<![CDATA[Poetry Forum - All Forums]]>

<![CDATA[Poetry Forum - All Forums]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/ Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:42:55 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Year Unknown]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27513.html Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:52:19 +0000 alonso ramoran]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27513.html Year Unknown

Fading light please take my breath away
Can it be like falling asleep
I can't remember waking
All I have are words like empty vases
Unexplainable is the mauve of tender flesh
Nothing explains the last reaches of day discoloring and bruising clouds
Sometimes its cries are buried in the clouds
An infant suddenly without guidance like I was godless
My god revealed herself in the emptiness of reappearing vases
Sometimes they had hydrangeas or dust
But maybe it is the beliefs of shadows that obstruct the letting go
Maybe the weight is the strain that is mine
Maybe it is only matter in the shape of a prison
The halls connect in all the same directions
The halls are always cast cold gray
Someone tell me where to go
Please
Tell me where to go]]> Year Unknown

Fading light please take my breath away
Can it be like falling asleep
I can't remember waking
All I have are words like empty vases
Unexplainable is the mauve of tender flesh
Nothing explains the last reaches of day discoloring and bruising clouds
Sometimes its cries are buried in the clouds
An infant suddenly without guidance like I was godless
My god revealed herself in the emptiness of reappearing vases
Sometimes they had hydrangeas or dust
But maybe it is the beliefs of shadows that obstruct the letting go
Maybe the weight is the strain that is mine
Maybe it is only matter in the shape of a prison
The halls connect in all the same directions
The halls are always cast cold gray
Someone tell me where to go
Please
Tell me where to go]]> <![CDATA[Man this forum is so inactive, it's a real drag]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27512.html Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:36:57 +0000 matsunosuperfan]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27512.html

(08-08-2026, 09:36 AM)matsunosuperfan Wrote: I like it here but it is a bummer that people don't even post daily. Also it seems there are like, 6 truly active users. Suffer the little poets to come unto us?

I don't even need to post as often as I draft, I just want something to crit XD]]>

(08-08-2026, 09:36 AM)matsunosuperfan Wrote: I like it here but it is a bummer that people don't even post daily. Also it seems there are like, 6 truly active users. Suffer the little poets to come unto us?

I don't even need to post as often as I draft, I just want something to crit XD]]> <![CDATA[Blue Herons]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27510.html Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:43:55 +0000 matsunosuperfan]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27510.html Blue Herons

The world used to be charged with grandeur, some
of which was even God’s, the bisoned plain,
the clouds like artifacts tracking their progress
through men’s eyes, hollowed bones and strings
of endless generation, hills that shimmer
when the wind waves grain across their faces
as a mother folds her cub away
from cliffs as stark as milk—not any more
than seconds in the cosmic memory,
our scampering about between the legs
of taller trees, and still whatever lake
we launched a boat across to get here breaks
each morning with a shattering of wings
too loud for us to notice or ignore.]]> Blue Herons

The world used to be charged with grandeur, some
of which was even God’s, the bisoned plain,
the clouds like artifacts tracking their progress
through men’s eyes, hollowed bones and strings
of endless generation, hills that shimmer
when the wind waves grain across their faces
as a mother folds her cub away
from cliffs as stark as milk—not any more
than seconds in the cosmic memory,
our scampering about between the legs
of taller trees, and still whatever lake
we launched a boat across to get here breaks
each morning with a shattering of wings
too loud for us to notice or ignore.]]> <![CDATA[You ask me why. I tell you that]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27509.html Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:04:54 +0000 matsunosuperfan]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27509.html You ask me why. I tell you that

today I saw a man around
my own age, from Afghanistan, fleeing through
the orphan desert to Iran. He found himself
caught short on water, felt the rain

of too much light against his head and knew
with any luck, he should be dead
by sundown. “Forgive me, mother—”
patchwork scarf ballooned a tent

around his head to block the glare, he gave his last
words to the sand’s miasma:
“and if he can, let my brother pay
my debts, or if he cannot, humbly I ask

my friends—forgive them, for God’s sake.” I will never
scrape across the desert for a second chance,
will never know what makes a man
spend his last breaths begging,

except to notice every time
I cross the street, that something in me
wants to stop midstream and wait
for rain to find me falling.]]> You ask me why. I tell you that

today I saw a man around
my own age, from Afghanistan, fleeing through
the orphan desert to Iran. He found himself
caught short on water, felt the rain

of too much light against his head and knew
with any luck, he should be dead
by sundown. “Forgive me, mother—”
patchwork scarf ballooned a tent

around his head to block the glare, he gave his last
words to the sand’s miasma:
“and if he can, let my brother pay
my debts, or if he cannot, humbly I ask

my friends—forgive them, for God’s sake.” I will never
scrape across the desert for a second chance,
will never know what makes a man
spend his last breaths begging,

except to notice every time
I cross the street, that something in me
wants to stop midstream and wait
for rain to find me falling.]]> <![CDATA[The Aegis chapter 5]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27508.html Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:36:22 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27508.html Ghost Moves

The payday loan office on Halsted had a sign in the window that said FAST CASH — NO CREDIT CHECK — YOU DESERVE A SECOND CHANCE in letters large enough to read from across the street, which was where Marcus was standing when the police tape went up.
He hadn't been looking for it. He was cutting through on his way to Curtis's when he saw the cruiser parked at the curb and the officer running tape across the door and the owner of the office standing on the sidewalk with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who had arrived at his business that morning to find something that was going to take a long time to explain.
Marcus stopped.
The door was intact. The window was intact. From across the street there was no visible sign that anything had been broken or forced or damaged in any way that the word vandalism would ordinarily cover. The officer with the tape had the quality of someone going through a required motion rather than responding to an emergency.
A woman stopped beside Marcus on the sidewalk. Thirties, neighborhood, a bag over one shoulder. She looked at the tape and the officer and the owner with his crossed arms.
"What happened?" Marcus said.
She didn't look at him. "Computers wiped," she said. "Everything. Records, files, the physical ledgers too. All of it gone."
Marcus looked at the owner. The man's face had the quality of someone who had lost something he couldn't report completely without explaining what it was.
"My sister," the woman said. Still not looking at Marcus. Looking at the door. "Three years she's been paying that man back. Eight hundred dollars she borrowed. Three years." She shifted her bag. "Somebody wiped the ledger."
She walked on.
Marcus stood on the sidewalk for another moment. Then he went to Curtis's.

The barbershop had the television going and four people talking and Curtis moving between them with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had been listening to this block for forty years and had learned that the listening was the job as much as the cutting was.
Marcus found his spot along the wall.
The payday loan story was everywhere - same as the fulfillment center two weeks ago, same cycle of footage and reaction and people talking across each other on every screen. But the texture of the reaction was different. The fulfillment center had been abstract. A corporate facility, a distant target, easy to hold at the length of an argument. This was specific. This was a place on this block that had a history with almost everyone in this room.
"My cousin's been in there," the man in the near chair said. "Twice. You know what he paid back on a four hundred dollar loan? Twelve hundred dollars. Over two years. Twelve hundred dollars."
"That's legal," the man by the window said. He said it as a fact, not a defense. "Four hundred percent interest is legal in this state."
"Legal doesn't mean right."
"Didn't say it did. Said it was legal." A pause. "Meaning whoever went in there last night broke the law to undo something that was done legally. You want to think about that for a minute before you celebrate."
"I'm not celebrating."
"You're not not celebrating."
The man in the chair was quiet for a moment. "My cousin's not going to pay back twelve hundred dollars," he said. "That's what I'm thinking about."
Curtis made a sound that wasn't agreement or disagreement, just acknowledgment that something true had been said. He kept cutting.
Marcus listened. He did what he always did in rooms like this - took inventory of the currents moving underneath the conversation, the things people were actually saying beneath what they appeared to be saying. The relief that nobody would admit to. The unease that nobody wanted to be the one to name. The discomfort of a neighborhood that had been handed something it wanted through a door it hadn't agreed to open.
"You coming to the meeting tonight?" Curtis asked. He was looking at Marcus in the mirror. Directly, without making a thing of the directness.
"What meeting?"
"Alderman's office organized something. About the development." Curtis moved around the chair. "The notices. Amazon's subsidiary. What it means for the corridor."
Marcus thought about the photograph on his phone. Acquisition. Development corridor. The man at the utility pole. When the offers don't work they find other ways.
"Maybe," Marcus said.
Curtis looked at him in the mirror for a moment longer than the cutting required. Then he went back to cutting.

