ONCE UPON A PLANET, POETRY

TROUBLE AT THE FEAST

epic launch
but I heard
lunch

©2015 Eating Poetry stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#mythpo #writeprompt #writers #6words #fantasy  #mpy #mustread #AuthorRT @kelsye

notes

#writeprompt : In SIX Words or fewer, write a story about a mythical planet or society
write-prompt credits: @kelsye

WORKING AGAINST NATURE #IndiePubThurs #amwriting #blog #poetry #mythopoetics

UNWILLING TO BECOME A BODY WILLING TO BLEED

“A turning tearing from its emptiness; how fast this spin, the rooted thoughts of a conservative nature, radical nature unsettling things”

–Richard Lance Scow Williams, Raptor and Wren

something s[p®]ang or sp®outed
tearing― up↑. I

cannot see that salty word
and not see the watering

whole, the
transparency or

selfing soul
making an

in-stance
of that the

ab sensed
W   ord

image
fiery  wheeled feminine
unwillingness to become

spoken hitched broken or
rehearsed

no body has
what it takes

©2015 Her Embodied Shade stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#IndiePubThurs #amwriting #blog#poetry #mythopoetics

GO WEST YOUNG MAN #writeprompt

#writeprompt In #6words or fewer write the 1st line of an epic tale.

LIVIN' IN THE WEST
"If you get the Cart(w)right, you will have a Bonanza." ~Lorne Greene

it begins with
a burning map

2015 Family Tree stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#writeprompt #amwriting #6words #2lines #blog #poetry #mpy #mythopoetics #vss


notes

The theme song for the 1959 television show, "Bonanza" was originally sung by Lorne Greene but only for the first show of the long running series.

CICADA DISPLAYS / ON BODIES IN RUIN AND EMBODYING RUINS

HEARD UNSEEN UNKNOWN

deathless Tithonos
deathless Athena

the shared word, sleepless
the shared soul, speechless

the boundary between
missing notes


©2015 Missing Notes Bug Us stephaniepope mythopoetry.com


notes

1. Regarding mythical palinode, poetic image-formation describing the danger of cicada’s song and the clever usefulness of it in the Phaedrus by Socrates  with regards poetic ways of seeing, see Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus, Daniel S. Werner (New York: Cambridge, 2012) Chapter 6.2 pp.138-144. Socrates will say that cicadas (the soul of the poet) will grant their gift to the ones who, when lead by sound to cicada soul avoid the enchantment in cicada’s singing; to be led by it, through it is in manner very much like how Odysseus is led by and then through the sound of the siren’s song.

2. The soul of the myth of cicada singing is already part of tradition. Cicadas are seen as divine critters, closer to the deathless gods than mortal man. The poetic palinode is introduced into the Platonic, poetic tradition to reshape it in a discursive psychagogia. But, this cannot ever be a final word. The poetic image for this psychagogic problem is sleepless Athena’s (d)anger(ous) authority.

3. There is a story of Athena inventing deer bone pipes and trying to play music on them. Experiencing the ridicule of goddesses on how ugly her playing music makes her appearance and discovering just what they meant by the comments in gazing at herself playing, she puts down her sound instrument in both senses. She rejects it and she lays a curse upon its flesh. Athena’s response to her own body image dis/played through her music’s sounds seems excessive. She has a similar reaction to cicadas. The story goes that she, after battle and with battle fatigue, curses them for keeping her awake all night giving her no relief from headache. Yet the cicada that ails her is also the antidote. The ancient Greek authors sought out the cicada’s song (poetic soul) as remedy for relief from eros. See footnote 23 p. 137. Athena’s curse; what does it veil about Athena herself?

4. The Greek word for “old age” is also the word for the skin the cicada sloughs See foot note 22 p.137

5. The cicada will not sing in captivity. Footnote 23 p. 137. Said another way, Captivating the souls of persons enchanted solely by the beauty of the palinode (the poem’s form) is not to encounter the poem’s depths, which one must begin to interrogate oneself to hear exactly of what the poem (the soul of the poet) sings. More importantly, who is the poet? Is it not this very autochthonous life and who the poet “is” a skin shed to reveal it?

6. For cicada as a metaphor not for the poet but for the soul of the poet see footnote 20 p. 137. Old advisors and excellent orators are likened to cicadas. (see also footnote 20.) Elsewhere comparisons are made to the sound of old men’s voices as lily-skinned and like cicadas shedding skins. It is also noted how young men in ritual (See the poem by the Hellenistic poet, Theodoridas on the ritual shedding of a young man’s long hair in dedication to the Artemis of Warriors (as opposed to the Artemis of Hunter-Gatherers)  wear a cicada hairpin in their hair to show this autochthonic connection to the Greek landscape, a kind of natural bridging between the soul of the human animal and that of the landscape which contains and embodies them. Today the study of this kind of mythologized soundscaping is called zoomusicology. Elsewhere there is a turning of the ritual image of the cicada hairpin as a reference to (and putting down of) femininity.

