can email the editors for a link. I will put the instructions for that in the show notes as well. At the beginning of the symposium on that day, October 24, at 11:00 a.m. my good friend Cameron Clark from Sleet rickets will be giving a reading. So you can check that out too. And then at 08:00 p.m. in the evening, I will be giving a reading. So if you're free all day, those are three times to check out. But for listeners of the show, I'm sure you're most interested in my talk. So that's again at 03:00 p.m. eastern daylight time, it's on Herman Melville and Gnosticism. It's going to be very exciting. So with that said, let's get to your episode for today. I'm Elijah Blumoff, and you're listening to Versecraft, a podcast about the art of poetry seen through the craft of particular poems. In each episode, I recite an exceptional piece of verse, then analyze its overall form and follow with a sentence by sentence exploration of the content of the poem. To aid in understanding, you can follow along with the text of each poem included in the show notes. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with the Ohio Poetry association. Well, before, before we get started, let me just ask you guys what you're working on these days other than the new special issue.

Rachel: Phil has an incredibly busy. You start Phil, because you're busier than me.

Phil: Yeah, so I have. I'm a full time boarding school teacher, so we're in the middle of our fall semester right now. One full time job, jokingly, of course. The other full time job I have is being the editor of the classical outlook. And so that's really been, it's a labor of love. Really enjoyed working for the journal. This is the end of my second year with this third and fourth issue of the year. And the poetry issue should be out, I hope, this week. I think it's basically ready. I have, this is the final proofing copy that I have right now, and I just have to read it one more time through, and then it should be out to the world this week. Barring any last second major typo or things like that. I'm not a perfectionist. I don't expect everything to be exactly perfect. But there are also some howlers that I find that sometimes really need further examination. So that's what keeps you busy day to day.

Elijah: Awesome. How long have you been editor in chief?

Phil: So I've been the editor of the classical outlook for, since January of 23. So this is my end of my second year coming up, and it's a four year term. My predecessor, I think, was the editor for five or six years. Six years, I think. And then we've had a couple of long serving editors previous to that, so I have some very sturdy shoulders to stand on.

Elijah: Cool. What has been the thing that you've enjoyed most about your tenure?

Phil: Just getting to work. I mean, you know, personally getting to work, a different part of my brain. I have a PhD. I was trained, you know, to be a teacher scholar. And I really enjoy sort of keeping up with what's happening in the field in this little small part of the world that is interested in teaching and learning about the ancient mediterranean world. And actually what I found really illuminating over the past couple of years, and in part because of Rachel's service to the journal, is working with creative artists, with writers, poets, translators, who push us to reconsider texts that we know well or introduce us to texts that are very familiar or have a new spin or have a new take, you know, thinking about poetry in English. And so that has been a really delightful, not surprise because I knew it was a part of the journal, but, you know, being able to work closely with Rachel, closely with other poets and translators, with our colleague Diane Arnson Svarlian, who's our editor of translations from Greek and Latin that's really been a delightful part of the work.

Elijah: And is there a particular direction that you wanted the journal to take under your direction?

Phil: It's a good question. You're a good interviewer, I think. For me, my PhD is in comparative literature, and so I majored in classics as an undergraduate. And I know 25 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was entering graduate school, I don't think I could have written my dissertation on the subject that I wrote my dissertation on in a classics department. My dissertation was on the reception, the modern reception of aristophanes in different moments in time, primarily in great Britain. But of course, literature doesn't know national walls. I don't know if I could have written that dissertation in the brown classics at the beginning of the 21st century now. Very much so. I think. I think reception as a field of study has become not just a niche, but has become a major part of the work that all classicists do. At least the recognition reception is really, really important, no matter whether we're a philologist or a comparatus like I am. So I've tried to bring some of that energy into the journal itself, trying to expand what it means to engage with the ancient greek and roman worlds. You know, the audience of co is primarily teachers and professors. And so a lot of our work, of course, is grounded in the classroom experience or the experience of pedagogy. But I wanted to push that. And actually, that was where, I think, in conversation with Rachel early on as she came on board. I think one of the first ideas we bandied about was the idea of a poetry issue, given the richness that Rachel perceived in the submission we were getting. And I think also herself a teacher for her long career, and really understanding implicitly that these poems, these original poems, or these translations can help us learn more about the ancient world, can unlock things for us that may have been muddy or misconceived even in our first interactions with them, or even in later interactions with them. So that was really one thing that I've really, this particular issue has been. It's a long piece. It's like 120 pages, which is a long issue for us, most of our issues, about 50 or 60 pages. But I've really, really enjoyed working with Rachel closely and working with the other writers in the. In the issue and really, again, thinking about expanding what it means to be a teacher and a learner of the ancient mediterranean world. I think that's really what I've been thinking about as editor.

Elijah: Both of you can answer this if you want. In a couple sentences. Can you talk about what classical reception is for those who are, are listening and don't know?

Phil: Rachel, do you want to chime in?

Rachel: I was about to say, Phil could probably define it better. I used to say, elijah to my students at Rutgers that intertextuality was a long, ugly word for something very simple, that literature wouldn't happen without other literature. The texts talk to other texts. So reception, it might be an extension of that idea or a different aspect of it that we are inspired by what we read or that a piece of literature is going to be the German C. Reception's aesthetic. You know, it's going to be perceived in a certain way. Phil, you could take it from there. I have more ideas, but not that clear, necessarily.

Phil: Well, I think there's a long line of scholarship now on what reception studies is and in particular how it relates to classical studies as a field. You know, I think in a very pithy way, it's engaging with the dynamic relationship between past and present, that it's not just a one way street. We can learn about the ancient world by examining a poem that comes out of republican Rome as much as the experience of wrestling with past and present. So that back and forth. But I think that's the pithy way, is thinking about the dynamic relationship between past and present. The ancient world, the modern world. They're in conversation with one another. That's a brief definition of it and certainly something that animates my classroom. My students probably begin to roll their eyes at some point and not thinking about how our engagement with the ancient world is. We can think about it at a superficial level, but really asking hard questions about our experience with the text, how we can situate the text in a particular ancient context, but then also wrestle with it in the modern world.

Elijah: And I'll pivot to you now, Rachel, what are some things that you've been working? I know you have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment.

Rachel: Yeah, I think I have two books coming out late this year or early next year, kind of depending on a few factors, and one is called 44 pastorals. And, of course, a pastoral is an ancient genre in the first place. But they're sort of prose poems that I've written over the years, sometimes as poetry, sometimes as prose, but I've turned them all into prose, which is a really interesting experience. And they share a lot of themes and a lot of landscapes. They were mostly written here in Vermont, about Vermont, but they're also about memory. And like everything I write, they dip into other literature a good deal. So that should, that's a fairly short little book, and then something longer called, well, it's a long title, that, and the title might change. The genre is an ancient genre called a prosymmetrum, which I think goes at least back to Boethius in the western tradition. And I think in east asian literature it's even much older, where you have prose and poetry alternating, or you have prose with a little bit of poetry in the middle of it. Elijah, I don't know if you know James Merrill's late prose suite called prose of departure about a trip to Japan, but it's also about an AIDS diagnosis, and it's maybe a 20 page travel journal, but every page or so there is a rhymed haiku, somewhat summing up what's going on.

