University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

H.D.'s dramatic poetics: tragedy, translation, and processional poems; &, The jasmine years: in three books, Los Angeles, 2013-2020

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H.D.'s dramatic poetics: tragedy, translation, and processional poems; &, The jasmine years: in three books, Los Angeles, 2013-2020

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H.D.’S DRAMATIC POETICS:

TRAGEDY, TRANSLATION, AND PROCESSIONAL POEMS

&

THE JASMINE YEARS:

IN THREE BOOKS, LOS ANGELES 2013-2020

by

Catherine Marion Theis

A Critical and Creative Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Catherine Marion Theis

ii

“Let us take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra,
shining red on one side, black on the other. Here, Jinny, if we curl up close, we can sit under the
canopy of the currant leaves and watch the censers swing. This is our universe.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

iii

for all my teachers,
including Gianluca

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

LITERATURE

Epigraph ............................................................................................................................................................ ii

Dedication ......................................................................................................................................................... iii

Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................. vi

Introduction: prologue as AMPHORA ........................................................................................................ 1

Chapter 1: Entrances and Exits ...................................................................................................................... 7

Chapter 2: After a Choral Conditioning ...................................................................................................... 38

Chapter 3: Braving the Elements: H.D. and Jeffers .................................................................................. 65

Chapter 4: Performing the Classics: Oswald, Carson, and The Legacy of H.D. .................................. 88

Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................. 108

CREATIVE WRITING

The Jasmine Years: In Three Books, Los Angeles 2013-2020 .............................................................. 115

Book 1: SOPHIA .......................................................................................................................................... 117
Little Oranges .............................................................................................................................. 118
Treat Yourself Like a Sultan ..................................................................................................... 119
A Work of Art ............................................................................................................................. 145
Buen Clima .................................................................................................................................. 154

Book 2: NAXOS .......................................................................................................................................... 171
A Correspondence ...................................................................................................................... 172
The Reservoir .............................................................................................................................. 173
On Not Visiting Keats’ Grave .................................................................................................. 174
Under the Bloom ........................................................................................................................ 175
On Not Understanding Greek ................................................................................................. 176
The Educated Imagination......................................................................................................... 177
Wattage ......................................................................................................................................... 178
Wildfires ....................................................................................................................................... 179
A Carriage Ride Through the Park .......................................................................................... 180
Affidamento ................................................................................................................................ 181
A Whole Army to Feed ............................................................................................................. 182
The Living Joints ........................................................................................................................ 186
Dear Incognito, .......................................................................................................................... 187

v
Unlived ......................................................................................................................................... 205
Beach Photographs .................................................................................................................... 206
The Ruins ..................................................................................................................................... 207
Ionian Coast ................................................................................................................................ 208
Song .............................................................................................................................................. 209
Tree of Life, Unfinished ............................................................................................................ 210
Last Things .................................................................................................................................. 211
Sentences ..................................................................................................................................... 212
This Art ........................................................................................................................................ 213
This Vacant Seat ......................................................................................................................... 214

Book 3: L’AVVENTURA............................................................................................................................ 215
L’avventura, a prologue ........................................................................................................... 216
How Far the Fall: On Medea in 20 Acts ................................................................................. 217
Something Like the Missalette .................................................................................................. 226
Speechless Complainer, What Is it Like? ................................................................................ 228
Catastrophe Diary: Construction of a Poets’ Theater .......................................................... 233
Understudy, Understage, Undersiege ...................................................................................... 250
Pre-chive: Towards a Theory of a Performative Archive .................................................... 252
Indecipherable Hieroglyph ....................................................................................................... 261
At the Getty Villa ....................................................................................................................... 288

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... 296

vi
ABSTRACT

H.D.’S DRAMATIC POETICS: This study examines how the poet Hilda Doolittle’s (H.D.)
theatrical adaptations of Euripides influence her poems, and how her poems influence her dramatic
work. Unlike poets such as T.S. Eliot or Gertrude Stein who wrote original plays, H.D. translates
Euripides with the dual aims of (a) transplanting his language into her own original, dramatic poems,
and (b) grafting essayistic and lyric conventions onto her refabrications of his tragic plays. This
approach challenges received critical approaches regarding H.D.’s translation practice as ancillary to
her larger body of work. While non-traditional, H.D.’s translations merit serious treatment in their
very departure from scholarly methods and in her recasting of new interpretative emphases within
Euripides’ plays. As a counter-modernist, her work functions in the context of a much larger
contemporary dialogue on how to inhabit modernist literary landscapes. H.D.’s interest culminates
in a mode called processional poetics: the espousal of lyric intensity (sonic, material, kinetic) that moves
away from a source text in a ceremonial fashion.

THE JASMINE YEARS: Across three books of poems, fragments, and essays, this collection
investigates the fate of a family, as well as dealing with larger questions about art, love, language, and
the role of the female artist.

1

prologue as AMPHORA

“There’s nothing ornamental about the style of the real poet. Everything is a necessary hieroglyph.”

—Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragment No. 173”

In “H.D.’s Dramatic Poetics: Tragedy, Translation, and Processional Poems,” I examine
how the poet Hilda Doolittle’s (H.D.) theatrical adaptations of Euripides—or what we might call her
reinvigorations—influence her poems, and how her poems influence her dramatic work. As such, I
argue that H.D. uses drama in a way that is different from other poets working within this modernist
poetic tradition, particularly in regard to her use of source material and translation. Unlike poets
such as T.S. Eliot or Gertrude Stein who wrote original plays, H.D. translates Euripides with the
dual aims of (a) transplanting his language into her own original, dramatic poems, and (b) grafting
essayistic and lyric conventions onto her refabrications of his tragic plays.
My approach challenges received critical approaches regarding H.D.’s translation practice as
ancillary to her larger body of work. While non-traditional, H.D.’s translations merit serious
treatment in their very departure from scholarly methods and in her recasting of new interpretative
emphases within Euripides’ plays. Instead of simply calling H.D. a revisionary mythmaker, I prefer
calling her a counter-modernist, for her work functions in the context of a much larger
contemporary dialogue on how to inhabit and organize modernist literary landscapes.

2
H.D. carries out her creative transductions by moving elemental matter (both material and
mystical) across territories, across time. She operates primarily as a mythopoetic writer, rewriting the
eternal dramas of myth into self-knowledge. For example, I claim that by removing the chorus of
women from her translations of The Bacchae and placing them in freestanding poems, H.D.
challenges traditional ideas about classical reception and translation. H.D. interest in the choral odes
of Greek tragedies culminates in the ceremonial promotion of lyric intensity. In the hands of H.D.,
Euripides’ choral odes become individualized into discrete monolithic poems, radically broken off
from the unified action of tragedy.
My study examines how H.D.’s working between genres (and modes) generates a fluidity
between theater and poetry. My hope is to illuminate how the creation of theatrical work functions
as an important imaginative gateway, or portal, in the discovery of new poetic forms. In her
unpublished “Notes on Euripides,” H.D. writes about the power of Greek words functioning “as
portals, as windows, as portholes I am tempted to say that look out from our ship, our world, our
restricted lives, on to a sea that moves and changes and bears us up, and is friendly and vicious in
turn. These words are to me portals, gates.”
1
In my mind, the language of the theatre provides this
same kind of imaginative opening or possibility.
H.D. is the bedrock of this study. Her work is the flint struck that ignites the fire in the work
of contemporary poets Anne Carson and Alice Oswald, each of whom uphold her legacy in various
transformations. I trace how the dialogic nature of translating and adapting classical Greek tragedies
grants H.D. the freedom to be visionary or original, acknowledging how the mark of true originality
stems, in part, from the ability to use source material in a new way. Her adaptations pulsate with the
regenerative spirit of a dangerous female energy. Her deeply gendered sense of the theater stage
operates as the perfect place to distill an essence of the tension between private and public selves.
H.D. showcases female characters acting as Promethean boundary makers, speaking a new language

3
into being. As such, her work prefers to take on the rhythm of a dramatic narrator who speaks in
conversation and who speaks with a tragic lyric voice—thereby creating a collective voice that
upholds the rituals of tragedy while improvising upon and improving them.
My project seeks to intervene and enlarge the discussion on how a feminist visionary like
H.D. contributes to what female narratives sound like—both in lyric and theatrical traditions—and
the importance of staging such narratives. This book does not provide space for a full discussion of
H.D.’s work for it intends to build a case study on her poetics of translation, and for those particular
findings, causes, principles, and patterns to be viewed in relation to her other works, and the works
of other artists working in a similar vein. I will focus my attention on H.D.’s translations of two
Euripides plays, Ion and the Bacchae, although a close reading of the choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis
will also be considered, as well as a few of her early poems, namely “Eurydice.” The Californian poet
Robinson Jeffers will be invoked because, like H.D., he mines an elemental potency from his reading
of the Greeks, particularly in his retelling of the Dionysus story. The scope of this case study is
particularly interested in the time period between the two World Wars, roughly 1914 to 1935, as it
seeks to articulate a translation practice largely contrawar and productive.
Both Euripides and H.D. wrote out of the grief of war, their work recuperating loss as
experienced physically, psychologically, and spiritually. And while we might never be able to answer
the question of how much ancient Greek H.D. knew, it seems more worthwhile to consider how her
extensive knowledge of languages and literatures enabled a richly woven tapestry of allusions, myths
and music-making to be strung across the entire body of her work. For as Virginia Woolf rightly
understood and makes clear in her essay, “On Not Knowing Greek,” no one can claim an intimacy
with a language in which we do not know “how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to
laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only
difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition.”
2
It is precisely in this “breach

4
of tradition” where H.D. knowingly dwells, harnessing the ancestral sounds of a tragic theater’s
procession.
What makes my project original is its position at the intersection between translation,
poetics, and performance studies. Very little critical work in performance studies centers on how
poets operate in the theater, even less on how poets use translation in their source material within
such a theater space. Indeed, my intention is to write in such a manner and style that reflects my
own writerly and imaginative turns of phrase and thought. My desire is to enlarge the discussion on
how writers write their way into, out of, and alongside great works of literature. While interest in
H.D. continues to grow, her reputation as a leading modernist poet requires more nuanced critical
readings of her demanding work.
The first chapter, “Entrances and Exits,” considers why the art of translation appeals to
H.D. as something more than modernist gestures of cultural renewal. By exploring why H.D. chose
Euripides as the entry point into her re-fabrications, we come to understand how dramatic
translation exists in a potentiality unlike other literary forms that seek equivalence, inventiveness,
imitation, or appropriation because it makes room for the intuitiveness of the actor’s body and the
conditions of time. The second chapter, “After a Choral Conditioning,” reads H.D.’s more dramatic
poem-translations in relation to her idea of a chorus and translation as metaphor. For H.D., the
choral songs extend a revisionary space within an ancient poetic form, creating a poetic conditioning
that is not related to extending a tradition but to the improvisation of a new, embodied lyric
intensity, an affective rhythm particular to its own age. Finally, the third chapter, “Braving the
elements: H.D. and Jeffers” explores the similarities between poets H.D. and Robinson Jeffers and
their interest in the choral odes of Euripides’ Bacchae. An epilogue, “Performing the Classics:
Oswald, Carson, and The Legacy of H.D.” considers the extent to which the performances of
classical texts by Anne Carson and Alice Oswald have been influenced by H.D.

5
Michel Serres speaks of the creative spaces of transformation, where “noise, through its
presence and absence, the intermittence of the signal, produces the new system, that is to say,
oscillation.”
3
Serres describes a phenomenon H.D. knew quite well. As “original rune-maker, the
majic-maker,” H.D. stands outside various systems (of genre, form, and language), translating the
interference into new orders of poetic language.
4
H.D. speaks to the dead, on behalf of the dead, as
a sympathetic transformer. Her peculiar ability to pick up—distinguish the crash and fall of rising
waves in a neighboring kingdom—speaks to her radicalness as a true innovator of modernist forms.

The Band Shell
This book is an echoing cave, cut from wet limestone rocks. This book is a type of container, a
vessel, an amphora. It carries voices that cannot be expressed.
Writing beyond the brink of one’s beyond body. Breaking self—something outside of self’s
limited lunacy. That secret self hidden in reserve for just such acts of breaking. Disclosure or
exposure or revelation—they’re all of the same idea. An unfolding in static time of hidden visionary
spaces. Beyond the bride of oneself, the ultimate sacrifice. According to Roland Barthes, I cannot
give you this language but I can dedicate my giving it to you.
Not breaking walls, but building them, paving an ecstatic bridge to beyond self. Building
walls so new chambers can be created, a sonic space, as well an inscription surface. Song pushed to
the selfsameness, a strange noise pulsing underneath the earth. A fascination with the aural haunts
H.D.’s work. It places her in front of a curved shell—band shell, acoustical shell, choral shell—
licensing the transmission of sound. H.D. writes: “We wander through a labyrinth. If we cut straight
through, we destroy the shell-like curves and involutions. Where logic is, where reason dictates, we
have walls, broad highways, bridges, causeways.”
5

6
If the poet’s responsibility lies in the preservation and restoration of cultural memories,
H.D.’s sonic transmissions, rosemary-scented, cascade generatively down through the generations.
(Smell the sprigs of rosemary stashed around her house. Rosemary for remembrance.) H.D.’s revolutionary and
multiple forms, which include the poem and dramatic script, encourage a phenomenological
memory-making where her necessary hieroglyphs, her “wavering hieroglyph” can be seen as
continuance and endurance, entire worlds endlessly interpreted from sacred words.
6
H.D.’s
hieroglyphs represent a world studded with Greek rocks.
H.D’s original poems exhibit setting, character, voice, and movement reminiscent of an
embodied theatrical performance. Her dramatic translations sing in the felt intensities of the poem.
The Chorus marches across the stony landscape. It carries volcanic rock and the power of incantation: calling forth
presences, the Greek texture of limestone.

7
1

Entrances and Exits

“Greece is indeed the tree of life, the ever-present stream, the spring of living water.”
—H.D., “Notes on Euripides, Pausanius, and Greek Lyric Poets”

“Acts of translation add to our means; we come to incarnate alternate energies and resources of
energy.”
—George Steiner, After Babel

H.D. writes: “I know we need scholars to decipher and interpret the Greek, but we also
need: poets and mystics and children to re-discover this Hellenic world, to see through the words;
the words being but the outline, the architectural structure of that door or window, through which
we are all free, scholar and unlettered alike, to pass.”
7
The art of translation appeals to H.D. as
something more than modernist gestures of cultural renewal, a mode of literary production, or an
innovative site of forms, especially as it relates to critiques of gender.
8
While H.D.’s work does carry
out these three larger enterprises, her translations of the ancient playwright Euripides challenge
historicized notions of what lyric and dramatic forms look and sound like not within a modernist
poetic tradition as many scholars have previously argued, but in what I call a counter-modernist one.
H.D. sees herself operating on the margins of modernism. H.D.’s interest in translation and her
various translation projects allow her to challenge conventional modes of classical scholarship as a
renegade outsider, as a poet who does pretend to be a philologist.

8
One only has to remember her starring role in the silent film Borderline (1930) or as analysand
to Sigmund Freud to appreciate H.D.’s lifelong commitment as an artist who serves at the threshold
of interdisciplinary worlds—poetic, essayistic, cinematic, psychoanalytical, theatrical, fictional, and
critical.
9
Without her lifelong, untraditional, and experimental apprenticeship to translation, H.D.
would not have been able to develop her late style or write her later epic masterpiece, Helen in Egypt.
Her translation practice emboldens a breaking and restyling of conventional forms across multiple
genres. H.D. builds sonically rich entrance and exit passageways on pre-existing text-structures so
that her readers may arrive from unexpected points of entry. From translating individual Sapphic
lines (hidden throughout her original poems) to Euripidean choral odes to drafting a theories of
translation in her unpublished papers, H.D.’s habits and proclivities as a translator continuously
shape her poetic sensibility over the course of her long career. “Certain words and lines of Attic
choruses…have a definite, hypnotic affect on me. They are straight clear entrances, to me, to over-
world consciousness.”
10
H.D.’s “over-world consciousness” provides access to the “over-mind,” a
repository of received myths that all artists are welcome to use. For H.D., translation springs forth a
life-giving fountain, activating a series of rhythmic transformations that extend from the textual to
the scenic to the theatrical to the architectural.
By not taking H.D.’s translation work seriously—as seeing it as something ancillary or
sophomoric—we fail to recognize her truly original conceptual frameworks and inventive textual
practices that forever brand H.D. as an innovative female modernist. H.D. imparts modernist
conventions onto Euripides’ plays, while also repurposing his language into her own original and
dramatic poems. In this way, H.D. uses translation as way to escape the constraints of Imagism,
anticipating her moves in the creation of her later works, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. In her memoir
End to Torment, H.D. describes her book-length poem Helen in Egypt like this: “It all began with the

9
Greek fragments—and living in seclusion in Lugano and Lusanne (and here, too) I finished, 1952,
1953, 1954, the very long epic sequence, my “cantos,” as Norman called them.”
11

Firestarter
My own approach to H.D.’s writing is that of a practicing poet. Maurice Blanchot writes:
“Know what rhythms holds men. (Archilochus.) Rhythm or language. Prometheus: ‘In this rhythm, I am
caught.’ Changing configuration. What is rhythm? The danger of rhythm’s enigma.”
12
H.D.’s rhythms,
her language pulsates in waves that go against the currents of modernism. The pattern of her lines
echo like “fragments of musical notation discovered in the sand.”
13
My approach will identify and
define the kinetic, aural, and materialist qualities of H.D.’s work, including a translation technique I
liken to the act of spolia, the ancient practice of repurposing stone from built structures onto new
monuments. I will also identify a mode I call processional poetics, which uses the idea of a refrain to
organize the surrounding territory. H.D.’s refrain, “a phrase or verse recurring at intervals in a song
or poem, especially at the end of each stanza, a chorus,” builds an auditory structure and encodes a
rhythm particular to her age.
H.D. chose Euripides as the entry point into her re-fabrications of a living pastness because
of her affection for him as a radical writer. “Drawing sustenance” from his deadness in true Eliotic
fashion, Euripides encourages H.D. to break free from normative conventions of form and to
challenge the histories inherent in a word. As George Steiner maintains, “[o]ne thing is clear: every
language-act has a temporal determinant. No sematic form is timeless. When using a word we wake
into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history.”
14
H.D.’s invocations of certain words
revitalize their sleeping histories, but her creation goes well beyond language—it makes meaning
through its emotional, imagined processual acts.

10
When H.D. reimagines the Orpheus myth in “Eurydice,” a poem we will examine in detail
later, an embodied dramatic monologue appears. While the initial circumstances surrounding the
story do not stray far from the original, H.D. introduces a lyrical complexity using Euripidean
dramatic conventions. When H.D. translates Euripides’ play Ion in such a way as to highlight its
historical passage through time, its visible corruption by various translators’ hands and tongues, she
exposes the palimpsestic nature of such an act. By inserting yet another voice (that of the translator)
within the dramatic script, H.D. constantly challenges a fixed authorial voice. What’s curious is the
extent to which H.D. layers several voices in an already densely populated play. Numerous scores
and signs echo and reverberate throughout the play. Poised for interrogation, her work queries and
is the question. This imaginative back and forth, this questioning, also occurs in her early poems.

Rivers of Paradise
By translating ancient Greek, H.D. does not hope to join the brotherhood of classicism as
outlaw sister. In fact, she routinely rejects the tenets of classical scholarship in her written intentions
as editor and contributor to The Poets’ Translation Series (1915-6; 1918-1919), a series published by
Egoist Press that strove to return Greek and Latin poetry and prose to the general readers from the
hands of philologists and professors. H.D., and her husband at the time, Richard Aldington, served
as primary editors for the series, supplying their own translations for individual pamphlets. They
write in 1915: “The first six pamphlets, when bound together, will form a small collection of the
unhackneyed poetry, too long buried under the dust of pedantic scholarship.”
15
In fact, the series
first received recognition because of H.D.’s translations (issued as the third pamphlet) of Euripides’
Iphigenia in Aulis (1915).
16
Both Eliot and William Butler Yeats expressed admiration for these early
choral translations.
17
H.D. fictionalizes her translation practice as something feminine when
describing Julia in her novel Bid Me to Live: “She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it. Then she

11
tried to forget each word, for ‘translations’ enough existed and she was no scholar. She did not want
to ‘know’ Greek in that sense.”
18
Julia trains herself to intuitively know Greek, even if cognitively she
does not strive for mastery because “[a]nyone can translate the meaning of a word. She wanted the
shape, the feel of it, the character of it, as if it had been freshly minted.”
19
While this process might
be described as occultist, it reveals the larger dilemma of how women translators presented
themselves in the gentlemanly art of translation. Although H.D. self-labels as an amateur hellenist,
she still receives negative feedback from commentators like Douglas Bush (and Eliot to a lesser
degree), who fault her for misrepresenting the Greek text, and worse, for feminizing Euripides’
plays. Implicit in their criticism: a woman couldn’t possibly know Greek. And when she focuses on
maternal storylines, emotions, or descriptive details of a work, she feminizes them. Certainly H.D.
makes errors in her Greek translations, but so do many of her male contemporaries. Most
translators work from dictionaries, previous translations, and other textual resources, and H.D. is no
exception. For example, H.D. uses Mario Meunier’s Les bacchantes (Paris: Payot, 1923) when working
on her own choral translations of the Bacchae, the evidence of which can be seen in the title page of
her copy of Meunier’s book, but his translation provides only a starting point for her radical
intervention of how language and desire function in Euripides’ play that asks: what is a wise thing?
20

The act of Greek translation works for H.D. as way to speak to the dead. The magnetized
aural textures in her work point to a translation experience that prefigures before the written text.
From these early translations of Iphigenia in Aulis, H.D. hears the chorus as strange collective of a
unified but monumental force. Imagine the graceful limbs of young, lithe women intertwined
around Iphigenia’s soon-to-be sacrificed body, consoling her as she marches across the orchestra:
the collective “I” of the chorus dances a wall around the young virgin. The caves and cliffs they
create with their limbs make a kind of interconnected sound system, where their cries and voices can
bounce off skin and bone, leaving echoes right and left in the forest of shared, destabilized

12
wilderness. Carrie Preston locates H.D. as working within a tradition of ritualized reception, where
“she defamiliarized expectations of genre and employed kinesthetic strategies.”
21
H.D.’s own
kinesthetic responses to art (see “The Wise Sappho” or the unpublished Notes on Euripides) sought
to explore what Preston recognizes as her own poetry of suggestion “in which images evoke visual
sensory material (‘light and color’) but also aural experience” embodying “body-centered ritualistic
aesthetics,” where the solo performance uses the body as both whole and fragmented at the joints.
22

If solo performances suggest subjectivity, do collective performances suggest objectivity? In the
form of high ritual, H.D. learns how to sing in the crevices of tragedies, in the swing of trees, in the
whistling lip of cave, across riverbanks where the water runs a silver vein. The chorus, a symbol or
figure with occult significance, resounds as a moving text written in code. Not soon afterward, H.D.
writes “Eurydice,” a hymn sung by single speaker.
H.D.’s fascination with cryptograms and hieroglyphs, as well as her translations of ancient
Greek, point to a pleasure in reading the world through a series of signs that must be decoded.
Reading across H.D.’s oeuvre, one soon realizes how much of her language is coded, and how often
one text speaks to another text. H.D.’s language conceals as much as it reveals. In this way, her
poetic work centers itself on the discovery of things having yet begun. In autobiographies, essays,
memoirs, poems, novels, one hears H.D.’s shimmery bibliography as reiterative, poking through
sedimentary layers. Her practice as a visionary modernist poet depends upon this ability to read code
for the rest of the world, as well as proffer them. The “indecipherable hieroglyph” H.D. writes into
Helen in Egypt comforts her because it cannot be known, or fixed.
23
It engenders something akin to
Jacques Derrida’s différance, deferring meaning until a later date. By not seeking meaning, H.D. retains
her own attributed meaning to the hieroglyph—something private, sealed, and available only to her
imagination. It remains Ideal. In this way, H.D. controls her never-ending plurality. Drinking from
fresh waters whenever she likes, H.D. does not seek permission for her literary outings.