7. So then, what soul is femininity and how does a poetry in the soul of depths attempt to (re)embody it?

8. What soul is this soul, shut away, shut up and shut out by Athena’s gaze to which the deep cicadian life, antidote for eros, eternally (re)turns and moves toward in singing a past still present?

9. Finally, how appropriate a re-visioning is the image now of a cicadian band playing a set today in spite of or on account of its outsider status when it comes to knowing and giving an embodiment to the unknown or unseen image in bodies of ruins that bug us still?

POETIC AUTHORS / In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author.

AUTHORING THE SONG OF LIFE

ΕἰςτέττιγαΜακαρίζομένσε, τέττιξ,
ὅτιδενδρέωνἐπ΄ἄκρωνὀλίγηνδρόσονπεπωκώς,
βασιλεὺςὅπως, ἀείδειs (Ανακρέων)[i]

victory symbol this
cicada's chirping song

©2015 Forever Young stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

---

[i] “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.” WEST, M. (1986). Carmina Anacreonta. Leipzig: Teubner.#6words #amwriting #writers #blog #poetry #mpy #2lines #mythopoetics #vss

Writer’s Prompt: In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author. #6words #amwriting #writers
Prompt Source: @kelsye

notes

1. Cicada. Order, hemipteran and suborder, Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily, Cicadoidea. In Latin, “cicada” means “tree cricket”. When they start buzzing in late July and August there is about 6 more weeks till frost legend has it.  In Greek, “cicada” is called “tettix” with modern Greek calling it “tzitzikas”. Both words are fun metrics in writing.

2. In a scholar’s paper Anastasia Georgaki provides a number of interesting research ideas such as 

a) “The earliest explicit reference on the cicada singing, comes from Homer in the Illiad with the adjective leirios (like the flower 'lily') where Homer describes the 'shrilling voices' of the elder men, likened to Cicada song 'lily-like', after their city has been besieged. Hesiod's reference underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ) and Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine).”

~see Anastasia Georgaki Listening to the Cicada Chorus in the Plato Academy: soundscape research

b)  Hesiod’s reference (Hesiod Works 582 ff. : “τέττιξδενδρέῳἐφεζόμενοςλιγυρὴνκαταχεύετ̓ἀοιδὴνιπυκνὸνὑπὸπτερύγων, θέρεος” “καματώδεοςὥρῃ) underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ)

c) Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine); “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.”

d) Georgaki mentions two important myths with regards the cicada. One is the myth of Eunomos. Eunomos is a citharode, a poet who composes his poetry upon the stringed instrument, the cithara, a kind of lyre. The myth says there is a contest between Ariston of Rhegion and Eunomos of Lokri, which takes place in Delphi. During the contest a string breaks on the lyre of Eunomos and a cicada jumps up to fill the role and supply the missing note. The poet-singer adapts his music to that of his accomplice’s missing note and this move(ment) wins the contest. This odd thing happens along the Halex River marking the boundary between two regions, Rhegion and Lokri. The river passes through a deep ravine. The cicadas on the Lokri side of the bank sing, the cicadas on the Rhegion side do not. This tale is taken up again by a Christian revisionist, Clement of Alexandria, who retells the story another way, one, Roger Lipsey in Have You Been to Delphi? in a section called ‘A Chapter of Tales” says  Clement works with at great length to alter in accent the miraculous kinship bond the poet has with nature through cicadian rhythm. For more about this turn in the Christian theological imagination see Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds, New York: Suny Series New York Press, 2001 pp116-117.

The second cicada myth Georgaki mentions is the myth of Tithonos and Eos, Dawn. One of my poetic achievements around this story conflates it with the Endymion/Selene tale (a blissful form of the pair in the tale) and the rose of the Aurora-princely tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Endymion would be a sleeping beauty, Selene supplying “the kiss of 100 years” in a fresh way.  The poem I reference comparing the three is published here two days before today’s poem.

