what the goddess of funerals has hallowed

"...he is baffled...who looks back upon the annals, and values worth by years, and admires nothing but what the goddess of funerals has hallowed."

I find it tragically amusing or amusingly tragic or neither or both that we've been having this conversation for a couple thousand years. Who started it?

Horace in the above quote from an epistle dated about 14 B.C., begins his argument against basing the value of art on its age alone. An ancient poem is not wholly perfect; just like contemporary poetry it contains only a few shining lines. New poetry will eventually grow old, unless we kill it now, but then what art will we have to console us in our old age? However...

I will continue my Dante studies later. Right now, I am chipping away at the mountain which is Andrew Motion's biography of Keats. And I am working on my death and the life-after series, or at least some sort of map of study and limitations for these I-promise-they-won't-be-morbid poems. I don't know if it makes sense to anyone else, but I prize thinking over just about everything even while I struggle to be conscious, aware, most hours of the day. That is why I love complicated poetry: the level of consciousness is so evident, maybe enough so that I can copy it.

la bella scola

I am beginning a study of the poets that Dante lauded/condemned in Inferno as Limbo's la bella scola. I am not as familiar with Lucan or Horace as I am with Homer, Ovid, and, of course, Virgil. So, tomorrow, Kingsley and I will walk to the library (we will pass the leaning barn that I need to photograph before it falls), pay our fine for "The Happiest Toddler on the Block" (if you needed any proof that I am the most unpoetic of poets...), and hopefully find some Lucan or Horace.

On a slightly connected note, my lover is teaching me how to properly participate in conversation.
I am eager to practice.


"Loose the bow of speech, which you have drawn back to the very iron." Purgatorio 25.17-18.

More Publications

Basilica Review 1--"Pietà"

The Maynard 2.4 (forthcoming)--"Where Flowers Grow" and the remaining three sections of "Where the River Bends to Meet Itself": "The Homes on Eastview and Forrest," "Not Bethesda" and the intro.