13
Greek translation meant something different to Aldington. For him, it comprised of
portability, profitability, an alternate value system, as well as a continuity of a past age.
24
This
continuity proves crucial because it allows H.D. to imaginatively inhabit a Greek world, infusing it
with a modern voice while simultaneously thrifting its most memorable images. But H.D. does more
than just steal haunting images from the classical world, I will argue later that she inaugurates a lyric
complexity stemming from her lifelong conversation with Euripides. Translation becomes an act of
returning, or homecoming, for the poet.
H.D. invokes the Greek world because of its familiarity and foreignness. For H.D.,
Aldington, and the rest of her circle, Greek poems and their potential translations open the door to
original poem writing. The poems, “Hermes Lord of Ways,” “Epigram,” and “Priapus,” all
published in 1913 in Poetry, mark H.D.’s first entrance into the poetry world but under translation’s
colonnade. Subtitled as “Verses, Translations, and Reflections,” H.D.’s first published poems
position themselves in direct conversation with Select Epigrams from The Greek Anthology, published in
1925 and complied by John William Mackail, and extend a Greek state of mind into the twentieth
century. In this grouping, H.D. constructs a dialogic constellation of individual translated lines from
the Greek with her own original lines, including lines of poetic mediation. The result includes
original poems that use translation as an ignition of sorts, much like a match head dragged across the
striking surface, sparking certain chemical reactions to occur. If H.D. uses the metaphor of fire, she
also succumbs to the living pulse of water. H.D. steps into Greece’s “living stream of water,” again
and again, whether to translate a chorus of women dancing in Iphegenia in Aulis, or to prove herself as
a reliable amateur transmitter of classical knowledge when she writes into her poem her own
Sapphic translations. In a letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, she writes about this river of language:
“And was it Goethe said, ‘another language is another soul?’ Anyhow, another river is—but we must
find our own river first—rivers of paradise or what you will.”
25
And whether her motives rely on a

14
“poetics of antagonism,” the pleasures of linguistic estrangement, a desire to engender translation, or
in the staging of female choruses illustrating a woman’s commitment to learning within her newly-
formed universities, H.D’s finished translations and adaptations speak forth a rocky terrain.
26
Her
decipherment of the Greek depends upon its very untranslatability.
H.D. owned editions of Sappho, including the Wharton edition, and Mackail’s Greek
Anthology.
27
Traces of Homer, Sappho, and Euripides appear in much of H.D.’s work, operating
palimpsestically, rewritten underneath and alongside layers of voice as they do for H.D.’s
contemporaries, Ezra Pound and Eliot, who likewise engaged in similar dialogic projects with the
Greeks.
28
H.D. translates individual lines from Sappho, peppering her original poems with the
impressions, color, and light found in Sappho’s ancient Greece. Because H.D.’s early poetic
encounters begin with these ancient fragments, the language, images, and descriptions from her
reading of Sappho forever color her later poetic work.
H.D.’s essay “The Wise Sappho,” written in 1919, cements an allegiance to a Sapphic
tradition albeit in a seemingly non-poetic form. H.D. collects the broken shards of a breaking
voice—the fragment—and reconstitutes them as English versions. Like many of the speakers in
Sappho’s poems, H.D. feels compelled by intense feeling, “the lure of the invisible.”
29
Indeed, it’s
hard to classify “The Wise Sappho.” Like so much of H.D.’s writing, one wonders if it is a personal
essay, a defense of poetry, an apologia, or a theory of translation. Its memoir-like qualities run in
tension to its moments of critique. Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that H.D. extends a Sapphic
tradition, and should be considered a Sapphic writer even when other critics maintain that she only
uses Sappho as a point of departure.
30
Eileen Gregory similarly advances H.D. as an inheritor of a
Sapphic lineage but not as faithful translator or scholar.
31
The extent of H.D.’s intertextuality with
Sappho, which Diana Collecott’s careful scrutiny makes plain in an extensive appendix using both
the Wharton and Campbell editions, happens to be great. Collecott writes, “H.D. embodies actual

15
fragments of Sappho in over 30 poems and embeds many more in her prose.”
32
From Sappho, H.D.
learns how to speak, how to describe the color of the morning or the hue of a flower, how to weave
language with feeling. Her “technique of weaving or wreathing fragments of Sappho’s poetry into
her own writing was…. a tribute to the Lesbian poet that transcended mere translation or
imitation.”
33
Although H.D. would comes to be associated with a poetic movement called Imagism,
curiously her poems seem much more interested in conveying what things feel like rather that what
they look like. Her particular brand of image more felt than seen. Here, a stanza from “The
Helmsman”:
We forgot—for a moment
Tree resin, tree-bark
Sweat of a torn branch
Were sweet to the taste.
34

Perhaps it is this investigation into felt experience that leads H.D. into composing poems with
ecstatic speakers who voice their desire in apostrophic ways. Collecott describes H.D.’s poem
“Eurydice” as new kind of Sapphic bridal song—one that celebrates “abandonment” rather than
union. Highlighting language in “Eurydice” as belonging to a shared lexicon of translated language
from Sappho’s poems, we can appreciate how the Sapphic intertextuality naturally occurs in H.D.’s
writing because of her intimacy and knowledge of the poems. And don’t we see Sappho cultivating
her own chorus (of listeners, readers, and writers) within the sonic theater of her lyric poems? David
Wiles writes:
The earliest fragments of dramatic dialogue from the Greek world…were probably written
to be performed as an interchange between Sappho as a chorus leader and the chorus of girls
for whom she bore responsibility. The circular dance around the altar allowed the leader
either to lead and set movements for the procession, or else to stand in the centre and
establish her or his difference.
35

H.D. surrounds herself in a swarm of Sappho’s words, the noise of which she will later use for her
own swirling versions of poetic enchantment, her composition as performance. In painting and

16
iconography, Sappho is often pictured as the leader of a chorus composed of the women of Lesbos.
In writing about Sappho’s Song 1, Gregory Nagy describes the charged role as such:
As we will see in due course, Sappho is being pictured here as the lead singer of a choral
performance. She leads off by praying to Aphrodite to be present, that is, to manifest herself
in an epiphany. The goddess is invoked from far away in the sky, which is separated from
the earth by the immeasurably vast space of ‘aether’. Despite this overwhelming sense of
separation, Aphrodite makes her presence felt immediately, once she is invoked. The
goddess appears, that is, she is now present in the sacred space of performance, and her
presence becomes an epiphany for all those who are present. Then, once Aphrodite is
present, she exchanges roles with the prima donna who figures as the leader of choral
performance.
36

H.D. could not have arrived at Euripides without her prior engagement of Sappho, a poet who
teaches H.D. about the dynamic conversion of energy that takes places between two performing
bodies on stage. And because H.D. aligns herself with Sappho, we read her very differently than if
she had positioned herself with Homer or with John Milton. In fact, she will later align herself with
William Shakespeare in By the Avon River (1949), and by extension to Dante in the project’s initial
incarnation as “By the Arno River.”
37
But once H.D. finds Euripides, the ancient dramatist becomes
her primary conversant for the rest of her life. Indeed, as Gregory notes, Euripides represents the
“dream or ideal element” in H.D.’s consciousness as a writer. His work provides a “dreaming field”
which H.D. can inhabit and explore “fictions with a mythical, atemporal context.”
38
Frequently, this
Euripidean “dreamwork” coincides with the impending doom of war. Traumatized by the air strikes
of both World Wars, H.D.’s work engages in the atrocities and machinations of war. Like Euripides
who wrote though the Peloponnesian War (431-405 B.C.), H.D.’s daily writing life resonated with
the drumming of war. Her poetry book, The Walls Do Not Fall, opens with the speaker surviving a
bombing raid in London during The Blitz (1940-41). A complementary component of H.D.’s work
explores the historical, the rootedness or “time-element” of her literary consciousness. But it is her
fascination with ancient myths, specifically concerning female characters, that haunts H.D.’s work.
She appears invested in the maternal plotlines Euripides sets forth, but only insofar as they showcase

17
female characters in a constant state of flux, struggling against their own drama-mysteries. The
character of Medea, for instance, holds no interest for H.D. as she proves a static figure. Medea does
not flounder in uncertainty. She remains disinterested in Eleusinian mysteries, and does not
participate in periods of silence for purification. Medea is never forced downward into the
underworld as a test, or in an act of punishment. In fact, Medea goes unpunished for her crime of
fillicide—Euripides being the first tragedian to stage such an action—escaping into the clouds on her
own chariot. Never captive in the underworld, the flames she feels are those of goddess ex machina
traveling into bright light of heaven.
But for Robinson Jeffers, a contemporary of H.D.’s who likewise synthesizes the rituals of
Greek tragedy into his work, the totalizing feminine force of the Medea character, especially when
inhabited by the right actor, compels another version of the myth. Jeffers wrote his Medea, which ran
as award-winning production from October 1947 to May 1948, for the actor Judith Anderson. His
free adaptation of the play was published in 1946. Jeffers seizes the elemental foundations in
classical tragedies and builds upon them. Note his recasting of the Hippolytus story as Cawdor, or the
choruses from a wartime play, “The Songs of the Dead Men to the Three Dancers,” a poem that
explores rhythm in its linguistic expression.
39
The body of the first dancer performs an important
function in uniting the modern free verse lines with an ancient story, a moving joint who processes
in a new cadence—an experiment where the “dead men” long to be revivified by the bodies of a
past rhythm. Similarly, Jeffers’ treatment of the myth of the house of Atreus recast as a narrative
poem in epic form in “Tower Beyond Tragedy” demonstrates his fondness for women speakers,
namely, Clytemnestra and Cassandra, both of whom exhibit what the Greeks called parrhesia, or bold
speech.
Jeffers and H.D. each write Cassandra poems. Cassandra, the ancient prophet no one heeds.
Their poems illustrate a deep desire, on the part of their shared speakers, to set in motion the

18
generous act of listening required in poetic speech. Strange utterances. Fragmentary stories.
Unbelievable notions. And isn’t that what writing really is about? Asking our readers to listen, to
respond fully in kind with their kinetic imaginations? Unfortunately, no one bothers to listen to
Cassandra. Her madness is off-putting, the crazed song too loud, too disconnected. Fragmentary.
Everything always too late. But Cassandra’s tragic voice unites all of us as citizens in a shared
democracy of suffering. H.D. and Jeffers’ preoccupation of creating rich, aural worlds that go
beyond the simple lyric mode make their work memorable, much like the character of Cassandra
herself. We cannot blame Cassandra’s veil for the passage of sound, the unexplained instances of
prophecy at work. Cassandra wears the veil, separating belief from disbelief, from what you can see
and what you cannot. You hardly register the black lace covering her face since it’s so dark anyway.
Cassandra exists outside the story. She will have no affect on the story. Who believes the Cassandra?
The shock of white truth burns too much. Better to leave it elsewhere. Her eyes shine like
meteorites. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Clytemnestra yells at Cassandra for not knowing Greek. A
fountain of bitter truth, far from home, her words carry the sting of too much truth. Fountains of
truth, your ears ring—you sense the noise of prophecy, its pinprick, before it unfolds before your
eyes.
Friends with Jeffers and his wife, Una, Anderson reads the role of Cassandra in “Tower
Beyond Tragedy” one evening while visiting Tor House, their home in Carmel.
40
Moved by her
striking performance, Jeffers agrees to collaborate with Anderson in a stage version of the poem.
Known for his idiosyncratic and solitary working style, Jeffers’ willingness to collaborate with
Anderson shows how comfortable he felt with the actor. When executive producers eventually
promise support for an adaptation of Medea rather than “Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Jeffers and
Anderson quickly switch gears. Like Cassandra, Medea deserves an audience who might see her as
logical and cogent, even though most likely they will condemn her after all.

19
Jeffers writes in a New York Times article, “[p]oetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for
great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts….It’s a beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or
a high sunrise. You owe it no duty.”
41
Motivated by the tension of nature’s cool rationalism and
humankind’s intense passion, Jeffers’ work asks what do with our individual acts of irrationalism?
How do we make sense of the world in such signage? For Jeffers, this means building poems as
stone houses. In his Medea, the First Woman says: “But justice builds a firm house.”
42
Only to have
Medea answer: “The doors of her house are vengeance.”
43
A house built with bricks of language, a
place the characters in the play inhabit, a dwelling Medea imagines as moral ground. Medea prays to
Hecate, hoping to remember the “venomous fire, the magic song. And the sharp gems” that will
deliver her from her suffering.
44
Strangely, Medea spelled backwards is aedem, which comes from the
Latin aedis, a place with a hearth, and aestus, which translates to passion, hesitation, surge of the sea,
heat, fire, tide. Seemingly elemental to the core, Jeffers describes Medea as a cold, stony statue with
the power of fire-song coursing within her. The nurse describes her “….like a stone on the shore /
Or a wave of the sea,” and Creon calls out her “women of the stone forehead and hate-filled eyes.”
45

Medea wishes herself “….all dead, / Under the great cold stones. For a year and a thousand years /
and another thousand: cold as the stones, cold, / But noble again, proud, straight and silent,
crimson-cloaked / In the blood of our wounds.”
46
Of course the First Woman of the chorus is
harsher in her judgment: “She is terrible. Stone with stone eyes.”
47
In all these descriptions, Jeffers’
language is cool, detached and weighty; it enacts is own stone-like placement within the script.
Many writers were familiar with Ovid’s version of Medea as a sorceress, and they
exaggerated her ferocity because they were interested in highlighting issues of “witchcraft, security
of government, or women’s conduct.”
48
Because Medea is resistant to male modes of control and
because she goes unpunished for her crimes, her story is an affirmation of liberty.
49
Or is it? Does
her exile sing of the famine of the liminal? But like the speaker in “Eurydice” as we shall soon see,

20
Medea rewrites herself out of the landscape into a new one, taking hearth with her. Medea’s lyric
refrain wrapped in fire, her mode of announcing herself to the world, does not simply extend
beyond the theater stage, it flames upward, scorching the earth, perhaps revising our sense of the
territorial to something more like the celestial. But Jeffers’ descriptions of Medea points to his interest
of keeping her on earth. So why does Jeffers try to keep Medea marbled in Time? H.D. might tell us
it’s the power of revisionary mythmaking or a poet’s adamant conviction in language’s ability to
renew, restore, and keep alive one’s spirit in the materials of history—materials stitched from the
strands of war, myth, or family narratives.
In H.D.s novel, Bid me to Live, a thinly disguised autobiography of the disintegration of her
marriage to Aldington, the main character, Julia Ashton describes herself this way: “She was Medea
of some blessed incarnation, a witch with power. A wise woman. She was seer, a see-er. She was at
home in this land of subtle reverberations, as she was at home in a book.”
50
As self-described
prophet, Julia does not have to act on her premonitions, she merely has to voice them to the
bohemian set of writers she keeps company with, which includes her husband, Rafe. Or write them
down, as the case may be. At home, in the pages of her thinking, Julia reserves the right to do what
she pleases. Under the ongoing trauma of the Great War with its paralyzing delusion, as well as the
death of her unborn child, Julia writes a Eurydice and Orpheus poem sequence only to have
critiqued by the couple’s friend Rico, a character based on D.H. Lawrence, who despairingly
questions her authority writing as Orpheus:
Dear Julia,

There is no use trying to believe that all this war really exists. It really doesn’t matter. We
must go on. I know that Rafe will come back. Your frozen altars mean something, but I
don’t like the second half of the Orpheus sequence as well as the first. Stick to the women
speaking. How can you know what Orpheus feels? It’s your part to be woman, the women in
vibration, Eurydice should be enough. You can’t deal with both. If you go on—”
51

21
When Rafe comes home, he criticizes Julia’s poetry as well. But unlike Medea, Julia responds by not
responding. She makes no bold movements in words or in action. Julia “had no tragedy-queen desire
to stand, facing him” and snatch her poem back. Striking in Rico’s letter is the comparison between
the paralysis of war and the vibrating woman, a motif played out in several of H.D.’s other works.
What does it mean to be a woman in vibration? That the feminine body in motion enacts a
particular duty to a specific instance in time, to history itself. If so, what is this mysterious kind of
work? Meanwhile H.D. publishes a poem called “Eurydice,” perhaps the very one her Julia writes in
Bid Me to Live.
As a dramatic long poem, “Eurydice” speaks in a different register and tone than the quiet
but powerful short lyric, “Oread.” When Pound praises “Oread,” holding it as true specimen of the
moment his Imagism turns to Vorticism, he edges Eurydice out. Eurydice’s wide sense of justice—
indeed, the very meaning of her name—does not interest Pound for she talks far too widely and
dangerously, and for too long. Eurydice uses cryptic language, waves brash flowers, and dangerously
smudges the ground in soot. Uncontainable, her charged vessel burns the very air around it.

The Other Side of Night
What does it mean to brave fire? What does it mean to rewrite one’s landscape in a ritual of
refinement and purification, a singing song of flame? In “Eurydice,” the speaker’s incessant
questioning of Orpheus displays her anger, as well as her critical faculties. “Eurydice” functions as
proleptic text for H.D. since it foreshadows the styles themes that will occupy her later poetics. As a
precursor poem, it’s suspiciously out of place with “Oread,” a poem which follows in the Collected
Poems. As a hymnal poem, what might “Eurydice” be praising? Unlike Ovid’s version of the same
myth, H.D.’s speaker reproaches Orpheus for his impatient act. Eurydice harshly asks:
why did you turn back
that hell should be reinhabited

22
of myself thus
swept into nothingness?
why did you turn?
why did you glance back?
why did you hesitate for that moment?
why did you bend your face
caught with the flame of the upper earth,
above my face?
52

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid asks what could Eurydice complain of, except for being so well loved?
The only words attributed to Eurydice in Ovid are a “faint ‘Fairwell’ – / so weak it scarcely reached
his ears.”
53
By only treating Orpheus’ side of the story so to speak, it seems as if the story germinates
with Orpheus’ character. Many scholars categorize H.D.’s “Eurydice” poem as a revisionary poem,
one that reclaims a female voice. In my mind, H.D. invents a new structure—a speaking voice
behind a net of silence.
It’s a kind of tragedy that Ovid doesn’t revisit the myth in Heroides, a collection of poetic
epistles where he does reconsider twenty-one secondary heroes and heroines suffering the torments
of love. I suppose Ovid was waiting for H.D. to embody a speaker who seems more alive when she
is dead. Paradoxes like this occur often in H.D.’s poems, as well as oscillations between embodiment
and disembodiment, or between fragments and wholes. Like many modernist writers, H.D. remains
committed to the dream of wholeness. Blanchot writes in “The Gaze of Orpheus” how “art is the
power that causes the night to open.” Eurydice opens the other night, which Orpheus cannot find in
the blackness of her lowered veil. This woman is heard, not seen. Curiously, the trespass is not on
him since he cannot move beyond Eurydice’s refashioning of Hell’s rocks. Perhaps it is Eurydice’s
outspokenness, which keeps Orpheus distracted, unable to pinpoint the location of her voice.
Behind the other door of night, Eurydice uses the fire of the underworld, which only she can see, to
reclaim her land in interrogative refrain of agency, resistance, and defiance. Eurydice floods her
hymn in a sonic overload, using the repetition of specific words and phrases as mode to register

23
presence. Not interested in purifying language or making it referential, H.D. seems more interested
in orchestrating a somatic vocality. I classify this long poem as a dramatic monologue in the lyric
genre. Though Angela Leighton constructively submits that the lyric as not a genre per se, but “the
acoustical texture of a work.”
54
Considered in this way, the poem fulfills her definition with its
haunting, echoing quality. It’s as if we move forward but remain firmly in place. Leighton writes,
“[li]terary writing offers a threshold rather than a destination, and makes us pause there, to hear all
the summoned sounds that words can make or bring to the ear. It stops us going straight over into
sense and comprehension.”
55
Eurydice’s incantation calls us to the threshold of her underworld, and
so we stall, outside the dilation of time.
The lyric complexity of a poem like “Eurydice” mimics how characters in ancient tragedies
often spoke onstage. With “lengthy, virtuoso speeches alternating with rapid, impassioned, primarily
single-line dialogue (stichomythia),” the speaker agonizes over what has been done to her.
56
It’s
important to remember that in tragedy a character’s singing puts “voice” at the forefront. Tragedy is
the language of pain but we are aware of a voice even before we can make sense of its semantic
content.
57
Vibratory and material, H.D.’s poem differs from other modernist retellings. Ingeborg
Bachmann’s own Orpheus poem, “Darkness Spoken,” for example, calmly states, “I can only speak
of darkness.” Bachmann’s subdued rendition of the Orpheus story does not rely on a passionate
speaker. Instead it announces, rather matter-of-factly, “And I don’t belong to you. / Both of us
mourn now.”
58
Her short poem of one page—a different kind of jewel altogether—does not
compare to the nearly five pages of intense repetition, vivid colorings, and conditional phrasings that
H.D. employs to heighten the tension between the sexes, a common enough feature in tragedy but
one that Euripides particularly obsesses over in many of his plays. Most importantly, H.D. never
once mentions Orpheus name in her poem; a glaring hole, an omission of great telling. Bachmann’s

24
first line of the her poem—indeed the first two words!—reads, “Like Orpheus I play,” illustrating
her decision to employ more traditional narrative conventions in her poem’s retelling.
In H.D.’s explication of the myth, Eurydice explicitly places blame on Orpheus for her
banishment and loss of earth’s pleasures. She complains of Orpheus’s love. Relentless in her
questioning, she makes quite clear how his “arrogance” and “ruthlessness” have stolen the flowers
and people from her life. “Here only flame upon flame / and black among the red sparks,” her life
painted in a tapestry of black. What does it mean to brave fire? Already in the second stanza, the
“moss of ash” coats the room. Once the “fire of your own presence” is realized as double-saffron
flamed-hue on both their faces, her new home inevitably turns black.
Curiously however, Eurydice’s description of the blackness (“everything is crossed with
black, / black upon black / and worse than black, / this colourless light.”) calls to mind the poem’s
very inscription upon the listening world; a world part in air, part in stone. The etching of the
speaker’s questions in all black letters is the presence of her speaking voice. Thus, the strength in
Eurydice’s assertion at the of the poem that “[a]t least I have the flowers of myself, / and my
thoughts, no god / can take that;” rings true. If the listening world is but a blackness “small against
the formless rocks,” and the poem’s lines themselves jet-black, who then is the light?
H.D.’s “formless rocks” appear imaginatively realized—or perhaps materially telepathized—
in Sarah Ruhl’s original play, Eurydice, as a “Chorus of Stones: Big Stone, Little Stone, and Loud
Stone,” where a production note suggests the “stones might be played as though they are nasty
children at a birthday party.” Ruhl’s specific naming of the stones highlights their acoustical import
into the play: big stones rumble and tumble loud, little stones hardly make a patter, while loud stones
can never enter silently onstage. Ruhl’s procession of stones as “nasty children,” most likely amped
up on frosting and sugary soda, calls to mind how vocal (even if visually) a chorus can be in their

25
pronouncement or judgment upon a scene. This chorus of stones moves the matter of language
between characters, boulders rolled closed upon open mouths.
H.D.’s engagement with the image often incorporates a tension with sound. Her work does
not present one authorial voice. In fact, multiple speakers weave stories using acts of fragmentation,
dislocation, and interruption. As readers, we are meant to feel the mysteries of voice pressing into
our bodies. Who is speaking, and to whom, and from where? Many times it’s not altogether clear,
and purposely so. Can a voice ever really be disembodied? The corruption, the holes in her poem
(“Everything is lost” and “such loss is no loss,” and “such terror / is no loss;”) actually constitute a
gain. In the penultimate stanza, the speaker says, “and my spirit with its loss / knows this;” thus
solidifying her lack as knowing, as transgressive knowledge.
Let me be clear: Eurydice speaks from inside a death dream but she entertains no ludic
thinking. Like Medea, her voice is rational, singular, rhetorical, and dramatic. It stands in stark
contrast to the Bacchic chorus singing a territorial refrain. This inhabited dramatic monologue is
only one way H.D. explores her relationship to voice, myth, and ancient tragedy. Later, she will work
the chorus in isolation, in solo. But first H.D must negotiate the ancient play’s form as a whole.

