Making the Song GO

A new realization [Yet Again!!!]

2009-12-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

I've had a couple realizations and gradual shifts regarding the work and my perspective to the work. Not long ago I started writing a 'study guide' of sorts, and that's obliged me to focus my attention on what I'm trying to communicate and accomplish. Which is fine.
Also I've come to see that since I've been writing the epic itself into the void (meaning that I still don't have much of a readership, and yet that fact hasn't kept me from working on it; 2009 saw a lot of progress on the work! And for that reason alone I should think of it as a very good year, even though the previous one had been much better for my bug business) I might as well do the same thing with this blog.
Therefore I'm pushing forward, starting off with a small excerpt from the notes. {publishing notes instead of text is much easier, since although I'd like to include the best pieces of RW itself, I do want to start sending them off to journals -- yes, really -- and I don't want to disqualify myself from that}

Still on the fence regarding whether to write and/or post the Notes in the first or third person. Overall I find it a little easier to write them in third; somehow simpler to write ridiculous things about myself that way...

The Beginning and The End.

In early December 2009, around the time he started this study guide, he started realizing that he had fallen in love with some pieces of his own work; in fact he’d been in love with them for a good deal before that. It’s probably not such a healthy thing. In any case, the start and the ending of RW are prime examples of places where he detected his own genius.

The first line of the entire work is

Won’t someone tell me, please, the narrative

which features several of the special and powerful elements of the work. It starts with a contraction, which is a particularly modern typographical construction, therefore sending a message about the author's attitude about sacrosanct flowery language. Maybe. It's also a way to throw extra emphasis onto whatever syllable follows. Also the line is a sly promise: the first line suggests that the rest of the poem will be this particular narrative asked for. And since no one else can tell the narrator the story, Dave has had to write it himself, which means he’s telling himself the story even though he’s asked someone to tell it to him. This offers a window into Dave’s yearning for either an answer or for someone else to talk with – someone who knows something he hasn’t found. This is baldly state with the use of “me,” though direct expression of the narrator’s presence is very limited in the work: there's no knowing just yet how many there are of them, but probably less than ten references.

Getting more critiques from the world

2009-05-08T05:41:00.000-07:00

The new happenings include my increased courage: gettin' out there and asking some poets if they grok what I'm doing. I submitted both the first and last shards at three different forums. The mixed results are below, though some site administrator might well cull these threads at some point.

At each site I started by critiquing roughly ten poems as required [in fact one was required to post only one crit, but I was generous. ]

The first forum was Freewrights. I went by Dagra there and a little friction ensued between myself and another poet, not so much in the critique of my work as on other threads, where I'd critiqued someone else's work.

http://freewrights.freeforums.org/shard-one-t1267.html

The last shard got no feedback at all.

Next was "401: Songs of Despair," on the poets.org site. There I was DaveDave, and yeah, there was more friction. Lots more, and I THREW DOWN. The carnage is there to be witnessed -- it's relatively polite carnage. http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18647 and http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18667

Condensed version: Someone whose work I'd critiqued responded in kind. We had a brief discussion. No-one else contributed, so I eventually posted gentle challenges. This brought some other replies; I responded, and then an administrator reminded me of the rules. Upon which she felt I'd trespassed. Though I didn't agree I was most civil.

Then came Scribophile, and life became better. I'd found them serendipitously, through a Google alert for "epic poem." They had an epic poem contest, requiring iambic pentameter in heroic couplets with a 2,000 word limit. I don't want to confirm that I'm a total epic poetry snob, so I'll just leave it alone. What matters is that I both gave and GOT some good critiques: they said nice things about the work, and more importantly were insightful and appeared to grasp what I was trying to do.

http://www.scribophile.com/authors/dave-gracer/works/shard-one/

http://www.scribophile.com/authors/dave-gracer/works/shard-twenty-five/

I'm not certain there's much point in posting all of this, but this blog concerns my efforts to complete the poem and to communicate my work to the rest of the world. In the last few weeks I've gotten new determination to do both.

More Stuff Coming.

New Life

2009-04-25T04:16:00.001-07:00

Hard to believe that it's been less than a month since the last post -- feels like a year has passed.

On second thought, NO this blog is not dead. My renaissance of interest in the poem is expanding, and part of that rebirth (I'm committed to finishing it, as best I can) is to keep trying to communicate what I'm doing. This blog is an important part of that, even if no one's reading it, and there's no indication that anyone has.

