#constructing ruins
04/05/22 • text cut out from the information sheet for the cursus honorum exhibit at the capitoline museum / photo by my mother :-)
30/04/22 • poem for the anniversary of lucan’s death, cut out from his wikipedia + talk page
Lucan’s Death - clarify
a youth born in a century he regarded as a kind of death,
who grew up in a city burning with rhetoric.
he studied poetry until it bled
into history, the biography of a dying Republic
the wound at the core of the Silver-Voiced war-ode
he was not allowed to recite or publish.
A conspiracy is when you are discovered breathing
fire (and the rest of the story is better unsaid).
bleeding to death—30 April 65 AD—what survives,
or who? an Orpheus looking back on a City in flames,
the poem superfluous. his last words were disrupted.
an unspeakable judgement given to crime. but
his masterpiece of grief escaped, circulating
unfinished in the veins of other poets. read it and he lives.
26/11/21 • @galadhremmin said “idea. Save everything u chopped off [from the word count of a recent essay] and make into reverse blackout poem. Do necromancy on ur writing on necromancy,” unaware that i have incurable brainrot that makes me do these things Immediately and also makes every poem into catullus 51. h
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11/07/21 • iliad 18.50-77 translated using text from a national geographic piece on whales and whale song
Text ID: underwater it was gunmetal gray.
the whales wailed their rhythmic symphonies,
but Thetis led the lament:
“hear me, sister Nereids,
hear the dark sea rumble within me,
O unraveling me, the mother
who gave birth to the living
carcass of her newborn.
I cared for him, a young pine
on a mountain, taking root, raising branches,
and i sent him to Troy in a U-boat’s jaw.
But never again will I see
his homecoming, his return to me.
even while he survives in the light
of the sun, beneath the sea’s surface
it is inky dark, and he is mourned.
I can go to him, But there is no way
to protect him. I will see my child and hear
the grief that engulfs him, waiting out the war.”
She abandoned her song and the echoing waters,
and the deep-sea creatures went with her,
stringing sadness together in their dialect of clicks,
and around them the shapes of the waves
exploded into foam. /end ID
10/07/21 • iliad 18.52-54?56? It’s Ongoing
13/03/21
09/03/21 • poem made from the handout for a lecture on the fragmentary historical sources and missing tomb of alexander the great
Text ID: (Pause.) history is a vat of honey,
gold coalescing over the tombs of kings.
while exploring This otherwise-impossible space, you may
encounter the body. (Pause.)it died in Babylon
in June 323 BCE, and was buried in a tomb
of narrative possibilities. every historian reinters it.
(Pause.)there is reason to believe that the body
deteriorated. in the sarcophagus where time
is embalmed, a pseudo-body took shape, unlikely
to have incorporated the self. (Pause.)uncertainty
opens up the tomb, but the body lies still—history
made tactile and called Alexander. And now?
what fragments of him surviving can be glimpsed,
when someone asks (Pause.)whose body is this /end ID