The Mask of Euripides
H.D. picks Euripides’ misunderstood voice as an extension of her own. When she travels to
Greece in 1919, it’s as if the landscape becomes a held thing in her mind; an island image she returns
to again and again in her imagination. Her selection and identification with Euripides points to a
radicalness at the heart of H.D.’s own writing life. Ridiculed by history as a decadent, humored as a
revolutionary, and often labeled as distastefully modern, Euripides’ meta-theatrics and his peculiar
self-reflexiveness introduced dramatic innovations that set him apart from Aeschylus or Sophocles.
As many scholars have pointed out, he deglamourized the accepted myths of the time and

26
introduced new plots audiences hadn’t seen before.
59
According to John Aldington Symonds,
“Euripides overpassed the limits of possibility. The mould snapped in his hands. Therefore he is
better to read than he could have been in scenic representation.”
60
Euripides constantly pushed
against the limitations of form. In fact, his plays demonstrate not a unity of form, but what Symonds
calls “subordinate beauties rather than the sublime unity of a dramatic art.” But his transgressions of
genre and form are also H.D.’s. Both writers create new forms out of lyric intensities. Euripides
body of work comes to us already corrupt. Only about only one-fifth of his original works remain.
The unstable quality of Euripides’ body of work only promises fruitful reconstructions for the
willing translator. Derrida describes the translator as someone who “[t]he always intact, the
intangible, the untouchable (unberiihrbar) is what fascinates and orients the work of the translator.
He wants to touch the untouchable… ”
61
H.D. gladly accepts this constraint as it ultimately proves
generative. The untouchable for H.D. manifests in how “[t]he words themselves held inner
worlds…[i]f you looked long enough, this peculiar twist, its magic angle, would lead somewhere, like
that Phoenician track, trod by the old traders.”
62

On the act of translation, Lydia Davis describes the text and translator “locked in a struggle,”
where the translator is a “[p]eculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another
form something already created, creating and not creating.
63
Translation embeds a community and
commentary into its tradition. Working from texts or working from memory, the translator remains
hard at work, refitting and rejoining fragments of bone and stone. Translation as a spinning out, a
versioning of multiple radiances. The gaps bridging distances. Translation as personae, as multiple
masks. Greek translation allows H.D. a personal classicism. To turn, to be placed off-stage, off-
centered, away from the narrative arc of the play, an aliveness that operates at the margin’s of one’s
living. A revolution spins us out toward a tortured exile. The bold notion of including translations as
part of a literary collection. A monument dedicated to translation’s generous way of propagating

27
original work alongside those works translated. Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”
idealizes this idea of translation as a mode of literary production. If the art of translation exists as an
important mode of literary production, Steven Yao argues the extent to which translation practices
in the early twentieth century also often introduced great innovations in modernist forms, as well as
complex strategies for how to deal with larger issues such as gender, race, and language. He asserts
that for a writer like H.D., “translation represented an ambiguously gendered mode of literary
(re)production that insistently raised the question of the relationship between gender and writing.”
64

In this way, the act of translation could both critique and engender “alternatives to masculinist
constructions of both knowledge and literary production.”
65
H.D. perverts the brotherhood of
classicism by using translation as generative technique for her own poetry, as a way to effectively
critique classical scholarship, and to erect conceptual frameworks across multiple genres.
And because drama functions in way that is different than poetry, H.D. complicates her
project. If translation is form, as Benjamin maintains, dramatic translation is a form not easily
contained inside the reassembled amphora. Words in a dramatic script carry the actor who is always
in the process of becoming. Language in a dramatic text does not exist as an object or artifact; it
exists as a living equation. In theater, nothing is fixed. Like literary translation, theaterwork includes
the untranslatable, the impossible infinite. The theater’s inherent anti-authoritarian qualities
encourage demonic ghosts to haunt its stage in conditions, translating the invisible to the visible.
H.D. appreciates how this dramatic translation differs from other kinds of literary
translation. Dramatic translation involves two states of becoming: the dramatic solution performed
before our very eyes, and the Word made flesh. A good dramatic text must always include a hidden
door, a trapdoor, a false front the able actor can use. A dramatic script functions as a pre-text for
action, it cannot foresee all the possibilities inherent in a performance. In other words, dramatic
translation never strives for equivalence because it cannot offer a definitive text. Dramatic scripts

28
only offer a starting place for actors. A suggestion, a preference, a marked starting point. Dramatic
translations exist in a potentiality unlike other literary forms that seek equivalence, inventiveness,
imitation, or appropriation when translated because it makes room for the intuitiveness of the
actor’s body and the unpredictability of the conditions of an instant in time. A dramatic script
remains open to performance. Relishing the roving intellect of an actor’s body, H.D. also seems to
equally privilege her reader’s relationship to her dramatic translations in the private act of reading.
Since performance can never be fixed or known, it must be remembered—it begins anew in
memory. Marvin Carlson describes the theater as a memory machine filled with ghosts. Carlson
freely admits his debt to Derrida when he talks about ghosting, the recycling that happens in dramatic
performance. He goes on to equate spectatorship in live theater to the process of dreaming. This
notion, along with his larger argument about the theater as a memory machine, seems especially
promising when evaluating H.D.’s idea of a collective unconscious in her poems and dramatic
adaptations. Visionaries need audiences, a collaborative and generous kind of spectatorship. For a
writer like H.D., the transaction between listener and a speaker is paramount. In Tribute to Freud, she
envisions the cure: the talking cure, the writing cure, the truest writing as “an account of a speaking.”
H.D. is more interested in creating a community of listeners. The ancient Greek theater tradition
provides such a collaborative relationship, as well as a form that is exclusively dialogic, dynamic, and
haunted.

Ionic Iconicity
Of her stony marks in Ion, the nineteen explanatory notes she adds before each division in the play,
we might come to think of them as entrance & exit ramps H.D. builds onto the play’s pre-existing
structure. In writing about H.D.’s epic poem Helen in Troy, Susan Barbour describes the prose
passages as “interpretative captions” which extend the figurative field.
66
Blau Duplessis defines them

29
as midrashes. “Midrash makes annotation keep perpetual dialogue, conflicting interpretations put next
to each other…So write crossings, contradictions, the field of situations, the fields of ‘placeness’ and
mobility.”
67
Instead of closure or a fixed authoritative statement, the midrash generates “continuous
chains of interpretation….where the production and productivity of meanings is continuous.”
68
Ion
employs such prose passages. They appear as italicized paragraph asides. I consider them alternate
routes for the voices of the play. But a route marked by text (littered by letters, pounded on
parchment) that is material. This way in, this way out. The page materially scored with presence, but
also able to record where the one’s walking across disintegrates its very material. H.D. does not seem
afraid of objects becoming animated. In this way, these prose sections can be materially experienced,
like a layer of sedimentary rock, a container, a superstructure, a note-field to hold un-previously
released sounds, visions, sparks, or radiances.
In H.D.’s Ion, there is something I call the nuance of entrances and exits. H.D. seems concerned
with how song-refrain occupies, interrupts, and enlarges spaces. Her speakers make territorial claims
with their voices. Prose sections have been added by H.D. to the play’s original lineated lines. If we
think about Adelaide Morris’s idea—found in her study of H.D. called How to Live/What to Do—of
how poems exist as historical documents that capture an “acoustical richness” promoting
ongoingness, what do we make of H.D.’s relentless interruptions? Do they enlarge space (political,
historical, social) or limit it? Is there one voice? Or a cacophony of voices in the monument of
history?
The composition of Ion most likely begins in 1916. H.D. works again on the translation
during the years 1920 through 1924, but does not finish the play until 1935. Finally published in
1937, its curious composition cycle mirrors the narrative arc in the play that charts the confusions,
delusions, and swerving escapes which finally result in a circuitous closure. Embedded in its form of
double voicing (in lyric lines and prose) is the wish to go beyond duality. Because H.D. keeps re-

30
engaging the play over so many years, its completion marks an important turning point for her. Its
lyric suspension of nearly nineteen years corresponds to the nineteen entrances into the play itself.
In a letter to her friend and once lover, Annie Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), dated August 14, 1935,
H.D. writes: “I do miss you, but feel if I get this Ion done, it will break the backbone of my H.D.
repression.”
69
H.D.’s translation project represents a return to her Greekness, her inherited, albeit
constructed, poetic identity. We must remember that at this point H.D. did not publish much after
1931. Her next major publication wouldn’t be until 1934 with Kora and Ka, with Ion following in
1937. Indeed, her Boston editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenlet reminds H.D. that her “‘fans’
wanted more of the ‘Greek H.D,’” the poet they first encountered in the early poems of 1915.
70
But
more than just a return to her public Greek persona, this re-ignition of the Ion project coincides
with the completion of H.D.’s psychoanalytical sessions (1933-34) with Sigmund Freud, which H.D.
describes as the “most luscious sort of vers-libre relationship.”
71
Her work with Freud allows the
artist to the go back to the imagined or remembered scene not make things crystal clear, but to “get
the pattern.”
72
Getting the pattern becomes important to H.D., as well as a visit from Gertrude Stein
and Thorton Wilder. Writing from Switzerland in August 1935, she explains, “My work is creative
and reconstructive…..This was work I was doing after the first confinement and during my preg.
with old Pups. Probably I have it linked up with my physical creative force. As that is going, I
translate it into this out-put of plays….The Greek will hold me to my centre, now whether here on
in London. It was all ‘meant’ to work out this way, and already I feel stabilized and balanced.”
73

By opening up these generative note-fields of possibility, H.D. articulates a statement of
poetics, translation theories, as well as individual lines of poetry. With these prose passages, she
highlights various presences operating within the entire text—that of translator, who works as reader
of the lyricist-dramatist of the original work, as well as poet-visionary. In this early translation work,
we see H.D. formulating a theory of her poetics, similar to Martin Heidegger, in which her writing

31
corresponds to the construction of an imaginary building or dwelling. In Ion, for example, H.D.-the-
translator builds onto the pre-existing structure of Euripides’ play with the addition of her prose
passages. Most of the time, these additions to the text are not seamlessly added. The new tile does
not match the old. The inconsistency in color and style proves purposeful. H.D. shows the
incongruity between the new and the old because it reveals a literary history in its sedimentary
collection of parts. As such, her work opens up a fracturing in time, a palimpsestic condition where
the ancient past emerges into present view. H.D. replaces various stylistic choices of Euripides with
her own sense of ornamentation. We find out about her remodeling decisions and executions in
these prose passages. “What time is it? Greek unity give us freedom, it expands and contracts at will,
it is time-in-time and time-out-of-time together, it predicts modern-time estimates.”
74
Ancient Greek
theater relied on a synthesis of various codes and practices, giving it a fixed structure. Playwrights
freely worked within this structure, giving shape to wildly unbounded content. Because of the
freedom found in Euripides’ sense of Greek unity, H.D. adds onto his playhouse with a translation
inspired by this flexibility. H.D. extends Euripides’ playhouse since she knows its structure, its
materiality (as language) will not suffer the ravages of time.
If we think of the chorus as ornamentation, H.D. costumes them in blue robes when
Euripides never specified. If we wonder why the Prologue drags on, we are made to consider our
fellow theatre-goers. If we are taken by the epic descriptions of a Delphic temple, or craggy
Parnassus itself, we uncannily sense “a Presence still haunted those weathered stones and spiritually
impermeated rocks.”
75
These prose passages ruminate on everything from how to produce a play to
the physical stage of an imagined Delphi. We see this specialized attention paid to architectural
spaces in early lyric poems like “Eurydice,” where a speaker’s voice, particularly housed in a dramatic
poem, reverberates with a querying cry that bounds as well as surrounds. Eurydice’s defiant

32
questions seal her off from Orpheus, she guards herself in the flames of hell, in her own tapestry of
flowers.
H.D.’s sense of the visionary is tied to spatial metaphors. Helen Sword highlights this
characteristic of H.D’s writing as well, noting that “[s]patial disclosures are enabled by temporal
layerings; ‘breaks in time’ open new spaces for writing.”
76
One of H.D. early visionary experiences is
titled “The Writing on the Wall,” while in her wartime book Trilogy, she titles one of the sections,
“The Walls Do Not Fall.” Fascinated with walls, H.D. uses walls in her work not as a way to keep
others out but as a way to provide shelter and comfort for herself and her readers. Wall as receptive
screen to projected image. Wall as necessary surface for the transmission of sound. Wall as warm
hearth and home. Wall as aqueduct, supporting huge reservoirs of water. Wall as sacred altar temple
to singing voices. More importantly, the walls are then fitted with windows and doors. The walls,
rooms, chambers, doors, windows, portals of H.D.’s writing process all speak to “the word being
the architectural structure of that door or window.”
H.D. falls into mythic time. Indeed, the intended Dionysian experience of the festival
focuses on a total experience of paradoxical proportions. All citizens participate with one another
and with the stage as altar-temple. The theater as a physical space harmonizes with H.D.’s ongoing
poetic practices and preoccupations. The character of Greek theater relies on the weather, open-sky
revisions and decisions; the unbounded blue of sky, of ocean, and of emotion figures predominately
in H.D.’s translation of Ion.
H.D. equates acts of cognition (thinking/writing/translation) with its potential to crystalize,
but sometimes not before the “subtle rhythms…silence us.”
77
H.D.’s crystal-gems are not a
refinement of one’s sense-thoughts, but a secondary substance. On the lady-in-waiting Chorus-as-
Visitors, H.D. writes: “Personally, I visualize them in blue, one colour of various shades.”
78
When
H.D.’s physic imagination equates their Refrain with blue, she prepares us for Kreousa’s robes

33
falling “in folds that are cut of pure stone, lapis.” Then a crash. What to do with a woman who “has
the inhumanity of a meteor, sunk in sea.”
79
Kreousa’s lyric entrance into the play is mediated by
Ion’s understanding of her as “rock, air, wings, and loneliness.” Perhaps it’s H.D. unwavering belief
in the power of language that assures her she will only dig up a living statue instead of a dead body.
When mother and son finally meet in front of the temple (look! are her eyes finally open?)
H.D. chooses to condense the language into staccato free-verse. In a daring game of acquaintance,
mother and son throw familiar rocks at one another, remembering the earthquakes and sea-waves
that once threw them. Sizing each other up in the phenomenology of stone, both characters chisel
lineage, facts.
This essayistic hybrid work captures its twinned moments of closure in its doubled
beginnings. “For B. Athens 1920” is printed on the title page. H.D. dedicates her translation to her
lover, Bryher, but she also erects a dedication to her daughter, which reads, “For P. Delphi 1932.”
These two pillars, spanning a temporal distance of twelve years, signal a dislocated, extended, or
fractured area of composition. Indeed, the distance and strangeness felt in a play like Ion is palpable.
The characters, mother and son, don’t recognize each other. The sun is hot. The reading is
frequently interrupted with commentary, and the language heavy to lift to our reading mouths.
The two marble pillars—perhaps chipped, stained and weathered from acid rain—standing
sentry on the play’s dedication page (one lover, one daughter, two icon-figures) foreshadow the
major innovations of the play itself. In fact, one can read them as Kreousa and Ion talking to one
another in the clipped dialogue H.D. uses instead of the “sustained narrative” of long lines. The
short lines, often two to three words condensed from the original ten, bounce back and forth
between mother and son in their newly built temple of weaving words:

Ion —whose wife are you?

34
Kreousa —of a stranger—
Ion —but a great prince?
Kreousa —grand-son of Zeus—
Ion —strange to your rocks?
Kreousa —near Euboia—
Ion —sea-waves wash it—

Here is a childless woman seeking motherhood, and a motherless boy trying to place where such a
woman comes from. They speak of Kreousa’s origin based on what rock, and what “sea-waves wash
it—” Elemental like the sea, Ion tends to his adopted Delphic temple, washing its stones and
keeping it cool as best he can. As his fingers tense around the handle of his broom, he wonders why
this woman speaks so cryptically, like a stone moved from the mouth of tomb. As the play
continues, the pillars move closer to one another until childless woman and motherless boy
recognize each other. The pillar—in solo silhouette of twinned recognition—represents the origin
point, the first rock upon which to shore the strange sorrows of humankind; in the laments of a
young boy, in the wishes of an old queen, or in the founding of a future iconic culture.
At the same time, the chorus figures as the classic outline of the play. As a group of 12 to 15
members, it stands like a row of stone-cold pillars, like a row of soldiers guarding the actors of the
play. They are a moving wall of curtain. The chorus sings the collective mood of the play. It
comments on the action of the play by asking questioning of what will happen next. Its mode is
strictly interrogative. Like any good rhetorician, they chorus already knows the answer to its
questions. And as protocol would have it, they wait diligently at the gate for their king. They stand
outside. The mark the boundary from outside going in. They mark the time of the play, the distances
traveled, the limbs numbed. The mediate the direct expression of lyric song. These gorgeous women

35
trimmed in blue and gold grieve for Kreousa in a classic way. Locked in tightly, “so singularly a unit
yet breaking occasionally apart like dancers, to show individual, human Athenian women of the
period, to merge once more into a closed circle of abstract joy or sorrow….”
80
As such, the chorus
in Ion ceases to be mere decoration or ornamentation. They cross the orchestra in patterns and
formations never seen before, the normal parados (entrance song) not taken as traditional threshold
and passageway. Strangely, they embody a patience of plan needed of all believers. The one Ionic
column stands firm, stained in a overflowing of red wine, having witnessed the Voice who spoke to
the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, enduring a monumental time; it marks a territory between life and
death.

36

1
H.D., “Notes on Euripides,” Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion: Adaptation of Two Plays by Euripides by H.D., ed. Carol Camper
(New York: New Directions, 2003), 278.
2
Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” The Common Reader, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1951), 39.
3
Michele Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 52.
4
Donna Krolik Hollenberg, ed., Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1997), 32.
5
H.D., By Avon River (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 34.
6
H.D. describes “leaving her waving hieroglyph as upon white parchment.” HERmione, (New York: New Directions,
1981), 224.
7
H.D., “Notes on Euripides,” 278.
8
See Steven Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
9
H.D.’s friend, Annie Winifred Ellerman (Bryher) created POOL Productions, her own film and production company,
so she could collaborate on experimental films and writings with H.D. and Kenneth MacPherson. See also H.D.’s
memoir about her sessions with Freud in A Tribute to Freud (New York, 2012).

10
H.D., Notes on Thoughts and Visions & The Wise Sappho (San Francisco: City Lights Book, 1982), 24.
11
H.D., End to Torment (New York: New Directions, 1979), 41.
12
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 5.
13
Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 275).
14
George Steiner, After Babel (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 24.
15
Richard Aldington and H.D., “Introductory Note,” The Poets’ Translation Series (London: The Egoist Press, 1915), 7-8.
16
Caroline Zilboorg, “Joint Venture: Richard Aldington, H. D. and the Poet's Translation Series,” Philological Quarterly;
Winter 1991; 70, 1; 78.
17
See T.S. Eliot’s essay “Euripides and Professor Murray” in The Sacred Wood (London, 1920) and Richard Aldington’s
letter to Frank Flint on February 8, 1916 in Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Life in Letters (Manchester, 2003), edited by
Caroline Zilboorg.
18
H.D., Bid Me to Live, 163.
19
Ibid.
20
Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 247.
21
Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), 194.
22
Ibid., 195.
23
H.D. Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961), 21.
24
Ibid., 89.
25
Krolik Hollenberg, Between History and Poetry, 31.
26
For H.D.’s “antagonism,” see Leah Culligan Flack’s Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip
Mandelstam, and Pound (Cambridge, 2015); for “pleasure,” see Josephine Balmer’s Piercing Together the Fragments: Translating
Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry (Oxford, New York, 2013); for engendering translation, see Steven Yao’s
Translation and the Languages of Modernism (London, 2003); for the rise of women’s learning in the universities, see Yopie
Prins’ Ladies Greek (Princeton, 2017).
27
Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 113-4.
28
See T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (New York, 1971) and The Family Reunion (New York, 1971), and Ezra Pound’s The
Women of Trachis (New York, 1985).
29
H.D., Helen in Egypt, 21.
30
Rachael Blau DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 24-5.
31
Gregory, Hellenism, 151.
32
Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 10.
33
Ibid., 215.
34
H.D., “The Helmsman,” H.D. Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), 6.
35
David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 131.