But it's fine if my work on the poem and in this blog is like standing in the wilderness, cupping my hands around my mouth, and shouting. It's cool if the work will never be as good in the real world as it is in my internal vision of it. It's even okay if this blog lacks dynamic presentation, like images and stuff. Maybe someone will come along and read about what I'm trying to do.

Onward.

I guess I'm done with this after all

2009-04-03T04:08:00.000-07:00

I'd meant to keep this blog as a record of the creative process. I posted a couple interesting things about what I'm trying to do with the epic, but it's time to stop kidding myself.

After neglecting the work for a long time, I'm busy with it. The noble Sachio of Philadelphia is reading it (it's roughly 450 single-spaced pages and about 9700 lines). Some friends of his are interested in the work, so there will be some sharing. I've posted two excerpts on poetry forums, which I hadn't done before. No one replied with anything useful; in fact there have been extremely few responses at all, even though I'd critiqued other poems previously, as etiquette requires.

There's no point in maintaining this blog, but I'll leave it up: a cairn and a beacon.

The title, and other updates

2008-04-07T08:31:00.000-07:00

Hi again.

This may seem a tad ridiculous, but at least for the benefit of you folks who've just arrived: this blog concerns my work on a long poem, entitled Returning Waves.

I thought I'd mentioned that before, but no.

I'm hopefully starting to get better about posting at my other blog, but I doubt that that will happen for this one. I'm trying to write more on entomophagy, and succeed in putting a book together on that subject. With a lot of hard work it might become acceptable to the public -- the book, that is, as opposed to entomophagy itself.

As much as I'd like to get more done on the epic, I don't see that happening in the near future. Other parts of life are pulling at me.

I'm aware that this blog doesn't get much traffic, but I felt like posting this info.

To anyone reading this, have a good Spring.

We Are Not Dead.

2007-12-27T13:13:00.000-08:00

So yeah.... been a while since the last post. (I haven't done all that much with my other blog either but the point is that) I'm still at work on the beast. Early this fall I'd found a helpful method; I printed shadow copies of the episodes wherein I 'shrunk' the content of the longer scenes into the smallest font size possible.

Doing this makes a 17-page episode print as 8 pages, which throws new light on the landscape of the storylines. I can more easily ensconce the written-but-not-placed segments in their proper positions within the overall arc of the narrative. Stuff like that.

And actually I had gone several months without touching the work but I'm back to it now. With a little determination 2008 will see more activity on both the work and the blog that seeks to document it.

Has it Died?

2007-11-15T03:55:00.000-08:00

The Epic lives. This blog, on the other hand....

In September I printed the whole thing -- a protracted undertaking. I also printed the innovation I'd discovered early this year: compressed text. Finding it hard to keep track of the story-lines (each piece is pages long) I keep the first few lines at 12pt but shrink the rest to 1pt. Looks good.

But the rest of my life has had

===============

just vague lines, as can be seen. Retained for historical record. Published same night as Queen Ant post

Portrait of a Queen

2007-08-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of a queen carpenter ant; she was taken as part of a raid on a large colony back in the heat of the summer.

There were many queens there, and even more drones and workers. Their frenzied movements made the ground look almost like a threadbare black-and-gold carpet, the gold being their wings of course, upon the soft brown floor of the shattered, softened former tree-trunk . They were running for their lives but I captured many of them. Readers of my other blog will know my reason for the raid.

Anyway, I couldn't help but think of Mab, even though she's a Termite of course and not an Ant. I should consider having specimens -- insects in particular, but other creatures also -- in front of me so as to write about them while inspired by their lifeless forms. Or at least find if that will work for me....

For no particularly good reason other than my own amusement, I'll add that, regardless of whatever date this entry posts on, I'm writing this on Winter Solstice 2009. This entry was languishing in the 'drafts' bin and I finally finished it. Such is my screwball methodology.

The Underlying Proposition

2007-07-23T17:09:00.001-07:00

For some reason it's never really sunk in that the basis of the opus is kind of old hat, in a way. One of the things at the bedrock is the idea that humanity is on its way out; that our species is doomed; that the end is nigh.

There's a lot of reason to think so. When I say to people -- as I sometimes do -- that the writing is on the wall, and our species is living beyond its means so egregiously that we're doomed, they agree with me. This means that either they really feel this way or they're simply putting on the pose for my benefit, which is also quite possible.