Elijah: Oh, yeah, haibun high bun.

Rachel: And I find that prose and poetry seem to have very liquid boundaries these days. You see an awful lot of books that are prose and have poetry in them, or vice versa. So this is not something peculiar to me. But the interesting thing is, I took the theme of this book. If the genre is a prosymmetrum, the theme is really mythology. Because I taught mythology mythologically inflected literature courses at Rutgers for many years, I put together poems, many of which had been published before, but some had not, which were indeed inspired in a way. Phil was talking about, I think, by classical literature or by a classroom experience of classical literature, teaching the philoctetes of Sophocles or teaching the Iliad. And then what was new in the book, I put together these poems, and I wrote a short essay about each of them. And all those essays were written in 2023. Because I had retired. I had the time to do that and spread my wings a little. So if you looked at the essays without the poems, they turned into a kind of a memoir, because every teacher, whatever he or she is teaching, has something going on in their life at the same time. So when I was working at gay men's health crisis in New York in the late eighties and early nineties, doing some volunteer running of a poetry workshop, it changed the way I was thinking about the Iliad. It's been an interesting experience and experiment, and this book will be a little longer, and I hope it will be out in the spring. Other than that, I've really enjoyed working on classical outlook, and I feel as if being an editor, helping Phil with this particular strand of classical outlook and working with the poet, saying, could this poem be a little clearer? Could your postlude which was a great idea of Phil's, that each poet submit some prose. Could you make clearer what you're saying here? It's a little bit like correcting papers, but it's more fun. And there seems to be an editorial impulse I have that might be left over from teaching, or maybe it's just as I get older, I put on more of an editorial hat. So I really enjoyed that part of it. And I find that poets are grateful for the attention.

Elijah: That's a question I was going to ask, is how the postlude idea came to be, because it's a great idea. I wish more journals did it.

Rachel: I think it was Phil's idea, was it not?

Phil: I mean, I'm sure that, and in fact, in your introduction you refer to a couple of other, I don't know.

Rachel: If you saw that, Elijah, but in David Lehman's wonderful anthology ecstatic occasions, expedient forms, which first came out in 1986, he was asking poets to choose a poem and talk about their formal decisions and procedures. And I think that book has been reprinted since then. And then Lehman is series editor of the best american poetry, and every year, even though there's a different editor for each volume, the idea of a postlude or a little prose explanation has persisted. And it's also in a new anthology edited by Aaron Ballou and Carl Phillips called personal best makers on their poems that matter most. One of the things one finds is you learn things from the postludes that you wouldn't necessarily notice in the poems. This may be an enlightenment or it could be a problem. It could mean that the poet had things in her mind that did not make it onto the page. So it's quite enlightening one way or another.

Elijah: Yeah, I think it's a wonderful idea because I think poets should be, not necessarily always have to, but they should be able to justify what they may.

Rachel: Right.

Elijah: So I think that's very important.

Phil: And, yeah, when we first thought of the issue itself, we didn't necessarily, we weren't necessarily thinking about including post loads. And in fact, I think in the call they were an optional choice. But then I think as we started receiving poems, I think both Rachel and I realized, like, oh, this is actually a great opportunity to put into conversation a creative piece with maybe a lifetime of teaching or a lifelong engagement with an idea or an experience that a poet had as a child, and they're coming back to it, or a relationship that is now gone. And those echoes, those repetitions, like, that's very, that's the meat of ancient literature. I think that's the meat that's part of the creative heart.

Rachel: Elijah, would it help if I read a little bit from a paragraph of my introduction?

Elijah: No, please go ahead.

Rachel: I say that this whole project, working with Phil on this issue has nurtured a wish that more journals and periodicals that publish poetry asked the poets to give some account of what they were doing. Such prose commentary is often enlightening. It's also individual and frequently unexpected. Poets seem to relish revisiting the occasion that first inspired a poem, a poem that may have undergone multiple alterations and iterations before it ever left their desk. Such revisiting of a poem's genesis may take the poet back to a course they took or a class they taught. The pedagogical theme is very important. As Phil suggested, local history they learned an island they visited, a movie they saw, a dream, a house they built. A difficult relationship that turns out, in light of the right classical text, to have been a source of inspiration. One never knows quite what led to the birth of a poem. I suspect these poets often didn't know themselves until someone asked them. The postludes provide a dazzlingly varied showcase of some of the myriad ways poems come into being. So I would say that this issue could be looked at through at least three sets of lenses. I mean, one of them is mythology, classical mythology, classics in general, maybe mythology in particular, because mythology and poetry have such a close and generative relationship. So classics, poetry, what's going on in poetry now in 2024? What are poets doing and what have they been reading and what inspires them? And then third is pedagogy, because I would think that every poem in this issue could be fruitfully read by students, high school or college students, graduate students, as an accompaniment to some text or other. So I love this sort of triple feature. And if you're more interested in pedagogy and less interested in poetry, that's fine, too. But I think we were braiding together these strands.

Phil: And then to bring the idea of reception into this, one of my great teachers at Brown University, Arnold Weinstein, in his last book, talked about the living chain, and it's a chain that he thinks of with respect to his own teaching and learning over his long career, and a chain that actually includes the books that he taught. And that's very much what reception is about, is finding the links in the chain, going, you know, pulling Ariadne's thread, you know, even though some of, you know, many of these poems don't explicitly engage with other poems about Ganymede or other poems about the Aeneid itself. They are part of a living chain. And it's up to folks who are interested in reception, in reception, classical reception studies to unearth, to make sense, to put them into conversation with one another, to grapple with them. Cause sometimes those chains don't necessarily link together. But that's very much a part of what I try to do as a teacher. And I think from Rachel's perspective, as an artist, very much part of what she is doing.

Rachel: I was fascinated to hear that. Like Phil, or like me, rather, Phil majored in classics as an undergrad and then got his PhD in comparative literature. I did the same thing. I thought, I don't need to be an english major. My big sister was an english major. And I thought, I can read the things I'm enjoying reading without being told how to read them. And I've never regretted having been a classics major. And particularly since my retirement, which sort of coincides with my going to work for classical outlook, I have felt that that youthful love of the classics coming back more and more. And in some of the translation work I've done, obviously, yeah.