Tithonos is granted immortality but not youth, by Zeus when Eos, the goddess, Dawn asks for immortality for Tithonos. When Tithonos grows old he begins to babble on and on about all the things he’s lived and knows about life and this is that to which he is forever riven as a result of his unnatural longevity. Eos is dutiful as a lover and shuts him away from the world to live forever in this manner…

…when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.  (see Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

3. Other Greek variations in telling the myth of Tithonos say Eos turns him into the first cicada. And here it strikes me this renders something visible. A Delphi of the mind is perhaps suggested here. So when the word Delphi is invoked, it invites both the historical imagination and the soul of this other, earlier Pythian form. Like the twin banks of the river Halex, cicadas sing only one side of Delphi. That side can be likened to the Delphi of the mind in which a patterned potential capable of archetypal activism evermore and particularly now activates in aging psyche. And in the story of Tithonos, Eos can be likened to the likes of the thirteenth fairy who is really the twelfth; she is changing the way Tithonos is fated by Zeus.  (In the painting of Endymion on Mount Latmos, 1879, Grimshaw has painted Selene in the form of such a fairy!)

The river place has become likened to the riven place place of the split, crack, boundary, gap, place for turning outcomes another way; it marks the spot in the temporized zone of the mind’s space―that deep ravine, just where revisioning in poetic seeing is possible. Yet, like that landscape along either side the bank of the Halex River in the story of Eunomos and the cicada, not every kind of poet hears it.

4.  In the same scholarly paper, Georgaki also notes how Thucydides wrote that Athenians wore gold Cicadas in their hair in order to show their "autochthony".

5. There appears to be a comparison in Homer between lily-skinned voices (old age) and the missing note cicada supplies Eunomos…

λειρ-ιόεις, εσσα, εν, prop.

A  like a lily, but in Hom. only metaph., χρόα λειριόεντα lily skin, Il.13.830; of the cicadae, ὄπα λειριόεσσαν their delicate voice, 3.152; of the Muses' voice, Hes.Th.41; Ἑσπερίδες Q.S.2.418.  2 of  the lily, κάρη Nic.Al.406.    see Liddel and Scott  http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.43:4.LSJ

6. The application of this missing note, the poetic life’s lilyskin, psyche’s deep voice in the age’s aging seems to be that similar solution Eos supplies Tithonian existence. At first light the goddess puts a Dionysian sweet on Tithonos’ tongue which is drunk with dew; it supplies the missing note giving way to metamorphosis.

Noticing this I note how it is these days. To outlive one’s beautiful youth and still be too young and healthy to die seems to be the lot of a good many retirees.  The spiritual task individuating a long life, what will it have been like? Into what image and likeness will it have been reborn?  How will it show its autochthony?

Having grown up under the sign of the hippie, perhaps wearing the lily skin in our hair is the role of the 60’s generation who are now in their 60’s literally.

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL H-GEEKY

Endymion on Mount Latmos (1879) (John) Atkinson Grimshaw

SEEING THROUGH FAIRIES SEEING THROUGH

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. - John Steinbeck


Sleep's nocturnal algorithm
Endymion's element

©2015 First Nocturne stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
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notes

 For more on JA Grimshaw see http://www.grimshaworigin.org/AtkinsonTheodosia.htm

1. Mythic tales carry image remains and are themselves remainders, burial mounds inscribed with such remains still remaining.

2. Hypnos, God of Sleep, resides in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness, beyond the gates of the rising sun. From here he rises into the sky each night in the train of his goddess mother, Nyx or Night. The Oneiroi, dark-winged spirits of dreams, are often depicted as bat-like creatures. These are his brothers, sons of Night, too. In the form of the spirit of dream, the Oneiroi are given the name, Morpheus and personified in notion. Thanatos, Death, a brother, belongs to this complex as well.

3. Let me begin in such ruins with a Roman-era collection of myths and the account of the one great love story between immortality’s goddess and mortal man. It is based largely on the mythologer and poet Pherecydes of Leros.  His account has perished but he is the one in which this particular telling of the myth whether Rose (Aurora), Eos or Selene.

There are three stories, three lights, three ladies, three lovers but really they are remains of the one story. I am pondering the Roman story of Selene and the shepherd, Endymion, the Greek story of Eos and the Trojan rhapsode, Tithonos and the marchen or fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, Aurora―a Roman reference again. She is called Rose by Charles Perrault in the 100 sleeping years before her kiss with the prince. I am pondering more deeply how analogies are made through poetic meanings held in abeyance. Perhaps I am thinking of a myth of the body that remains embodied and the heroic turn into mythopoetic man as we move from a heroic mode that once made meaning possible to a poetic one making meaning still possible.

I am beginning with the story as it is told in Greco-Roman imagination since it is Greek imagination in western psyche-making which tells our first story of poetic imagination (and imaginally speaking Tithonos is both a Trojan soldier and a poet.) I am musing on how poetic imagination often resolves the problems of the day-world’s mortality during slumber. Night seems to play an eternally important role.