One would have to admit that the mountains of evidence are overwhelming. These days the only people who deny global climate change, loss of biodiversity, etc have a vested interest in doing so, or are working hard to live in denial. The science on this subject seems to be extremely clear. But the fact remains that people have been saying this for a very long time. There's never been a shortage of people who see the great big cataclysm heading right towards us. Despite their convictions both the world and the humans upon it are intact.

The same could be true even now. What if all this dire glacier-melting, temperature-rising, rain-forest-falling, fisheries-depleting, and population-skyrocketing turns out to be no big deal, that the data has been read incorrectly or that we'll develop a technology that will save our asses and humanity is going to be fine? Wouldn't that be a travesty? It would mean that our species could do exactly what it wanted, with no consideration of the consequences, and still not have to be faced with any consequences. Where's the fairness in that?

D-Day for the environment

2007-07-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

It's time for a real excerpt.
This is from Shard Three [codename: beaten] and it details the havoc wreaked by The Flood. This could be a good place to launch into a disputation about the Ark movie currently playing in the theaters, Evan Almighty. That's not for today, though; I'll just post the verse.
Hope it's not too effen long.

Throughout the Beasts' peregrinations, the skies
made them apprehensive. A soft glow caressed
the mountaintops and tallest limbs of stunted Trees.
Lightning touched a Giraffe's horns. He toppled;
his widow turned to seek an alternate,
yet his heart revived and he regained his feet.
The sky cleared its throat; resulting hail
brought low the shrubs and baby Trees.
The world was rendered in a dark palette --
the light diffused, a king banished, hiding
in the vents of clouds, glinting on bushes and stones.
The world a play, the Beasts an audience forced
upon the stage, watching storms convene.
Springs below them bubbled upwards, to bury the land;
the sky developed along a path of bitter rage,
as if the Land had deeply offended. Winds
swept the earth like minions sent to the fore.
Birds that fled their flailing perches were touched
by lightning's fingertip or brutally concussed
between the meatless palms of thunder's hands.
Waves of rain like tall Grass in the wind
grew upon the land, rejoining itself.
The water nibbled, chewed, and sucked
the soil, annexing, adding to its strength. Was it one
or many? Army made of millions or mass
amoebic? Water played leapfrog down canyons,
formed columns, made a flowing host, subsuming
the world, aided by forces that spoke with the storm.
A thousand streams burst upward; their stones mixed
with hail descending. The many worlds
that make The World perished in their fashions: deserts
drank their death; tumbleweeds flew before
the damp winds o'er plains and high rangelands.
Along the banks of rivers, supple Willows
essayed to bend and thus appease the gale,
but flowing water, overweening, stole
the motes of earth from out the smallest roots.
Bereft of their foundations, they toppled, weeping.
Immense jungle Trees came down as well,
despite their buttress roots. The scenes bespoke
of sudden invasion from a host that knew
the victory that comes without resistance.
The sluicing killer raped the upland meadows;
With boneless hands the cataracts birthed upon
the level, fertile expanses seized that good
and topmost soil. Bushes flew, and Flowers
were ripped to shreds. The fragrant Herbs
in simple gardens keened. Along the sides
of lustrous mountains, grim, arcing scythes
that gained speed felled stands of thick Bamboo.
Trees flew from earth, struck by an infinite blackjack,
cold and weighted with passive trunks become
broom-straws wrought into weapons, sweeping clean
the world. Grass-stems piped tinny screams and joined
a soup of matter. Thus the round body
went through its convulsions. As befell the plants,
so the roaring waves found the Beasts,
whose very screams of shock killed them:
into open mouths expressing chagrin flowed water
that filled their lungs -- the few who'd not died
at once lost their lives in one of many other ways.
Coyote, famed for ingenuity, now found
himself short of tricks. His flailing limbs
did nothing to prolong his life. The tiny Owls
nesting in Cactus trees chirped forlornly
as their homes toppled, the water exploring all
the little byways therein. Rattlesnakes heard
the waves from afar, pounding the arid floor.
Lifting noisy tails, the Snakes warned
whatever had dared challenge them; they died
striking the shape of water that overcame
them. Seals and well-blubbered Walrus tried
to navigate, but wind and surf combined
to smash them against the rocky shores. All
were killed: the Snails in temperate gardens; fast
and garish Lizards hidden in jungle leaves;
Cheetahs racing across veldt; Penguins sliding
on bellies as icebergs clashed around them.
Like the meat of soft fruit beneath a thumb,
the world's flesh slewed and yawed. Indeed,
the very dirt itself became a rainbow
of disordered silt; an ocher toy that spun
in spirals; a gauzy mist; a vast ghost.
The land, submerged, disresembled what
it had been before. Most regions were consumed
in mud's myriad grades. The former seas,
subsumed, held jumbled life: the Dolphins, Whales,
and sundry Fish surprised by moving surf
were snapped in half, and died terrified by the storm's dim
reflection, and smaller things encased in thick
armor, afraid and yet determined to celebrate,
for the storm met with their approval.
The streaming sheets of rising silt buried
Oyster beds, overwhelmed fields
of Grass Eels, and confused the Rock Lobsters
that walked in single file; they broke their holds
upon each others' tails and scuttled each
to safety. At first the Fish refused to stir;
the stones ground against each other like teeth
before the boulders tumbled by the storm crushed
many who'd gathered beneath; their pulped bodies made
the water thick. Yet those that fled fared no better.
Yet in certain places, due to slopes
and subtle gradients of the land, the water's flow
had taken like a gentle lover, not
a rapist, engulfing slowly; these spoke of peace,
as if preserved in crystal. The flood had been
a peaceful despot, the Beasts and Plants euthanized,
the land pacified without a mark of damage.
Where certain forest acres hung suspended,
and stilled currents kept the motes of seed
and leaf from drifting throughout the drowned woods.
Beneath a raging storm was calm, and when
at length the sun would return, after the span
of storm, the light would shine in long shafts of gold.
At length the bits of matter slowly calmed,
and lapped the base of a hill. Those that approached
endured the small fists that hammered them
and therefore couldn’t appreciate the scene.