Elijah: For similar reasons, I majored in philosophy and undergrad because I didn't want people telling me how to read books. And also I think that just the system that we've inherited for teaching English from the new criticism, it often puts the cart before the horse, I think. I think we often assume that kids already care about literature and that. And then we're asking them to find all these literary devices and symbolism and they don't care yet. So you need to teach English in such a way that people understand why they should be reading in the first place and how it actually is relevant to their life.

Rachel: Absolutely, absolutely.

Elijah: Yeah. And I wanted to say with the postlude, I agree with everything you're saying. I think it's wonderful. And for me, as a person who looks at art primarily as a form of communication, I think it's especially crucial that artists always, the muse plays a certain role, and you can't always be entirely in control all the time. It's important for artists and writers especially to know what they're saying and to know what is happening. And so even if not every poem necessarily has to come with a postlude all the time, I think that the potential for a postlude should always be there, like a writer should always be able to, if necessary, justify what they've done. So I really love that philosophy, which sort of is latent in the idea of doing a postlude.

Phil: But I also want to push anyone who's really enjoyed reading these postludes. I think there's something to be said about once a piece of art is released into the world, the artist in some ways loses control over it. Postlude pushes back against that a little bit because it allows the artist to have a final word. But I think there's actually really interesting things to think about in terms of the relationship between the poem and the postlude or some of the postludes are relatively short in this issue, and some of them are actually pretty long. We gave a couple of folks who were particularly motivated or particularly excited to write a little more space, but we have several short ones as well. So I think that's actually delightful to me, too, that there was no set expectation. We gave these artists free rein. We asked them, we asked everyone whose poetry was accepted to write, and all of them were very great, very excited to write on them. But we didn't give them any instructions.

Rachel: Apart from all kinds of things pop up.

Elijah: Yeah, I think that actually the existence of the postlude points to what you're talking about, about the author sort of having to let go of their work. Because if you read the postlude as a reader, then you can say, oh, well, there's this actually this other thing that I thought of that the author doesn't even mention where I took it in this other direction. And I see now that the author wasn't intending that. And so you actually get, I think, a more defined perception of that phenomenon.

Rachel: I think Robert Frost says somewhere, sorry, Elijah. He just says the writer has a right to any idea that any reader has about the poem. You know, I never thought of that, but I'll take it.

Elijah: It's right. Free stuff. Free meaning. All right. Well, at long last, I will finally get to my introduction. I kind of like to do this in medias race thing. I like to thrust people into it, and then we can figure out what's happening after. So, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your fortnightly episode of Versecraft. I'm extremely enthused from the greek enthusiasmos, meaning to be possessed by a God, and honored from the latin honos, the God of military honor, to welcome to the show today two incredible classicists and editors of the stellar literary, scholarly, and pedagogical journal the Classical Outlook. For those who don't know, the classical outlook is the journal of the American Classical League and is the leading publication for teachers of latin, greek and the ancient mediterranean world. In schools, colleges, and universities. According to its own mission statement, the classical outlook is a journal for teachers at all levels of instruction. It seeks to engage its readers with the latest thinking and teaching and learning, to stimulate discussion about developments and debates in classical studies, and to center teaching spaces as important sites of classical reception. As if that were not enough, however, the classical outlook is also one of the best places in the literary world to find verse translations of classical poetry, as well as contemporary poems centered on classical subjects. I have been lucky enough to publish with them a couple of times and am incredibly excited to be included in this very special new issue, which is what we're here to talk about. As you've heard, this month the classical outlook will be releasing a marvelous issue entirely dedicated to new original poetry. Not only that, but as we've been talking about, each contributing poet has included with their poem a postlude where they talk about the classical sources and inspirations for their poems. I have gotten a chance to read the final draft, and I can therefore say with authority that you are all in for an incredibly rich and varied reading experience. Here to speak with me about the new poetry issue and classical outlook is editor in chief Philip Walsh, who you've already heard from, and contemporary poetry editor Rachel Hadas, who you've also heard from, of course. Philip Walsh is the classical department chair at St. Andrew's School in Delaware, as well as the editor of Brill's Companion to the reception of aristophanes. Rachel Haddas is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University and a widely published and decorated poet, critic, and translator in her own right. She is the author of many books of poetry, including most recently, ghost guest from Ragged Sky Press, as well as the forthcoming 44 pastorals from Measure Press and the prosimetrum from which we start awake from able muse press. As a translator, she is noted for her verse renditions of Euripides and nonus. Diana, Sciaca, Phil and Rachel, thank you so much for being on the show.

Phil: Thank you for that great introduction.

Rachel: It's a pleasure. Thank you, Elijah, of course.

Elijah: So the, the main thing that we were setting out to do here is to actually give a sneak peek of some of the poems that you'll see in this classical outlook issue. So what we decided to do is we each chose a poem that we wanted to highlight, and we'll just have a little discussion about it. We'll have a little roundtable. So the first one I have up is, I believe this is Rachel. Yes, this is Rachel's pick. This is Achilles and Odysseus by Susan McLean Rachel, would you do us the honor of reading this for us?

Rachel: Sure. Achilles and Odysseus, of course, they hate each other, one a sword, the other more a river than a rock. Achilles, when Odysseus brings word of what the king will give him to come back, replies, I hate like hell's gates, one who says one thing and hides another in his heart as much as calls him liar, which he is. Although he stuck to facts, in his report, he mentioned no apology. There's none. Achilles isn't wrong. Odysseus lies to everyone, his father, wife and son, his men, his slaves, Athena in disguise, whatever gets him the desired result. To him, Achilles is a pride mad brat, sharp as a blade but wobbly in the hilt and dangerous, wrapped up in his conceit. Achilles never takes advice except from gods, whereas Odysseus pays heed to everyone, slaves, herdsmen, girls in the street, and follows their advice if it seems good. Odysseus, on the shore of deaths domain, is hailed there by Achilles prickly shade and tries to soothe and flatter him again, praising his high esteem among the dead. Don't sweet talk me about death, Achilles snaps. Better to be a poor man's half starved farmhand than king of the played out dead. He turns his hopes to hearing news about his distant homeland, imagining men mistreating his old father, asking about the son he never knew concerns Odysseus shares how much he'd rather be alive. He doesn't say like you.

Elijah: Great, thank you, Rachel. So could you tell us a little bit about why you chose this poem in particular?

Rachel: Well, I think it works extremely well as a commentary and perhaps an original commentary. I mean, everyone would notice the contrast between these two characters in the Iliad and in that wonderful encounter in the underworld in the Odyssey. But Susan McLean really lays it out in a very witty and concise way. For example, if you were teaching the iliad or the Odyssey, and teaching it in translation is fine, this would be a wonderful accompanying text. I bet Phil would agree with that. I hope so. So, as a commentary and something pedagogical as her own reception of the text. And she talks about that in the postlude that she read Eric Auerbach's essay in Mimesis about Homer's characterizations being very superficial, and she found that she disagreed with that. There were things in the characterization that if you dug a little you would see. So it helps as an analytical tool. It also works really well as a poem. And Susan McLean talks about how slant rhyme helped her. She finds that she writes better when she's rhyming. I get that. I do, too. I bet Elijah gets that, too. That sense that the discipline of rhyme really makes you pay attention.