Regarding this apparent change which is made possible in the soul of words as they emanate from the temporized sphere of a dark goddess’s eternity― poetic meanings held in abeyance turns them metaphorically; regarding this changing of hours into h’ours marking just where something new is possible―moreover necessary, there is, the myth shares, once a necessary flaw in that early mythic and poetic dream’s algorithm supposed to resolve the changing of hours in that eternal love affair that always and forever goes on everywhere at once between mortal and immortal things words attempt to embody. What matters embody, matter embodies in the aging remains of our words which live on after we are gone.

The first myth’s “love problem” gets handed down to us today in the story of Aurora’s birth. Aurora is the Roman name given the goddess, Dawn although in the story it is Selene who resolves the solution to the first light’s love problem. Pre-Sentient being is resolving being in a day-world kind of knowing passing between both science and art; the passage between both is a space in which a kind of becoming time in space and becoming space in time share without obstruction.

Here is perhaps a distinction. The Greek Goddess of dawn, Eos, links being to root it in the irrational soul carrying the same light’s meaning both ways. This is just what Selene does in the tale of the shepherd Endymion, Endymion in the same role held originally by Tithonos, soldier as poet. Later on this is the princely role in that moment in Sleeping Beauty with the midnight kiss. Selene resolves the problem Eos has at first light and throughout all time. Moon’s lingo (sleep) resolves for eternity how it is in love with the forms of time, of which, one’s consciousness is also made in image and likeness. The three goddesses form a committee of sleep to do for us now what we cannot do for ourselves daily. Within our remains is our unknowing made known.

The marchen tale, “Sleeping Beauty” carries Aurora’s curse as the rose within it but this curse is a new twist on the original love theme in how love’s “changing movement” turns the logos of hours to h-our or h’our’s psyche-making awareness which cannot ever die. (No matter which ego thinks what next morning!) Alas, because of what ego thinks in the morning and in spite of this, immortal love can only live in the body of matter’s life in as much as we are able to bring it to life ourselves.  Yet, in as much as the committee of sleep sustains our nocturnal algorithm, love seems to find its own way into our world.

The tale of Eos and Tithonos

The tale of Selene and Endymion

Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL THEY CAME

THE SEEING POOL 

GODWIVES LIFE-GIVING THE GIFT GIVING LIFE


wild heaven's fairy
dew gifts Aurora

2015 Original Mothering stephaniepope mythopoetry.com



notes

In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about a momentous celebration. #6words #writeprompt
Page_48_illustration_from_Fairy_tales_of_Charles_Perrault_(Clarke,_1922) image in public domain
water overlay applied

Charles Perrault Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

A SHORT MEDITATION ON THE LOGOS OF THE GENOS GYNAKON

Mother Tucking Children Into Bed
Norman Rockwell, 1921 image in public domain

RE VISIONING MOTHER'S DAY

Here's the thing about Mother's Day that gets to me. It is celebrated in a way that highlights dumbing down its origin which originally was a heroine's call to adventure which ritualized mothers actually leaving their roles as mothers to enter history! Whereas the day the way it is being celebrated now keeps mothers in the image and role and does not create the opening for real citizen-speak the way it originally once did in 1858.

Mother’s Day began as a call to action to improve the lives of families through health and peace. Ann Jarvis of Appalachia founded Mother’s Day at first to promote sanitation in response to high infant mortality. But, after the Civil War, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe made a Mother’s Day call to women to protest the carnage of war. She was a feminist and this word carries this double or twin powers which tend the kind of soul-making in it.

The fire in this heart(h)-tending, the spark or logos in the word, "feminist" is "igne sacra inflammata", inflamed by sacred fire, an essia necessary for keeping the cultural polis healthy. (Hestia's cupboard of remedies) That it is this dumbed down signifies a lack and so personally, I want all women kind to come in contact with what they don't know in the way they are not being honored. I want women to hear the call and venture forth seeking contact again with this kind of spark igniting in their own hearts. I want them to re claim their own journey to the great heart(h) of first woman, the genos gynakon; I want them to knowingly receive a divine spark--their original inheritance which will gift them a tongue dipped in essia's hearth so on this one day in May they may without thinking twice, leave their role of mothering [the way it is for them normally], give the workload to the family for the day and unite in a body that matters in the name of "sacred fire" or female force of polis within polis. Thank you for allowing stef's riff re visioning our democracy's national health care plan. Here's some history.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED #2lines #6Words #writeprompt #amwriting #blog #poetry #mpy #mythopoetics #OHJ #vss

image in public domain

LAST NIGHT IN THE SEEING POOL

Peeking through fairies
seeing through magic


©2015 Expect Magic stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#6words #mpy #writeprompt #vss #2lines #amwriting #blog #poetry #mythopoetics #ohj



notes


In SIX WORDS, or fewer, write a story about what really happened.