One reason to post this now: last night I saw a really good WWII movie, "When Trumpets Fade." What a great story, like Shakespeare and the Iliad and Middle Earth and a Documentary all in one. It concerns the Hurtgen Forest battle, not D-Day, but it got me thinking and besides I'd described the above passage to Jo as reminscent of D-Day as seen in "Saving Private Ryan."

I'd suppose that the day the asteroid hit -- the one that supposedly killed off the dinosaurs -- would've been like D-Day. These days not much happens in a single day that could be called 'cataclysmic.' On the other hand, in the total time-scale of Life on Earth, the last few hundred years isn't much; we've arisen and changed things in the blink of an eye, relatively speaking. But it may seem that from our point of view we haven't been doing all that much. Sure, we lose a lot of rain forest, and for specific populations [or even entire species] a few acres of jungle falling is like the apocalypse. But in the bigger picture it's death by degrees. Reminds one of that old chestnut about the frog in the pot; throw him in boiling water and he'll bolt, but turn the heat up gradually and he'll stay and die.
Not a bad metaphor for our approach...

The Gruden Box

2007-07-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Mailbox along a road I use for a frequent three-hour trip, and it always caught my attention. I think it was more than just the white-and-black stencilled garishness; the sound of the name stuck in my head.

It became the name of my poem's main protagonist; this is the only time I took a name off a mailbox, and I don't believe I ever went through a phone book looking for names as I've read about other writers doing, but then I've been working on the damn thing for a long time, with great big gaps between the work, and so my mind is hazy. Some names, like Prizren, I got from the current events of the day; that was in the '90s. Prizren was/is the name of a town in the Balkans that saw at least its fair share of slaughter and suchlike atrocities. Other character names came from the names of ex-girlfriends, or are altered names of writers or their characters, or are the Latin names of real animals, or are etc., etc.

In actual fact I mostly wanted an excuse to include a picture or two in the blog, but recently I found some reasons to include more of them in future posts. [And maybe some further excerpts too, even].

Anyway, Gruden is Achilles-meets-Hamlet, with the latter dominating. A previous version of that sentence included the male pronoun, yet Gruden -- like nearly all of the Termite characters -- is neither male nor female. I'm pretty sure that the great majority of the eusocial insects feature workers and soldiers that are non-reproductive, and in the convenient shorthand of our world that means that they're genderless. Therefor my epic utilizes gender neutral pronouns for these characters. I've opted for "seu," and its forms "seul" for possessive and "seult" for nominative. At least I think that that's the correct term of the case: stands in for "him/her." Though I teach English in its forms for a living, I've never studied ESL and consequently learned my mother tongue the way that most have; without knowing the jargon, meaning the names of the different components beyond the parts of speech.

