Classics Colloquium April 27, 2022: Momentum in Modern Poetry

This afternoon, I attended the poetry reading of “The Eleusinian Mysteries”, a reworking of the ancient Greek myth of Hades’ abduction of Persephone written and recently published by a Haverford alum. As a lover of Greek mythology, I found both this topic and in particular the reworking of this myth into modern poetry and reimagined with Persephone as protagonist, especially interest. This book (in gross oversimplification) retells the story of Persephone’s abduction by and forced marriage to Hades from (supposedly) her perspective, reimagines her interactions with Orpheus in both poetic metaphor and plot impact, and then narrates her rise from victim to villain, as she seeks the demise of both Hades and Demeter, the overthrow of Zeus, and seems to pursue divine world domination. In the words of the author, the book reads as “erotic mythology fan fiction”, interested particularly with perversion and post-Soviet Russia as well as laced with continual references to infrastructure. The poet also mentioned being “obsessed” with the idea of person as place, pointing to how Hades refers to both the name of the god and the Greek underworld as a place as well as other instances of name/place confusion/conflation/consistency in Greek mythology including Tartarus (both the hole where the Titans were thrown and the name of an individual Titan) and Gaia, the Titan of the Earth and the Earth as a physical entity/location itself (the poet also alludes to a similar Zeus/sky person/place dynamic but less directly so in the later poems of the book). While largely focused on Greek mythology, the book reaches far beyond the world of mythical Greece, both with an entire section focused on a couple living in post-Soviet Russia and consistent allusions to Soviet and post-Soviet Russia throughout the book and in the titles of the poems that make up the book, including a direct reference to Ancient Rome with one poem titled “Carthage Must Be Destroyed”. I found this interlocational and intertemporal approach particularly compelling given our discussion of Momentum in class today, as this work and other interpretations and/or reworkings of classical mythology serve as a kind of momentum both ancient and modern, carrying ancient advice, warnings and calls for remembrance into the modern world and adapting those lessons, hopes, and memories into culturally, politically, and emotionally relevant stories for the present.