He found the crew in the afternoon and the crew was different.
Not in any way he could have pointed to. Just the temperature of it. Dre had the particular energy he got when something had shifted in his assessment of what was possible, which usually meant he'd been thinking about something for days and had arrived somewhere Marcus hadn't been invited to yet.
He laid it out carefully. A new target. Bigger than the depot, further from the facility, better cover. He'd done the observation. He'd run the numbers. He presented it the way he always presented things when he'd already decided - with the completeness of someone who had left nothing out so there would be nothing to argue about.
Marcus listened to all of it.
"No," he said.
Dre looked at him. Not angry. Something more unsettling than angry, genuinely confused. "The numbers are solid."
"I know."
"Then what."
Marcus looked at the table. At the map Dre had drawn, cleaner than the last one, more detailed, the kind of preparation that said I've been thinking about this for longer than I've been showing. "I need some time," he said.
"Time for what?"
Marcus didn't answer. He didn't have an answer that would make sense to Dre. He had a photograph of a permit notice and a man at a utility pole and something that was reorganizing itself in him that he didn't have the shape of yet and couldn't explain until he did.
Dre looked at him for a long moment. Then at Bea.
Bea was looking at Marcus with the expression she wore when she was deciding how much she understood versus how much she was going to say she understood.
"There's a meeting tonight," Marcus said. "The alderman's office. About the Amazon development."
The room was quiet.
"You're going to a city meeting," Dre said.
"I'm going to see what it is."
Dre sat back. The confusion on his face had moved into something more complicated, a recalibration of something he thought he'd had sorted. "All right," he said. Not agreeing. Just noting it.
Tiny was looking at his phone again. The screen tilted away. Marcus watched him for a moment. Tiny put the phone in his pocket and caught Marcus looking and held his gaze for a second and then looked away.

He went looking for Tiny after.
He found him where he'd half expected to find him - across the street from the fulfillment center on the low wall, in the posture Marcus recognized as the one Tiny used when he was working something out. Not restless. Settled in the way of someone who has been here long enough that the settling has become its own kind of decision.
Marcus sat beside him.
The building hummed across the street. It was always humming. Marcus had stopped consciously hearing it months ago, the way he'd stopped consciously seeing the poster's faded corner, and sitting here now he heard it again, a low constant note underneath everything, the sound of something very large doing very much all the time.
"You see the payday loan thing," Tiny said.
"This morning."
"My mom cried." He said it without particular emotion, reporting a fact. "When she heard. She had a thing with them a couple years ago. Before I knew." He looked at the building across the street. "She cried."
Marcus didn't say anything.
"There's a sign," Tiny said. He tilted his head slightly toward the facility entrance, fifty yards up the block. "On the door. I've been reading it for a couple weeks."
Marcus looked. He could see it from here - a printed notice, the facility's logo at the top.
"They're hiring," Tiny said. "Thirteen with a note from a parent. My cousin got in at sixteen. He said." He paused. "It's money, Marcus."
The building hummed. The sign was readable from where they sat if you knew what you were looking for, and Tiny had clearly been looking.
Marcus thought about what to say. He ran through several things and discarded them all because they were the things you said when you had a different answer to offer, and he didn't have a different answer. Not one that solved the problem Tiny was describing, which was not a philosophical problem but a practical one. Thirteen years old and already doing the arithmetic the neighborhood forced on people before they were old enough to understand what the arithmetic was teaching them.
"Don't do anything yet," Marcus said.
Tiny looked at him.
"Just give it a minute," Marcus said. "I'm working on something."
He didn't know what he was working on. He knew that what he'd said was true in some way he couldn't articulate yet and that Tiny's face suggested Tiny understood this, the way Tiny often understood things Marcus didn't fully say.
"Okay," Tiny said. Not yes. Not no. The okay that meant I hear you and left everything else open.
They sat with the building for a while. The hum of it. The sign visible on the door. The neighborhood spread out behind them doing what it did, owing nothing, requiring everything, going on.

The church basement smelled like folding chairs and industrial coffee and the smell of a room that had held a lot of meetings, which was different from the smell of a room that had held a lot of conclusions.
Marcus came in late enough to find a seat in the back. The room was fuller than he'd expected, not packed, but the kind of attendance that said people had decided this was worth coming out on a weeknight, which was its own data point.
The alderman was at the front. Young for the job, or young-seeming, the quality of someone still in the process of discovering what the job actually required versus what he'd expected it to require. Beside him a woman from Amazon's community relations office, mid-thirties, composed, the particular warmth of someone professionally trained in warmth, which was different from the real thing but not easily distinguishable unless you were looking for the seams.
She had a presentation. Renderings of the development, green spaces, a community plaza, the kind of architectural drawings that showed a neighborhood as it would look if everyone in it had agreed to become an amenity. The number ten thousand appeared early and was repeated at intervals, which Marcus noted the way he noted timing.
Jobs, she said. Opportunity. Community investment.
The word community doing its work, smooth and load-bearing.
The room pushed back in the way rooms with long memories pushed back, not uniformly, because nothing in a room like this was uniform. A man three rows ahead of Marcus wanted to know about the wage structure. A woman on the left side wanted to know about local hiring percentages versus regional hiring percentages, which was a different question than it appeared to be. An older man near the window wanted to know who had already signed option agreements on properties in the corridor and whether those agreements were public record, which made the community relations woman smile in a way that used all the right muscles.
Marcus listened. He tracked the questions and the non-answers and the places where the alderman's slight discomfort became visible at the edges of his composure. He was doing what he always did - mapping. The room as terrain. The currents beneath the surface. What people were actually asking versus what they appeared to be asking.
Then Curtis spoke.
He stood up from his chair in the measured way of someone who doesn't stand up unless he means to. "Ten thousand jobs sounds like a number," he said. "Until you look at the wage and the hours and the turnover rate and who actually gets hired from this zip code versus who gets bused in from outside it. Then it's a different number."
The community relations woman said they were deeply committed to local hiring and said community again and the word landed the way it always landed when it was doing too much work, slightly hollow, like a step that sounds different from the ones around it.
Marcus was watching the room and tracking the responses and doing the mapping when something at the front made him stop.
Near the front. Left side, two seats from the aisle. A man he didn't recognize, or thought he didn't recognize, sitting with the quality of someone who had come to listen more than to talk. He had a stillness about him that was different from the stillness of patience. More like the stillness of someone who had already processed the situation and was waiting for a moment.
When he spoke it was brief. Precise. Questions about the subsidiary structure. About which properties were already under option agreements. About the timeline between acquisition and groundbreaking and what that implied about decisions that had already been made before anyone in this room was invited to weigh in.
The community relations woman's smile stayed exactly where it was. Something behind it shifted.
Marcus looked at the man. Something familiar he couldn't place. The angle of the shoulders. The way he'd turned in his chair to address the room, weight forward, head tilted slightly
The meeting ended without resolution. These meetings always ended without resolution. People filed toward the doors and Marcus stood and moved through the crowd toward the front and lost the man somewhere in the shuffle of coats and folding chairs and the friction of people who have been in a room together and are now leaving it.
Outside on the church steps he stood in the cold and looked up and down the block.
Gone.
He stood there for a moment. The neighborhood around him. The cold. The feeling of something almost caught.
He went home.