Elijah: Absolutely.

Rachel: She had a little trouble as long as she was trying full rhymes. But we have a lot of half rhymes. Sword and word, rock and back, heart and report. They don't quite rhyme. They're somewhat similar, a little bit like Achilles and Odessus. There's a lot of parallels, but, boy, are they different. So Susan Maclean taught for many years. She says, I don't know Greek. So I was depending on translations. That doesn't matter. I would say maybe at least half of our poets worked with translations. When my father, Moses Addis, was helping to develop the core curriculum at Columbia, which was then called colloquium after the second World War, he kind of had an epiphany that people who were coming to college on the GI Bill probably had more insights about greek tragedy than the classics majors who were focused on grammar. And that insight continues to hold. Obviously, Homer comes across in any translation. Tragedy is a little harder to translate, but tragedy loses none of its relevance and none of its eloquence and its kind of versatility. So I think Susan's poem is doing a lot of things at once. There are other things that poems in this issue do, like take a different slant on a myth, take a myth in a different direction. Take a more personal direction from a myth. This is not a personal poem to Susan Maclean. This is really about what she sees in the text, but she does it superbly.

Elijah: Yeah. And speaking of it as a pedagogical tool, I think it's a great invitation to a conversation. Oh, yeah. What I was thinking about reading this is it's almost like one of Dryden's introductions to his plays, where in this case it would be almost like this was an introduction to a platonic dialogue between Achilles and Odysseus. And I would love to see that platonic dialogue. I feel like this almost feels like a teaser. It's like you have this ideological stance on this side and this ideological stance on the other side and let's see them duke it out. And to see them duke it out. One way to do that is to actually go to the Odyssey, go to the Iliad.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Elijah: And see how those ideologies are played out. But also it would be a great activity for students, I think, to sit down and try to write from the perspective of Achilles or from the perspective of Odysseus. And see how that works out.

Rachel: Absolutely. Walter Savage Lander has a book the title of which I'm not remembering, but you might, Elijah. Or we could look it up.

Elijah: But it's, it's imaginary conversations, right?

Rachel: Imaginary conversations, yeah. I was going to say dialogues in antiquity or something. I mean, a lot of people have done that. And of course, Avid's heroides is letters from mythological heroines to the men who have treated them badly and so forth. It's a very old idea. Idea. She's not writing a dialogue precisely. She's writing a kind of a third person analysis. But all kinds of possibilities arise from this. Absolutely.

Elijah: It really does pose to the reader. It kind of asks them or it doesn't ask them outright, but it suggests for them to take a side. You want to either be like Achilles and say, oh, well, I would like to be alive, but not like you. I want to live my life nobly or, you know, but there's also a lot of sympathy for Odysseus and how he is much more pragmatic in the way that he gets things done. And obviously more clever than Achilles is.

Rachel: Turning, just for one quick second, from poetry to prose, the characterization of these two important heroes in Homer has been developed in a delightful, if kind of snarky way by the british novelist Barry Unsworth in a novel called songs of the kings 2012, and then again, to some degree by Madeline Miller. I mean, many, many extremely popular novels. Mary Renault, different novelists who I think are sometimes are having a moment, even if they lost it. Mary Renault died some years ago. She's out of date in some ways. In other ways, she's absolutely terrific, I think. And Barry Ensworth, which I recommend, songs of the kings, if you've not read it, it's about the sacrifice of iphigenia. Achilles doesn't come up particularly well, and neither does Odysseus. In greek tragedy, Odysseus doesn't always come out very well either.

Elijah: Have, have either of you seen Michael Cacayanus's 1970s film version of iphigenia?

Rachel: I love that.

Elijah: It's one of my favorite films of all time. I recommend everyone see it. To me, it's like it's really greek tragedy come alive. The actors speaking in Greek.

Rachel: A lot of the dialogue is just translated from Euripides in that immortal fight that Agamemnon and Menelaus have, blaming each other for the situation. It's exactly what Euripides says and it's so lifelike.

Elijah: Yeah, the actors are tremendous. I mean, you have Irene Pappas as Clytemnestra, and she's just.

Rachel: I don't know if you know that film, Phil. We really recommend it.

Phil: Yeah, I haven't seen it myself, but, I mean, I've been captivated listening to you all dialogue on this poem. I was drawn to a couple of things that you all were talking about a little few moments ago. It seems to me one of the most exciting places where classical teaching and learning is happening are with veterans groups who are reading greek tragedy, for instance, or watching a translation or a performance of Sophocles, Ajax, or the Philoctetes or any of these, any number of these tragedies. And what you were saying, rachel, about your father, that these veterans would know more about what it means to be a hero or to be a villain or to know what suffering looks like. Certainly a lot more than folks who've just spent their early lives in antiseptic classroom spaces. And another really, I think, powerful moment or place of reception is in our incarcerated populations, where folks are reading classical literature, ancient literature, mining insight and wisdom and dignity from those experiences. In fact, I think one of your colleagues, former colleagues at Rutgers, Emily Allen Hornblower, has been really involved in that.

Rachel: Rachel, she actually zoomed into my classroom a couple of years ago with the formerly incarcerated person she'd worked with. Absolutely.

Phil: And, in fact, classical. I look in the fourth issue of this year, will have a piece on the teaching in an incarcerated population, not by Emily, but by another, I think, you know, shining a light on these. These spaces which may not draw, you know, draw the attention that, say, an exciting seminar at the University of Chicago, for instance, or at Princeton University or one of our, you know, any number of our great colleges and universities, you know, they're folks. And I think bringing it back to, you know, the poets in this issue, you know, folks have, you can think really hard and really deep about these characters, about these storylines, about these myths, apply them to your circumstances, rely on them, turn to them through the course of a life. And, you know, I was drawn to that great line that Achilles has. I hate like Hell's gates, one who says one thing and hides another in his heart. I remember reading that might be fagles, and reading it as an undergraduate, perhaps for the first time, and just having that insight open up to me that Achilles indeed is. Is a rock.

Rachel: I think Phil was referring, I'm not sure if you had in mind specifically the theater of war that was.

Phil: I mean, that program was more 15 years ago now, maybe even a little bit longer. But, yeah, Peter Meinek. And even during the pandemic, there was a theater company that would perform zoom renditions of these places. So really open access. Right. Not just to a veteran population. I think that actually, that sort of makes your point, makes our point even greater, that everyone has a claim on these texts. And yes, they can be obscure and mysterious, and we might not know the myths and all the characters, but if we have a really charismatic actor or actors, or if we have a really charismatic teacher that draws out the. Why, like, why do these characters matter? Why do these myths matter? How do they relate to us? Those are the people that we should be celebrating who can unlock the ancient world. They don't have to be professors and teachers, either. They can be.

