Our featured participant today is Christine Smart, whose lyrically-inspired villanelle for Day Eleven may make you . . . not want to read the news.
Our daily resource is the collection of the American Visionary Art Museum. Focused on outsider art – which is sort of like folk art’s more bonkers cousin – the museum describes itself as “one small speck in a Bling Universe where art reflects life, both literally and figurately.” I’m not exactly sure what a “Bling Universe” is, but it appears to include automatons featuring bathtubs filled with spaghetti, video tutorials for making sock monkeys, and kinetic sculpture races. Good times!
And after all those shenanigans we, we bring you a very serious (or is it?) optional prompt. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” It’s a complex poem that not only heavily features the idea of music, but is structured like a symphony. Its four sections, like symphonic movements, play with and expand on an overall theme, using the story of Susannah and the Elders as a backdrop.
Try writing a poem that makes reference to one or more myths, legends, or other well-known stories, that features wordplay (including rhyme), mixes formal and informal language, and contains multiple sections that play with a theme. Try also to incorporate at least one abstract concept – for example, desire or sorrow or pride or whimsy.
Happy writing!
Ah, now that’s a challenge I can tune into. A poem with myth and music, grief and groove, structure and strangeness. I had fun with this. Lots of fun, as you can see. My first thought was to go with Orpheus (I wrote a bit, maybe I will publish it as a second response...?) but I decided to stick to my blog theme and persona:
Myth of Oizys: Goddess of Misery – Greek personification of Misery. Rarely invoked directly in myth, which makes her perfect to be my haunting, half-seen muse. Here, she’s not just sorrow. She’s a kind of dissonant prayer, a force that demands to be felt but never fully explained.
Gilgamesh & Enkidu – Of course pulled from The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving literary works. Their story is one of loss and longing, of a hero who tries to outpace death and fails. Enkidu’s death is the axis around which Gilgamesh spins and the poem taps into that as a symbol of longing’s first true note.
Theme: Longing – Longing as grief, as beauty, as ache, as beat like those old, cracked lines that still hum beneath our feet.
Tone – If Stevens wrote jazz with the bones of the classics, this is a little midnight blues riff on his tune with some underworld smoke in the keys.
Symphony of Longing
I. PRELUDE IN DUSK MINOR
(a setting, soft and sly)
The dusk came loping in like grief with lipstick,
Trailing Oizys behind her, barefoot and bitter.
She hummed in fifths,
a dissonant kind of honey—
low like cello strings grumbling through molasses.
In Uruk's ruined courts, Gilgamesh still weeps,
palming stone tablets like forgotten lovers.
He knows:
even kings with names etched into time
must kneel to the hunger of night.
“I built the walls,” he says,
“but they do not keep out dream.”
And what is dream,
if not a symphony we misremember upon waking?
Oizys dances —
a sharp-heeled pas de deux on the bones of stars.
She's laughing in half-rhymes:
blister, sister / rue, undo / fate, too late.
Her breath smells like attic dust and half-read letters.
You can’t court a goddess like her.
You endure her.
You let her hang her coat in your ribs
and call it “home.”
She speaks:
“Desire is a jackal dressed in velvet.
Feed it once, and it names you meal.”
Still, we follow her music —
spilled like wine
on the floor of some dim-lit bar
where myth and man
sip gin together, wincing with every swallow.
There’s a silence between lovers
that tastes like copper and myth.
Here, Oizys kneels beside Enkidu’s grave.
She doesn’t cry —
her tears calcified centuries ago
into opals of ache.
She strokes the dust and speaks in whispers
so old they can only be heard
by those who’ve lost something unnamed.
“Grief,” she murmurs,
“is the twin of longing.
One looks back,
the other forward—
and both wear your face.”
She hums again —
this time, a lullaby:
three notes, descending.
Not unlike falling.
And what remains, after music has gone?
After myth folds its wings
and the last chord chokes in silence?
We remain.
Tuning our bones
to the rhythm of longing.
Still naming the stars
after the ones who left.
Oizys smiles, faintly —
a flicker, like candlelight remembering its purpose.
She slips into our dreams,
not as villain,
but muse.
Gilgamesh, old now,
carves one last note into the stone:
“To long is to live twice.”
And so the symphony plays on—
not in halls,
but in hearts,
where the strings hum
and ache
is music
we dare to remember.
- Oizys.