He passed the payday loan office on the way. The police tape still across the door. The police tape would come down in a day or two and the question of what the office would do, reopen, relocate, dissolve was a question nobody had answered yet.
He stopped outside it.
A woman came from the other direction and stopped too, without seeming to plan to. She had the quality the woman from this morning had something held carefully, something that had been a weight and was now slightly less of one. She looked at the tape on the door.
She didn't say anything. Just looked. Then she walked on.
Marcus watched her go.
He thought about what was taken and what was left. About the records that weren't there anymore. About the woman's sister, three years, twelve hundred dollars, eight hundred borrowed. About the note on the counter that morning: knowing something is wrong and doing nothing about it is its own kind of choice.
He thought about the man at the front of the church basement. The precise questions. The stillness.
He took out his phone. Not Aegis footage. Not Ghost footage. He pulled up the photograph of the permit notice and looked at it in the glow of the screen.
Acquisition. Development corridor. Kedzie Industrial Partners LLC.
He put the phone away.
Looked at the tape on the door.
Looked at the night sky above the block, where the light from the fulfillment center made the stars on that side of the city invisible.
He kept walking.

He couldn't sleep.
At the window. The city below. He'd been at this window enough times now that the view had become a kind of thinking, the way some people thought better moving and some thought better sitting still, Marcus thought better here, with the block laid out below him and the fulfillment center glowing at the edge of his sight line and the new development barriers extending further into the frame each week.
He watched the street.
And then - movement.
Not the ordinary movement of the block at this hour, the occasional car or the person walking with purpose from somewhere to somewhere. Something different. A figure moving through the block the way the block moved when it was at its most itself, not sneaking, not performing, just present. The unhurried fluency of someone who knew every inch of this street because every inch of this street had been theirs long enough that the knowing had become something below thought.
Marcus went still at the window.
The figure moved through a pool of streetlight and Marcus lost the breath he'd been holding because for a moment in that light
The figure stopped.
Below a streetlight on the corner, in the amber of it, standing with the stillness of someone who has arrived somewhere. And then, slowly, in the way of someone with no reason to hurry, the figure looked up.
Not at Marcus's window specifically. Or at Marcus's window exactly. It was impossible to say. The angle was wrong for certainty and the distance was wrong for certainty and Marcus stood at his window with his hand against the glass and couldn't have said afterward whether the figure looked at him or through him or simply at the building.
A beat. Two beats. The stillness of it.
Then the figure moved on. Around the corner. Gone.
Marcus stood at the window with his hand against the cold glass and the street below empty and the city going on around the emptiness.
He stayed there for a long time.
He thought about the church basement. The precise questions. The weight forward. The head tilted right.
He thought about the poster on his wall. He thought about the man on the sidewalk that morning with the voice that didn't know his name.
He thought about all of it and stood at the window until the cold coming through the glass reached him and he stepped back.
He didn't sleep.
But something had shifted in the room while he stood there, something in the quality of the dark, like a frequency he'd been hearing at the edge of his range had moved, just slightly, into something he could almost name.
Almost.]]> <![CDATA[Contra Heterodoxy]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27507.html Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:59:10 +0000 RiverNotch]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27507.html

If in the present turn I played a role
as tender as the daughter who foresaw
disaster when she gently asked her sisters
not to make light of filial obligation
only to be rebuffed, I would feel more
compassion for your cause, I would shed tears
for how the storm yet scars your senseless face
by whipping water droplets into darts,
but in this reenactment I was cast
as one of all the nameless background figures
suffering as you suffer, if not more,
our tokens of this kingdom as it prospered
poorer by far than yours, our taste of order
only as mother nature righting wrongs.]]>

If in the present turn I played a role
as tender as the daughter who foresaw
disaster when she gently asked her sisters
not to make light of filial obligation
only to be rebuffed, I would feel more
compassion for your cause, I would shed tears
for how the storm yet scars your senseless face
by whipping water droplets into darts,
but in this reenactment I was cast
as one of all the nameless background figures
suffering as you suffer, if not more,
our tokens of this kingdom as it prospered
poorer by far than yours, our taste of order
only as mother nature righting wrongs.]]> <![CDATA[Last Times]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27506.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:03:34 +0000 dukealien]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27506.html

As age infuses every thing
from pain in hips to length of stride
one cannot help but wonder which
things one will not experience–
the trip to France, the Eschaton–
and even more, such places as
one’s been, but was that time
the last?

Will I see Dallas once again,
or twice, or never? Who can say
if I will fly the stratosphere,
a passenger, to see Seattle
or Cape Kennedy, as once was,
or the Statue on its fortress,
Liberty, or Death come first,
to know is to have finished, making
questions moot?

But still, I wonder if that shadow,
Love, I’ve missed so many times
unnoticed, will expose itself
or keep on hiding just beyond
my blind eyes shrouded with a pride
which veils its insufficiency
until too late.]]>

As age infuses every thing
from pain in hips to length of stride
one cannot help but wonder which
things one will not experience–
the trip to France, the Eschaton–
and even more, such places as
one’s been, but was that time
the last?

Will I see Dallas once again,
or twice, or never? Who can say
if I will fly the stratosphere,
a passenger, to see Seattle
or Cape Kennedy, as once was,
or the Statue on its fortress,
Liberty, or Death come first,
to know is to have finished, making
questions moot?

But still, I wonder if that shadow,
Love, I’ve missed so many times
unnoticed, will expose itself
or keep on hiding just beyond
my blind eyes shrouded with a pride
which veils its insufficiency
until too late.]]> <![CDATA[West]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27505.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 07:16:42 +0000 RiverNotch]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27505.html West

1. The Birth of Capitalism

A giant from the northern coasts of France
struck with a club the giant sat on the shining
cliffs of Dover, stomped on his slumping back,

and shouted "Now I'm lord of all this land!"
Wiping away the brains about the knot
of wood he used for a weapon, he drew a knife

and started to skin and butcher the corpse beneath him,
passing the ribs for braising and loins for frying
to gluttons he called peers---to himself leaving,

beside the nutritious offal, the foremost right
to settle any disputes that should arise
between his peers and the corpse's former dependents

kept somewhat free as labor-selling tenants.
Thus started a vicious cycle: with all this work
vended for mere subsistence and laws too rigid

to license overt exploitation, the emphasis shifted
to making the land more productive, to feeding the city
where workshops and factories sprang, to birthing a world
where markets could supplant both laws and lords.

2. The Fountain of Youth

This gift of God was found in Florida's tip
first by the peoples to whom the land was given
then by the peoples who through war and sickness

stole it: a drink which all those later founders
esteemed to grant them vigor, making them young
at heart and body, if not at mind and soul.

