She walked me over to the heaviest book I’d ever seen-a standard dictionary on a table of its own. Stevens, thanks to integrated busing in the south, was one of the first Black women I’d had the luck of calling my teacher. One day at school, I asked my teacher, yet again, what a word meant. I scratched out poems about clouds and took snapshots of my striped kitten and beautiful mother. And so, I began to gather words and to frame images. When I was 5, my mother gave me a spiral notebook and a roll of film to take my first photographs. I tell you this because I want to answer a question I often ask poets: What childhood experiences with language informed your relationship with poetry? For myself, I’m reminded how all that informs your relationship to poetry also informs who you are and how you relate to the world. Writing anonymously for strangers, as Marion had done, became my own kind of guerilla art and helped me get through heartbreaking years now in the past. Sometimes, young women who identified with my daughter wrote to me about the raw truth of their younger selves. Struggling parents wrote to me and I wrote back. Remembering her spray-painted messages on Houston overpasses decades later, I started writing an anonymous blog of lyric prose, “The Notebooks of Mother X,” chronicling a parenting crisis with my teenage daughter. Here was a woman showing me how I might survive. I was still reeling, but learning to create. My father had died suddenly the year before. The intimate connection between loss and making art had already begun to save me. She had found a way to speak directly to people in one of the largest cities in the United States. I could only imagine how she suffered, but what I saw was a woman quietly writing all over Houston. Marion gave me a place to stay when I needed one. A beautiful boy I knew in high school, Alex died at 21 in a house fire. Marion McEvilley is a painter, poet and guerilla artist-but I knew her as a friend, mentor and as Alex’s mom. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of resistance-brought to you by Ms. digital columnist Chivas Sandage.ĭressed in black, she drove through Houston late at night with spray paint cans and large stencils she’d made, painting overpasses with Zen-like graffiti such as “Watch Your Breath” and “Breathe” or lyric phrases like “City of Glass.” Even if this poem is monody, as seems probable, 6 the first person here need not be understood strictly as the poet's own persona, but may be better viewed as the conventional "first person indefinite," shown by Fraenkel, Young, and others to be a common feature of the epinicia: a generalized, gnomic first person that includes poet, patron, audience, and all men who participate in the same community of values. I believe that a preliminary step toward unraveling the mysteries of the Theoxenus ode may lie in a reexamination of the use of the first person in the poem. 4 However, Isthmia 2 implies that Pindar, in the 470s, already considered this kind of poetry obsolescent, more common in the generation of Anacreon and Ibycus than in the present age of commissioned song. 123 as just such an effusion of personal feeling Athenaeus, our source for the poem, took it as such, as have several modern commentators. 3 What then is the motivation and social context of this short poem? The famous opening of Isthmia 2 (verses 1-11) distinguishes between the present age of writing poems for hire and the poets of old, who composed pederastic songs out of personal enthusiasm. Of course, this anecdote can easily be dismissed on both chronological and geographical grounds. Magnus Hirschfeld, the early twentieth-century German gay rights pioneer, called "one of the most perfect love songs in the Greek language." 2 The picture of an aged lover melting away for a fair youth inspired the story recorded by Valerius Maximus (9.12 ext. Pindar's encomium for Theoxenus has long been appreciated as a choice specimen of pederastic verse.
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