Some more feedback

2007-07-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

Though this isn't much of a big revelation, I thought I'd send it out into the void....

I spoke with a friend -- Jo -- about a week ago about the work. She'd had a bunch of pages for some time, and when I got to her place the pages had a lot of comments and questions all over them. It's really heartening to see that. She asked me to explain a few things about what I'm trying to do, and as I explained the themes I've got, well, it flowed out of me nicely. So I guess I'll try to recapture that here.

I've taken the Noah's Ark myth and adapted it so that I can talk about what most interests me, which is the "mythological aspect," for lack of a better phrase, of: ecology and the environment; humanity's horrific impact on same; evolution; etc. I can't claim to be deliriously happy with my choice of original inspiration -- even when I started the project I felt that the biblical Flood Narrative is overused and a little trite [the recent movie with Steve Carell only highlights this, and deserves its own post].

Yet it's this particular tale that best suits my needs. The same is true of the central plot device: the backbone of my story is that the Termites eat the Ark. As before, this sometimes strikes me as a really overly-predictable and trite plot device, but everything I'm trying to do hinges on this choice that these characters make. They make their choice for two reasons: first, because they [feel that they] have no other choice given the circumstances, and second because it's their primary function to consume. It's the same for our species, and it's led us to the world we live in right now.

Though I could ramble on regarding the human situation here in 2007, it's back to the work at hand. In my story the world ends several times, but each ending is simply a transition to the next thing. If we look at the fossil record as interpreted by paleontologists, we see a series of mass extinctions (and if we look at that same history from the point of view of an artist, we might well think of different themes; ideas; attempts; paradigms; each tried out for a time and then discarded). There seems to have been five of these, and we are currently living in the sixth. What makes this one unique is that this is the first one to be caused by a single species of life, as opposed to, say, impact from an asteroid...
But in each previous case, when up to 90% of life on the planet was destroyed, enough was left to carry on. And what came next was completely unlike what had been before the event. In the current case, we won't be killing off quite that large a percentage, but it still might well be enough to ensure our own demise.

But again, I digress. The course of my tale thus mirrors what happens in Nature. There are other themes, but this is a big one: redemption through evolution. And, moreover, play as expressed through the medium of organisms. Now sure, some may say that this kind of talk is ripe for accusations of "Intelligent Design." I'm not sure of how to respond to that; on the one hand, I find ID to be an amusing, even pleasing notion because it helps me in some way to make sense of the universe. This follows the Vonnegut model propounded in "Cat's Cradle," wherein religion is a bunch of lies [read: a story] that makes one feel better. Well ID is just that bunch of lies for me, and perhaps for others too.

On the other hand, it seems clear that ID is most likely a sneaky tool created and manipulated by those who would seek to introduce some faith-based quasi-Christian thinking into public-education and general discourse, thereby displacing the good ol' rationality and egalitarianism embodied in the more neutral scientific-method approach. This is troubling of course. Not only do I have no problem with scientific thinking, but hey it's quite useful in many cases, and has gotten us out of some jams. (Gary Trudeau did one or two great strips on this topic in Doonesbury -- a doctor has to tell his patient about the fact that an infection has evolved in response to the drugs administered. I wish I'd kept a URL for that particular strip.) The fact that some of the craftier Jesus-heads may well be using ID for their own political ends is regrettable and unhelpful, but then people will tend to be disappointing sometimes, won't they?

As a consequence to this perceived attack on evolution, parts of the scientific community are lashing back, to the result that one who may wish to point out to patterns in nature may find himself in a duck-and-cover kind of place. I've got this group of essays I've been fooling with for several years now, and they focus on the recurrent themes found throughout Nature. I'd like to see them published -- or at least like to start sending them out there -- but I haven't researched the markets much, and I'd dislike the prospect of having to defend my views against those with better debating skills than myself.

Jo said she'd like to see more of the epic, which is great and I'm happy to oblige [I may well be reading some of her stuff too]. I told her what I've told others, which is that the sad thing about writing an epic poem is that it's the literary equivalent of an edible insect business. Meaning that it's completely unmarketable.

Or maybe it's just a longshot.....

Two responses

2007-06-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Over the years I've had a relatively small number of responses to the work. They range from positive to negative and from articulate to vague. More importantly for this blog, some were spoken, others hard-copy-written, and still others emailed. Though I may someday key in some of the printed comments, but that seems unnecessary.