Rather, it proved the reverse. A single sip
and the vessel stays its course, gathering worms
while the crew is all replaced by mewling babes,

but how could the conqueror have learned all this
without experiment? Why should they trust
the word of beggared ghosts or beaten dogs?

And should a slave be risked to reach a state
for which the free repine? So thought the men
who first imbibed the fountain's blessed waters,

making immortal imbeciles of themselves:
a gloomy circle of gaunt and grey-haired figures
huddled around a pair of upturned gargoyles
that drool forever with divine revenge.

3. Acapulco

Here was another giant: a cruel frame
of bulging forehead, crooked eyes, and lips
perennially drooling, yet housing a tender soul.

Often he sat on the shore, dreaming of boats
that came in from the ocean laden with riches
his vision could only sketch, could only shape

and color as fuzzy forms, as mere abstractions,
for which he would offer the singular treasure he thought
he had in his hoard: silver and precious stones.

Often was monthly turned weekly turned daily turned hourly
turned every waking minute he'd rather spend
by the sea---he no longer slept---he was the shore,

his friends found moss and ferns and grass on his back
give way to shrubs and trees, the bones exposed
as an incoherent scaffold of white sand,
until all that was left of himself was his mad dream.

4. Guam

Their Empire's western border is the eastern
edge of the sea named after us: those islands
we once considered sisters, yet they never

fought for their freedom when we fought for ours.
Perhaps they believed that when our latest common
masters allowed us to leave, they would become

more than a stopping point for treasure-hunting
galleons turned into steamships on their westward
courses, that their lonely little boulders

floating like lost coconuts near the center
of the Pacific would instantly be considered
destinations in and of themselves, exchanging
the beggarly commonwealth for the one more brutal---

5. Pearl

Pearl of the Orient Seas: what does this mean?
What sort of pearl are we? Formed by a clam---
gigantic, oft mistaken for its shell

by lacking the usual luster---or by an oyster?
How are we built? A perfect sphere, a teardrop,
perhaps a malformed button or even something

completely uneven---again, more like the shell
of our molluscan mother---whence our color:
are we the white of noon? the pink of dusk?

the black of a moonless night? the golden spears
thrust by the sun across the sky at dawn?
or even some kind of rainbow, our nacre skin

burnished beyond recognition to something born
of earth and flame and not of flesh and water?
Were we dredged up or farmed? What sort of use

became of us: a bead in an endless string,
one half a pair of earrings, or the chief
draw to some tall crown or weighty locket?

Whose hands have held us? Who continues to hold?
And will we be passed down again or sold
or, as the parable goes, cast off to pigs
and crushed at last between their greedy teeth?

]]> West

1. The Birth of Capitalism

A giant from the northern coasts of France
struck with a club the giant sat on the shining
cliffs of Dover, stomped on his slumping back,

and shouted "Now I'm lord of all this land!"
Wiping away the brains about the knot
of wood he used for a weapon, he drew a knife

and started to skin and butcher the corpse beneath him,
passing the ribs for braising and loins for frying
to gluttons he called peers---to himself leaving,

beside the nutritious offal, the foremost right
to settle any disputes that should arise
between his peers and the corpse's former dependents

kept somewhat free as labor-selling tenants.
Thus started a vicious cycle: with all this work
vended for mere subsistence and laws too rigid

to license overt exploitation, the emphasis shifted
to making the land more productive, to feeding the city
where workshops and factories sprang, to birthing a world
where markets could supplant both laws and lords.

2. The Fountain of Youth

This gift of God was found in Florida's tip
first by the peoples to whom the land was given
then by the peoples who through war and sickness

stole it: a drink which all those later founders
esteemed to grant them vigor, making them young
at heart and body, if not at mind and soul.

Rather, it proved the reverse. A single sip
and the vessel stays its course, gathering worms
while the crew is all replaced by mewling babes,

but how could the conqueror have learned all this
without experiment? Why should they trust
the word of beggared ghosts or beaten dogs?

And should a slave be risked to reach a state
for which the free repine? So thought the men
who first imbibed the fountain's blessed waters,

making immortal imbeciles of themselves:
a gloomy circle of gaunt and grey-haired figures
huddled around a pair of upturned gargoyles
that drool forever with divine revenge.

3. Acapulco

Here was another giant: a cruel frame
of bulging forehead, crooked eyes, and lips
perennially drooling, yet housing a tender soul.

Often he sat on the shore, dreaming of boats
that came in from the ocean laden with riches
his vision could only sketch, could only shape

and color as fuzzy forms, as mere abstractions,
for which he would offer the singular treasure he thought
he had in his hoard: silver and precious stones.

Often was monthly turned weekly turned daily turned hourly
turned every waking minute he'd rather spend
by the sea---he no longer slept---he was the shore,

his friends found moss and ferns and grass on his back
give way to shrubs and trees, the bones exposed
as an incoherent scaffold of white sand,
until all that was left of himself was his mad dream.

4. Guam

Their Empire's western border is the eastern
edge of the sea named after us: those islands
we once considered sisters, yet they never

fought for their freedom when we fought for ours.
Perhaps they believed that when our latest common
masters allowed us to leave, they would become

more than a stopping point for treasure-hunting
galleons turned into steamships on their westward
courses, that their lonely little boulders

floating like lost coconuts near the center
of the Pacific would instantly be considered
destinations in and of themselves, exchanging
the beggarly commonwealth for the one more brutal---

5. Pearl

Pearl of the Orient Seas: what does this mean?
What sort of pearl are we? Formed by a clam---
gigantic, oft mistaken for its shell

by lacking the usual luster---or by an oyster?
How are we built? A perfect sphere, a teardrop,
perhaps a malformed button or even something

completely uneven---again, more like the shell
of our molluscan mother---whence our color:
are we the white of noon? the pink of dusk?

the black of a moonless night? the golden spears
thrust by the sun across the sky at dawn?
or even some kind of rainbow, our nacre skin

burnished beyond recognition to something born
of earth and flame and not of flesh and water?
Were we dredged up or farmed? What sort of use

became of us: a bead in an endless string,
one half a pair of earrings, or the chief
draw to some tall crown or weighty locket?

Whose hands have held us? Who continues to hold?
And will we be passed down again or sold
or, as the parable goes, cast off to pigs
and crushed at last between their greedy teeth?

]]> <![CDATA[Haiku 1 - Apples]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27504.html Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:41:04 +0000 Mic]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27504.html picking apples in harvest
want sweet and crunch; sour]]> picking apples in harvest
want sweet and crunch; sour]]> <![CDATA[One piece epic intro test]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27503.html Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:42:58 +0000 CRNDLSM]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27503.html rubber arms plow through Alvira's pirate
henchmen, terrifying them. But Koby,
her young slave, amazed, gives food to this
new kid, whose only mission is
to be the 'King of Pirates!' Shouting, laughing,
jabbing him about not following
his own dreams, coward Koby watches Luffy
pound Alvira's crew to smithereens,
inspiring him to join Marines.]]> rubber arms plow through Alvira's pirate
henchmen, terrifying them. But Koby,
her young slave, amazed, gives food to this
new kid, whose only mission is
to be the 'King of Pirates!' Shouting, laughing,
jabbing him about not following
his own dreams, coward Koby watches Luffy
pound Alvira's crew to smithereens,
inspiring him to join Marines.]]> <![CDATA[yield]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27502.html Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:53:05 +0000 milo]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27502.html as if I'm reaching for a friend

and yet the laddered labor's endless
and I another migrant friendless

"oh sullen servant what's the matter
why can you not just climb your ladder

why must you always reach for more
the light, the dark or Pluto's shore."