Rachel: No, no, absolutely. I mean, in a way, we're talking about three genres of literature, not counting television and performances or graphic novels or cartoons, but we're talking about novels, plays, and in the case of this issue, poetry. Every one of them has been kind of vivified or revivified by the classics.

Phil: Yeah, even the novels. You referred to that as.

Elijah: Well.

Phil: Thank you for reminding me about that, Rachel, because the novels, these readaptations of myths, I think everyone knows Madeleine Miller Searcy, but there's a whole sort of genre of texts, of novels that have come in the aftermath.

Rachel: I just finished Pat Barker's third novel in her trilogy about the first one's called the silence of the girls. It's about the Iliad, drawn from the Iliad. And the second one is more about the fall of Troy, and the third one's called the Voyage Home, which focuses on Cassandra and Clytemnestra. And every now and then, just like your reference to Phil, to the I hate, like, hell's gates speech, she manages to quote the place in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus where cassandra says, ew, this house smells like a slaughterhouse. Haven't you noticed the smell of blood? And she. She manages to sort of insert that into a conversation in a way that just made me jump. I mean, I'm not always a fan of Pat Barker, but I think she does an amazing job. And certainly she's not a classicist. She's very interested in women's lives and women's deaths, whatever. Whether you're particularly interested in gender themes or in something quite different in philosophy, you will find something in the classics.

Elijah: Yeah. And I love the way that this conversation has really. It's revolved around different facets of classical reception in a way you can think of, quote, unquote, western civilization as a history of classical reception. That's largely what it's been. Because the classical world is so fecund and can be interpreted in so many different ways. And even when there are cultural movements against so called classicisms or neoclassicisms, they still claim the Greeks or they claim the Romans. They claim the vitality of those original authors. And yet we're still finding new ways to reinterpret the classics, whether it be through the lens of a veteran or through the lens of the penal system or whatever it is. So it's just really miraculous. Let's move on to our second poem. And this is the poem that Phil chose. This is called libertius decimus by Julia Griffin. And would you like to read that for us, Phil?

Phil: I can. Liber tertios decimus. So this is how it feels. Was all he thought, the sword already cooling in his hand? Yes. He addressed his ghosts, you understand? And no one spoke. Those comrades who had fought so long with him, his men, his trojan band, kept staring at him, silent till he caught the words son of the goddess. And that brought him back. Prince Turnus, take him, make it grand. He gave the shield to someone, wiped his face, prayed privately to Jupiter, stood still like Victor's marvel, rooted to the place, his piety, remastering his will. And he saw his ulyss born the self, same day as Hector's son. Look down and move away.

Elijah: Awesome. Thank you, Phil. And I apologize for not having the classical hard c when I pronounced that. I should have. I should have remembered that. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about why you chose this poem.

Phil: Well, mine is. So I am not a poet by training. And so I'm, again, sort of fascinated just by how Rachel reads poems. And part of the joy of work being. Being an editor is really being in contact with her several times a week, whether we've been wrestling with this issue for months now. But as we receive new poems, and if anything, I can plug that, the classical outlook is the place for original poetry in English about classical material. So to your audience, I welcome any new poets who have ideas or poems they're working on, send them over our way. We'd love to read them and give you feedback or accept them for publication. Um, I say that because I want to highlight Julia Griffin, who's been such a loyal contributor to the journal, as we have several poets who've been loyal contributors over the years. And Julia keeps saying religion. Yeah, exactly. Chris Childers, who, whose work is in this journal, in this issue, was our poetry editor for a number of years, and his great book of translation, Penguin Book of Greek and Latin lyric verse, has just been out. And so there's a review of that text in the journal for this issue. So really, just to celebrate Julia's work. And I was drawn to this poem because I teach the Aeneid every year. And right now we're my students in latin class, we're wrestling with book one. So we have a long way to get to this moment. But I think in some ways, you know, the Aeneid is such a capacious text. The very first lines, we're thinking the very end of the poem. The moments of intra textuality, of the echoes and repetitions that Virgil has throughout the poem, I think are really, really powerful. And I try to introduce these ideas that we'll be wrestling with at the very end when Aeneas decides to kill Turnus. We were talking about those lines, actually, I think you quote these lines in one of your poems, Rachel. Furor Arma Ministrata from book one we were talking about. That's the first epic simile taken from that first epic simile in the innian and how furor administers literally the weapons. And I asked my students really to think carefully about what that meant to them, and they were unsure about what that significance was. I mean, we're only a couple hundred lines into the poem, but I'm drawn to that line and I'm drawn to this poem because it makes us wonder at the end, what did we just read? The ambiguity of the ending, which, as Julia highlights in her postlude, she believes is quite deliberate on Virgil's half, that this is indeed a poem of foror as much as it is a poem of pietas, as much as it might be a poem of dolor, as much as it might be a poem of amor. All of these prevalent ideas ripple through, I think, really crystallize as Virgil takes us to the last sweeping hundred lines of his poem. And as Julia mentions, there are artists and poets throughout time who have been unhappy with how Vianney it ends. I think of Maffeo Veggio's 13th book, right? That comes out of the English or the Italian Renaissance and all these. What might have happened, right? Is it that novel, Lavinia, Rachel, that takes this question?

Rachel: Ursula le guin. Yeah. Yeah.

Phil: And this is a poem I could certainly teach having with students at the end of a course on the Aeneid thinking, because this allows us to pop the hood a little bit and think about what makes Aeneas tick. And that's something that Virgil, that, you know, Aeneas keeps us at arm's length throughout the entire poem. Virgil's not really interested in building a psychological profile of, of Aeneas in the way we as modern readers, we want to go there like we want to think about his complicated nature. And not unlike Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. Tell me about a complicated man, Odysseus. Those are some of my thoughts. I'd love to hear what you and Rachel have to say about this short poem.

Elijah: Yeah, well, I'd like to start by saying that I think the ending of the Aeneid is one of the best endings in world literature. I think it's a masterstroke, literally and figuratively, because you've spent twelve books seeing Aeneas show restraint, Shang Aeneas show piety. But then this is the moment where you see that actually this war has been breaking him down spiritually. And I think that's one thing that I honestly think Virgil does better than Homer is show the spiritual casualties of war, show just the tragedy and utter waste and how that traumatizes people. And then this is the summation of that. It's showing how even Pius Aeneas, who's been just this stalwart, just epitome of a certain roman ideal, he collapses under the pressure. And so really it adds this just incredibly touching, tragic note to the end. I mean, there are many places where Virgil subverts the idea that the Aeneid is propaganda for the augustan regime. This is definitely one of those places where his first priority is to show you the horror of the situation and the sacrifice that the situation calls for, even if in some transcendent sense it's all justified. So, yeah, I think it's wonderful. And Julia does a great job of picking up on that. And the ending where his son sees him right after he's murdered Turnus, his arch rival. It's a wonderful detail to add. And it reminds me a little bit of in the Iliad when Hector's son sees him with his fearsome helmet on and starts crying. And yeah, a similar situation where the trauma is being passed down, the trauma of war. You could argue that Virgil and Homer are not Henry James in the way that they psychologically analyze, but it's all there, it's just under the surface. And I think Julia really highlights that and brings that out.

