For me, contemporary myth poems deserving of at least another reading are a rare find. Usually what I find are poems that recontextualize a myth or mythic figure, but I don't end up thinking about the myth or this world in any way remotely approaching the new. These poems by McKinley and Nienow, though, floored me.
McKinley's first book, Vanitas, winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize, is forthcoming from Texas Tech UP. Early 2011. Here's a link to another of McKinley's poems, "Speaking Gillican," posted at Poetry Daily.
The next poem by Matthew Nienow (be sure you click over to read the other good stuff published in the current issue of The Collagist) is one of those rare poems that hit me so hard in the gut on a first read that I actually uttered an expletive loud enough for E. to ask me what was the matter.
The matter was, as you'll find, that Matt's poem is a myth poem that also takes on a classical ode structure. And, no, I don't think I'm contorting the definition of "ode." There's no casual tossing around of the term in his poem. It gestures toward the Pindaric in structure and the Horatian in sensibility, and I find it to be deeply nostalgic, and moving. I think you will, too. Also, be sure to click the link and visit Matthew's blog, "It Goes Without Saying."_______
Persephone Descending
As if she were cock-eyed—one eye trained on what’s below,
the other squinting toward the sky—the landscape divides.
What’s at her feet is variegated, tinged with ash:
goldenrod smothered by silver, Queen Anne’s lace laid waste
by frost, curled into a bird’s nest, flecked with shroud.
The eye still angling life reels in a blaze of pomegranate,
quince, a copper beech, blue plums, and sun-streaked wheat.
She’s caught between two worlds, an eye in each,
the way I am this morning, winter pawing at my feet
while autumn rages through the trees, dying to fall.
from The Georgia Review, Fall 2010
Ode to Paul Bunyan
To have been blinded by the blade
just sharpened, its devil-toothed
grin swimming through the air
like whole schools of fish
or the ocean itself, a cliff
of agates, a sliver, a gleam,
the slit eye of a monster, a gash
in a silver creature’s side,
an opening to another world,
the crescent moon captured
and put to work, commanded
by the one man closer to god
than any other, who perhaps
should have been named Jesus
if Paul Bunyan hadn’t had
the perfect ring and pitch.
O, to have been witness to your work,
your ox, to have stood clear,
to have felt the thunder
of your cough, the shirring
of your breath, the rain
of your perspiration,
the earthquake of your step,
to have seen you sleeping
and think you the most beautiful mountain,
to have seen Babe standing over you
and think her the sky.
Matthew Nienow
from The Collagist, Issue 15