another rung compresses seasons
the fungal earth that forces reasons:

the trunk, the hips each branch a jaw, Some
sex to push the apple blossom

and then there's Frost - the killing bite
merchant, peddler, murderous mite

Second is the idle thought
the mushy pungent apple -y rot

and yet another rung of drinking
to put to rest such labored thinking

"come scouse the pubs and let's get pissed
and put aside your stupid list"

and that is fine my thinking's slurred
I can't recall the portent third

I cannot make a thot for thee
I cannot make it to list three

I cannot climb the ladder more
cannot seek the light or shore

so I will lift my cup alone
and let it now unyoke my stone

as graphite yields to clicky keys
and wolfram yields to LED's

and I will yield to one of these
and I will yield to one of these]]> as if I'm reaching for a friend

and yet the laddered labor's endless
and I another migrant friendless

"oh sullen servant what's the matter
why can you not just climb your ladder

why must you always reach for more
the light, the dark or Pluto's shore."

another rung compresses seasons
the fungal earth that forces reasons:

the trunk, the hips each branch a jaw, Some
sex to push the apple blossom

and then there's Frost - the killing bite
merchant, peddler, murderous mite

Second is the idle thought
the mushy pungent apple -y rot

and yet another rung of drinking
to put to rest such labored thinking

"come scouse the pubs and let's get pissed
and put aside your stupid list"

and that is fine my thinking's slurred
I can't recall the portent third

I cannot make a thot for thee
I cannot make it to list three

I cannot climb the ladder more
cannot seek the light or shore

so I will lift my cup alone
and let it now unyoke my stone

as graphite yields to clicky keys
and wolfram yields to LED's

and I will yield to one of these
and I will yield to one of these]]> <![CDATA[Once Enemies - edit]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27501.html Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:33:38 +0000 dukealien]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27501.html

Today the Knight of Doleful Countenance
would not assault our giants in the sky–
those monstrous dandelions whose white arms
of balsa-wood moan deeply as they turn
and often break away, or crash and burn.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote would respect
today’s gaunt windmills’ dated loyalty -
like his to tarnished codes of chivalry -
in still contending with the Giant Warming
whose menace, overblown, has passed away.

I picture him and bony Rosinante
posed with a giant pinwheel, skeletal,
whose day, like theirs, is done while what remains
recalls old loves, arms bravely raised, campaigns
which, long betrayed, still honor lost ideals.

They try so hard one’s soul must sympathize
with wasted effort, industry, good heart
expended in their quest to save a world
conjecturals no longer terrorize,
which neither needs nor wants its rescuers.

]]>

Today the Knight of Doleful Countenance
would not assault our giants in the sky–
those monstrous dandelions whose white arms
of balsa-wood moan deeply as they turn
and often break away, or crash and burn.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote would respect
today’s gaunt windmills’ dated loyalty -
like his to tarnished codes of chivalry -
in still contending with the Giant Warming
whose menace, overblown, has passed away.

I picture him and bony Rosinante
posed with a giant pinwheel, skeletal,
whose day, like theirs, is done while what remains
recalls old loves, arms bravely raised, campaigns
which, long betrayed, still honor lost ideals.

They try so hard one’s soul must sympathize
with wasted effort, industry, good heart
expended in their quest to save a world
conjecturals no longer terrorize,
which neither needs nor wants its rescuers.

]]> <![CDATA[The Epic]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27500.html Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:58:36 +0000 RiverNotch]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27500.html
My general thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey are that it's sufficiently faithful, and that Nolan's obsession with chronological disorder works well to give an impression of the original poem's overall vibe. The chuds were dead wrong, not only by being racist, but also because I think the movie's best performances were delivered by Lupita Nyong'o and Elliott Page, even if one of those actors had only a bit role. Those who had more general misgivings over the trailers were only half-wrong: the trailers definitely highlight the worst aspects of the film, namely its drabness, but when one actually views the film one gets so thoroughly impressed by what Nolan and company do right that one doesn't care if, say, Odysseus' ships are more Viking than Greek, or that Agamemnon's costuming is too angular.

In fact, Agamemnon's aura of menace is emblematic of what the film typically gets bang on, which is that the aura or vibe of what sequences it chooses to adapt match the aura or vibe of Homer's story, certain adaptational differences aside. (Here we get into spoilers, not so much for Homer's story as for how Nolan chose to adapt it.) The encounters with Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, and the dead are terrifying in ways that capture the overall spirit of terror in those episodes as written, even if the scenes were somewhat truncated. The Fall of Troy is a spectacle one cannot help but cry over, much as every veteran in the book cries when they hear people sing of their war, though that episode of the war itself I don't remember being so directly described by Homer. Odysseus' final encounter with his dog and the slaughtering of the suitors are truly cathartic, even if the latter feels more in the spirit of a contemporary action film.

As for the overall spirit of the adaptation, three things stood out for me, two as I watched the film and one more in retrospect. Most obvious is Nolan's historicizing of the Odyssey qua the Bronze Age collapse, to the point that characters outright mention "peoples of the sea" (and Odysseus himself says "Our age of bronze is ending"). I liked what Nolan meant to do here, even in terms of overall message---that old social contracts, being broken, have left our world in ruins, though we'll get to this in a bit more detail later on---but, I mean, those quoted lines made me roll my eyes in the theatre. Nolan messing with time is a 'Nolanism' that really works for a narrative as sprawling as this, but Nolan writing lines like those....

Next is Nolan's sanitizing of the Odyssey, in particular Odysseus' character. The truncation of the encounter with Polyphemus involved cutting Odysseus making the cyclops drunk, telling the cyclops his name is nobody, and later shouting to everyone but the cyclops that his name is actually Odysseus---this is a sanitization of Odysseus' character that I really didn't mind, since in the film his particular actions still get his men killed, which I believe was the final point of his hubris in the book. But where the sanitizations become....interesting....is in the way the film emphasizes the Fall of Troy, especially Odysseus' culpability in it, such that it becomes a sort of 'ancestral sin' for posthomeric society being as broken as Odysseus or Nolan assay it to be; in the way the film emphasizes the virtue of Xenia, in the film called "Zeus's law", being far more based in the essential dignity of individuals---in their being made in the image of God, essentially---than being as rooted in notions of social class as in Homer; in the way the film frames Odysseus' departure from Ogygia as a "leap of faith", faith thus being framed more as the theological virtue than as the more straightforward loyalty or fidelity of the book; in the way the film omits the slaughtering of Odysseus's unfaithful slaves, again making it seem like Odysseus actually thought of his slaves as anything more than property. The combination of all these choices makes Nolan's Odysseus, not just 'modern', but also markedly 'Christian', which I personally liked, but which more generally is a choice neither good nor bad.

Now for a bad choice, or rather set of choices. Nolan completely omits the Phaeacians, including Nausicaa and Arete, conflating their role in the story with Calypso; Calypso herself gets Odysseus hooked on lotus, rather than the two episodes being entirely separate; Odysseus and his men spend much less time with Circe; Odysseus' time in the Underworld is reduced to a meeting with Tiresias, Agamemnon, and the movie-only character of Sinon, completely omitting his conversation with Anticleia; Athena is reduced to Odysseus's post-traumatic hallucination; and Penelope doesn't actively test Odysseus and his identity at the very end of the story. Some of those choices are for the sake of shortening or historicizing the story, sure, making it feel more verisimilitudinous to the modern audience, but added up, Nolan's adaptation is an oddly regressive one, when it comes to its women, even when compared to the millennia-old original.

