#Lucan in Averno

[catilinas]

not even the first of the romans can learn his roman history in the future tense […] hindsight as foresight makes no sense 🤝 we are trapped in meanings that circulate like blood 🤝 the past will lead on, saying nothing more than what it has already ceased to say

[fragbot]

Halfway off the path nobody keeps to, the poet meets himself in Hades, like a creditor on the stairs, a started ghost with a face of wet ashes and wrists hollow as wax the stylus dug too deeply, emptying of words.

- from "Lucan in Averno," Sonya Taaffe (x)

[ovidiana]

Lucan in Averno

Inspired by Sonya Taaffe’s poem (text under the cut)

Lucan in Averno by Sonya Taaffe

Halfway off the path nobody keeps to,

the poet meets himself in Hades

like a creditor on the stairs, a started ghost

with a face of wet ashes and wrists hollow as wax

the stylus dug too deeply, emptying of words.

Scared, with a cynic’s grin, he holds out

a half-corrected scroll, laurels frozen in his hair

like hemlock. Is he whispering his name?

Am I whispering it for him?

So casually we practice this blasphemy,

raking up the dead, their rings and calcined bones.

My tongue between his teeth will speak

of Cato, Caesar, and a nameless soldier’s corpse,

my fingers follow Nero’s razor cuts.

The past will lead on, saying nothing more

than what it has already ceased to say.

[transsexualprophet]

pez dorado - the mountain goats // modern rome - william turner // red is for soldiers - sonya taaffe // fragment 147 - sappho, trans. anne carson // ruins of an ancient city - john martin // an introduction to the ancient world - lukas de blois & r.j. van der spek // graffiti - sonya taaffe // alexandria corniche - samir shalabi // lucan in averno - sonya taaffe

[iphisesque]

im just like lucan in averno by sonya taaffe but a girl

[cithaerons]

happy lucan in averno by sonya taaffe sunday….

[the-literata-letters]

reading list - narrative & dramatic poetry

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS MY OTHER READING LISTS.

✵ ACTIVELY UPDATING ✵

☐  APOLLONIUS RHODIUS – Argonautica ☐  ARISTOTLE – Poetics ☐  BÉROUL – Tristan ☐  BLAKE, William – Songs of Innocence and Experience ☐  BROWNING, Robert – Home: Thoughts from Abroad ☐  BROWNING, Robert – The Laboratory ☐  BYRON, Lord – all narrative poems ☐  CAMÕES, Luis Vaz de – Os Lusíadas ☐  CARSON, Anne – Autobiography of Red ☐  CHRÉTIEN de TROYES – Arthurian cycle ☐  COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ☐  DANTE – Divina Commedia ☐  GLÜCK, Louise – Averno ☐  GLÜCK, Louise – Meadowlands ☐  HESIOD – Theogony ☐  HOMER – The Illiad ☐  HOMER – The Odyssey ☐  HORACE – Ars Poetica ☐  ITALICUS, Silius – Punica ☐  KEATS, John – Endymion ☐  KEATS, John – Ode on Indolence ☐  LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth – The Song of Hiawatha ☐  LUCAN – Pharsalia ☐  LUCRETIUS – De rerum natura ☐  MACAULAY, Thomas Babington – Lays of Ancient Rome ☐  MARTIALIS, Marcus Valerius – Epigrammata ☐  MICKIEWICZ, Adam – Pan Tadeusz ☐  MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent – The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver ☐  MIŁOSZ, Czesław – Traktat poetycki ☐  MILTON, John – Paradise Lost ☐  OSWALD, Alice – Memorial ☐  OVID – Metamorphoses ☐  OVID – Fasti ☐  SHAKESPEARE, William – The Seven Ages of Man ☐  STATIUS, Publius Papinius – Thebaid ☐  STATIUS, Publius Papinius – Achilleid ☐  TENNYSON, Alfred – Idylls of the King ☐  UNATTRIBUTED – Epic of Gilgamesh ☐  UNATTRIBUTED – Beowulf ☐  UNATTRIBUTED – La Chanson de Roland ☐  UNATTRIBUTED – Sasna cṙer ☐  UNATTRIBUTED – El Cantar de mio Cid ☐  UNATTRIBUTED – Der Nibelunge liet ☐  VALERIUS FLACCUS, Gaius – Argonautica ☐  VIRGIL – The Aeneid ☐  VIRGIL – Georgics ☐  WALCOTT, Derek – Omeros

POETS

GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von HARDY, Thomas TENNYSON, Alfred

[catilinas]

hihi is necronarrative an extablished theory i could read about or look into more? 👀 do you have any recs or should i start fishing?

i am so sorry to have to inform you that it is a word i made up like last week :/ and i'm not entirely sure what i mean by it yet, but definitely Something. it is vaguely adjacent to the stuff in this tag (which is a line from lucan in averno by sonya taaffe) but like. my tongue between his teeth will speak is more about authors (re)animating or repurposing the dead via writing (and imo includes Translation As Necromancy my beloved) while necronarratology is more. what if an inset narrative was a dead person. narratives around and about a dead person. not necessarily reanimated in any way. or even specifically not reanimated in any way. like how else is the death written around or what is it written into. there is definitely overlap between the two ideas! they are both ways of thinking about what's going on behind the amount of ''''''agency'''''' a work gives to dead people, and what for in which direction etc. idk im still figuring it out. i recommend lucan's pharsalia probably! or like anything about narratology and then put ghosts in it. it's just narratology with dead people. hauntology adjacent?????? probably. but with more narratology :-)

[catilinas]

for the essay ask thing: 3, 6, and 14!

