HOMER'S TANTALUS
A cannibal rally
the social tie
a Tantalus meal
all-knowing & god-knowing knowing
how gods do feed one with another
taking the one bite
but the poet's ambrosia is depth
& Pindar's habit
for growing stories
©2014 Homer's Cannibal, stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohj rally, cannibal
notes
1. Just as we today suggest the bible is an inspired text and mean the writing is god-inspired so too, are considered inspired certain texts of other cultures. Inspired texts from the Greek classical period include Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, Homer's epic poetry, Iliad and Odyssey and Pindar's odes. Such texts are considered sacred stories or god-inspired story.
2. In Ceremony (and speaking to the powerful forces at work in storytelling and the sacral nature of stories), Leslie Marmon Silko suggests the principle of femininity, in weaving light and dark aspects into our stories, "knows" the only cure for what ails the social tie...
What she said:
The only cure
I know
is a good ceremony,
that's what she said.
This might suggest the hidden ambrosia carried in the belly of stories and the belly work at work in an unfolding story's embodiments.
3. Pindar's habit /In his poems Pindar's telling will digress in order to break with the myth to reject it or alter it in some way. It is suggested such passages "have rhetorical purpose...introducing subject-matter which has to be avoided for reason of religious propriety and encomiastic suitability." see American Journal of Philology vol. 109, no. 1, Spring, 1988, "A Pindaric Feature In The Poems of Callimachus." http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/294759?uid=3739552&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104435960923
Posts