What this adaptation means to say, overall, is probably a lot sharper than what the Odyssey has meant for its various audiences, and that's to be expected, since it's a three-hour-long film adaptation of a twenty-four-book-long epic poem, and it mainly goes back to Nolan's historicizing of the narrative, to his notion that certain old virtues such as Xenia, once broken by individuals, lead to irrevocable changes in society. I have heard some commentators note how Nolan's Odyssey is overall 'conservative' in its outlook, that it forwards too much a 'great man' theory of history, but I think this criticism is grossly misguided, since overall where Nolan's Odyssey is 'conservative' is where it faithfully adapts the narrative---where it delivers a millennia-old vision of history, one that predates the divide between conservatives and liberals or especially Carlyle's 19th century notions on 'Great Men'. Thematically, Nolan's Odyssey is only as 'conservative' as one wishes it to read it as 'conservative', its anti-Homeric regressiveness on women aside; one can just as well read its emphasis on Xenia as the emphasis on shared humanity from which all liberal and socialist ethics is ideally derived.

So....yeah. It's a great movie. I think my favorite Nolan movie is still Dunkirk, since that's a story where Nolan's biases against women and towards conservative politics are overcome by the subject matter---the systemic biases behind few women being involved in the Dunkirk evacuation is not one that needs to be interrogated by any adaptation of that story, while the adaptation itself ended up being far more collectivist and egalitarian than Nolan's tendencies might suggest---but my love for seeing Greek myths be treated with respect pushes this adaptation to a comfortable number two, or maybe number three next to The Dark Knight (a movie that is conservative to the point of being ur-fascist, sure, but damn if the spectacle don't impress).

Now, why I put this review in "Poetry Discussion" rather than "Movies, Music, and Media" is because I don't want to talk about Nolan's Odyssey alone, I want to talk about epics---rather, epic poetry, just to exclude things we conventionally describe as epic but are much closer to other genres, for instance movies.

An old, now-closed thread by Quix once asked the question, "What makes an epic poem"? To which this not-quite-dedicated scholar is wont to respond with this diagram of Northrop Frye's theory of genres, courtesy of Robert D. Denham: https://imgur.com/a/aYkcncw

In fact, Frye uses the terms 'epos' and 'epic' separately, with epics referring to particular works that are in genre more typically epos but also inclusive of such prose works as Finnegans Wake. 'Epic' he ties to his notion of 'encyclopaedic forms', which he defines as "presenting an anagogic form of symbolism, such as sacred scripture, or its analogue in other modes"---"modes" Frye generally defines as "a conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature", which in short we could say is the difference between, say, Dickens and Kafka, or between Scripture and the Commedia; "anagogic form of symbolism", even Frye struggles to describe in less than religious terms, so let's have it be the visionary sensibility shared by, say, Homer, Milton, Blake, and Joyce.

'Epics', then, he ties to cyclical structures of creation to apocalypse, law to kingdom, or birth to death, and he further classifies epics into epics of return, epics of wrath, analogical epics (as in, analogical to some process within the aforementioned cyclical structures), and contrast epics (as in, contrasting one cyclical structure with another). The examples he furnishes are numerous, and thus instructive. Epics of return include the Eddas, the Muspilli, the last book of the Mahabharata, and the Odyssey. Epics of wrath include the Iliad. Analogical epics include the Hercules legends, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Holy Scripture, the Commedia, the Faerie Queene, legends of the Holy Grail, the Aeneid, Milton, Blake, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Contrast epics include Ovid, Hesiod, Boethius, and Langland's Piers Plowman. Lastly, there is the distinction he adapts from Milton between the brief epic and the diffuse epic, with the brief epic being a less encyclopaedic epic, or perhaps a more thematically concentrated lyric: his examples here are the Book of Job, Beowulf, Spenser's Epithalamion, Lycidas, Michael's prophecy in Paradise Lost, and The Waste Land.

I'd say Frye gets to what we generally think of as epics, which is to say we generally think of epics as two different kinds of work. There's epics per Frye's definition of 'epos', with an emphasis I think on rhythm and radical of presentation, and there's epics per Frye's definition of 'epic', flexibly allowing for a good deal of prose and lyric poetry, but also thoroughly excluding, say, the less universalizing works of Jane Austen or Sappho.

I don't know how useful this all is for the general reader, except maybe that it helps set up expectations. The epic-as-'epos' is usually gonna read more even-handed and monotonous than a dramatic or lyric poem; the epic-as-'epic' is gonna feel more expansive in scope than your average novel or anthology. As such, the general reader is advised to have copious cups of coffee or tea ready when reading epics-as-'epos'; reading epics-as-'epic', and it seems enjoyment of such works is really a matter of taste, just as one could prefer Mozart over Wagner when listening to operas, albeit I agree with Frye that certain epics-as-'epic', especially the Bible and Homer, should be required reading for anyone serious about anything related to (Western) literature.

As for the writer, herein lies my dilemma. I'm setting myself up for failure by desiring to write an epic, but my first dilemma is whether it's gonna be an epic in the second sense alone, or if it's gonna be an epic in both senses. As someone whose main experience writing creatively is by writing lyrics, it's gonna be much easier for me to write an epic in the first sense rather than to write prose, but won't that sound terribly outdated, sinking the project just as I embark on it? Indeed, what use do we still have for a genre that's meant mainly to be recited or read aloud for a long period of time, and with a consistent metrical rhythm---we still have plays or at least films, we still have novels or at least comics, we still have anthologies or at least pop records, but where has gone the epic? And, in this age of nuclear disaster and climate catastrophe, how should one anticipate its return?

(It's been ages since I read Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, so for this discussion, I've mainly relied on this dissertation: https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/cri...eface.html )]]>
My general thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey are that it's sufficiently faithful, and that Nolan's obsession with chronological disorder works well to give an impression of the original poem's overall vibe. The chuds were dead wrong, not only by being racist, but also because I think the movie's best performances were delivered by Lupita Nyong'o and Elliott Page, even if one of those actors had only a bit role. Those who had more general misgivings over the trailers were only half-wrong: the trailers definitely highlight the worst aspects of the film, namely its drabness, but when one actually views the film one gets so thoroughly impressed by what Nolan and company do right that one doesn't care if, say, Odysseus' ships are more Viking than Greek, or that Agamemnon's costuming is too angular.

In fact, Agamemnon's aura of menace is emblematic of what the film typically gets bang on, which is that the aura or vibe of what sequences it chooses to adapt match the aura or vibe of Homer's story, certain adaptational differences aside. (Here we get into spoilers, not so much for Homer's story as for how Nolan chose to adapt it.) The encounters with Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, and the dead are terrifying in ways that capture the overall spirit of terror in those episodes as written, even if the scenes were somewhat truncated. The Fall of Troy is a spectacle one cannot help but cry over, much as every veteran in the book cries when they hear people sing of their war, though that episode of the war itself I don't remember being so directly described by Homer. Odysseus' final encounter with his dog and the slaughtering of the suitors are truly cathartic, even if the latter feels more in the spirit of a contemporary action film.