In December 2005 I got two responses in the same week. The first was from George, a friend of my friend Eric. George lives in NC, where Eric is from. Eric had said that George should absolutely see some of the work, that he'd love it and have lots to say. Didn't work out that way.

=============================

.... I just can't seem to really connect emotionally with it. It's certainly well-wrought and pentameterifically well-measured. And the flow of the words is pleasing. But the combination of not knowing what the f--k it's about combined with the obvious great length and lack of much that I could personally relate to makes it very hard for me, personally, to say much more about it. Please tell Dave not to take my lack of enjoyment as a crushing blow. Tell him that I hardly read or enjoy ANY modern poetry, so I'm really not the one to ask. Maybe he should post bits of it at www.everypoet.org They're more than eager to do detailed critiques of shit that I can't even read. And Bobbie only comes up here to the library once every month or so. I'm sure that Dave's a fascinating guy and I would love to talk to him in a less specialized context. Sorry I can't be any more helpful.

========================

The second response was from Keith, whom I'd found online by virtue of a literary journal he'd edited. I remember being impressed with the journal, though I wasn't sure I'd understood all of the entries. Upon receiving my email Keith said he'd be quite willing to look at some of my stuff, and this is part of his feedback:

===============================

I think it is an effective mix of language, form, story and character. To me, the key to writing a modern epic is finding the right mix of these elements, and if you don’t have the right mix of all, your effort is doomed. The epic is, by definition, an elevated style. I think a lot of people have erred by trying to force a modern drawing room drama into an epic style (to give one example). I’ve made that mistake in my verse dramas.

With just the excerpts I got a sense of the story, but I’m obviously missing many of the details. The poem, however, has a fascinating thematic mix of ecology, evolution, apocalypse, fantasy and religion. And the animal perspective gives it a fable quality.

The language is very expressive, the style elevated. Personally, I like a more elevated style. Poetry, I believe, should sound a little odd. It shouldn’t sound like prose. It’s not supposed to be colloquial. The only problem I’ve run into myself is occasionally slipping into a colloquial style which can undercut the overall tone of the work.

The excerpts seem to focus on a world of people and animals – is there a single character presented in depth? Or is it striving to show a whole social spectrum?

=====================================

Keith's feedback has been on my mind a good deal; that, plus the fact that despite my sincere appreciation of his work on behalf of what I'd sent him, I'd never thanked him. For some reason it's been only recently that I've gotten better at thanking people for what they've done for me. Yeah, I know; pretty inexcusable.
I'm going to thank Keith, even though it's been a really long time since we were in touch. Whether or not he'll be willing to look at any more of the epic will be another matter. I'll keep you updated.

The Story Thus Far

2007-06-03T08:08:00.000-07:00

Must start this way; as with my other blog, I've jumped on this bandwagon quite late in the history of blogging. More importantly, it's [hopefully] late in the history of the subject, which is my epic poem.

I started it properly in early March 1997, though some of the basics arose in 1991. I will be posting some selections of the poem, plus news updates, critiques I've received, and maybe a little ranting. In the unlikely event that it gets published (or even if I just finish it, for that matter) I'll have a handy place to document the progress.

The poem is a loosely-construed blank verse. It's roughly 400 single-spaced pages, depending on how one counts it. I'd guess that it's about 10,000 lines, but that's just a guess. It concerns a narrative we all know about, but it's been reworked to suit my own purposes. Not so different from Tom Stoppard did with Hamlet for his play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

More to come.

Also: in case it's not clear, I used the word "Song" in the blog's title not because there's any music involved, but because epics have traditionally been thought of as songs. The idea makes me feel good.

Here are the first few lines:

Won't someone tell me, please, the narrative
of their ordeals, and such beatific stuff
as how they’d lived and died; transformed; and came
around like living, dancing boomerangs
to find again their serried ranks and roles?
O tell me, brain, my antic attic Muse --
assist me as we share their story. Did
an unchecked vengeance make them suffer? Their
beseeching voices claim as much, and cry
for my attention. Me? I yearn for a song
that no one's sung before, and wish that it
would teach me; make me clever; let me try
to make it new. This pen, mundane, becomes
a votive taper – by its glow I will
a novel tale beverse, wrought without
a hero, filled with yet bereft of foes
and wrongs.