Rachel: I would add two things. You could do much worse if you're looking at reception. I mean, I'm trained in comparatism like Phil, and you could look at two different receptions of the Aeneid over the centuries. What do people say about the attitude of the poem toward war or toward patriotism? I'm sure that it veers back and forth, that it oscillates because it is an ambiguous and sudden ending. I love what Elijah said about the ending, but it has troubled a lot of people. And I've been in a terrific zoom group for the last. Since the beginning of 2022. We were reading the metamorphoses, and then now we're approaching the end of the Aeneid, and some of us are reading in Latin. And I think I'll show the group this poem and say, well, what do you make of this? But I also think Julia Griffin on purpose does not describe the actual killing of Turnus. She takes this moment after the sword already cooling. If you didn't know that he had killed Turnus, there's sort of this moment of reflection. He hands the shield to somebody, wipes his face. I almost feel as if it could be read as he's decided not to. And I realize that's not what happens here, but I wonder if that's an intentional ambiguity. So there is a fair amount of ambiguity in the poem. Yeah, I'm trying to act more ignorant than I am, you know, if you didn't know how it even Ulyss looks down and moves away, which is a wonderful ending. But could it be read as his son wants to distance himself because the father is somehow paralyzed standing there, not doing anything? I think it's not that likely. It's a slightly unlikely reading, but I don't think it's an impossible one.

Phil: No. There's that famous participial phrase, wall Wayne's akulos, that occurs towards the ending. And it's like that note. That's that moment of interiority. He's turning his eyes, and that is to say, almost like turning into himself. It's that delicious moment where you could, if you wanted to, begin to build a reading. Okay, what is he thinking? What is he doing? What does wall wings, alcoholos mean? Beyond the superficial? And it's this type of moment, maybe, where he. Maybe he's talking to himself. Who knows?

Rachel: Yeah.

Elijah: I also appreciate that it's a hybrid sonnet. It's a combination of an italian and an english sonnet, which I think is actually one of the strongest forms of the sonnet. Because you get a chance to have two voltas, if you want. The main volta is at the end where we have the sun revealed. You would do have a slight turn earlier, so we have the octave, and then we have. So in this form of the hybrid sonnet, you have an octave and then a quatrain and then a couplet. And so you can choose to turn after the octave and during, during the quatrain, and then also from the quatrain to the couplet, you can have a turn. And so here after the octave, she literally has Aeneas turn. And this is when he gives the shield to someone and he wipes his face. And so you see him turning away from his public Persona and sort of wrestling with this action as just a human being and sort of being paralyzed by what he's done. And then, of course, we go back to the public, but specifically his son. So it's a personal, familial public at the very end. So it's showing all these different dimensions of how this act affects various dynamics.

Rachel: And it's done so economically, which is what sonnets make us do. I mean, you talk very well, Elijah, in your own postlude about tertiaryma sonnets. So given the opportunity, poets will find a way to talk about the form they're using. And if they're using the form well enough, the form and the content merge so completely that you can't tell them apart. I mean, what I would call to my students, the what and the how. And I like to say in poetry, the how trumps the what, but the what is important as well. And these things merge. The sonnet is not one line too long or too short. The rhyme scheme is interesting, as you say, sort of a hybrid sonnet. And it's a little narrative in a way. It's a narrative and a commentary. So it's a tour de force.

Elijah: Great. Well, I think that's a great note to end on. And we can get to the final poem for today, which I've chosen. And it's an interesting one for me to choose, actually, because it's nothing. It's not the most formal poem in the, in the issue, but I really liked the. I like, I liked the themes that were being addressed in this one. And this is after the fall by David Katz. Nothing could be more beautiful than the real. Watch Icarus walking wingless on the ground at his ease. No story any longer to uphold but that of this day. The young man, now fully free of any father's bidding, strides easily in the webless air. He is no longer made, no longer of high aspirations. What he was to become is now complete and at a safe distance from the sun. The air is cool and bright, and the road beneath his feet and ahead of him. It is a delight to be unable to fly. So this obviously takes the sort of alternate history of Icarus. In the usual version of the greek myth, Icarus flies too close to the sun. His wings are held together by wax, the wax melts, and he falls into the sea to his death. In this version, he has survived the fall. What really draws me to this Poem is that. I mean, what initially draws me to it is the title after the fall, because really what this is is a commentary on greek mythology, but also on the Bible. And you have the IcaruS story, as, I think, several GreeK stories that can be seen as a parallel to the story of the fall in the Bible of Adam and Eve. I think PromEtHeus is another one. It's very interesting to compare the idea of pride in the Bible to the idea of hubris in greek mythology. And here we have this kind of. It's similar to maybe an argument for a happy fall. A fortunate, fortunate fall, yeah. Where, yes, Icarus does fall out of pride, but it's into a kind of wisdom which is invaluable. And in a way, having striven and failed to reach the sun or to reach the godhead or whatever it is, just as Adam and Eve fail to become gods after having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they then go to a different place. Adam and Eve literally go outside the garden, Garden of Eden. And Milton describes them as taking their solitary way. Here David Katz describes Icarus as walking on his own road ahead of him. And there's this liberation there, which is, in a way, the liberation comes out of a sense of limitation. And I think this is one of the healthiest ways that we can think about life, is to recognize our own limitations, our own mortality, and use that as a cause for appreciation rather than a cause for angst. We start out with, nothing could be more beautiful than the real, which is sort of like a pretty bald statement which isn't supported. But then we come back to it at the end of the poem. If we realize the reality of the situation, which is that we shall never be gods and we shouldn't strive to be, that we should be here now where we are and appreciate where we are, then that is really the only serenity that we could have. And that's the most beautiful thing we could have. I appreciate the meditation that the poem offers, and I appreciate the parallelism between this and the sort of biblical commentary which is implicit but never stated.

Rachel: It's also, as some of the poems are, in a way, Julia Griffin's, not Susan McLean's. It is taking a myth and changing it, giving it a different ending. As he says, a contemporary poet may have license to render a new conclusion. So that's one thing that poems can definitely do. Take the myth off in a different direction. Give it a new spin or a new interpretation or even a new narrative.