As for the overall spirit of the adaptation, three things stood out for me, two as I watched the film and one more in retrospect. Most obvious is Nolan's historicizing of the Odyssey qua the Bronze Age collapse, to the point that characters outright mention "peoples of the sea" (and Odysseus himself says "Our age of bronze is ending"). I liked what Nolan meant to do here, even in terms of overall message---that old social contracts, being broken, have left our world in ruins, though we'll get to this in a bit more detail later on---but, I mean, those quoted lines made me roll my eyes in the theatre. Nolan messing with time is a 'Nolanism' that really works for a narrative as sprawling as this, but Nolan writing lines like those....

Next is Nolan's sanitizing of the Odyssey, in particular Odysseus' character. The truncation of the encounter with Polyphemus involved cutting Odysseus making the cyclops drunk, telling the cyclops his name is nobody, and later shouting to everyone but the cyclops that his name is actually Odysseus---this is a sanitization of Odysseus' character that I really didn't mind, since in the film his particular actions still get his men killed, which I believe was the final point of his hubris in the book. But where the sanitizations become....interesting....is in the way the film emphasizes the Fall of Troy, especially Odysseus' culpability in it, such that it becomes a sort of 'ancestral sin' for posthomeric society being as broken as Odysseus or Nolan assay it to be; in the way the film emphasizes the virtue of Xenia, in the film called "Zeus's law", being far more based in the essential dignity of individuals---in their being made in the image of God, essentially---than being as rooted in notions of social class as in Homer; in the way the film frames Odysseus' departure from Ogygia as a "leap of faith", faith thus being framed more as the theological virtue than as the more straightforward loyalty or fidelity of the book; in the way the film omits the slaughtering of Odysseus's unfaithful slaves, again making it seem like Odysseus actually thought of his slaves as anything more than property. The combination of all these choices makes Nolan's Odysseus, not just 'modern', but also markedly 'Christian', which I personally liked, but which more generally is a choice neither good nor bad.

Now for a bad choice, or rather set of choices. Nolan completely omits the Phaeacians, including Nausicaa and Arete, conflating their role in the story with Calypso; Calypso herself gets Odysseus hooked on lotus, rather than the two episodes being entirely separate; Odysseus and his men spend much less time with Circe; Odysseus' time in the Underworld is reduced to a meeting with Tiresias, Agamemnon, and the movie-only character of Sinon, completely omitting his conversation with Anticleia; Athena is reduced to Odysseus's post-traumatic hallucination; and Penelope doesn't actively test Odysseus and his identity at the very end of the story. Some of those choices are for the sake of shortening or historicizing the story, sure, making it feel more verisimilitudinous to the modern audience, but added up, Nolan's adaptation is an oddly regressive one, when it comes to its women, even when compared to the millennia-old original.

What this adaptation means to say, overall, is probably a lot sharper than what the Odyssey has meant for its various audiences, and that's to be expected, since it's a three-hour-long film adaptation of a twenty-four-book-long epic poem, and it mainly goes back to Nolan's historicizing of the narrative, to his notion that certain old virtues such as Xenia, once broken by individuals, lead to irrevocable changes in society. I have heard some commentators note how Nolan's Odyssey is overall 'conservative' in its outlook, that it forwards too much a 'great man' theory of history, but I think this criticism is grossly misguided, since overall where Nolan's Odyssey is 'conservative' is where it faithfully adapts the narrative---where it delivers a millennia-old vision of history, one that predates the divide between conservatives and liberals or especially Carlyle's 19th century notions on 'Great Men'. Thematically, Nolan's Odyssey is only as 'conservative' as one wishes it to read it as 'conservative', its anti-Homeric regressiveness on women aside; one can just as well read its emphasis on Xenia as the emphasis on shared humanity from which all liberal and socialist ethics is ideally derived.

So....yeah. It's a great movie. I think my favorite Nolan movie is still Dunkirk, since that's a story where Nolan's biases against women and towards conservative politics are overcome by the subject matter---the systemic biases behind few women being involved in the Dunkirk evacuation is not one that needs to be interrogated by any adaptation of that story, while the adaptation itself ended up being far more collectivist and egalitarian than Nolan's tendencies might suggest---but my love for seeing Greek myths be treated with respect pushes this adaptation to a comfortable number two, or maybe number three next to The Dark Knight (a movie that is conservative to the point of being ur-fascist, sure, but damn if the spectacle don't impress).

Now, why I put this review in "Poetry Discussion" rather than "Movies, Music, and Media" is because I don't want to talk about Nolan's Odyssey alone, I want to talk about epics---rather, epic poetry, just to exclude things we conventionally describe as epic but are much closer to other genres, for instance movies.

An old, now-closed thread by Quix once asked the question, "What makes an epic poem"? To which this not-quite-dedicated scholar is wont to respond with this diagram of Northrop Frye's theory of genres, courtesy of Robert D. Denham: https://imgur.com/a/aYkcncw

In fact, Frye uses the terms 'epos' and 'epic' separately, with epics referring to particular works that are in genre more typically epos but also inclusive of such prose works as Finnegans Wake. 'Epic' he ties to his notion of 'encyclopaedic forms', which he defines as "presenting an anagogic form of symbolism, such as sacred scripture, or its analogue in other modes"---"modes" Frye generally defines as "a conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature", which in short we could say is the difference between, say, Dickens and Kafka, or between Scripture and the Commedia; "anagogic form of symbolism", even Frye struggles to describe in less than religious terms, so let's have it be the visionary sensibility shared by, say, Homer, Milton, Blake, and Joyce.

'Epics', then, he ties to cyclical structures of creation to apocalypse, law to kingdom, or birth to death, and he further classifies epics into epics of return, epics of wrath, analogical epics (as in, analogical to some process within the aforementioned cyclical structures), and contrast epics (as in, contrasting one cyclical structure with another). The examples he furnishes are numerous, and thus instructive. Epics of return include the Eddas, the Muspilli, the last book of the Mahabharata, and the Odyssey. Epics of wrath include the Iliad. Analogical epics include the Hercules legends, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Holy Scripture, the Commedia, the Faerie Queene, legends of the Holy Grail, the Aeneid, Milton, Blake, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Contrast epics include Ovid, Hesiod, Boethius, and Langland's Piers Plowman. Lastly, there is the distinction he adapts from Milton between the brief epic and the diffuse epic, with the brief epic being a less encyclopaedic epic, or perhaps a more thematically concentrated lyric: his examples here are the Book of Job, Beowulf, Spenser's Epithalamion, Lycidas, Michael's prophecy in Paradise Lost, and The Waste Land.

I'd say Frye gets to what we generally think of as epics, which is to say we generally think of epics as two different kinds of work. There's epics per Frye's definition of 'epos', with an emphasis I think on rhythm and radical of presentation, and there's epics per Frye's definition of 'epic', flexibly allowing for a good deal of prose and lyric poetry, but also thoroughly excluding, say, the less universalizing works of Jane Austen or Sappho.

I don't know how useful this all is for the general reader, except maybe that it helps set up expectations. The epic-as-'epos' is usually gonna read more even-handed and monotonous than a dramatic or lyric poem; the epic-as-'epic' is gonna feel more expansive in scope than your average novel or anthology. As such, the general reader is advised to have copious cups of coffee or tea ready when reading epics-as-'epos'; reading epics-as-'epic', and it seems enjoyment of such works is really a matter of taste, just as one could prefer Mozart over Wagner when listening to operas, albeit I agree with Frye that certain epics-as-'epic', especially the Bible and Homer, should be required reading for anyone serious about anything related to (Western) literature.