37

36
Gregory Nagy, “Lyric and Greek Myth,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, ed. R.D. Woodard (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27.
37
See Laura Vetter’s introduction in By Avon River (Gainesville, 2017).
38
Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism, 179.
39
See Emile Benveniste’s “The Notion of Rhythm in its Linguistic Expression” for further reading.
40
See James Karman’s Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. (Ashland: 1995).
41
Robinson Jeffers, “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” New York Times, January 18, 1948,
https://www.nytimes.com/1948/01/18/archives/poetry-gongorism-and-a-thousand-years-robinson-jeffers-holds-
the.html.
42
Robinson Jeffers, Cawdor and Medea (New York: New Directions, 1970), 171.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid., 144.
45
Ibid., 114, 124.
46
Ibid., 118.
47
Ibid., 122.
48
Katherine Heavey, Early Modern Medea (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.
49
Ibid., 5.
50
H.D., Bid Me to Live (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1983), 146.
51
Ibid., 51.
52
H.D., “Eurydice,” Collected, 51-2.
53
Allen Mandelbaum, tr., The Metamorphoses of Ovid (New York & Boston: Mariner Books, 2017), 327.
54
Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018), 47.
55
Ibid., 38.
56
Diane Rayor, Euripides’ Medea: A New Translation (London: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xviii.
57
See Sarah Nooter’s Mortal Voice In Tragedies Of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 2017).
58
Ingeborg Bachmann, “Darkness Spoken,” Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachman, trans., Peter Filkins
(Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2006), 11.
59
See Simon Goldhill’s chapter “Genre and Transgression” in Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986).
60
John Aldington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, Volume 1, (London: Smith, Elder, & Co, 1873), 204.
61
Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours del Babel,” Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 191.
62
H.D., Bid me to Live (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1983), 162.
63
See Lydia Davis’ introduction to her translation of Maurice Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus: And Other Literary Essays
(Barrytown, 1995).
64
Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism, 19.
65
Ibid., 9.
66
See Susan Barbour’s “The Origins of H.D.’s Prose Captions in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt,” Review of English Studies, 63,
260, (2011), 466-90.
67
Rachel Blau Duplessis, “Otherhow,” The Pink Guitar (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2006), 154.
68
Rachel Blau Duplessis, “Haibun,” Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama
Press, 2006), 229.
69
Susan Stanford Friedman, ed., Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and their Circle (New York: New Directions, 2002),
528.
70
Ibid., 515.
71
Ibid., 165.
72
Ibid., 528.
73
Ibid., 530.
74
Ion, (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1986), 185.
75
Ibid., 161.
76
Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 128.
77
H.D., Ion, 154.
78
Ibid., 166.
79
Ibid., 171.
80
Ibid., 254.

38
2
After a Choral Conditioning

“She was working on a chorus-sequence that she had always, it seemed, been working on. It would
take her forever to get what she wanted, to hew and chisel those lines, to maintain or suggest some
cold artistry. She was self-effacing in her attempt; she was flamboyantly ambitious.”

—H.D., Bid Me to Live

H.D. spent decades translating Euripides. Her lifelong obsession with Euripides often
appears as fictional moments about the art of translation. Julia, a character in H.D.’s novel Bid Me
Live, speaks in the above epigraph of the practice H.D. cultivated in own writing life. The translator
compares herself to a sculptor, chiseling and hewing lines from ancient blocks of text. The
translator’s relationship with time is one of a kind. She must prove bilingual in languages both inside
and outside of time, in dimensions above and below ground. H.D. understands this, collecting
marble from ancient broken statues, refashioning a statuary all her own.
What compels H.D. to obsess over Euripides rather than Sophocles? Euripides’ meta-
poetics hold a special kind of appeal for H.D. His frequent use of allusions compliment her own
mode of writing and translating. Euripides’ plays suggest the access and use of a library—not only of
his own library but those of his audience as well. Euripides’ particular brand of meta-theatricality
rests on the idea that every tragedy is a re-telling or a version told from a set pool of received myths.
Like H.D., Euripides writes for the erudite crowd. A library beckons in the distance. As Gregory
writes, “Euripides is the architectonic poet of H.D.’s hellenism.”
1
H.D.’s translation strategy does

39
not engage in the simple reproduction of language, her translations swell with innovations, with
metaphoric growth, building a composition upon an ancient structure.
2
Finally, Euripides uses
performance as a way to self-efface. For a poet who uses a moniker of an abbreviated name, H.D.
hides behind masks of her own making, too.
In a 1935 letter to Bryher, H.D. writes about her translation of Euripides’ Ion: “My work is
creative and reconstructive, war or no war, if I can get across the Greek spirit at its highest I am
helping the world, and the future. It is the highest spiritual neutrality.”
3
Here, most clearly, H.D.
unequivocally ties her translation and transmission of “the Greek spirit” to an ethical act. Sandra
Bermann argues that whenever a translator is “performing translation,” she is engaged in a parallel
act that must imaginatively consider how to negotiate foreignness or difference. H.D. believes the
ancient Greeks offer a way of seeing the world that is ultimately beneficial to her readers; an
elemental source radiating wisdom. Because H.D. applies translation as a practical art—in the sense
that it produces a textual version—we are able to view her translations as a concrete example of
political activity, not an abstract or theoretical project. But her translation activity exists as a largely
subversive act, questioning ideas of authenticity and originality, because she engenders an un-
scholarly and feminist approach to the art form. H.D.’s only credential being her work for The Poets’
Translation Series, specifically defined as amateur under her own terms.
In many ways, the act of translation fulfills a social need for H.D. Caroline Zilboorg
maintains that “[h]ellenism provided not only academic matter but a way of being with another
person and way of defining one’s self. It was a social and psychological as well as an intellectual
challenge.”
4
Translation allows H.D. to work collaboratively with her husband, Aldington, and other
poet friends, but it also provides a safe haven for independent work and study.
5
Portable and
potentially lucrative, translation could accompany the Aldingtons wherever they went, both literally
and imaginatively.
6

40
H.D.’s fascination with Euripides seems partly due to the sense of disintegration in his plays,
his way of breaking down dramatic conventions (disunifying the parts to the whole, distancing the
chorus even further from the action of the play than earlier playwrights, privileging the ear over the
eye). His radical stylistic fragmentation emboldens translators to pick and choose what passages they
like best.
7
Euripides’ plays were not as universally liked as Aeschylus or Sophocles, perhaps because
of this corruption he invites. His popularity deepened when Erasmus presents discrete scenes and
passages from his plays to a Renaissance audience, empowering a kind of transmission that might be
categorized as “fragmentary translation.”
8
While the Bacchae is arguably the most traditional of his
plays, it comes to us with two gaping holes at the end of the play. A long passage is missing after line
1300—ironically right after Agave asks if her son Pentheus’s dismembered body has been
reconstituted from the bloody limbs scattered around her and Cadmus—“perhaps about 50 verses
if, as seems possible, the loss was caused by the tearing away of the outer column of a two-page
column.”
9
Not only do these two lacunae mirror the beheaded Pentheus at the end of the play, but
they prepare us for the loss and dismemberment ancient texts often bring in translation.
Translations of ancient texts often bring a sense of disorientation due to their fractured,
ruined, and foreign parts. Pages go missing, text is corrupt. The poet and translator Johannes
Göransson advocates for these qualities to be viewed as redeeming attributes of the already corrupt
translation. In his book of essays on translation, Transgessive Circulation, Göransson maintains that the
very lawlessness of translation, its contagion and excess, makes it the “epitome of poetry and art,”
and, as such, any attempt to theorize it “is an attempt to theorize poetry and art.”
10
Useful is
Göranssan’s discussion of John Durham Peters’ work regarding the “transgressive circulation of the
written word, its ability to wander beyond the original context of its oral, interactive presence,”
something that troubled Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus.
11
The written word is problematic because
when a work circulates it opens itself up to misinterpretation and makes readers vulnerable to what

41
Göranssan calls “foreign influence.” I would argue H.D. places herself at the contested site,
demonstrating her right to intervene. Read in this light, translation then becomes a volatile zone,
where multiple texts circulate often in counterfeit copy, and where readers and translators read
possessed. In this “deformation zone,” no accurate translation exists, only violence and deformity.
12

For H.D., translation includes elucidation on the choices she makes at the individual word or
line level. In Ion, she calls this elucidation “prose commentaries,” in Helen in Egypt she will call them
“captions.”
13
These prose commentaries, rashes, or captions describe the difficulty the very act of
translation inspires, as well as calling attention to the difference in time and place from the original
text.
14
Bermann further clarifies that “[t]ranslation is not merely the interpretation that a translator
performs on a literary or social script. Rather, translation itself – and particularly its encounter with
otherness – becomes a model for ethical and political action.
15
Translation is an active encounter; it
first asks us to fully inhabit two distinct worlds, then to reconcile or balance their differences. It
prepares us imaginatively, coaxing out a sense of continuity, a shared history. How do we behave in
times of war? How to we work, live, and love in concert with one another? How does the individual
artist make sense of her commitment to herself and, at the same time, to her artistic community, her
larger community? These are all questions H.D. poses and struggles to answer in her multi-genre
work. Ultimately, H.D. grapples to understand herself through her writing not to change the world,
but to better integrate her anima, her life-force, with humanity itself. Demetres Tryphonopoulos has
noted this propensity for self-study, calling it palingenesis, or soul-making.
16

In this chapter, we will consider why the Greek chorus so preoccupied H.D, tracing its rich
historical habitat in the very songscapes she builds in her work. H.D.’s dramatic poetics insists upon
a disorienting enchantment, one that moves us closer to home even when standing still.

42
The Rhythm of Escape
H.D. devotes much of her translation activity to the choral odes of Euripides (Iphigenia In
Aulis, Ion, Hippolytus, Bacchae, and Hecuba) because it allows her to pursue an entirely different set of
aims than those found in a dramatic monologue like “Eurydice,” or in her translation of Ion. The
lyric intensity of Greek choral odes greatly complicates the task of the translator in several ways.
Traditionally speaking, the choral songs in ancient drama represent a highly-charged transformative
moment in the action of the play that paradoxically denies place and time. Oliver Taplin describes
how choral odes inhabit a “different register, distinct from the specific events of the plot. The lyrics
are not tied down in place and time, in language, in the reasoned sequence of speech and thought, as
the dialogue is” with the implication being that the choral ode charges itself primarily with emotion
rather than intellect.
17
The lyric flees from dramatic story or narrative. Its pronounced escape, in
fluttering feet no less, from narrative provides an alternative mode of seeing and feeling the world.
In fact, one could read an ancient tragedy with the choral songs omitted and still understand the
drama’s main story and development.
Except in the case of the Bacchae, where the choral odes are closely linked to the action of the
play, and “[i]n no other extant Greek play since Aeschylus, and in Aeschylus only in the Supplices and
Eumenides, is the chorus so prominent.”
18
In fact, the choral odes demonstrate an interdependence
on one another, building upon the image of the bacchic hunt that begins in striking melody only to
end in an ecstatic dedication to Dionysus, the divine god. Classicist Gilbert Murray maintains that
although the Bacchae appears wildly inventive, it simply makes use of ideas and themes found in the
plays of Aeschylus and in the theater’s own tradition of ancient rites dedicated to Theater of
Dionysus. Why is the Bacchae so compelling if its basic architecture or shape doesn’t stray from
tradition? Murray equates the vehicle of drama as a safe cover for the poet to freely express
emotions and ideas she might be hesitant to articulate in a poem. He writes:

43
The Bacchae is the most formal Greek play known to us; its Chorus is its very soul and its
lyric songs are as long as they are magnificent. For the curious thing is that in this extreme of
formality and faithfulness to archaic tradition Euripides has found both is greatest originality
and his most perfect freedom.
19

H.D. envisions the choral songs as a way to extend a revisionary space within an ancient poetic
form. The choral songs allow her a generative threshold, an echo chamber where new modern
language can be coded into a space adjacent or even beyond the original performance space. Murray
might say that this is how the ancient form allows the writer to leave her own mark or trace or
contribution to tradition. H.D. explores the language of emotion in her translations of choral songs
without having to worry about its form, for its foundation has been set and dry for years.
Theater appeals to H.D. because it marries the material and the metaphysical. In writing
about verse drama, Eliot maintains that a poet feels most at home in the choral odes, where lyric
intensities are the greatest, rather than in the dramatic dialogue.
20
When “great poetry” is dramatic, it
“has checked and accelerated the pulse of our emotion without our knowing it.”
21
The lyric
intensities of the choral odes afford H.D. a kind of poetic emotion unparalleled in the speech of
dramatic monologues because they integrate poetry, music, and dance into song; a complex
operation involving rhythmic, performing bodies. The reliable transmission of the Greek spirit
depends upon this dynamic collaboration of three distinct parts.
22
While the dramatic monologue
offers the subjective voice of a solo performance tied to mythic traditions, the choral songs provide
a different kind of potentiality as it marries music, body, and recitation. H.D.’s attraction to the
chorus (and the choral ode as fertile landscape for her poetic thinking) becomes apparent when we
begin looking at the chorus in relation to dramatic modes of storytelling.
The chorus as a collective, figurehead, and animating sequence enchants H.D. because it
permits the improvisation of a new, embodied lyric intensity, an affective rhythm particular to its
own age. As if answering classicist A.M. Dales’ question whether “rhythmic feeling” (R.P.

44
Winnington-Ingram) in lyric meter is stable from age to age, H.D.’s unusual choral translations
suggest that every age must enunciate its own unique rhythm plucked from an eternal rhythm.
23

These translations do not seek to replicate Euripides’ original, rather they follow an irregular meter
more closely aligned with H.D.’s experience of rhythm in the early twentieth century. Both she and
Aldington write in their 1916 preface to the Imagist anthology: “A new cadence means a new
idea.”
24
In her letters, H.D. subscribes to this idea of the individual artist reconstructing a rhythm
particular to her age when she speaks of a new “chant rhythm” she uses in her translation,
something akin to a bodily invocation that is not precisely measured like meter. She writes: “I am
beating out Greek Prologue [for Ion] to more or less chant rhythm, a new method—‘a wonderful
idea, I just thought of it, as [Gertrude] Stein would say.’”
25
This new chant rhythm works to bridge
the gap between the ancient and modern world, extending the melodic line across the centuries. Fair
to say, an understanding of rhythm runs underneath all successful writers. Rhythm harnesses both
the body and mind so it might be transported:
One cannot understand rhythm without considering its realization in human psychology and
physiology; as readers of poetry, it is the experience of rhythm that is important to us, and
this experience is both mental and bodily. At its most basic, rhythm is patterning of energy, of
tension, and release, movement and countermovement that we both perceive and produce—
or reproduce in our own brains and muscles.
26

Twinned in use, a poet of H.D.’s caliber understands how mind and body must both be activated for
the poem to work successfully; of particular interest is the way rhythm, movement, and emotion
work in shared collective experience of a chorus or audience member. One of the responsibilities of
a Greek chorus was to express emotions that could not be expressed in lyric or dramatic language
alone; chorus as “an echo, a sort of music in the air.”
27
Not just dancing feet but the entire body
used in prayer. Murray describes it as “some residue which no one on the stage can personally feel
and which can only express itself as music or yearning of the body.”
28
Dance or gesture works
alongside sung language to convey what words cannot. Wiles reminds us the chorus usually ignites

45
the spatio-temporal transformations in a Greek tragedy. This phenomenon can be seen in how a
strophe (a turning) and anti-strophe (a counter-turning) work onstage to move a large chorus around the
altar one way, then the other way, then to dead-center stop in front of the altar (epode).
29
Judith Hall
sums up the function of the chorus in one simple word: space. Later, we will see how H.D.’s chorus
inhabits space in a way reflective of their modernist rhythms. And so, every age must also then claim
a new relationship to space. The somatic responses H.D. encodes in her translations of choral odes
speak to her unconventional approaches.

Chorus As Translator
The chorus is perhaps the most foreign element of ancient theater, the one element modern-
day audience members seem to have a difficult time relating to. Yet, at the same time, the chorus
might be the most exciting aspect of a live performance. The chorus usually brings an aulus, a double
flute, to accompany their song. In the Bacchae, they also bring kettledrums. The chorus sings in
unison. Twelve to fifteen bodies occupy the stage with singing, dancing, reciting, and chanting. Their
power stems from an occupation of space. Sonically material, their wall of language processes
onstage and surrounds the actor. The chorus inhabits a unique role because she is fellow actor and
audience member at the same time. Like H.D.’s own self-declared status of amateur translator, the
chorus initially represented the non-professional actor or citizen in the Greek democracy.
30
This
pleasure then, partly, comes from the fact that the chorus mirrors us as well as represents us. We
watch ourselves unfold in the play’s running time, but we also realize we are part of the older story
being told onstage.
For Nagy, “[t]he chorus represents a “go-between” or “twilight zone” between the heroes of
the there-and-then and the audience of the here-and-now, which happens to be, in the case of the
dramas, Athens in the 5th century.”
31
This twilight zone extends to the twenty-first century, where

46
the chorus has been professionalized but still represents the symbolic citizen culled from the body
politic, active in her political service and duty. Murray, stealing much from Harrison and M.F.
Cornford, describes the chorus as inhabiting a plane that is separate from the other actors in the play
in their pursuit of expressing the “overflow of emotion” as it is related to ritual dance. Speaking for
the chorus Murray writes: “We are not imitating the outside of life. We are expressing its soul, not
depicting its body.”
32
Taplin’s insistence on reading Greek tragedy strictly through materialist terms
precludes him from noticing any nuances of the metaphysical kind that Murray might describe the
chorus as having. In fact, Taplin explains in his influential study, Greek Tragedy in Action, because the
chorus is “not closely involved in the action or plot,” he will not devote much time to any closer
scrutiny of their function other than to notice that the chorus mainly demarcates when a dialogue
begins and ends. Challenging this notion, Wiles contends the chorus should not be marginalized or
seen as cut off from the action of the play. Rather, if we view the chorus as fundamentally
integrated, we are more likely to acknowledge how they provide another way of seeing the action.
He also makes clear just how the chorus transforms space and time; only the chorus can activate a
large theatrical space with its fluid, multi-part body.
33
In fact, the sheer size and physical magnitude
of an ancient chorus is what makes them so conspicuous, so out of place, in our contemporary,
stage-oriented, black box theaters. While Taplin may be right in arguing that we don’t have hard
evidence of the true function of the Greek chorus, it seems reasonable to take an approach,
advocated by Wiles, that is informed by both material and metaphysical concerns; where we at least
try to imagine how the presence of the chorus provides three-dimensional vision.
34
Older than any
character onstage, what if we think of the chorus as a translator, reminding us what the ancient
melody first sounded like when it rushed across our anticipating bodies?
Classicist and poet Anne Carson says that the chorus’ purpose is to “introduce the possibility
of emptiness.”
35
In her typical vatic fashion, her notion of “emptiness” only mystifies. While we

47
know how difficult it is to generalize about the chorus in Greek tragedy, we often marvel at their
lyric freedom. Sometimes the chorus works like “a moving curtain,” (H.D.) cueing the passage of
time as it winds around the actors on stage. But the primary mode of the chorus is to interpret the
action of the play, passing judgment on the main characters of the play, foretelling the future, or
disrupting the illusion. Disruption. Interruption. A chill overtakes the air. The falling of a curtain. The
falling off a cliff. The veil reveals as much as it conceals. In many ways, the chorus acts as a sounding board
for the protagonists in which to test the validity of their desires and future plans. Perhaps the
emptiness Carson refers to can be understood as the chorus’ level of receptivity to the speaking
actor, as its duty includes patient acts of listening. I’ve often felt the materiality of chorus as a kind
of living wall. Their arms linked in a flexible network of partly blossoms, partly bricks, a continuous
wall enclosing and dividing the terra. A living joint. Perhaps this is just another example of H.D’s
incorporation of a structural fortification into her work. For the women of the bacchanal chorus
however, their wall breathes a rhythmic and traveling enclosure that stakes out a deeply pleasured
freedom of elsewhere.

Processional Poetics
H.D. presents her new sense of rhythm in a mode I call processional poetics: the espousal of
lyric intensity (sonic, material, kinetic) that revolves outward away from a source text in a ceremonial
fashion, perhaps beyond a single consciousness. Processional poetics involves multiple entrances
and exits, where language, landscape, and meaning are interconnected. In her choral translations of
Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the first two stanzas charts the chorus’ movement in the tragic
landscape, giving precise coordinates of their displacement:

I crossed sand-hills.
I stand among the sea-drift before Aulis.

48
I crossed Euripos’ strait—
Foam hissed after my boat.

I left Chalkis,
My city and the rock-ledges.
Arethusa twists among the boulders,
Increases—cuts into the surf.
36

Notice the nature of the words here: “crossed,” “hissed,” “twists,” and “cuts.” Immediately, we
sense a portent of what’s to come in the menacing, ill-omened scratches of language. Used twice, the
word “crossed” scores a mark across the map, cutting into the landscape a line of travel and
eyewitness. The reference to a trapped Arethusa only serves to heighten the difference between the
sea nymph’s fate and those of the women of Chalkis. While Arethusa “twists among the boulders,”
this chorus traverses the rocky landscape. Whose fate is worse? Within the first-person pronoun,
these women of Chalkis announce themselves as dislocated from their homeland, but more
importantly, we understand they will be our witnesses to the atrocities in the play, namely, the killing
of Iphigenia.
But their role of first witness begins even earlier than the play’s opening. These women
“….come to see the battle-line / And the ships rowed here / By these spirits— / The Greeks are
but half-men.”
37
The chorus keeps the history of war in sight and in memory. They have seen the
warrior heroes (“I have seen Ajax. / I have known Protesilaos….), as well as the endless horizon of
“ships / circled with ships / This beauty is too much / For any woman. / It is burnt across my eyes.
/ The line is an ivory-horn.”
38
The pageantry of war often stuns its viewers. Burdened with accomplice
sight, the chorus suffers their own kind of shell shock. In a fascinating turn of lines, H.D. transforms
the horizon line of warships “burnt” into the chorus’ eyes into a trumpet of war. Ivory horns, or
oliphants as they were called in medieval times, sound the blare, alerting trespassers they now are in
territory not their own. Whether as warning or immediate call to war, this horn carved from an
elephant’s trumpet blasts a refrain and demarcates a territory or boundary line. In this way, its

49
tuneless shock wave occupies space. “The line” represents 1) the assembled members of the chorus,
2) the sonic vibrations of the horn’s blast, 3) the row of gentle rocking battleships, 4) the scored line
upon the chorus’ eyes, 5) and the actual line of the poem itself, which becomes reinserted into the
poem’s landscape, activating the entire procession right to the beginning letter. How does H.D.
manage to do all this work with a few simple declarative lines of poetry?
But the chorus also hears a more human voice of war: “And nothing will ever be the same—
/ The shouts, / The harrowing voices within the house. / I stand apart with an army: / My mind is
graven with ships.”
39
The chorus sees the impersonal and perhaps majestic ships lurking in the
public harbor, but they are also privy to the domestic scenes taking place within the houses under
attack. Here, real human voices wail. The paradoxical nature of this rich vision—the magnificence in
the parade of war alongside the cries of the invisible women and children within the houses—carves
out a highly charged zone. The chorus stands apart from the violence but their “mind is graven with
ships.” They cannot escape; they have been permanently inscripted—graven with war, they roam,
singing at various historical battle sites of what they have seen and heard.
In essence, the choral odes of a tragedy highlight the relationship between territory and
refrain. The chorus sings o’er the mountains they go. For Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari, the
refrain is the territorial force fusing rhythm and melody to score, reinscribe, assemble, or depart
from the land altogether.
40
Seen in this way, the refrain creates a necessary critical distance between a
marked territory and an unmarked territory. And in the case of the Bacchae, we find the procession
always already moving. In the play’s first opening song (parados), Dionysus’ ecstatic troupe of
worshippers (thiasos) marks the god’s arrival into Thebes in the form of a procession that was the
custom in the theater festival of Dionysus. Sonically and visually, the chorus’ first processional song
(their address to the gods) must fill the auditorium entire with large drumbeats, fawn skins, magic
wands, flutes, and a syncopated chorus of fifteen bodies. As we have seen in her translations of

50
Iphigenia in Aulis, H.D. explores certain ideas about space, song, silence, and reception using the
chorus. While H.D. wholeheartedly engages in the rubric of mythic performance to explore what
“modernism’s mythic pose,” [Preston] H.D. does not privilege the intensity of a solo performance
because of an ambivalence regarding the political or ethical efficacy of a collective force. Rather, she
seems interested in a dynamic chorus made up of one-of-kind individuals, who surprise those
persons and systems around them with their inventive thinking. Again and again, H.D. uses
translation as a stable form in which to fill with unstable sonic material. The choral “I” disintegrates
and complicates the boundary self and other.
Visionaries need audiences, a collaborative and generous kind of spectatorship. But in the
darkened theater, how much could the audience really see on stage? How much did they rely on
their powers of listening in concert with their imaginations? The Dionysian underside of the band
shell appeals to H.D. for it echoes a disorderly procession—it seeks a recirculation of experiences,
not a possession of ideas.