Elijah: Yeah. I think one of the phrase that I find slightly puzzling and interesting is he is no longer made. And it's an interesting way of saying what he's saying. It calls to mind almost a mafioso's way of saying the word made. Like being a made mandeh.

Rachel: I wasn't sure of that either. Yeah. No longer made.

Elijah: Yeah. It's like no longer artificially fabricated. Maybe free to be his own person. Not really. Not anymore. A cog in the wheel of the story, in the wheel of fate, in the wheel of his father's machinations. But also. Yeah, I think in the sense of not being part. Not being made like a made man in the mafia, not being part of this cult anymore. Being free to try to kind of tread his own path.

Rachel: Maybe I should have pressed David, whom I know a little bit in New York. What did you mean by that? Put it. And we have another poem, I think, by someone also named David. Isn't that right, Phil? David Capps, also about Icarus, which also sort of takes a spin on the myth. And both of them, in a way, are about the father son relationship, fully free of any father's bidding. There's some kind of a rivalry. I mean, because who could? Daedalus is a hard act to follow. Even if he's no longer winged, Icarus is going to go off on his own. I'm sure Phil, teaching high school students sees this a lot. You know, how do I. How do I become my own person?

Elijah: Have you read the novel the Mazemaker by Michael Ayrton?

Rachel: No, I have not. I should.

Elijah: Yeah, it's really interesting. Michael Ayrton is most famous as a sculptor. He was fascinated by the myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur. And he did, I think, several really interesting physical sculptures of the Minotaur. But then he also wrote this book called the Maze Maker, which is from the perspective of Daedalus. And because Michael Ayrton himself is a craftsman and knows all about how to forge things together, he's able to take. He's really able to inhabit Daedalus in a way that feels very convincing because he talks about the lost wax method and he talks about how he's able to invent all of these things and make all of these things from a craftsman's perspective.

Rachel: I will look at that. I will look at that. Yeah.

Elijah: By far the most breathtaking part of them. It's a very weird novel. The first half is kind of standard narration, and the second half just goes way off the rails. It's interesting because you can. You can almost tell that he's not, that his first occupation is not novelist, but not in a way that turns you off necessarily. It's just that he's doing something that most people wouldn't think to do in a novel. And the most breathtaking moment of the novel is when Daedalus describes Icarus's death. And he describes it in terms of not so much grief as envy, because he sees that what? Because in the story, what Icarus is doing is he's like having this moment of extreme transcendence and is making himself a hero in this almost religious, martyrological sense. Because in the book, Daedalus has had this sort of very prickly attitude towards heroes. He thinks heroes are kind of stupid. They go off and fight wars and kill people, and then they're lauded for how well they're able to butcher other people, etcetera. And he thinks that the real glory should go to craftsmen like himself. And then Icarus sort of forges this path, which shows him that there are other ways to be heroic in his way of striving for the cosmos. And he sees Icarus reach this moment of truly metaphysical singularity where hes merging with the godhead and thats how he dies. And hes, like, I couldnt process it like I was. I was at once feeling grief and envy and also like, what the hell is happening? Because he sees he's. He's kind of a materialist. Daedalus is, because he's. He's always dealing with the. The concrete materials of the world. And then he sees this thing happen, which he can't account for. It's like totally beyond reason. So, yeah, it's. It's. It's fascinating, I think, that there's so much potential in this myth to take it in.

Rachel: I was going to say the myth of Icarus, the myth of Icarus and the related myth, because of Daedalus, of the labyrinth, are just endlessly suggestive. We have a little labyrinth here in Vermont, and we're friends with a labyrinth maker and we've done a certain amount of reading. I think it's. Is it Charlotte Higgins, who has a book called the Red thread, about the idea of the labyrinth. And interestingly, she zeros in on Catullus 64 and the labyrinthine sort of twisty way that the narrative works in that we have a poem, as Phil knows, in this issue inspired by Catullo 64, the little epilian about Ariadne. So, yeah, I mean, the Ayrton novel goes back to the seventies, doesn't it, Elijah? I think so, yeah. Not that recent. No. Thank you for mentioning it. I definitely need to read it.

Elijah: Yeah. And I was turned onto that novel by a different little book I read, which is pretty fun. It's about labyrinths called follow this thread.

Rachel: Okay.

Elijah: Which you may be also be interested in. It's cool because it's kind of postmodern and that you have to kind of interact with it to read it. It's a book where you have to, like, continually be turning the book in order to read. So it's like you're going through a labyrinth. And it talks about the symbology of labyrinths, and it talks about the Theseus myth and the Minotaur myth, but it also talks about modern. It also talks about modern day labyrinth makers. I guess there was like a huge fad for making labyrinths in England at some point.

Rachel: Yes, there was an article about that.

Elijah: Yep. So he talks about these, these, like, larger than life, obsessive savants who made labyrinths and were obsessed with making labyrinths their whole lives. And then one of. One of these guys, like, went missing and was never found or something like that. So, yeah, it's an interesting interweaving of subject matters based on the. Based on the idea of the labyrinth. So you might be interested in that as well.

Phil: If we're playing the association game. I. You know, when we think of. When I think of labyrinth, when I think of Theseus, Daedalus, Icarus, I think of that perhaps under known, underappreciated short story by vorges called the House of Asterion, which is obscure because Asterion is not a name that we think of when we think of the Minotaur. But the whole is a very short story. But the whole story is written from the perspective of Minotaurtain, and it is a oblique take on the myth. You don't really know what you're reading until you get to the end. You're like, oh, now I got to read it again. And I think that speaks to the enigmatic nature of this whole mythological thread that we've been tracing. I'm also drawn, of course, to the famous landscape of the fall of Icarus, which I often show to my students that's always in my. Had that beautiful painting. Icarus as a character has always been elusive to me. I understand what the myth's about. I've read the Ovid from the metamorphoses. At the same time, Icarus has always been at a distance. And I'm drawn more maybe to the Daedalus character, even though. And that's actually there. There I think of Madeline Miller Circe, where Daedalus is really out for, and give it a narrative voice. So I, you know, this is where my mind is. I'm just all over the place here. But, you know, I think it's a great.

Rachel: We all are. That's the way this works. In Mary Renault's novel, which I still love, the king must die. We have an extended section about Theseus in Crete and the labyrinth and the word, the name Asterian comes up there, too.

Phil: So.

Rachel: And of course, when. If you talk about the beautiful painting the fall of Icarus, we have to think of Auden's poem, musee de beaux arts, about suffering. They were never wrong, the old masters. And then we moved to the fall of Icarus and the expensive, delicate ship which had somewhere to go sailing by. And all you see is Icarus's legs sticking out of the water. I think in Ovid, Icarus is sort of a foolish young man who wants the car keys. That's what you kind of get in Ovid. So you have to sort of go beyond or behind Ovid and look at. I don't even know where that myth occurs, other than in Ovid. Is Ovid the only person who tells it in any detail?

