Comments on: Snow on the Parthenon

By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:10:47 +0000

Thanks for these comments… The snow is all gone now! John, I appreciate what you are saying–how does anyone write about where they live. Good question. I guess here so many things–the Acropolis, the “special quality of the light”, etc., are common props in travel poems of a certain ilk… while other aspects of life Athens would actually be too foreign in some ways to be grasped by an American audience–and I do feel my audience is largely an American one. Hmmm.
Daisy, I think self-suspicious perspective is exactly what is lacking from bad travel writing! And awakeness is what is present in good. There’s a pretty interesting book, The Oxford Book of Travel Verse, which is divided up by places. It’s dated (1989) but in some ways the more interesting for that…
Steve, OK I’ll let you know if I ever write my Desperate Aegean Housewives… I’m not sure it took any spirit to ex-patriate–a certain amount of ignorance was helpful! My husband is Greek and we opted to try life here for a couple of years–that was about 9 years ago.
The cartoon was a complete surprise–I just opened the web site one day and there it was. I think it is pretty nifty, Of course, it is strange to see the poem set in another city, and with the speaker’s gender reversed (at least how I read it), but mostly my reaction is… cool!
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By: Steve Mackin

Steve Mackin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:50:01 +0000

“Snow on the Parthenon” is such an evocative image. I’m culturally conditioned to think when hearing or reading “Parthenon” of luminous stone under aureate light. To think of it grey under brittle white is an interesting thing. I admire your spirit in expatriating. I could never do it. Once I almost had someone talk me into moving to England, to Cornwall. She failed to convince me to leave my beautiful home. Also, I find John’s question interesting, who can write about where they live? My thought is, who can write about anything else? It seems to be all I ever write about. And with regards to an Aegean Desperate Housewives; it would be a guaranteed best seller.
But all that is beside the point. The main reason I’m posting is to ask, what do you think of the Comic Strip?
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By: daisy

daisy — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:14:02 +0000

Alicia–
I know what you mean. The thing about travel poems for me is that traveling gives one the wide awake feeling that feels right for writing poems, yet it’s also hard to write good travel poems (for someone like me, who goes for two months at a time) that have something at stake, because it’s in one’s regular life that at stake-ness happens. Am I just repeating what you’re saying from the non-resident’s self-suspicious perspective? My travel poems tend to be very journalistic–and so I don’t try to publish them–it’s not what I want my poems to do. I do like having them as a record. But my most successful one, which I did publish, is, I think, about being American, and is a political poem. That’s one way I’ve dealt with it. Which is to say, NOT “I walked up the Acropolis and skinny dipped off Naxos on my spring vacation and I feel great and not as bored as I was in America and this metaphor came to me.” Heh.
Daisy
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By: John Blackard

John Blackard — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:43:00 +0000

How does anyone write about where they live– whether they’re native to the place or not? I’ve lived in and around this North Carolina town most of my life, and it’s always felt foreign to me. Most of the places I remember here don’t even exist anymore. I think we’re all travel writers on some level. Maybe time travelers. I know I’m still haunted by places I visited and people I met the summer I traveled in Greece thirty-five years ago. The trip changed the way I thought about myself and about the spirit of place. By the way, it snowed here on Valentine’s Day, which rarely happens anymore. Cheers!
John Blackard
http://www.johnablackard.com
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