Orphics

Leonard Kress

• Editorial: The Kent State University Press
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781612773506
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Poetry

"Imagine a postmodern Pindar with a liberal arts education and good command of Polish; think of an Orpheus who starts out as a horny kid from the American suburbs, hits the road like Kerouac, learns a few things along the way, but still looks back-wacked! Kress has come up with some playful and surprisingly haunting sonnets that glance at the old stories but sing their own new, not too sweet songs."-Julia Kasdorf

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Orpheus on and off the Road

Orpheus Hops a Freight

Orpheus Renames the Constellations

Don't Look Back

Practice

Impenetrable Grotto

Orpheus Considers Celibacy

Early Education

Early Education (2)

Orpheus at the Ashland Coal Mine

An Orphic Version of the Pastoral

Orpheus Accompanies a Caucus of the Women's Strike for Peace to the Union Hall

Orpheus on The Five Incomplete Phenomena or the Unripe Fruits

Orpheus in Therapy

Orphics

After Treny 14 (On the Death of His Daughter, Urszula)

Orpheus Practices Pindarics

Orpheus Gets an Earful from the Maenads

The Descent

Orpheus to His Polish Translator Jan Kochanowski in 1580

The Singing Oracle of Orpheus

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Journal; Orphics: The Descent; Snakeskin (On-line journal, UK); Orpheus on and off the Road, Orpheus Hops a Freight, Orpheus Renames the Constellations, Don't Look Back; Cortland Review (Online journal); Impenetrable Grotto; Artful Dodge; After Treny 14 (On the Death of His Daughter, Urszula)

Orpheus on and off the Road was awarded the 2002 William Stafford Poetry Prize from Rosebud.

Orpheus Gets an Earful was part of a collaborative project with printmaker Mania Dajnak and exhibited at the Southern Graphics Council Conference in New Orleans, March 2002.

Much of the work in this book was made possible by Individual Artist Grants from the Ohio Arts Council.

ORPHEUS ON AND OFF THE ROAD

A blinding locust storm in southern Illinois,

the kids who pick me up stole this Ford,

drinking and joyriding, reveling toward

the coast. And when they stop to let me pry

the black gook off the wipers, they screech away,

hysterical, my rucksack in their trunk.

I have surrendered to the road and pray

as I hitch, buffeted by each passing truck,

it will provide. And so it does. Two more rides,

Iowa cornfield to sleep, dancing stalks

and whispers—to be found you must be lost.

Falling stars throughout the night, roads

almost abandoned—a Mustang of...