Phil: I'd have to go to the Oxford Classical dictionary. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, certainly that's the myth that I always. Or the story that I always think about when I think of this myth.

Elijah: Well, it's interesting that you say giving the car keys because that makes me think of phython. And he's an interesting parallel to Icarus in terms of it's a very similar myth. It has a very similar moral, but the details are just different enough that you can maybe draw some kind of different conclusion from it.

Rachel: Yeah.

Phil: If I might interject here, one thing that we also wanted to do with this issue was the interplay between art and word, art and text. And one of the great joys, actually, in addition to working with Rachel in the journal, is to elevate the. So I have a high school student called Emma who has been the illustrator of the classical outlook. She's a high school senior, as we are recording this podcast and giving her the opportunity to be inspired by the ancient world and to draw. To draw those pen and ink illustrations on various ideas or stories that she's encountered in her reading here at St. Andrews. So, you know, I think one of. She's recently drawn a pomegranate. There is a. I'm looking at a snake illustration right now, Orpheus and Eurydice myth. So she read Ovid last year. So there are some of these on the mind, but, you know, really, in a small way, again, just highlighting the dynamic relationship not only between past and present, but between text and image, between idea and practice, you know, the fabrication of. Of art, I think that's really important to me. As someone who was once inspired by Jillaire's book of greek myths. I think it was one of the first mythological books that I read as a young person. And just being fascinated with the pictures, really not necessarily understanding the story of the fall of Icarus, but being fascinated with pictures I saw. And that, in a way, communicates so much more sometimes than we, as older folk would become hyperarticulate and can really engage powerfully with. With the ideas and the language. But arts important, right? Visual art is really important, just as this is. This issue is a celebration of poetry, and hopefully, it's just a celebration of the creativity that people bring to bear when it comes to the ancient world.

Elijah: Well said. I completely agree. Yeah. But before we end, I will just say one more connection in the string of connections and recommendations we've been making. The Edwin Muir, the scottish poet, has a wonderful monologue from the perspective of the Minotaur. I think it's from the perspective. It's either from his perspective or it's about him, but it's in this interesting, modernist, existential way. So I highly recommend that as well.

Rachel: What's the title of that, Elijah?

Elijah: It might just be called the Minotaur. I'm honestly not sure. I'll have to look it up.

Rachel: Okay, we have one specifically. That's great to know. We have one specifically ekphrastic poem called the Roses of Heliogabalus. Heliogabalus being the roman emperor who smothered his guests literally in rose petals. Dinner guests. And I believe the painting is by one of those victorian classicizing painters, I think waterhouse.

Elijah: Alma Tadema, isn't it?

Rachel: Oh, it could be Alma Tadema. Okay. Yeah. So, no, Phil is absolutely right. I mean, I like to say to my students who, when I was teaching children's literature, my students were anxious to get a moral out of absolutely. Absolutely everything from Little Red Riding Hood on up. And I would say it's not about the moral, it's about the vision. And one way to interpret vision would be, what do you see? And then let's keep looking and see what we see. But it doesn't have to come out as immoral. It doesn't have to be. Don't ask your dad for the car keys. It's bigger than that.

Elijah: All right. And what I would say is that for moral content or moral art to be really effective, it does have to take the form of a vision. It's offering someone a vision of how to live or how the world is that enables them to walk with more wisdom in their own lives. That's how moral instruction gets inculcated, not by, you know, slapping someone's wrist and telling them to do x, Y or z, but showing them a way forward and how to live. And, of course, how to live is.

Rachel: The moral life or how not to live.

Phil: It's so funny we're talking about this because I'm about to drive a bus. A bunch of students were going to go see Francis Ford Coppola's new movie, Megalopolis, which is a roman myth. It's a fable, and it's gotten the most polarizing reviews. And so, on one hand, visionary, on the other hand, a colossal mistake. So I'm really excited to see it. Talking about vision. We'll see.

Rachel: And it hasn't done very well at the box office. Phil, so you're helping out here?

Phil: We might be the only folks there, but my soldier students, they want to go see this film. They're good. Who would know that ten high school kids want to go see a Francis Ford Coppola movie on a Sunday?

Rachel: Well, that's a real tribute to you. That's what it is.

Phil: Well, no, you're too kind. Thank you.

Elijah: Well, the classical reception continues. That's right.

Rachel: Speaking of it, I'll just say really quickly that labyrinth is one of the words that turns up in linear b. So it's one of the oldest words in Greek. It's one of the oldest words in English. It's, you know, when in linear b syllabary, it comes out la b ri note. But it seems to be labyrinth. Those tablets were in Crete, so it's incredible.

Elijah: It means House of the axe, right?

Rachel: Yeah.

Elijah: Right? Yeah. Very cool. Well, this has been such a treat, guys. Thank you so much for joining me on this. I'm so glad we got to cover so many cool topics and I have a lot of recommendations to put in the show notes. So thank you guys.

Rachel: Wonderful as well.

Elijah: Yeah.

Rachel: Oh, we've enjoyed it. I know Phil has a time constraint here. I don't, but he does so well.

Phil: The conversation will continue. I'm really, really excited to share this issue with the world and with the contributors and again, really appreciate the conversation. Elijah and Rachel, absolutely.

Elijah: Thank you so much for joining me.

Rachel: Thanks so much. Elijah, could I stay on for 1 minute?

Elijah: Of course, yeah, yeah.

Rachel: Okay. Okay. Only that we are, we have organized, or are in process of organizing an event to take place at the Princeton Classics department on January 27. And we're going to have a little panel discussion. So I just wanted to mention that I don't know whether it'll be live streamed or whatever, but it's, Princeton is very kindly hosting this event and a few of our poets and one of Phil's students, this artist Emma will be there and Phil and I, we're excited about that. And I'm kind of hoping to organize a couple of readings in the New York area, maybe. Elijah, you want to do something in Chicago? Just a thought.

Elijah: So, yeah, if there's a way to connect, that'd be amazing because really what.

Rachel: We'Ve produced is a book. We've produced an anthology with the poems and the postludes and there's even a possibility of getting it published. But I'll just dangle that we don't know yet. But there would be no issue with permissions because these are all unpublished, previously unpublished poems. So I would.

Elijah: That would be really exciting. All right, sounds great, guys. Okay.

Rachel: Thank you so much.

Elijah: Thank you.

Rachel: Enjoy the movie, Phil. I look forward to hearing about it.

Phil: Yeah. All right, y'all take care.

Elijah: Thank you so much for listening and for letting me put a little verse in your universe. If you liked this episode, please consider rating the show or leaving me a review on Apple Music or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have friends who love poetry, or even better, friends who don't get poetry but wish they did, please let them know about the show. Thanks again and until next time.