“Theatre as a lived inquiry….”
41

The reception of Greek theater is often contextualized or foregrounded in discussion of
Greek rituals. Most likely, H.D. encountered modernist understandings of Greek ritual like those
found in Jane Harrison’s Art and Ritual and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
42
In her popular book,
Harrison examines the relationship between art and ritual, namely how the “decay of religious faith”
and the influence of other cultures from abroad birthed various new art forms, entirely different
than their ritual predecessors. Harrison argues, via Aristotle, that ancient Greek drama arose out of
ritual dance, or the dithyramb. “The Dithyramb is a Spring Song at a Spring Festival, and the
importance of the Spring Festival is that it magically promotes the food-supply.”
43
This spring song,
or choral hymn, was usually sung and danced for Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility by “men

51
and boys, tillers of the earth, who danced when they rested from sowing and ploughing.”
44
Harrison
speculates that everyone (except the women and children) dances the dithyramb, an a-leaping, a
procession originating outside the city wall that snakes through to the agora, or market-place, where
it culminates in the orchestra with circular dancing around the image of Dionysus at an altar.
Everyone participates until they don’t, until the city ritual transforms the group of active
worshippers into spectators, “watching, feeling, thinking, not doing. It is in this new attitude of the
spectator that we touch on the difference between ritual and art; the dromenon, the thing actually done
by yourself has become a drama, a thing also done, but abstracted from your doing.”
45
And so a
theater, complete with seats, is built around the orchestra. Here in the theater, the art of drama
pushes the procession rites to before and after the show. In the case of the Bacchae, “the parados
takes the form of a dithyrambic procession, and it seems altogether probably that the procession
brought on an image of the god.”
46
The opening song of the play operates as an example of how art
memorializes the old spirit of the ritual in a mimetic representation. While unproven, most scholars
believe “tragedy is the logical extension of choral dance, which was the most important form of
cultural expression in the pre-classical period.”
47

Since we definitively know very little about why and how Greek theater was performed, our
discussion here instead will remember the humanness of theater and the multitude of ways it can be
performed. For a poet like H.D., primarily interested in inner landscapes of the human psyche, the
realization that theater makes invisible things visible surely must have attracted her to the form.
Theaterwork requires an openness, flexibility, and receptiveness not unlike the act of translation
itself. Edith Grossman maintains that translation can be considered a “kind of interpretive
performance, bearing the same relationship to the original text as the actor’s work does to the
script.”
48
Barbara Godard creates the neologism “transformance” to describe how one uses aspects
of performance, translation and transformation to create the dialogue between the voice of the text

52
and the voice of the translation.
49
While Rebecca Schneider argues “that theatrical performance is a
mode of haunting, ghosting, or inhabiting nonlinear time (and that some theatre may even be ‘dead’
[Schneider 2012:159])….
50
All three maintain that within each performance there remains the
skeleton or trace of the original text. My sense is that because “theater is always a self-destructive art,
and it is always written on the wind,” H.D. uses theater’s mode of decreation to inform her
translation and writing practice.
51
The original text offers a pre-existing structure that H.D. corrupts
as she feels necessary. Theaterwork invites and welcomes such corruptions to the original script. In
fact, the theater may work as a way to contain or shape the corruption infecting those very
communities who attend and participate in its performances.
H.D.’s desire for wholeness manifests in her obsession with structure and form. Her stylized
ruptures represent a yet-to-be satiated, longed for reconciliation with order. H.D.’s fascination with
the chorus as a sonic material is related to this obsession with structure. Her individual lines
connectively build room upon room, where an echoing voice carries and multiplies. Michele Serres
describes this phenomenon as the following:
We create boxes in order to hear, we connect our ear to a conch to hear the sound of the
sea, we build spaces with the express purpose of listening, or hearing each other: town
squares, vaults, walls, churches, theaters, narrow passageways, alleys, ears of stone. We favor
echoes and rhymes.
52

The ancient chorus is refrain and echo at the same time, marking the monuments of the civilized life
as it moves, as it breaks across a new listening space. As the chorus processes through the city and
into the theater, it tests its thrown voice against the public structures. The importance of the theater
space in ancient Greece cannot be emphasized enough. Nothing in Greek drama was meant to be
private. Indeed the Greeks built their spaces with what Serres describes as “the express purpose of
listening.” It is also important to remember that during the classical period “we must visualize a
performance space that was temporary, disorderly and constantly changing.”
53
Because the

53
performance space was not fixed in stone, its instability lends itself to all kinds of makeshift surfaces
(altars, ledges, stages, dancing floors, entrances, exits) spread out in a constellation across the city
where sound can reverberate. H.D.’s manipulation of the chorus is directly related to these spatial
and temporal concerns. Gregory speaks of H.D.’s work with the chorus as an “effort to find
polyphony in lyric voice and complexity in lyric temporality and spatiality.”
54
The chorus—as tied to
executions of the dramatic or ritual mode—represents, for H.D. the high lyricism that ignites
imaginative, kinetic thinking in her reader.

Bacchic Boxes
The lyric intensities in the choral odes use a difficult prosody that even accomplished classicists do
not quite understand.
55
Since Greek prosody remains essentially unknown, the highly lyric choral
odes are often glossed over, or ignored, by those teaching ancient Greek to students. In fact, many
translations of ancient tragedies and comedies often exclude the choral odes. Additionally, study of
choral songs is made further difficult by the fact that much of recovered text is often corrupt, cut
from decomposing and compromised papayri. As a result, choral song or odes are not often studied
because they pose too many difficulties for the student. Because choral odes occupy a site
unsupervised by classicists, they offer a kind of delicious freedom for those pursuing untraditional or
un-academic modes of translation. These subversive conditions allow H.D. greater flexibility to
innovate, claim new rhythmic ground, and practice her anti-scholarly approach to translation.
A dedicated form unto themselves, the chorus in the Bacchae comes in celebration of
Dionysus with song, dancing, and sacred objects. They do not enter in silence. They process onstage
in sound, marking their territory in noise. As such, the chorus works in a measure of sound rather
than in language. Sound as meaningful material. The chorus relies on a technique of psychic sound
statements.
56
Fixed in form, they inhabit the literary text but generally do not influence the outcome

54
of a dramatic plot. Highly charged, even erotic, their strength comes from this inability to effectively
offer closure, or solve the action’s complicated dilemmas. As their role essentially requires them to
be both actor and audience, they possess the gift of double-consciousness. They wander, they float,
they dance lyric visions inside a traveling, unfixed double-lit band shell that contains, and is, the
performance itself. As chorus, they are refrain. Since the chorus’ main role is to listen to the dialogue
of the play, this listening symbolically represents the double function of an Athenian citizen, which
is to 1) listen and 2) speak out in response when politically and ethically appropriate.
57
The chorus
simultaneously exists as curtain, vibrating wall, bell, stone frieze, siren, entrance, and exit door.
Something Serres defines as “[a] vibration in several voices. Coming together [jouissance]. The
collective, at the least, is sonorous utopia.”
58
The collective makes a kind of music, hoping to
enchant its listeners into a new sonic territory. “The collective takes many names—pack of wolves,
herd, forest, crowd of women—music each time providing their rare and unstable harmony, rare like
silence, unstable like the music of genius, always at risk of collapsing into noise.
59

We can’t help but notice the sonic hole in the forest where no bird sings. In Euripides’ play
Helen, a small, plain songbird calls the chorus home, its melody an entire musical landscape fitted
inside beak. The refrain assembles a territory, and is a territory at the same time; melodies most
often arising in the between zones. An unlikely protectorate, the songbird shields the chorus from
the harsh elements of the earth by scoring the coordinates of their long way home.
H.D. writes about this moment of coming home—this trope of being “escorted” home
appears in other plays—in her unpublished “Notes on Euripides, Pausanius and Greek Lyric Poets,”
a collection of essays celebrating the playwright, the traveler-geographer, and other lyric poets like
Meleager. In these notes, perhaps fashioned after William Pater’s Greek Studies, H.D. strives to come
to terms with the scope and vision of these ancient Greek writers in relation to her own writing
interests and proclivities. H.D. lyrically describes the scene between the chorus and bird as such:

55
It is to a bird, they call; a bird, but not a swooping, swerving gull, or a wide-winged swan
such as went to make Helen’s body, but to a small familiar loving spirit, one whose voice
calls them home, back to the woods, veiling the elements of fire and strength of the earth,
the kind woods, tender as a lover’s arms after the fire and the elemental power of love is
scattered.
60

In these notes, one finds philosophy, lines toward an ars poetica, travelogue, and critical theory. One
also finds useful advice for the writer who must always be moving from one place or condition to
another; or in other words, translating the world around her. Functioning as notes toward of theory
of translation perhaps, they are multivalent, dialogic, phenomenological, and personal. “There is a
vibration, a stirring of old bodies, the young course of the electric fervor of the vinegod spreads
vitality, old, old branches may feel the golden sap course through the gnarled and knotted fibre.”
61

In these lines, H.D. attempts to describe the energetic rhythm, the cosmic pulsation that overtakes
the scene when the chorus is filled with holiness, divinity. How does one write about invisible
forces? These notes chart H.D.’s appreciation of Greek literature and history, presenting an
intellectual and emotional response and its affect on her own thinking and writing.

Eventing an Escape
As the description of the song-bird and chorus demonstrates, H.D. writes of an ancient
rubric built into the landscape of earth, and fueled by natural elements. The act of listening is always
connected to place. An element of mysticism works to condition the imagined scene. The songbird
representing “the hope of home now” that endures in way much different than the cormorants or
herring-gulls. The “kind woods” as a character in H.D.’s explication, and the “strength of the earth”
calls to mind how much the forested mountainside in the Bacchae figures in the action of the plot.
Certain characters, like Helen, are like songbirds or nightingales listening to captured voice or song,
waiting “upon moss fronds” for the cry that will carry them home.

56
Unfortunately H.D.’s essay on the Bacchae—unlike her others meditation on Helen or Ion—
mainly involves a plot summary of the play’s action. Some showcasing of her original translations do
appear but the rest of the content does not illumine. Rather, it merely exists as a perfunctory
description of the play. In this way, H.D.’s Bacchae notes function much differently than the other
sections. Less time is spent on the reverie of certain provocative words or questions arising from the
mechanics of performance, and more time is spent on the play’s action and the plight of its
characters. H.D. does call the Bacchae Euripides’ “most exquisite and passionately mystical writing,”
62

comparing it to Shakespeare’s own last play, The Tempest, which deals in similar themes of reality and
fantasy, but she does not ask us to imagine the sound of running water or how the play might be
staged without the stage property of religious drama but on “some exquisite sea-shelf” like she does
in earlier essays.
63
Instead H.D. seems more preoccupied in setting down the chorus’ “emotional
broken metres” of her own translations, which appear after the opening page of the essay.
64
Her
usual spirited observations about the revolutionary nature of Euripidean theater do not appear
alongside these translations. We come to miss H.D.’s insightful readings but we gain a translator’s
commentary speaking in direct conversation with her translation: “a word difficult to translate,” and
“[b]ut the whole is lightened from within with passion and broken breath, even as the scards of
Cithaeron are broken with patch and runnel and curved wave-length of cold....”
65
Obviously, the
intellectual challenge of translating Euripidean choral odes compels H.D. to stay close to the task at
hand. Her rigorous focus emboldens her to do something radical with Euripides’ work.
It all starts somewhere, in a place. In località, in a pinprick point in space. A crack. Shards
ricochet out from an archaic vessel when written upon. Decorum, etiquette, and tradition can only
take you so far, H.D. might say. H.D.’s resistance to meaning is not overly confrontational.
Remember, as a poet, she’s not obligated to communicate meaning. Let me be quite clear—the
poet’s service resides in the transmission. As a translator however, H.D. finds herself with quite

57
different responsibilities, which she upholds to varying degrees. H.D.’s main subject then is desire,
birthing original poems alongside submerged ones in need of translation. She uses form—whether it
be a dramatic script or another language—as a constraint that allows her the ability to ramrod the
machinery of a text, so a processional escape can be made into a new elsewhere.
What H.D. accomplishes through her translations of the Bacchae is a poetic revolution. A sea-
change, an innovation, a radical alteration.
66
Earlier I argued that the poem “Eurydice,” works as
exemplar of a unique dynamism because of its dialogic qualities. H.D.’s ruminations within the lyric
force her to contend with various speeds, intensities, rhymes, rhythms, and sound patterning. The
stuck, fixed, or attached qualities of her lyric voice in the shorter poems almost seem to prepare her
to push beyond into the processional mode she finds in Greek tragedy. When discussing ancient
Greek tragedy, Hall writes: “No genre is so definitively dialogic, nor erases the authorial persona to
such an extreme degree.”
67
If the speakers in the shorter, lyric poems watch from fixed place, the
women in “Choros Translations” call for a circling back to a place of origin.
In Theory of Lyric, Jonathan Culler posits that narrative time is measured, while lyric time is
eternal. This distinction proves useful when considering H.D. as a counter-modernist who
annihilates the authorial voice as part of the creative act. Culler maintains that the lyric is not simply
an enunciation or articulation of an individual experience but presents “a formal principle of unity
more than the consciousness of a given individual.”
68
He extends Kate Hamburger’s position of the
lyric as “a statement about this world rather than the projection of a fictional speaker” to include
this unified approach as first articulated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but also asserts that the
lyric is a special kind of linguistic event related to ritual or performance, or what the Greeks meant
by epideixis: “discourse conceived as an act, aiming to persuade, to move, to innovate.”
69
According
to Culler, lyric performance “succeeds as it acts iterably through repeated readings” and its success
very much depends upon its re-enactment.

58
Culler does not ever explicitly define what a lyric is, but he writes about its rhyme, repetition,
rhythm, its unusual temporality, and modes of address. He seeks to enlarge the discussion of how to
receive a lyric into one’s reading world. He maintains that the lyric requires to be experienced as an
event in time; an event revolving around the language of the poem (its sound becoming a pattern)
more than the representation of a remembered event.
70
H.D. embeds such instances of lyric intensity
(as an event in time) within her complex narratives. Her poem-translations are more like a script for
performance than an utterance overheard. Its subject is its own dislocation—the rhythm of breaking
free. HD does not want her translations to remain fixed in place. She wants them to move. Greeks
didn’t use rhyme. (Empty echoing.) Rather, they used rhythm, as connected to bodies in motion,
music, and voiced language. Rhythm is harder to systemize, constantly in flux, and only understood
in terms of its flux. Culler maintains that because narratives ask us to imagine fictional elements, it’s
harder to appreciate the musical or ritual aspects.
71
While H.D.’s choral lyrics do include some
fictional elements taken from Euripides’ Bacchae, the fierce repetition and intense patterning of the
poem cannot be missed. In this way, the musical and ritual elements contribute to the lyricism of her
translation.
In “Choros Translations,” printed in Red Roses for Bronze (1931), H.D. claims ownership of
the collective female voice by removing the chorus of women from the Bacchae and placing them in
her own free-standing poems. She repositions the chorus of women so that tragic community is not
tied to resolutions based on the dramatic plot of the play. In such a move, H.D. challenges what this
community of women represents. If they don’t represent the supernatural women indentured to
Dionysus, who are they? In my mind, they are actors paid to perform something called a poem-
translation. H.D. translates most of the entrance song (Section “I”) found in Euripides’ play but she
does not include all of the subsequent choral odes. A ferocious speed and intensity drives the engine
of “Choros Translations.” But iterations of the third and fourth choral odes do appear in her poem-

59
translation. A notable mutation occurs in her fourth choral ode, which includes a speaking part for
Agave that appears out of nowhere, a revisionary coda perhaps holding the secret to H.D.’s
translation practices that will be examined in the next chapter.
The plot of Euripides play is fairly straightforward: Dionysus comes to town and converts
the women of Thebes to worship him as his bacchants. Their king, Pentheus, tries to contain
Dionysus but to no avail. At the play’s end, Pentheus is killed by his own mother, Agave, a recent
convert. The women seek an ecstatic honeycomb, a visit to oblivion as a jeweled plain. The
predominant rhythm of the entrance song is comprised of Ionics, two short syllables followed by
two long syllables. Fairly uncommon, this kind of rhythm is usually associated with cult songs of
Asian origin.
72
Kettledrums produce loud rumblings or the crashing sound of thunder. In sum, the
bacchanal promises a comradeship, which includes an intoxicating blend of freedom mixed with
transformative violence. But H.D. removes all the action of the play. H.D.’s bacchants are not
within hearing distance of other characters because she does not include any other characters in her
poem-translation. By removing characters like Teiresias, Kadmos, and Pentheus the point of view
shifts solely to that of the female chorus. H.D. also removes Dionysus. In many ways, the entire play
depends upon Dionysus. As master of ceremonies, he orchestrates much the ensuing action,
including the play’s many epiphanies. Instead, the bacchants create their own soundscape in which
to live, sing, and cast spells. It is a material world, rhythmic, enchanting. “Again, / again in the night,
shall I beat white feet in delight / of the dance / of Dionysus?”
73
In writing about enchantment, Rita
Felski maintains that “[t]he notion of the soundscape underscores that attending to the materiality of
language is far from synonymous with a soulless formalism; a soundscape is an auditory
environment, a lived world composed of interwoven sound patterns that resonate inside and outside
of the self.”
74
The choral form enables and magnifies this kind of exploration of self. In section IV,

60
when the chorus asks “which of the gifts of the gods / is the best gift?” (a version of what is wisdom?
what is a wise thing? the original play asks), H.D. has them respond like this:
this,
this,
this,
this,
escape
from the power of the hunting pack,
and to know that wisdom is best
and sheer beauty
sheer holiness.
75

This incessant re-inscription of the word “this” (“hard,” “hope,” and “on” will also be chanted in
other odes) uses language as a material fence in this particular instance, scoring the boundary line of
an escape as a sonic entity. This moment occurs in the strophe, which also forces us to contend with
multiple pairs of the chorus’ feet turning and turning as they chant in unison. Voices and feet
measure out the scene or auditory environment.
The women speak the poem into being—a refrain across the land that is a replacement of
Dionysus’ sound. Sections “II” and “III” of the poem-translation offer a continuation of the
entrance song. In narrow lines, some of which only consist of a single sacred word, the chorus
describes the ecstasy available to them as a fertile sweetness traveling beyond measure. The
fecundity of their religious experience, their sense of arrival prolonged, deferred in hypnotic speech.
The women describe the experience of celebrating with Dionysus in a language that is liquid,
generative, pleasurable, and fertile. Dionysus’ world enchants them. Their exuberant singing goes on
and on, for “it is sweet on the hills.”
76
In essence, the women cast a spell upon themselves. Their
music enchants them. Felski adds: “Listening to music is often associated with a decentering or
displacement of the self, a loss or blurring of ego boundaries, a sense of the oceanic merging or pre-
oedipal bliss.”
77
The bacchants rely on this decentering and displacement of self, enacting their
processional poetics.

61
H.D. extends the entrance song as way to highlight the joy the band of women must feel,
but also as a way to mark the temporal passage of their mountain walking, what the Greeks called
oreibasia.
78
This kind of freedom walking, this mountain walking, is described in the two long
messenger speeches in Euripides’ play, but what I’m suggesting is that for H.D. the chorus—within
the act of translation itself—scales a neighboring mountain that Euripides didn’t even know existed,
or was unwilling to have his characters inhabit. Dionysus (or Bromios or Bacchus for he is many
named) is addressed but is never allowed to speak in H.D.’s poem-translation. His icon generates a
fleeing in form.
In Euripides’ version, Agave unknowingly beheads her own son, Pentheus. This idea of
sparagmos (Greek for dismemberment) as it relates to translation’s power in loss, corruption, and
fragmentation could make for a compelling reading but H.D.’s poem-translation does not depict
Agave killing her son. Instead, the chorus asks Dionysus to invoke Diké (“armed Justice”), goddess
of justice and moral order, to kill “this monster.” The gruesomeness of Euripides’ scene has been
left out, a gaping hole with no blood. No mother will kill her son in this new order. Dismemberment
occurs at the translator’s discretion. Instead, a pleasurable mountain walk calls us home.

62

1
Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 181.
2
Jacques Derrida describes how translation is not a reproduction of language but a transformation, a growth of
language. He writes: Translation augments and modifies the original, which, insofar as it is living on, never ceases to be
transformed and to grow. It modifies the original even as it also modifies the translating language. This process–
transforming the original as well as the translation–is the translation contract between the original and the translating
text. See The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 122.
3
Susan Stanford Friedman, ed., Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and their Circle (New York: New Directions, 2002),
530.
4
Caroline Zilboorg, “Joint Venture: Richard Aldington, H. D. and the Poet's Translation Series,” Philological Quarterly, 70:
1 (Winter 1991), 72.
5
Ibid., 70.
6
Ibid., 74.
7
“Fragmentary Translation,” Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 364.
8
Ibid.
9
G.S. Kirk, The Bacchae of Euripides (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 131.

