Done With Mirrors

I’ve added a new blog to my blogroll: Done With Mirrors. The blogger over there is Callimachus (obviously a nomme de blog). There’s a lot that I like about Callimachus’s posts: there’s an enormous variety of subject matter, they’re well-written, and I like his point-of-view. It’s not identical to mine but it’s close enough that I find a certain resonance there. I’d say we rhyme.

So go over there and check him out. You’ll certain to find something interesting.

And, if you were curious, the original Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet and chief librarian of the Alexandrian Library. Not a great deal of his work has survived to the present day. Here’s his Prologue to the Aeitia:

The malignant gnomes who write reviews in Rhodes
are muttering about my poetry again –
tone-deaf ignoramuses out of touch with the Muse-
because I have not consummated a continuous epic
of thousands of lines on heroes and lords
but turn out minor texts as if I were a child
although my decades of years are substantial.
To which brood of cirrhotic adepts
I, Callimachus, thus:

A few distichs in the pan outweight Demeter’s Cornucopia
and Mimnermos is sweet for a few subtle lines,
not that fat Ladypoem Let “cranes fly south to Egypt”
when they lust for pygmy blood,
and “the Massagetai arch arrows long distance”
to lodge in a Mede,
but nightingales are honey-pale
and small poems are sweet.
So evaporate, Green-Eyed Monsters,
or learn to judge poems by the critic’s art
instead of by the parasang,
and don’t snoop around here for a poem that rumbles:
not I but Zeus owns the thunder.

When I first put a tablet on my knees, the Wolf-God
Apollo appeared and said:
Fatten your animal for sacrifice, poet,
but keep your muse slender.”
And “follow trails unrutted by wagons,
don’t drive your chariot down public highways,
but keep to the back roads though the going is narrow.
We are the poets for those who love
the cricket’s high chirping, not the noise of the jackass.”

Long-eared bray for others, for me delicate wings,
dewsip in old age and bright air for food,
mortality dropping from me like Sicily shifting
its triangular mass from Enkelados’s chest.
No nemesis here:
the Muses do not desert the gray heads
of those on whose childhood
their glance once brightened.