SPEAKING OF HEROES : THE LEGEND OF THE STOLEN CHILD

Image from 1870, "The Fairy Mythology"
 by Thomas Keightley, public domain

DEPTH'S DEADLY THINGS DEPART SECRETLY

adventure won underful
sung un d-meter

©2015 Stolen stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
Speaking of heroes, in SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about saving the day.
#6words #writeprompt

notes The hero story is a grave story in both senses of grave as serious and grave as burial mound. The hero's story is the story of the death of the hero as giving life back to people. Since 911 the image of the death of the hero has morphed to encompass images of the "death of the hero myth" signaling a revisioning from within the mythic image itself... The Taking of Persephone In Myth suitable for middle primary; it names the four dark steeds of Hades (Aidoneus). The four are Aeton (Swift As An Eagle) Nonios (Like No Other), Abatos (The Remote One) and Abaster (Away From The Stars or inaccessible) Greek classical sources naming the four black immortal horses (Orph. Argon. 1192, Hymn. 17. 14; Ov. Met. v. 404; Hom. Hymn. in Cer. 19; Claudian, Rapt. Proserp. i. in fin.)  Stephanie Pope on "The Stolen Child" more poetry Grandmother Eyes Movie Review: Pan's Labyrinth "The Heroine Low in Soul's High Adventure

ODDLY hGEEKY JOURNEY! #amwriting #poetry #limerick #mythopoetics

ALONG THE SOUTHWEST TRAIL

crested the saguaro looks regal
a comic attraction for eagle
arms held in the air
but immunity rare
along borders where it looks illegal

©2015 ohj Limerick stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
 #mythopoetics #amwriting #poetry #limerick #ohj #ohjDailyWords

A PSYCHE’S HAPPINESS

This image of Psyche’s Ants belongs to artwork reproduced in
Sonia Cavicchioli's Tale of Cupid & Psyche, an Illustrated History.

WITHIN THE GRANARY SHE SORTS

Anti, anti-federalist―her EROS

bond―the army at work 

rambunctious ants

           
©2015 Psyche-Making  Psyche stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

#ohjDailywords #mythopoetics #amwriting #poetry #vss #3lines #micropoetry

notes

image credit: The image of Psyche’s Ants belongs to artwork reproduced in Sonia Cavicchioli's Tale of Cupid & Psyche, an Illustrated History. Historically as early as the 1480s such imagery circulates under the supervision of Ercole Roberti in a fresco sequence illustrating the tale of Cupid and Psyche; the series is no longer extant. The tale reappears in a later series of frescoes c. 1527, in Mantua under the supervison of Giulio Romano.  The Psyche-EROS tale often appears as the subject for numerous marriage chests during the 15thC-18thC. The image is part of the Historical Tarot of the era. For more on this tarot see http://dionysisandtarot.blogspot.com/2012/04/blank_8209.html

SCENT-ENCING HERA'S EYES: ODORS OF (DE)LIGHT

Jessie Arms Botke The Peacock (1931)Oil and gold leaf on canvas (34 x 40 inches)

RE VISIONING HERA'S EYES

ONCE UPON A TIME...

                          IN GRECO-ROMAN IMAGINATION HERA'S EYES, THE STARS, ADORNED THE VAULT OF THE DOMAIN OF ZEUS, HEAVEN UNTIL HERMES AS ARGEIPHONTES, SLAYER OF THE ARGUS FLITS AMONG THE STARS, DARKENING THE BROW OF ZEUS WHO PLOTS.  HERA, EMPLOTTING TOO, GIVES THIS STARLIGHT TO THE LASHES OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL.  HOW?  LET THE POEM TELL THE STORY FROM HERE...


ARGUS PANOPTES SIMULACRUM
FIREFLY LIT
ALLURINGLY COME
WHEN ARGEIPHONTES FLIT
BEJEWELING HERA'S LASHES


©2015 Hera's Bling stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#amwriting #poetry #ohjDailyWords #vss #mythopoetics #5words


notes

ARGUS – ALL EYES; PANOPTES-ALL-SEEING ATTRIBUTE OF THE GOD, HELIOS; ARGEIPHONTES-ARGUS-SLAYER, SAID OF HERMES
Jessie Arms-Botke biography and artwork http://www.jessiearmsbotkegallery.com/jessiebotkebiography.html
you tube video on peacocks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdc6fakRto


Enjoy the video!