63

10
Johannes Göransson, Transgressive Circulation (Blacksburg, VA: Noemi Press, 2018), 14.
11
Ibid., 18.
12
Ibid., 26.
13
Donna Krolik Hollenberg, ed., Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1997), 177.
14
Rachael Blau DuPlessis calls these midrashes. See her essay “Otherhow” in The Pink Guitar (Tuscaloosa, 2006).
15
Sandra Bermann, “Performing Translation,” A Companion to Translation Studies, eds. Sandra Bermann and Catherine
Porter (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014), 293.
16
Matte Robinson, The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose (London:
Bloomsbury, 2016), 5.
17
Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (London & New York: Routledge, 2015), 13.
18
R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2009), 2.
19
Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913), 92-3.
20
T.S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (San Diego; New York; London: Harcourt, 1975), 140
21
Ibid., 136.
22
Classicist A.M. Dale describes it as a triple partnership, and I can’t help but to remember “triple path-ways” from
H.D.’s poem, “Hermes of the Ways.” See Lyric Meters of Greek Drama (Cambridge, 1968).
23
See R. P. Winnington-Ingram’s tribute to A.M Dale, “Amy Majorie Dale, 1902-1967,” The British Academy,
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/53p423.pdf
24
Robert Duncan, A Selected Prose (New York: New Directions, 1995), 109.
25
Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (London: HarperCollins, 1985), 219.
26
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition, eds. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan
Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1195.
27
Murray, Euripides and his Age, 116, 121.
28
Ibid., 117.
29
David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 114.
30
“The actors who delivered their lines by reciting the verses of non-melic poetry embedded in the dramas of Athenian
State Theater were professionals, while the choruses who sang and danced the melic poetry also embedded in these
dramas were non-professional, recruited from the body politic of citizens; theatrical choruses became professionalized
only after the classical period, toward the end of the fourth century BCE (PP 157, 172–176).” Gregory Nagy, “Lyric and
Greek Myth,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, ed. R.D. Woodard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 21.
31
Ibid.
32
Murray, Euripides and His Age, 118.
33
David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 110.
34
Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, 125.
35
Peter Streckfus, “An Interview with Anne Carson,” Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Josh Marie Wilkinson (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press: 2015), 217.
36
H.D., Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), 71.
37
Ibid., 71.
38
Ibid., 72-3.
39
Ibid., 76.
40
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1987), 312.
41
Michael Witmore, “Shakespeare, Sensation, and Renaissance Existentialism” Criticism, Volume 54, Number 3,
Summer 2012, 419-426.
42
Gregory, Hellenism, n6, n7, n9, 272-3.
43
Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913), 124.
44
Ibid., 124.
45
Ibid., 127.
46
Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, 172.
47
Ibid., 131.
48
Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 11-12.
49
Barbara Godard, “Performance/Transformance: An Editorial,” Tessera, 11, 11-18.

64

50
Rebecca Schneider, “New Materialisms and Performance Studies,” The Drama Review, Volume 59, Issue 4, Winter
2015, 7-17.
51
Peter Brooks, The Empty Space: A Book about The Theater: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (New York: Scribner, 1995), 115.
52
Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 140.
53
Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, 103.
54
Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism, 124.
55
For more on the discussion, see A.M. Dale’s The Lyric Meters of Greek Drama (Cambridge, 2010).
56
See Edith Hall in “Euripides’ Medea,” a video documentary for made for BBC/Open University by Two Cats Media
(1998), in her description of how word content does not matter, only in the manner delivered.
57
David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
212.
58
Serres, The Parasite, 134.
59
Ibid., 137.
60
Typescript of essay Helen in Egypt from Notes on Euripides, Pausanius, and Greek Lyric by H.D., 1918-20, YCAL
MSS 24, Series II, Box 44, Folders 1119-20, H.D. Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University,
New Haven, Connecticut.
61
Ibid., 46.
62
Ibid., 4.
63
Ibid., 1.
64
Ibid., 43.
65
Ibid., 53.
66
My favorite definition of a sea change: “Although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at
the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what was once
alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the
elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring up into the
world of the living—” [Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940”]
67
Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 148.
68
Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015), 350.
69
Ibid., 130.
70
Ibid., 137.
71
Ibid., 350.
72
Euripides, Bacchae, trans. Richard Seaford (Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 156.
73
H.D., Collected, 226.
74
Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 72.
75
H.D., Collected, 227.
76
Ibid.
77
Felski, Literature , 71.
78
Charles Segal, “Introduction,” Bakkhai, trans. Reginald Gibbons (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
9.

65

3

Braving the Elements: HD and Jeffers

“Mixing poetic genres is the first step on the road to anarchy or revolution.”
—Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric

At the end of Terence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, Kit stops his Cadillac, shoots a bullet in the front
tire, then hops on the car’s hood scanning for police cars in the distance. He quickly jumps down
and begins collecting rocks. Police sirens wail. The script reads: He makes a stack of the rocks to mark the
site of his capture for posterity, finishing just as the police car skids to a stop. Before he is handcuffed, Kit nods
to a stack of rocks near the blasted Cadillac—his sense of the monumental great. He commemorates
his capture with a rock sculpture. X marks the spot. In this way, Kit writes upon the earth his
signature into exile. Maurice Blanchot writes, “whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the
country—his own—where he is not a prophet.”
1
Kit’s modest stack of stones, his inscription upon
the badlands, resounds as a talismanic tracing in the language of voiced rock. Throughout the film,
we see Kit breaking stones, throwing stones, making love on the rocks near the riverbed, carrying
souvenir rocks, and otherwise scoring terrain with his repeated refrain—I was here, I was here….
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari define the refrain,
or ritornelle, as “territorial, a territorial assemblage.” They name the Artist as the “first person to set
out a boundary stone, or to make a mark.”
2
Kit’s deeply intuitive sense of how the natural materials
of a landscape works in tandem with an American mysticism—its animating fusion between spirit

66
and matter—encourages his renegade practice of outlaw rituals. Deleuze and Guattari would have us
believe that Kit marks his boundaries because he possesses only distances. When Kit’s misguided sense
of right and wrong finally catches up to him, we don’t really know if a larger rock in the mountains
would have saved him, but we do know that his readymade cut from the badlands announces a lyric
entrance. Kit enters into arrest on his own terms. He stages the entire production, landing in a fissure
of rock broken into new expressive vocabularies. His rock sculpture creates a melodic line out of the
landscape. It echoes back as reclaimed land.
Malick’s filmic inhumanism, his sense of divinity in the natural world, and of a geological
time operating beyond man’s true understanding, speaks to a competing mysticism found in H.D.’s
work and to the sacredness found in her contemporary Robinson Jeffers’ work. All three artists seek
out to brave the elemental forces in prophetic ways. This chapter braves a way in considering how
H.D. and Jeffers, contemporaries of one another, weave melodies from Euripides’ plays into their
own counter-modern work, an autonomous pilgrimage into bacchic territories of songscape.

Voice as Strategic Resistance

Northern California’s stark beauty shares much in common with Homer’s Ithaca, Jeffers
famously wrote.
3
H.D. and her friend, Bryher, seemed to have felt the same way. The two women
pasted nude photographs of themselves taken on the beach near Carmel, California during the fall of
1920 alongside images of temple ruins they photographed when in Greece a year earlier. They pose
like Greek figures from a chorus—columns of living rock—at the water’s edge. Their palimpsestic
cataloguing flash as stylized tableau scenes. Is it too strange to think that H.D. drops a note among
the rocks that Jeffers found, initiating a literary exchange to include a poetics of rocks?
No historical evidence exists of a meeting between H.D. and Jeffers. Writing on opposite
ends of the high modernist continuum, these native Pennsylvanians born exactly within four month

67
of one another in closely-knit Christian households, each undergo a life-changing visionary
experience in 1919 that forever changes their writing lives. These spiritual epiphanies place H.D. and
Jeffers in an American lineage of Transcendentalism. H.D. documents her first visionary experience
in 1919 in Notes on Thought and Vision, an artistic manifesto pinpointing how the experience of
consciousness intersects with a bodily intelligence to create the artist’s over-consciousness. Because
H.D.’s definition of an artist’s “over-mind,” what she likens to “a cap of consciousness over my
head”
4
shares much in common with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the Oversoul and Jeffers’
acute sensitivities to the “grave and earnest energy packed within stone”
5
mark him as receptive to
nature’s divinity like many American Transcendentalists, it’s not implausible to read their work in
such a light.
6
Both writers subscribe to the phenomenon of finding “books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones.”
7

In the autumn of 1920, while H.D. works on “Notes on Euripides, Pausanius, and Greek
Lyric Poets” in Carmel, a few miles away Jeffers begins building his writing studio, Hawk Tower. A
year earlier, Jeffers experiences his own vision while building Tor House. His wife Una Jeffers
describes the event in a letter to friend: “As he helped the masons shift and place the wind and
wind-worn granite I think he realized some kinship with it and became aware of strengths in himself
unknown before…there came to him a kind of awakening such as adolescents and religious converts
are said to experience.”
8
This intimacy with stone, hauling boulders, stacking rocks, turns into an
intuitive operation. Hauling granite boulders millions of year old from the Big Sur coastline, Jeffers
contemplates what James Karman calls a “phenomenology of stone” alongside his ever-deepening
pantheism.
9
Rock re-appears in Jeffers’ work as representative of a divine geological time, a
talismanic earth.
In her highly idiosyncratic aftering of Euripides’ Ion, H.D. writes: “A woman is about to step
out of stone, in the manner of a later Rodin.”
10
The past must come into the present, bodies bearing

68
weight in ancient gold. H.D.’s statue stepping out from marble folds speaks to the stone’s ability to
communicate across time. For H.D., ancient Greek provides not just an imaginative portal into the
past, but a conduit to her physical body. H.D.’s translation tactics disclose a phenomenon more
invested in an exploration of the generative quality of her own work as a modernist visionary and
post-WWII poet than in Euripides’ originals. Euripides provides the Hellenistic landscape for H.D.
to inhabit with her imaginative, re-vivifying voice. By approaching H.D.’s translations of the choral
odes in Bacchae, I read her alongside Robinson Jeffers’ own choral adaptation called “A Humanist’s
Tragedy.” Through such a reading, I can conjecture as to why and how both writers felt compelled
to reimagine the choral odes in Euripides’ Bacchae.
Why did this origin story of the myth of Dionysus, with seemingly no performance history in
the Early Modern or eighteenth century, seduce both H.D. and Jeffers to translate and adapt its
choral odes into free-standing poems? Perhaps the clue lies in the publication of Murray's Euripides
translation (1902-1913) before the war, which sparked something of a classical renaissance of
translation, and H.D.’s dissatisfaction with her Imagiste label. As Gregory notes, in his Euripides and
His Age, Murray “speaks of the function the chorus as expressing an emotion ‘that tends quickly to
get beyond words: religious emotions of all kinds.’”
11
She further stresses how Euripides’ choral
odes, easily detached from their dramatic contexts in comparison to other dramatists, exemplify the
spare language and short line promoted in modernist poetry.
12
Eliot preferred H.D.’s Greek
translations to those of Murray’s. “The choruses from Euripides by H.D. are, allowing for errors and
even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than Mr.
Murray’s.”
13
But H.D. doesn’t simply omit lines she cannot translate. Gregory writes that H.D.’s
translations are selectively edited “because she is crafting a single lyric piece with its own
interpretative emphases,” affirming the way certain intensities resonate within the translated choral

69
odes.
14
While Gregory argues for a ‘single lyric piece,’ it seems that H.D as well as Jeffers use lyric in
a more complicated sense.
Because H.D. and Jeffers remain fascinated by a living pastness, they comb the ruins of an
ancient Greek theater to collect the artifacts necessary in their writing lives—stones as words, stones
as monuments hiding singing bodies, and a Greek architecture that is the “high-water mark of
human achievement.”
15
H.D. and Jeffers cultivate a poetics of rocks to include varied
representations of women who “voice” psychic experiences through mediation between physical
objects such as stones and monuments, and the bodily but ecstatic realization of a psychic life. H.D.
writes, “[w]here a Greek voice speaks there are rocks.”
16
For H.D., equating the sound of a Greek
voice to an elemental substance illustrates the way a rock can function materially as an obstacle
preventing meaning, but also as a tool that can create new meaning. H.D. often saturates her writing
with a hypnotic sonic quality (“Rose, harsh rose, / marred and with stint of petals”) but the
translation of choral odes allows her to cultivate a range of voices, as well as the opportunity to play
with amplification of voice.
17
Both H.D. and Jeffers collect the rocks fallen from a Greek voice to
build original works of literature.
In Euripides, they find a narrative architecture from which to quarry. This adaptation
technique is closer to something I liken to spolia, the ancient practice of repurposing stone from built
structures onto new monuments. The canvassing of antiquities sharpens both H.D. and Jeffers’
creative sensibilities in the sense that they search for alabaster portals everywhere. Because of this
technique, their work is often tied to spatial metaphors. The opening in the wall creates the free-fall
of imagination into language. The ancient theater tradition provides both writers a complimentary
way of thinking through contradictory temporal states, which requires falling into mythic time, a
requirement that was also expected of the original Greek audience. Theater festivals were held in

70
open-air theaters, where actors and spectators braved the natural elements. The spirit of Greek
theater relied on this circularity of space and weather.
While H.D. constructs materially rich superstructures, Jeffers reengages dramas against the
natural stage of the American West coastline. Describing the Western Coast as a kind of natural
theater-set in “Thurso’s Landing,” Jeffers writes, “the platform is like a rough plank theater-stage /
Built on the prow of the promontory.”
18
Jeffers accesses the high ritual of Greek tragedy quite easily.
His adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae (1928) points to a cast of mind accustomed to the unstable
boundaries of form tragedy often brings.
19
Just as in his translation of Medea (1946), Jeffers works
within an Ovidian tradition, incorporating female characters from myth alongside elements of
violence, exile, and elegiac eroticism, to create a Dionysian fiction.

Strangenesses—Acts of Cognition as Revelation
As kindred spirits working in similar island waters, H.D. and Jeffers use dramatic
conventions to challenge their sense of the poem, where the act of translation and adaptation
includes elemental forces (wind, stone, fire, water) corresponding to the physic forces
(visions/sparks/radiances) that weather the very bedrock of the inner landscapes of their creative
beings. H.D. and Jeffers’ engagement with complex narratives across their oeuvres suggests the
shortcomings they felt of the lyric form and why they felt it necessary to adapt and transform lyric
practice. In their respective ways, each poet develops an outlaw poetics to complicate traditional
understandings of the lyric. This lyric complication involves the displacement of the tragic chorus
thorough radical translation.
In some ways, the lyric narrows the listening field when it speaks out of itself, often with no
contending interlocutors. The lyric form lacks the acoustical space to capture the complexities of
life. Most often, it sings the song of a single consciousness. Complex narratives, comprising

71
elements of the lyric, epic, and dramatic form, promote multiple voices before an audience of many.
The complex narrative structures found in H.D. and Jeffers’ work promote such larger fields where
various speakers and auditors can assemble. Specifically, their dialogic use of Euripidean choral odes
showcases a polyvocality, a many-voicedness common in modernist works, acting in concert with
the lip-synching of a translator in mediation with an unstable theatrical text. Both writers take
advantage of the chorus’ polyvocality because it contributes to the idea of a complex narrative. The
lyric intensities of a Euripidean choral ode work not only to complicate a stable dramatic frame, thus
compounding the composition, but, in this case, also exist as translation, adding another layer of
complexity. Both writers assemble the elemental refrains of their chori (composed of untranslatable
Greek word-rocks) into new texts.
Instead of calling H.D. a revisionary mythmaker, I prefer calling her a counter-modernist.
20

Her work functions as part of a grander investigation of how to inhabit and organize modernist
literary landscapes, often rewriting the landscape when “the rock breaks or falls into ruins,” flooding
the cracks with cataracts of new language.
21
In poems such as “A Dead Priestess Speaks,”
“Cassandra,” and “Eurydice,” H.D. showcases female characters acting as Hermes boundary
makers, speaking a new language into being with those around her. As such, the nature of her work
prefers the rhythm of a dramatic narrator who speaks in conversation with the tragic voice—a
collective voice upholding the rituals of a prescribed tragedy while also improving upon them.
H.D.’s tragic voice, like Kit’s inscription upon the badlands, repurposes raw material—i.e.,
Euripides’ chori—refining them through repetition, subtraction, and alchemical transduction.
H.D. carries out these creative transductions, moving elemental matter (both material and
mystical) across territories and time. Jeffers accomplishes a similar feat—artist as boundary maker,
fugitive, cartographer, and protectorate of sacred lands. As boundary makers, H.D. and Jeffers
excise expressive vocabularies from classical literary landscapes. Both poets seek an opening in the

72
rock through which their appointed chori can pass through. This sacred passage between the rock
includes a territory, as well as a refrain that marks the passage in song. But a territory, in the
Deleuzian and Guattarian sense, is not simply a place. A territory can only be claimed through the
organization of the individuals who inhabit it, which includes their customs, habits, gestures, and
language. H.D. and Jeffers explore this idea of the territory through the collective identity of the
chorus. Both poets claim a mythic language to imagine eternal dramas against the backdrop of their
current time. While their individual projects prove different, both revolutionary writers seek
openings out of Euripides’ portals.
Dramatic work proves attractive to both writers because it provides landscapes for
characters to inhabit. For H.D., it’s the sound in the rock, the fascination with the aural—this being
a rewrite of Alain Badiou’s “fascination with the visual”—that allows her to weave the inter-milieu
melodies of the refrain, or ritornelle. The refrain is the responsibility of the chorus; it must carry its
song within the poem’s lines, or make arrangements for it to reside elsewhere. If all theater is
political, as Badiou claims, H.D. helps makes his case by asserting the importance of a collective
spectatorship, a chorus, collaborating with(in) a literary text.
22
From the extensive use of the “we”
pronoun in many of H.D.’s poems, especially in “Choros Translations,” to her claim that wisdom
resides in communities, her sense of the political resides in the shared experience of the theater’s
auditorium.
Critical emphasis often has been placed on the imagistic import of H.D.’s poetry, but her
relationship to the aural proves to be a rich avenue of study as well. In Ladies’ Greek, Yopie Prins
articulates a “rhythmic body” at work in H.D.’s poetry, especially relating to the chorus, where
“coordinating movements of the body with verse that can be chanted ‘as they moved’ exemplifies a
kinesthetic experience of rhythm” so integral to moving beyond the self and into a true collective
experience.
23
Prins’ understanding of how H.D.’s poetic feet integrate poetry, music, and dance into

73
a phenomenological appreciation of “dancing Greek letters” illuminates how H.D. is able to
perform a free-verse approach when negotiating the difficult prosody of classical choral odes. H.D.
translates against the backdrop of tragedy, a form ideally suited for pursuing how the rhythm of the
speaking voice performs its drama upon the listening, landscaped world, “visualizing these broken
sentences and unfinished rhythms as rocks.”
24
H.D.’s careful, albeit non-academic scholarly, study of
Sappho’s poems helps fine-tune her ear, for it is the ancient poet’s broken sentences that H.D. sees in
the rocky distance of her own imagination. The scientific pursuits of both H.D.’s father and
grandfather influence her poetics, superimposing a geological cast of mind to later literary pursuits.
Adelaide Morris writes that H.D. “aspired to recalibrate science and poetry by becoming what one
of her characters calls a ‘scientific lyrist.’”
25
Jeffers, too, incorporates scientific ideas into his poems
using a “public prose” speaking style, something Helen Vendler describes as a Greek oratorical
style.
26
H.D. and Jeffers’ sense of a geological time makes them receptive to the rhythms in the
natural world—the sound of the waves lapping, raindrops falling, or even the drumming of the
human heart.
Classical tragedy appeals to H.D. and Jeffers because of the poetic shapes it cuts. From his
desk in Hawk Tower, Jeffers witnesses the violence of the rugged California coast, the injustices
naturally occurring between land, animals, and humans. Jeffers develops a way of thinking he terms
inhumanism, which places the natural world as the primary focal point rather than on humankind.
Jeffers cultivates an imaginative listening that hears the cries of a tragedy before it is seen. H.D.’s
first collection, Sea Garden (1916) alludes to the generative relationship between rock and storytelling,
between the natural elements and its landscape, set within the scalloped edge of reverberating shell:
“It is a strange life, / patterned in fire and letters….If I glance up / it is written on the walls,” the
speaker in “Prisoners” announces, recalibrating a poetics of rocks also found in “Hermes of the
Ways” that “piles little ridges” only to have the “great waves / break over it.”
27
H.D.’s

74
preoccupations with speaking stones, breaking waves, and singing fires points to her own sense of
an inhumanism at work, especially relevant in her bacchic translations.

Beyond Tragedy’s Tower: Jeffers’ Panoramic Auditorium
Jeffers equates his physical acts of stone masonry with poem-making. Tor House and Hawk Tower
represent a statement of poetics. Jeffers brings into being physical artifacts that exist as handiwork
of poetic procedure. More practically speaking, Hawk Tower provides Jeffers a literal space for
writing. In a Heidegerrian sense, he builds his place of dwelling. He writes in “To the Stone
Cutters,” clearly an ars poetica: “The poet as well builds his monument mockingly; for man will be
blotted out.”
28
The intense physical labor required of Jeffers to build his home matches the brutality
of the California coastline. Building poems becomes akin to building stone houses—both processes
include the experiential and mystical. The diction in Jeffers’ work cuts itself out of the landscape. His
characters’ temperaments are often described using the qualities of stone, and his birds fly according
to shape and character of rock. In his poem, “To the House,” the speaker explains in the last line,
“[t]he sea and the secret earth gave bond to affirm you.”
29
One cannot help but think of H.D.’s sea
poppies in the secret earth of her Sea Garden.
Like H.D., Jeffers demonstrates an affinity for women speakers like Cassandra and Medea,
who carry potent speech of ancient wisdom in their bodies. An early poem, “The Songs of the Dead
Men to the Three Dancers,” reflects Jeffers’ interest in combining song, music, and dance in
dramatic verse. It begins with a querying voice reminiscent of H.D.’s: “(Here a dancer enters and
dances.) / Who is she that is fragrant and desirable, / Clothed but enough to wake wantonness.”
30

Jeffers’ lyric narratives often include what Karman calls a feminine energy, but perhaps the chorus in
the Bacchae exemplify qualities too inflammatory, too radical even for Jeffers?