As for the writer, herein lies my dilemma. I'm setting myself up for failure by desiring to write an epic, but my first dilemma is whether it's gonna be an epic in the second sense alone, or if it's gonna be an epic in both senses. As someone whose main experience writing creatively is by writing lyrics, it's gonna be much easier for me to write an epic in the first sense rather than to write prose, but won't that sound terribly outdated, sinking the project just as I embark on it? Indeed, what use do we still have for a genre that's meant mainly to be recited or read aloud for a long period of time, and with a consistent metrical rhythm---we still have plays or at least films, we still have novels or at least comics, we still have anthologies or at least pop records, but where has gone the epic? And, in this age of nuclear disaster and climate catastrophe, how should one anticipate its return?

(It's been ages since I read Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, so for this discussion, I've mainly relied on this dissertation: https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/cri...eface.html )]]> <![CDATA[As in, "of the horizon"]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27499.html Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:28:21 +0000 matsunosuperfan]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27499.html As in, “of the horizon”

A summer day is something like a watermelon,
Ellis says, digging trenches with her toe, my accomplice niece.
We’ve come to watch seagulls steal bread, to lurk
among the bathers in their underwear like creeps.
I can’t resist—I ask her what she means. You know,
she says. With all the little seeds.

When you spy people from a plane, they look like seeds,
not ants. Ants are always moving chunks of watermelon
back and forth; people know
a hundred thousand different ways to sit. Garrisons of knees
entrenched in sand, vines of sunscreen creeping
down dilapidated towers, and off in the moat, lurking

like assassins: hungry teenage eyes. They lurch and lurk
their way between the waves like seeds
lashed out by trebuchets, creep
around the curl of tides, get washed up like watermelon
rinds along the beach. Ellis always picks her knees
up when she runs. I taught her that, you know.

Her mom’s been riding waves again. I know
the signs: a look over the shoulder, something lurking
in the eyes. Less cogent declarations: Owls have knees,
you know. They just don’t use them. Seeds
have memories and you can train them how to grow. “Watermelon
Sugar” is a remix of a Motown song. Radiohead stole “Creep”

from Pat Metheny. She calls me a creep
for screening her calls, and she’s not wrong, but I know
what goes on. I am properly vigilant: “Watermelon
Sugar” could be their word for the juice. The voice lurking
into my kitchen from a number in Bulgaria perhaps seeds
cells of dealers here who break men’s knees

like melons. I like my knees,
so I don’t mention any of this to Bethany, who creeps
into my room at night to make seeds
from my bones. I know
she’d love to feed me to the lurkers
on the corner with their watermelon

slice-mouths, but there’s vodka in the watermelon, seeds
to plant, and Ellis now is looking bored, lurking low, knees
rising as waves creep in like only they know how.

]]> As in, “of the horizon”

A summer day is something like a watermelon,
Ellis says, digging trenches with her toe, my accomplice niece.
We’ve come to watch seagulls steal bread, to lurk
among the bathers in their underwear like creeps.
I can’t resist—I ask her what she means. You know,
she says. With all the little seeds.

When you spy people from a plane, they look like seeds,
not ants. Ants are always moving chunks of watermelon
back and forth; people know
a hundred thousand different ways to sit. Garrisons of knees
entrenched in sand, vines of sunscreen creeping
down dilapidated towers, and off in the moat, lurking

like assassins: hungry teenage eyes. They lurch and lurk
their way between the waves like seeds
lashed out by trebuchets, creep
around the curl of tides, get washed up like watermelon
rinds along the beach. Ellis always picks her knees
up when she runs. I taught her that, you know.

Her mom’s been riding waves again. I know
the signs: a look over the shoulder, something lurking
in the eyes. Less cogent declarations: Owls have knees,
you know. They just don’t use them. Seeds
have memories and you can train them how to grow. “Watermelon
Sugar” is a remix of a Motown song. Radiohead stole “Creep”

from Pat Metheny. She calls me a creep
for screening her calls, and she’s not wrong, but I know
what goes on. I am properly vigilant: “Watermelon
Sugar” could be their word for the juice. The voice lurking
into my kitchen from a number in Bulgaria perhaps seeds
cells of dealers here who break men’s knees

like melons. I like my knees,
so I don’t mention any of this to Bethany, who creeps
into my room at night to make seeds
from my bones. I know
she’d love to feed me to the lurkers
on the corner with their watermelon

slice-mouths, but there’s vodka in the watermelon, seeds
to plant, and Ellis now is looking bored, lurking low, knees
rising as waves creep in like only they know how.

]]> <![CDATA[Atlantics]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27498.html Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:52:26 +0000 alonso ramoran]]> https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-27498.html Atlantics

Leviathans swim deep under the world
of light and sound again. Under the heaving
dark, the first dreams, silenced and betrayed,
became frenzied nightmares with always empty
memory and stomachs. Beings accept
what monsters deny in avoided rest.

That is why I toe the waves, avoiding rest.
I dream and can’t recall those worlds
like they were past lives, or I must accept
I never dreamed, nor gave my salt and heaved
something weeping out of the emptiness
within, without some sense of betrayal

looming. Ghoulish men fear their betrayal
or they awaken to it, from their carefree rest;
shackled beings show them the emptiness
of their investments, their recorded world
of commerce, in the waters they are heaved
into. And the liberated walk into the sea, accepting

of their fates. What wounds have I, to accept
that there is no cowardice to be betrayed
in what I ponder? Just grief that we’re born heaving
with, before we’re lulled to rest?
There are chasms in my memory where worlds
of lullabies have sunk. In empty

darkness now, all song sounds curdled, emptied
of any softness, like a music box accepted
in an undiscerning maw that swallows worlds.
They circle now. Their movements are betrayed
in currents underneath me. If I rest,
what if a nightmare stops this heart I heaved

across collapsing time, because all I heaved
within it rotted, I could not leave it empty
of anything except itself? I cannot rest
afloat this long; I sink because I can't accept
my last sight could be terror as the body was betrayed
for the indulgences of a forgotten world.

It tastes like a world no longer empty,
like tears, this heaving source that accepted
my breath, that betrays every call to rest.]]> Atlantics

Leviathans swim deep under the world
of light and sound again. Under the heaving
dark, the first dreams, silenced and betrayed,
became frenzied nightmares with always empty
memory and stomachs. Beings accept
what monsters deny in avoided rest.

That is why I toe the waves, avoiding rest.
I dream and can’t recall those worlds
like they were past lives, or I must accept
I never dreamed, nor gave my salt and heaved
something weeping out of the emptiness
within, without some sense of betrayal

looming. Ghoulish men fear their betrayal
or they awaken to it, from their carefree rest;
shackled beings show them the emptiness
of their investments, their recorded world
of commerce, in the waters they are heaved
into. And the liberated walk into the sea, accepting

of their fates. What wounds have I, to accept
that there is no cowardice to be betrayed
in what I ponder? Just grief that we’re born heaving
with, before we’re lulled to rest?
There are chasms in my memory where worlds
of lullabies have sunk. In empty

darkness now, all song sounds curdled, emptied
of any softness, like a music box accepted
in an undiscerning maw that swallows worlds.
They circle now. Their movements are betrayed
in currents underneath me. If I rest,
what if a nightmare stops this heart I heaved

across collapsing time, because all I heaved
within it rotted, I could not leave it empty
of anything except itself? I cannot rest
afloat this long; I sink because I can't accept
my last sight could be terror as the body was betrayed
for the indulgences of a forgotten world.

It tastes like a world no longer empty,
like tears, this heaving source that accepted
my breath, that betrays every call to rest.]]>