3. What essay was most outside of your comfort zone?

definitelyyy one on like. roman law (or ig semi-legal public shaming rituals? the flagitatio is law-adjacent but it's not technically A Law) in plautus like i just don't really care about plautus And the module made it really hard to find actual Legal sources bcs the guy running it actually specialised in love elegy??? turns out the Big article that everyone cites on the flagitatio is over 100 years old and in german. also i was doing the reading for it approximately during the aftermath of tumblr historical event november 5th, so was. not the most focused alas

6. What was your dissertation about (if you’ve already written one)?

lucan! my guy!!! and WOMEN! it grew out of me getting very pissed off at a) bruère saying "the women in lucan's bellum civile are, with two exceptions, unsubstantial or grotesque," and b) alison keith saying "no latin epic is complete without the death agony of woman" bcs like. fury rage anger etc. keith is just plain wrong bcs...... show me the woman who dies in lucan. who is she. phemonoe? phemonoe is hyped up like she's Going to die, but then Doesn't. julia? julia is historically dead before the poem starts and Comes Back As A Ghost. that's like the opposite of killing off the female characters. but bruère is lowkey right that a majority of lucan's female characters are. not insubstantial but...... spectral. or otherwise 'grotesque' in their constant association with death Without Dying Themselves. so my diss was basically asking what the fuck is going on, via weird detours to like. Is Being Proleptically Dead A Gender?, Legally You Cannot Divorce A Ghost, Fellas Is It Matrona-coded To Graverob Pompey Magnus' Actual Real Skeleton, Necromancy Is Metapoetic And Also Sexy, and Prophecy Is Just When You Remember The Future. in conclusion: holy shit i have so many conspiracy theories about lucan's wife polla argentaria, none of which actually made it into the thing.

one of my favourite deeply niche parts was getting to use a line from horace smith's ozymandias as title on the chapter abt pompey's fucked up funeral bcs like. the intertexts that lucan has w horace odes 3.30 + that both ozymandias poems Also have w odes 3.30 + pompey's Trunk as priam's corpse and the whole aeneid thing + 'trunkless' in shelley + the whole idea that a p famous poem actually has a whole shadowy Other poem that it's lowkey in a losing competition with? THAT'S lucancore to the max. and also extra funny to Me bcs 'a gigantic Leg' as the only relic of a dead guy + pompey's funeral is just so john franklin the terror vibes. franklin pompey REAL. intertexts for one person (me). anyway shoutout to horace smith for writing an objectively worse poem than shelley BUT also accidentally(?) getting perfect lucan particularly book 9 troy-but-it's-actually-rome vibes into it.

i've already answered 14!

[catilinas]

need to read bartsch’s aeneid i am SURE it is deeply haunted by lucan

[catilinas]

im sorry but your tag “#my tongue between his teeth will speak” on the recent post about greek masks, just took me the f*ck OUT!!!! in a positive way :)

but PHEW!!! I need to sit by the ocean and think for a minute after reading that tag…

NICE but i must make you aware that it is a line from the poem lucan in averno by sonya taaffe!

[cithaerons]

happy lucan in averno by sonya taaffe thursday

[catilinas]

fave poems/poets?

the aeneid (tr. dryden or ruden)

catullus 51(tr. peter whigham)

the library of ice - helen mort

alphabet - norman cameron

in a cardiff arcade, 1952 - gillian clarke

postscript - seamus heaney

dyad - katharine towers

midnight - katharine towers

good bones - maggie smith

nox - anne carson

autobiography of red - anne carson

advertisement for the lonely heads column - caroline bird

sonnet to eva - sylvia plath

falling into the sea - w.s. graham

the nightfishing - w.s. graham

implements in their places - w.s. graham

(tbh anything by w.s. graham)

the fire - mary oliver

famous last words - john glenday

frater ave atque vale - tennyson

turnus - rosanna warren

dear lemon engine - lauren zuniga

dulce et decorum est - wilfred owen

anthem for doomed youth - wilfred owen

exposure - wilfred owen

memorial - alice oswald

lucan in averno - sonya taaffe

you poem - marianne morris

having a coke with you - frank o’hara

requiem - anna akhmatova

war music - christopher logue

that one limerick about eating poisoned apples and dying 

the motor bus - alfred dennis godley