75
By changing the title of the poem from “Women on Cythaeron” (first published in Poetry
Magazine in 1928) to “The Humanist’s Tragedy,” Jeffers repositions the poem’s point of view.
Instead of celebrating a chorus of women, the poem memorializes the downfall of one king. But
other than punctuation changes, the title change remains the only major revision. Although Jeffers
chooses to mute the play’s choral odes, its music ominously persists in counterpoint to a fixed
dialogue between King Pentheus and his Messenger. The chorus’ song remains audible but muffled,
an undermelody built into mountainscape. In a sense, this only heightens its urgency. The chorus
processes through a voided intensity, a crack in the mountainside singing this refrain: “Oh sisters, we
have found an opening.”
31

Jeffers’ poem reads as didactic parable between the human and divine. He uses long prosaic
lines to fence in the drama, much of which focuses solely on Pentheus’ discomfort of Dionysus’
arrival in town. H.D.’s treatment, which we will examine later, highlights the democratic
transmission of a roving choral voice in a free-verse blast of staccato lines. In contrast, Jeffers’ long,
declarative, and narrative lines between Pentheus and his Messenger expose a deliberateness at work;
there are no ecstatic revelations in the king’s court. Instead, intensities register themselves in the
dramatic import of actions reported. We slow down to reconstruct scenes given in extended
dialogues. Formal in its tone, Pentheus' restraint and the Messenger’s subservience signal a rhythm
of stateliness, as well as a temporal distance from the events recounted. Repetition appears as
epithets (“mindful of all his dignity as a human being, a king and a Greek”) like those found in epic
poetry. A sonorous quality fills the poem’s expanse. We hover above described scenes but the
chorus does not request an introduction to the king, almost knowing their wild bestiality prevents
such a meeting with the humanist. Cordoned off, they remain hidden in the slit of mountain.
If H.D.’s poem-translation of the Bacchae displays a lyric ongoingness from its chorus,
Jeffers’ imperialistic recasting closes it down, driving it inward: “A wild strait gate-way; / Slit eyes in

76
the mask, sisters, / Entered the mountain.”
32
His chorus processes blindly into theater’s mask of
deception. Oblivious to their king, the maenads sing: “[w]e are fire and have found an opening.”
This refrain marks the entrance and exit of the chorus’ territory. Little does Pentheus realize they
“‘have hewn in the stone and mortar” an entrance into the mountain’s mask.
33
The chorus carries
their refrain inward into the poem’s molten core. But their entrance into the sacred rock does not
tempt Pentheus. He ruminates outside the maenads’ spell, missing his entrance in.
Jeffers’ deliberate excision of Mount Cithaeron in his revolutionary revision of title marks
absent a hallowed ground. Euripides’ description of Cithaeron’s glittering sublimity, along with E.R.
Dodds’ reminder of its snowy summit no matter the season, anoints the mountain as a liminal space,
a site conducive to earthshaking transformations. In a defiant act of spolia, Jeffers carries off
mountain rock. His quarrying leaves only more questions. Jeffers demolishes the mountain in the
title, moving its material—the refrain-cascade of falling rocks—outside the landscape of the poem.
Instead, we are meant to feel the cool austerity of the king’s palace.
The rationalist humanist remains outside animated conversation, unmoved by the stolen
fires of sacred wisdom. He will not notice the trap waiting for him: the drunken bacchants waiting to
dismember him and throw him into the void. Agave holds the severed head of her son, his wet
beard running blood down her forearms. This bloody scene reinforces Dionysus’ earlier warning
that “human collectedness” will not save us, nor increase our power.
34
In fact, solidarity might even
be more destructive than we think. But the true thief of fire, Arthur Rimbaud tells us, is the poet
herself.

Soundness, A Salutary Attitude of the Depths
What does it mean to brave fire? What does it mean to rewrite one’s landscape in a ritual of
refinement? H.D.’s poem “ “Eurydice” functions as a proleptic text for H.D. since it foreshadows

77
the styles and themes that will occupy her later poetics. Using fire to reclaim land in an interrogative
refrain of agency, resistance, and defiance, Eurydice floods her hymn in a sonic overload, using
repetition and this interrogative mode to register presence. H.D. seems not as interested in purifying
language or making it referential as she seems interested in orchestrating a somatic vocality. H.D.’s
experiments with a participatory and repetitive orality disclose a difficulty for her readers. As Morris
explains, even an aurally alert and sophisticated reader cannot generate a total visionary
transformation. Ultimately, H.D. is asking us to be better listeners. Her work challenges how
characters (and readers) come to understand the world through phenomenological cues—that is,
through language that is voiced, vibrational.
H.D.’s poetry suffers at the hand of critics who cite the tediousness of her static images,
varied forms, and paradoxical philosophies of art and literature. Pound famously brands H.D. an
Imagiste, pushing her into an artistic corner. Perhaps feeling the heat of literary claustrophobia, H.D.
responds by writing in various genres (diary, essay, memoir, autobiography, film, translation) that do
not easily fit into the generic conventions of high modernism. Jeffers did not fit into the club either.
Like Euripides, a playwright often described as prophetic, modern and not truly classical, H.D. and
Jeffers destabilize notions of the accepted literary practice in their use of complex forms. They
embrace the organization of a material, acoustic space as a way to control the chaos of creation.
Their efforts stem from a simultaneous desire to rupture and contain new pockets of chaos. In the
harnessing of a refrain, speakers sound out the terra, transducing ancient lyric voices across narrative
forms in a renegade ritual of poetics.
H.D.’s personal classicism uses an intuition of fire.
35
H.D. presents herself a translator of the
classics to her literary community, but as Gregory notes, “she saw her role in terms of a subversive,
erotic, and visionary endeavor fundamentally challenging the assumptions of classical
transmission.”
36
Breaking bodies, reading into fracture fires, H.D. seems intent on re-writing her

78
reputation as Imagiste. Her role as a radical translator enables such a revision, while the act of
translation energizes the production of original counter-modern work. In poems like “Eurydice” she
writes dramatic lyrics using mythic characters who sing odes against a backdrop of a heroic narrative.
H.D. pursues how bodies respond to sonic immersion, or what Stefan Helmreich calls transduction, a
process that “describes sound as meaningful and material, reaching across (while also exceeding)
sensory, cognitive registers.”
37
Whether material or semiotic, transduction (from the Latin, transducere,
“to lead across”) refers to a process where a conversion of energy takes place. For poets, the energy
measured and transferred is the “private melody or undersong hummed during composition by the
poet as a spell or charm” that produces a materiality.
38
(The placing one’s hands on a large speaker
and feeling the vibrations as music plays perhaps demonstrates how transduction is receptive rather
than productive). The human eardrum, for example, lives as a natural transducer. Transduction is
also the way one setting (or context) serves as the model for another; how new settings are
established out of existing ones, or even how to deliberate between two different orders, thereby
creating a third way.
H.D.’s use of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition points to a literary practice invested in
participatory song and ritual—the actual vibration of the eardrum important to trance. Hers is a
mystical body, igniting the process by which outside energies shape a poetic interiority. Such an
interest in sound and its material effect on the listener/audience, points towards a healing poetry,
what might be termed a curative poetics. Transduction is the process H.D. uses in her choral odes to
orchestrate an oversound, a collaborative voice that catches a territory entire.
H.D.’s translation practice serves as a necessary antagonism, an occult process, and a training
ground for her poetic voice.
39
H.D. introduces an irritant, a grain of sand in the oyster shell, when
she self-initiates into the boy’s club, a “whole tribe of academic Grecians.
40
H.D.’s continuing use of
the Wharton 1885 dual text edition of Sappho even after newly available fragments of Sappho’s

79
poems were published and translated further solidifies her translation operation as decisively non-
scholarly and personal.
41
When H.D. moves away from mastery, she names herself as Outsider.
Whether it’s a writing cure, or a dreaming field, or a parental knot she hopes to untangle, H.D. relies
on the bitterness of Euripides for the right measure of modern matter.
42
Just as Euripides uses the
tragic form to meditate on the atrocities of the Peloponnesian War, H.D. adopts Euripides’ voice as
a way to introduce her own anti-war sentiments. Gregory writes that H.D. finds in Euripides “a
mirror for the visceral and bewildering experience of war.”
43
Euripides de-glamourized the accepted
myths of the time and introduced new plots audiences hadn’t seen before.
44
By translating Euripides,
H.D. enters unlettered into a largely male-dominated, classical Greek scholarship.
45
H.D. does not
use classicism to impress upon her readers the rigor of her literary projects. And whether her
motives rely the pleasures of linguistic estrangement or the desire to engender translation, her
fascination with the female chorus discloses a radicalness at the heart of her writing.
Dramatic poems and theatrical works challenge ideas about performativity, theatricality, and
the textual with their use of embodied language. In her adaptation of Ion, H.D. initiates a dialogic
exchange that includes fields of interrupting prose sections inserted into the play’s lineated lines. By
working with Euripides’ lesser-known plays, H.D. invites us to consider a formula of subtraction, a
highly stylized negation; a privately funded laboratory researching alchemical powers in the wild.
H.D. ghosts around Euripides’ stories but leaves her own stony mark. The prose sections function
like sedimentary rock, layers which include statements of poetics, translation theories, as well as
individual lines of poetry.
H.D. builds onto the existing structure of Euripides’ Ion but the new tile does not match the
old. She showcases the incongruities because they reveal a literary history. Her work opens up a
fracturing in time, a palimpsestic condition where the ancient past emerges into present view. H.D.
replaces various stylistic choices of Euripides with her own sense of ornamentation: “What time is

80
it? Greek unity give us freedom, it expands and contracts at will, it is time-in-time and time-out-of-
time together, it predicts modern-time estimates.”
46
Ancient Greek theater relied on a synthesis of
various codes and practices but playwrights freely worked within this structure, giving shape to
wildly unbounded content. H.D.’s prose passages catalogue the admissions, revisions, and omissions
of a shared theater tradition.

Chorus as Inner Mood Curtain, They Wore Veils Over Their Eyes
The landscape of Bacchae is plagued with fire and earthquakes. Festive drunkenness and sweet
delirium shake loosened limbs. When Dionysus calls for the female spirits of earthquake to strike,
flames included, we weather the brute force of an elemental authority not through language per se,
but through a spectacle of sensation.
H.D.’s translations of Euripides’ Bacchae appear in a lyric sequence titled “Choros
Translations” in Red Roses for Bronze. H.D. chooses to only translate the choral odes because she
realizes its capability of arriving at an intensity, something beyond the mere connotative import of
words. By translating only the lyric meters, H.D. creates a primarily aural world, where the chorus
sings, “wisdom is best / and beauty / sheer holiness” but is not subservient to plot.
47
With the
narrative frame removed, the chorus opens entrance into high lyric song. While sections of H.D’s
poem-translation are titled “Strophe,” “Antistrophe,” and “Epode,” they are not surrounded by
dramatic dialogue. She forcibly corrupts the linear narrative of the drama when she translates
selectively. Using wildfire sprung from Semele’s grave-smoke, H.D. harnesses the play’s elemental
forces of “hill and mountain worship” into a new kind of lyric procession.
48

H.D.’s chorus transmits, as well as represents, the intense lyrical now.
49
Fixed in form, the
chorus inhabits the literary text but generally does not influence the outcome of a dramatic plot.
H.D. reinterprets the role of Euripidean chorus when she repositions them beyond the artificiality of

81
the theater space and its attending illusions. By extracting the chorus from its original context and
focusing on the aurality of their song, H. D. generates enough momentum to “bring on a movement
of absolute deterritorialization: “Goodbye, I’m leaving and I won’t be back.”
50
H.D’s chorus wishes
a similar farewell, marching outside the mountainous terrain of Penthesus’ kingdom and into her
poem-translation, distinguishing between a marked territory (Euripides’), a previously unmarked one
(the Poem), and an unknown territory (of Beyond). The following lines speak to the revolution
afoot: “Bromios leads us, / bearing aloft the narthex, / himself / even as the pine-torch / himself
the flame and torch-light.”
51
This deterritorialization also mirrors what H.D herself is doing within
modernism, solidifying her label as a counter-modernist.
The chorus’ singing marks out territory, and is territory at the same time. Gesture then—the
chorus’ dancing bodies, their shaking procession—speaks in felt intensities. The chorus speaks of
new potentials: the polyvocality of dancing feet, clapping hands, and nonsense words. For example,
the chorus does not speak of Zeus’ birth found in the second stasimon of Euripides’ original,
instead it leaps forward to the third stasimon of divine vengeance. These women walk away in
spirited defiance, restructuring a feeling not found in Euripides. H.D.’s chorus embodies a lyric
procession sonically rich and kinetically aware of its entrances and exits onto the sweet hills, the
“distant hill-peak,” and the “steep ledge of hillock” because “the hills belong” to them.
52

The collective speaker in H.D.’s “Choros Translations” opens with a string of questions
seeking to score or mark its territory, the first of many echoing refrains. “Who is there, / who is
there in the road? / who is there, / who is there in the street? / back, / back, each to his house, /
let no one, / no one speak;”
53
This call-and-response exposes a gnarled texture, challenging notions
of addresser and addressee, the power of language in naming, and how melodic landscapes are
strung into being. The chorus asserts its authority because it takes its identity wherever it goes,
carrying the wild fennel wand, the thyrsus, which includes this spell of “swift, / be swift, / invoke

82
and draw him back / from the Phrygian mountain-peaks.”
54
The women voice psychic experiences
through the thyrsus and mountainside they dance as sacred. Their singing refrain “always carries
earth with it; it has a land (sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation
to a Natal, a Native.”
55
What follows is simultaneous entrance and exit. Whenever H.D.’s chorus
goes, they take their revolutionary refrain with them.
Their revolution subscribes to a necessary evacuation, a key movement placing themselves
beyond the-beyond-realm of the Deleuzian mythic. H.D.’s poetic revolution anticipates the
construction of something I define as processional poetics: the espousal of lyric intensity (sonic,
material, kinetic) that revolves outward away from a source text in a ceremonial fashion, perhaps
beyond a single consciousness. This intensity triggers and sets in motion the phenomenological
dislocation necessary for a reader to truly inhabit a poetic experience. Processional poetics involves
multiple entrances and exits, where language, landscape, and meaning are interconnected.
Processional poetics enacts a revolution, a flight from inside the cross-hatched lines of language.

Writing from No Place
As a counter-modernist, H.D. willingly writes a kind of minor literature; a tradition that works
against the more visible and accessible kinds of literature.
56
A minor literature is not any less
interested in telling major stories, but its agency comes from participating outside recognized
systems of order, whether social, political, or linguistic.
57
Desire is procedure then, the molten lava
flown from a form. H.D.’s project involves writing and reading out of form, off form, perhaps even in
bad form. Her transcreative translation practice coaxes out a rupture. A crack in the terracotta pot
breaches a capture of words. H.D.’s main preoccupation focuses on this experience of escape—
what the scenery is like beyond the conscriptions of a word—a procession always already in extremis.

83
Within minor literature, these intensities are experienced as raw material, like sound without
signification.
Translation of a dramatic script is never one of equivalence because it must allow for the
potentialities of performance. The actor’s error a necessary revision. H.D.’s “Choros Translations”
include fictional elements taken from Euripides’ Bacchae but the ritual lyricism is its own brand. The
women speak the poem-translation into being—a refrain across the badlands standing in as
replacement for Dionysus’ speech. Two separate bands of women inhabit Euripides’ play: the
bacchants who travelled from Asia to Greece, where the story takes place, and the Theban women,
the maenads, recent converts of Dionysus. Both bands of women travel outside the bounds of a
civilizing force. Both choruses thrive on states of elsewhere: drugs, disasters, miracles, milk, wine,
honey, fire. Their choral wall breathes a rhythmic and traveling enclosure, staking out a deeply
pleasured freedom of elsewhere. In the secondary growth of Mount Cithaeron’s mountain pine we
read their walking notes: Ritual, reunion, communion, collaboration, labor forces.
H.D.’s poem-translation survives as counter-epiphanic, counter programmatical, for it does
not depend upon the rituals of ancient tragedy. H.D.’s bacchants re-enact a catharsis of refinement
rather than purification.
58
Receptive, then, to the experience of tragic possibility, this chorus
relocates to new reality without the aid of male protagonists, seamlessly and without internal strife.
Transductively, the chorus transcends dualities of form and content. Their relentless questioning,
repetition (their fallen footsteps), and vatic holes should not be read as a failure of imagination but
insistence of a transformation. Critics who fault the “Choros Translations” for not adequately
applying Imagist poetics do not appreciate H.D.’s sonic disturbances. When H.D. repeats a word
like “on” or “this” for example, she asks her readers to suspend sense—to enter nonsense’s grand
trance of asignifying sound. “[T]his, / this, / this, / this; / escape / from the power of the hunting
pack” the bacchants trace in blue skies.
59
This refrain, repeated elsewhere in the poem, enchants the

84
reader and invites the pleasures of nonsense. Only when language stops being representational does
it generate potency. The halting quality of her translation—its honeyed, drawn-out ritardando—
represents an active intensity. H.D.’s connection to the political strives for disequilibrium and
dislocation, not poetic momentum.
The chorus’ bodily vocality of “on, / on, / on; / the fields drip /honey” marches them into
the valley of transformation.
60
H.D’s recasts the chorus’ behavior as something other than Dionysiac
emotionalism or enthusiastic reverence: they are a talented troupe of actors rebuilding a new order.
In fact, there is no real need for Cadmus. Only a portion Agave’s speech appears at the end of
“Choros Translations.” The gift of translation remains one of loss. H.D. disallows a conversation
between Pentheus and Dionysus. Their dialogue remains buried underneath mounds of Greek. H.D.
translates the frenzy of the fourth ode describing the hunt for king Pentheus, but this transcription
merely records a stylized ritual to drive out a godless man. It is not a true exorcism, only an imagined
one the bacchants devise to keep their landscape free from desecration. As actors, they enact a scene
of their freedom. And this point proves crucial: H.D.’s bacchants only speak this murderous refrain
from the original play—“slash him across the throat”— as way to remember past offenses.
61

Although the dismemberment of Pentheus proves inevitable, the ritual of performance or a
ritualized reading will never make us whole. And sonic memorials—monuments where wisdom
resides as vibrating language in our open mouths—can only offer temporary consolation.
Agave erects such a sonic memorial for her shared sisterhood of the theatre. And yet, the
bacchants do not convince Agave to renew her contract with the show. She hands off her tragic
language, a democratic property, to the band of women seizing the last stretches of a territory in
translation. “The thyrsus shall pass on / to other Dionysians;” Agave laments, adding, “O let me
never see / haunted, mad Cithaeron / nor Cithaeron / see me.”
62

85
If myth functions as speech stolen but never restored to its proper place, it appears H.D.
employs a thrilling variation of spolia, where instead of adding onto the house of Euripides as she
did in Ion, she convinces the bacchants to leave the Bacchae altogether but not before claiming the
choral odes. The intentional repositioning of the chorus outside the lines of the play creates a new
meta-textual space. This departure emancipates the chorus since they are not bound to the confines
of any single text. Their processional refrain across the poem-translation recasts them as a talented
troupe of actors who collectively create a post-text of performance. H.D.’s radical mixing of genres
enables a textual revolution unperformed by anti-modern classicists or modern materialists to date:
H.D. presents herself as a counter-modern transducer.

Exodos
H.D. and Jeffers rewrite themselves out of Euripidean landscapes, taking stone hearth with them.
Lyric refrains wrapped in fire (a mode of announcing oneself) does not simply extend beyond the
theater stage, it flames upward, revising our sense of the Deleuzan territorial to something more like
the celestial. Both writers subscribe to language’s ability to renew, restore, and keep alive one’s spirit
in the materials of history—materials stitched from the strands of myth. Both celebrate the Artist as
boundary maker, re-animating refrains etched in stone, translating the unmapped territories and
heavens within us—the Badlands tinged in smoke.

86

1
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 63.
2
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1987), 312.
3
Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume Four: Poetry 1903-1920, Prose, and Unpublished Writings, ed.,
Tim Hunt, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 392.
4
H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982), 18.
5
James Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1995), 48.
6
See Robert Zaller’s Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime (Stanford, 2012).
7
See William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
8
Robinson Jeffers, “April 24, 1934,” The Collected Letters Robinson Jeffers with The Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, Volume Two,
1931-1939, ed., James Karman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 310.
9
James Karman, Stone of the Sur (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 25.
10
H.D., Ion (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1986), 30.
11
Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124.
12
Ibid., 140.
13
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 77.
14
Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism, 184.
15
H.D, Ion, 113.
16
Typescript of essay Curled Thyme from Notes on Euripides, Pausanius, and Greek Lyric by H.D., 1918-20, YCAL
MSS 24, Series II, Box 44, Folder 1117, H.D. Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New
Haven, Connecticut.
17
H.D., “Sea Rose,” Collected Poems: 1912-1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), 5.
18
Robinson Jeffers, “Thurso’s Landing,” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume One: 1920-1928, ed., Tim Hunt
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 174.
19
Both H.D. and Jeffers adapt Euripides’ Hippolytus-Phaedra story into Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) and Cawdor (1928).
20
Counter-modern should not be confused with anti-modern. Both H.D. and Jeffers are modernists but since they are
working in streams running alongside or adjacent to currents of traditional modernism, I view their endeavors as
countering alternatives to the major flows of modernism.
21
H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 2012), 107.
22
See The Emancipated Spectator. Jacques Rancière similarly advocates for a theatrical text that generates its own
spectatorship: “An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators” (22).
23
Yopie Prins, Ladies Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 203; 205.
24
H.D., Notes on Thought, 58.
25
Adelaide Morris, How to Live/What to Do: H.D.'S CULTURAL POETICS (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2003), 153.
26
Helen Vendler, “Huge Pits of Darkness, Huge Peaks of Light: Robinson Jeffers,” Soul Says, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 58.
27
H.D., Collected, 34; 37.
28
Jeffers, Collected, Vol. One, 5.
29
Ibid.
30
Jeffers, Collected, Vol. Four, 223.

87

31
Jeffers, Collected, Vol. One, 381.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid., 382.
35
See Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston, 1987).
36
Gregory, Hellenism, 57.
37
Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction,” keywords in sound, eds., D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2015) 224.
38
John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California, 1981), iv.
39
In Piercing Together the Fragments, Josephine Balmer makes the case that H.D.’s antagonism to classical scholarship frees
the poet to pursue her own idiosyncratic methods of translation, even inserting practitioner’s statements into fictional
works like Bid Me to Live.
40
H.D., Collected, 328.
41
Josephine Balmer, Piercing Together the Fragments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47.
42
For further consideration, see Eileen Gregory’s insightful chapter in H.D. and Hellenism called “Euripides: Dream Time
and Dream Work.”
43
Gregory, Hellenism, 25.
44
See Simon Goldhill’s chapter “Genre and Transgression,” in Reading Greek Tragedy.
45
See “Notes on Euripides,” where H.D. writes, “I know we need scholars to decipher and interpret the Greek, but we
also need: poets and mystics and children to re-discover this Hellenic world, to see through the words; the words being
but the outline, the architectural structure of that door or window, through which we are all free, scholar and unlettered
alike, to pass.”
46
H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion: Adaptations from Euripides (New York: New Directions, 2003), 185.
47
H.D., Collected, 227.
48
Ibid., 233.
49
I’m using Jonathan Culler’s term from his Theory of the Lyric.
50
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 327.
51
H.D., Collected, 225.
52
Ibid., 230.
53
Ibid., 223.
54
Ibid.
55
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 327.
56
The same can be said of Jeffers’ treatment in his poetry of taboo subjects, like rape and incest, often in long, complex
narrative forms.
57
See Michel Serres’ The Parasite for additional reading regarding productive noise, interference and systems of order.
58
See Jonathans Lear’s seminal essay “Katharsis,” where he defines catharsis as condition more akin to being receptive
to the experience of tragic possibility, where we never forget our role as audience members. Lear goes on to assert,
“tragedy is not rhetoric, it is poetry.”
59
H.D., Collected, 227.
60
Ibid., 225.
61
Ibid, 230.
62
Ibid., 231.

88
4

Performing the Classics: Oswald, Carson, and The Legacy of H.D.

“They were things under things and things inside things.”

—H.D., Tribute to Freud

]
“Sir, I cannot let you in. I have specific instructions to not let anyone in now. We’re past the time.
If you go through those doors, you will be banned from ALL future readings at the Hammer.” I
take a deep breath, straining to hear what will be said to this usher on the other side of the
auditorium’s closed doors. Although I know what will happen. Someone like me has come to see the
English poet, Alice Oswald perform Memorial, her book-length poem on Homer’s Illiad. Oswald
rarely travels to America to read. This was definitely a treat for Los Angeles. I remember finding out
about the reading only a few hours beforehand, and quickly rearranging my day and nighttime plans
so I could see her. Poetry readings are often usually boring, for reasons I’ve never entirely
understood, but I knew in my bones this reading would change my life. This was a rare opportunity
to see a poet perform the miraculous spectacle of language itself. “And so I am banned,” I heard my
fellow audience member proudly announce to the usher. “Ban me for life, but let me in!” The
overhead lights go out. A dim blue light percolates up from the bottom of the walls all around me.

89
]
The poet, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) spent a good portion of her life translating the ancient playwright,
Euripides. In an unpublished essay on the fifth-century author, H.D. writes:

….the lines of this Greek poet (and all Greek poets if we have but the clue) are today vivid
and fresh not as literature (though they are that too) but as portals, as windows, as portals I
am tempted to say that look out from our ship our world, our restricted lives, on to a sea
that moves and changes and bears us up, and is friendly and vicious in turn. These words are
to me portals, gates.
1

H.D. describes her translation practice thorough the use of metaphor, specifically in architectural
terms. Her insistence on language as activating threshold—words as window openings or portals—
invests in the classical world as starting point, as departure. H.D.’s translations of Euripides do not
always function as a display of truthfulness or fidelity but as a way to dissect the cultural mindset
surrounding their complex forms, modes, and essences. Many of her contemporaries, including T.S.
Eliot who had a similar affinity for dialogic poetics, felt H.D.’s translations conveyed the essence or
the spirit of the ancient Greek world better than most classicists, including the illustrious Gilbert
Murray. Eliot writes,“[t]he choruses from Euripides by H.D. are, allowing for errors and even
occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than Mr.
Murray’s.”

H.D.’s translations purposely mine the language of Euripides’ plays so that a modern lyric or story
can be built with it parts, usually accompanied with a mediation either embedded in the work itself,
or set alongside it. Repurposed, reimagined. Think of a brilliant diamond ring you’ve inherited, your
grandmother’s perhaps, reset in new gold setting with two baguette diamonds you bought on your
last trip to Switzerland, where you also happened to tour Villa Kenwin, a house on Lake Geneva

90
where H.D. spent many years with her friend and once lover, Annie Winifred Ellerman, also known
as Bryher.

Here is what Douglas Carne-Ross writes of H.D.’s reworking of Greek tragedies:
Here, to my mind, she suggested certain elements in the Greek lyric better than they have
ever been suggested before or since. She leaves out an enormous amount. She is not
interested in the syntax, in the elaborate weave of the Greek lyric; and she shows little
dramatic feeling. She is hardly concerned with the ‘sense’, it is the picture – the ‘image’ – that
she is after, and this is what she presents, a sequence of images as fresh and unexpected as
though they had just been disinterred from the sands of Egypt.
2

I will take this astute assessment and go one step further. That while H.D. is interested in the
image—perhaps like the good Imagiste, she is—she also appears invested in in Greek lyric because
of its ability to generate a particular kind of acoustical texture. “Now sing, O slight girls, / Without
change of note, / My death-paeon and Artemis’ chant. Stand silent, you Greeks.”
3
This speech made
by Iphigenia in H.D.’s translation of Iphigenia in Aulis makes clear the imperative demands of
language itself, sung language, commanding and instructing us. We build temples with our voices.
My sense is that H.D. inhabits the classical Greek world because of its generative instability, the way
its vessel or container already comes to us in the twenty-first century as cracked, broken in
possibility. In her early poems, specifically those in Sea Garden, H.D. first explores the use of the lyric
fragment via her engagement with Sappho. Several of her poems dramatize narratives of desire using
translated language and images from Sappho’s fragments. This engagement with Sappho sets the
foundation for her lifelong engagement with the classical world. After gaining recognition for her
translations of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, H.D. appoints herself as custodian to the fifth century
dramatist.

The added complexity of the dramatic form challenges notions of the lyric and narrative modes, a
difficulty H.D. integrates into her work, create a lyric complexity that adds to the acoustical texture

91
of her work.
4
In general, a dramatic script is more volatile than a poem because a performance
changes the dramatic script each time it’s performed. Actors, multiple bodies in motion, add to the
intricacy and dynamism of its form; bodies add the grace onstage, but they also complicate.
Grammatically speaking, the language of the theater is often tied to the future tense, while narrative
is measured in terms of its identification of the past tense. H.D.’s particular brand of dramatic
poetics, then, is the search for finding oneself in the future through the stories of the past.

H.D. recognizes the richness of the classical Greek theater as a living thing—to be mined and
quarried—and uses it to her advantage in her richly contaminated translations. Two contemporary
poets, Anne Carson and Alice Oswald, are guilty of the same. In their own performances of the
classics, Carson and Oswald extend the legacy of H.D.’s translation practice with startling, and often
surprising, creative reinvigorations of ancient Greek stories.

]
Is translation really about loss?

Is translation really about impossibility?

Or have we just been fooling ourselves?

Isn’t translation really about abundance?

Isn’t translation really about the blue light coming up from the ocean floor?

92
“How does it start the sea has endless beginnings”
5

And the joy flooding, speaking from all corners of our mouth?

]
We are sitting in the dark. Not metaphorically, but literally. I cannot see my hands in my lap. The
blue lights, dimly lit at the baseboard, barely give off any light. Oswald appears at the podium as
shadow, as dark outline of poet perched before the night sky. Her voice speaks from somewhere,
though I cannot see her mouth move. Her voice from the rafters begins telling a story. Although
disoriented, I sense the cues that I’m being told a story, and so I dutifully settle in. Her voice is clear
and strong, but quiet. She begins listing names, a whole litany of warrior names sail through the air
on catapulted arrows. Gravestones start piling up in my mouth from her mouth. Although there has
been no announcement made, no formal introduction by Steven Yenser as I remember it, no catalog
copy read aloud, I know Oswald is reciting sections from her book-length poem, Memorial, which
she describes in her forward note as “a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story.”
6
And this
point is important—Oswald recites her book from memory. As my eyes adjust to the cool blue light,
I confirm she’s not holding a book or papers at the podium. I see her foot tapping in time to the
charge and gallop of her voice. A rush of names gathers in the corner of the room. I almost feel the
presence of Patroclus and Achilles in the room, goose bumps up and down my arm. A frieze
appears before me: disputed armor, a bandaged arm, a ghostly blue-lit funeral pyre suffused in soul
vapors, trees blowing in the wind, trees blowing in the wind, leaves rustling.

]
You can see repetition and rhyme even in a language you don’t know.

93

]
H.D.’s work has been criticized as apolitical, but her experiments in language point to something
other than modernism’s interest in formal innovations. She writes inside the darkened tunnel of war,
sometimes stuttering, writing oneself alongside forms of power, resisting, seeking defiance. Her
embodied language is a confrontation with systems of tyranny. H.D.’s soundscapes scavenged from
echoing rock, the falling rocks of history. “Stand around the temple-front / And the altar of heaped
earth.”
7
Invested in creative freedom, H.D. invites the elect who use language as “portals, gates” to
take a step further into optimistic inscription:
I know we need scholars to decipher and interpret the Greek, but we also need: poets and
mystics and children to re-discover this Hellenic world, to see through the words; the words
being but the outline, the architectural structure of that door or window, through which we
are all free, scholar and unlettered alike, to pass.
8

H.D.’s translation practice, her way of seeing “through the words” allows her construct a
palimpsestic scaffolding, where multiple layers of language and history appear and disappear. This
sedimentary way of seeing and hearing the world allow the poet to simultaneously inhabit multiple
tenses, scenes, and monuments.

]
As if answering H.D’s call from a hundred years earlier, here is how Oswald describes her
translations process for Memorial: “I work closely with the Greek, but instead of carrying the words
over into English, I use them as openings through which to see what Homer was looking at. I write
through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation.”
9
Notice the
similarity to H.D.’s description of translation, specifically in the metaphorical use of “openings” to
cast a certain kind of light upon the imagined scene through portal or keyhole, and this way of

94
seeing through the words themselves. A lightness, a “translucence,” must inform the work. Oswald
trains her translator’s eye and ear to see through or beyond the shadowdark Greek letters. Perhaps
this is why Oswald-the-performer uses the cover of night in her recitation at UCLA. Shining
through, her words illuminate a way out of the darkened corridor, connecting the past to the
present.

]
Spatial metaphors often are used in discussions of translation (just think of Martin Heidegger’s
concept of “indwelling”), but when H.D., Oswald, and Carson speak in concert with one another
the overall effect is uncanny. It’s as if they all convened in a backroom of history to discuss, picking
up where the other translator leaves off. The metaphor of the house—with its windows, doorways,
thresholds, and openings—occupies a complementary plot in Carson’s imagination as well.

Carson describes a dream she once had during the period when she was translating Sophocles’
“Electra”:
One night I dreamed that the text of the play was a big solid glass house. I floated above the
house trying to zero in on a v. 363. I was carrying in my hands wrapped in a piece of black
cloth the perfect English equivalent for lupein and I kept trying to force myself down through
the glass atmosphere of the house to position this word in its right place….I swam helplessly
back and forth on the surface of the transparency, waving my black object and staring down
at the text through fathoms of glass.
10

As luck would have it, Carson wakes up right before she takes off the black cloth, forever frustrating
what might have revealed the perfect translated equivalent for “lupein.” The perfect translation
really doesn’t exist but we can dream, can’t we? Oswald’s aim of “translucence” in her translations
manifests as Carson’s imagined glass house, where such “transparency” allows her to envision the
text of the play as a constructed thing, a house, whose joints, walls, and beams makes space for the

95
imagined scenes with breathing bodies, perhaps in a room, or in a stanza of high lyric. And Carson
doesn’t just imagine a door or window, she exceeds H.D.’s expectations, dreaming up an entire
house.

Carson’s “black object,” her untranslated word, defiles the glass house of the translated play in the
sense that it marks itself as other. And yet, perhaps this yet-to-be translated word reminds us of “the
shadow of that text where it falls across another language. Shadows fall and move.”
11

Sometimes a translator can’t get between a body and a shadow no matter how hard she tries.

Sometimes poetry becomes the answer to the unsolvable equations.

Oswald’s poem, “Shadow” was first performed at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, as part
of Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden on June 25, 2015.

Her hand—the shadow of her hand waves me over.

]
If not equivalence, what then?

A version.
An imitation.
An aftering.
An appropriation.

96
A theft.
An expressive reformulation.
An interpretation.
A sampling.
A reimagining.
An excavation.
An adaptation.
A poetic re-creation.

]
Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad is comprised of equal parts biography (from the poetry of lament)
and simile (from the pastoral lyric). Because Oswald removes the overarching narrative of the war
story, we contend only with the remembered dead as litany and the natural world in extended simile.
Similes singing like a Greek chorus. By juxtaposing these distinct poetic modes and recontextualizing
them, we get a very different version of the Iliad, something Oswald claims as “an attempt to
remember people’s names and lives without the use of writing.”
12
For her, the oral component of
this translation project is paramount. Sound remains important to Oswald, as she prefers to call her
poems “sound carvings,” suggesting that the song is already there to chiseled from the air.
13

Much of Oswald’s poetry sounds out sense in its melodies of meaning, in its operatic durations. In
“Tithonus,” for example, the entire poem depends upon its very execution of “46 MINUTES IN THE
LIFE OF THE DAWN.” The poem opens like this:
as soon as dawn appears

as soon as dawn appears

97
4:17 dressed only in her clouds

and murk hangs down over hills
as if guilty
14

The repetition registers the slowness of the scene, the time signature its presentness, and the heavy
cloak of personification further weighs us down in primordial beginnings, we are at morning’s
doorstep, suspended at the muddy hems of night’s initiations. Angela Leighton writes, “[l]iterary
writing offers a threshold rather than a destination, and makes us pause there, to hear all the
summoned sounds that words can make or bring to the ear. It stops us going straight over into
sense and comprehension.”
15
Oswald, in essence, creates the circumstances in her poems for the
perfect acoustical encounter. Think of her river in Dart (2002), which is a place of listening but also a
landscape that is generator of sound, of shared activities, or the Beckettian effect of moonlight on
our voices in A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009).
16
Her particular philosophy of listening reverberates in
almost all her poems. As readers we are asked to listen closely, to use our ears as portals, when
occupying the listened-after landscapes of her natural world. Oswald uses her first lecture as
Oxford’s Professor of Poetry to discuss the process of natural refinement in “The Art of Erosion.”
Again, Oswald returns to this idea that “poems are implicit in the air,” we just have to listen.

The first eight pages of the Memorial include a running list of all the names of the dead soldiers. It
functions much like a war memorial built in stone. However, unlike a physical monument, these
dead will appear again within the body of the poem as embodied entities made light, illuminated by
language and imagination. Oswald’s mode of naming creates discrete sonic memorials. By invoking
each dead solider individually, their living deeds and biographies attach themselves to the signifier of
their name. In this way, the names stack up materially in the poem. When the dead are called out
into imagined presence, we simultaneously escort them back into their graves. They are named and

98
remembered. The extended, and often repeated, pastoral similes provide an atmosphere like that of
a Greek chorus. They sing of a life all warriors shared on earth. They bear witness to the often
exquisite and bittersweet details of life, they record its unstoppable rhythms: “And a stormwind
rushes down / And roars into the sea’s ears / And the curves of the many white-patched waves /
Run this way and that.”
17
Each warrior dies in a kinetic rush of energy, sometimes like a crash of
waves as exemplified in this noisy quotation, or in a quieter collapse of arrested breath.

But can we really call Oswald’s Memorial a translation? Does Oswald transgress too far? Here is what
Emily Wilson says, for instance, when she describes her translation work on the Odyssey: “Maybe
the logic of purity just doesn’t apply. Homeric poems are inherently works of revision. They didn’t
even exist in an original form. They comprise many voices.”
18

]
And another, and another. The dead march on, long black pauses. The auditorium must have an
occupant capacity listed somewhere on its walls. Who is recording this? We are getting closer and
closer to the limit, I’m afraid. The energy in room, the hidden piano, the invisible accordion, might
blow the roof off.

The optimistic inscription of ruin.

The ruin of listening provides black holes of silence.

Performance as willed forgetting.

99

]
No definite book study of H.D. and Anne Carson exists. Sure, unpublished dissertations, passing
references in online articles, and casual book reviews chart the similarities between these two writers
but a scholarly edition does not appear in any catalogue. Carson often references other writers, even
using them as characters, within the fabric of her work. But she rarely mentions H.D. except in
passing, and only in regard to her relationship with Sigmund Freud. (See essay’s opening quotation
as example.) And while scholars have focused on the triangulation of Sappho, H.D., and Carson,
little work explores the power and influence Euripides seems to have exerted on both women.
19
I’m
not quite sure what to make of Carson’s silence surrounding H.D. For a writer who has consistently
conscripted herself alongside artists as various as Dickinson, Flaubert, and Simonides, it’s baffling
not to find H.D. in a constellation of influence, even a buried one. Why does Carson ignore H.D. in
her constructed and performed lineage?

In her memoir, end to torment, H.D. writes on April 9, 1958: “No, my poetry was not dead but it was
built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano.”
20
In several early biographies, Carson lists
painting volcanoes as one of the facts of her life. When asked about her fondness for volcanoes by
interviewers, Carson simply maintains they are “dead easy to paint.”
21
In Carson’s Autobiography of
Red, we meet Geryon, a boy who is also a red-winged monster. His identification with a volcano, and
later mastery of it, sets him apart from the other characters in the book. Carson uses the potent
symbolism of a volcano (image, setting, and even an Emily Dickinson poem ["The reticent volcano
keeps / His never slumbering plan”]) to advance Geryon’s character.

Writing with myth seems a lot like walking around extinct volcanoes. The trace elements in volcanic
soil make it oh so fertile.

100

Near Mount Etna in Sicily grows a flowering shrub of a plant. It’s sometimes called a broom plant.
Small, yellow fragrant flowers. Recently, I was translating an Italian poem when I came upon its
Latin name, genista, and all of a sudden my grandmother stood before me, roasting meat between
lemon leaves on her tiny circular grill. The smoke saturating me in sweetness, the volcano singing
clouds. My grandmother hears rustling broom. Her favorite genista through the window.

]
H.D. translated selections from eight of Euripides’ plays.
22
At present count, Carson has translated
seven of Euripides plays: Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos, Alkestis, Orestes, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and
Bakkhai. Carson’s Norma Jean Baker of Troy is not a translation. On the title page it reads: “a version
of Euripides’ Helen.” Unquestionably, Euripides occupies a noteworthy place in Carson’s
imaginative and creative life just by the sheer number of her willed encounters. She translates
Euripides in scholarly editions, but Carson’s most recent engagement points to certain stylized
inventions first appearing in H.D.’s work of the Greek tragedian. Like H.D., Carson has written
about the fascination with Euripides and why so many later writers bothered to transcribe and
preserve his plays. Unlike his contemporaries, Euripides turned his attention to the interior life of
his characters. Carson writes: “Euripides introduced to the Greek stage a concern for the solitary,
inward self, for consciousness as a private content that might or might not match up with the
outside appearance of a person, that might or might not make sense to an observer.”
23
Carson
admires Euripides’ talent for subversion, his desire to shock the audience. A radical at heart, he
learned how to play by the dramatist’s rules by innovating what we could get away with: incoherent
choruses, un duex a machine, and gods portrayed as if they were ordinary people. Carson maintains it
is Euripides skill at amplifying the tension between content and form that make him so explosive.

101

“Trust Euripides.” Reads a note, an interlude, a page titled, “HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 1,”
found in Carson’s latest work, Norman Jean Baker of Troy, a reimagining of the Helen story, as told by
Euripides.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy is a slim book with only character, Norma Jean, who you may remember as
the legal name of Marilyn Monroe. Carson collapses—or switches out, really—Helen of Troy with
the Hollywood starlet Marilyn Monroe. Both icons of female beauty, Carson’s dramatic meditation
addresses desirability and the “optics” of war. Indeed, one of the lessons of war relates to managing
the optics of a situation, or how to “generate an alternate version of the facts.”
24
In Euripides’ play,
Helen never leaves with Paris to go to Troy. Instead, a phantom of Helen is sent to Troy while the
real Helen is carried to Egypt by the gods. H.D. writes an entire poem epic, Helen in Troy, about this
switcheroo. In Carson’s version, “a cloud went to Troy. / A cloud in the shape of Norma Jean
Baker. / The gods arranged it, sort of. / They flew me to L.A. Locked me in a suite of the Chateau
Marmont.”
25
Duplicity, deceit, the double life. Even the chorus named Truman Capote is, in fact,
Norma Jean. “I am my own chorus,” she tells us.
26

The character of Truman Capote is the truth teller, a “true man,” also capable of telling lies for he is
a famous writer. Eileen Gregory tells us this version of the choral “I” is a paradox, “it is at once one
and many, a single identity with a single complex of emotion and thought, and at the same time a
multiple entity, projecting a kind of experience by consensus.”
27
Norma Jean then is a multitude of
voices—the only character, and translator extraordinaire holding the entire endeavor together.
Norma Jean wonders how one might redeem “the good name of Norma Jean?’” and we are left
wondering if the war prize is big enough.

102

]

What is the beauty of an awkward translation?
It reminds us how other languages think, how they move in time so different from one another.

The bad translation deserves an award, of course, for it introduces the errors we must take so much
time to correct.

]
The text of Norma Jean seems less like a play and more like a staged poem. Writing about Greek
tragedy, David Wiles notes, “[t]he source culture that we seek to honor is always some sort of
fabrication.”
28
Both Carson and Oswald use the gigantic backdrop of the Trojan War to frame their
projects, but it’s fascinating how their invocations are stripped down to the bare minimum. Do our
modern tastes run spare?
29
Carson’s interludes, titled as histories of war, do not appear in Euripides’
play but they’re oddly similar to a structural device H.D. espouses in her translation of Ion.

Ancient Greek plays do not have traditional scenes or acts, so characters enter and exit the stage
while singing. H.D. decides to intervene. She adds nineteen explanatory notes before each division
in her translated play. They appear as italicized paragraph asides. I consider them alternate routes for
the voices of the play. But a route marked by text (littered by letters, pounded on parchment) that is
material. This way in, this way out. The page materially scored with presence, but also able to record
where the one’s walking across disintegrates its very material. H.D. does not seem afraid of objects
becoming animated. In them, H.D. might flesh out an important historical reference, meditate on

103
the function of an ancient Greek chorus, or clarify a distinction regarding Greek poetic forms. Her
added prose sections engage in a dialogic performance with the text itself, and with its imagined
performance. They seek to solve modern-day problems of putting on a Greek play.

For example, H.D writes in one prose section: “Roughly speaking, there were two types of theater-
goers in ancient Greece, as there are today. Those who are on time and those who are late.”
30
The
scaffolding H.D. constructs around her translation adds density to the original play, which she
translates entire. In her direct address, H.D. invites her readers to think of themselves as audience
members of a play. Carson, on the other hand, erects fragments of rock from the ruins of Euripides’
Helen. She removes much of the original storyline, only keeping Helen as a transformed Norma Jean.
But like H.D., she speaks directly to her reader with factual-seeming asides. In “LESSON 2,” it is
announced: “War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t. /
Both carry wounds.”
31
The interludes between Norma Jean’s speaking parts function both as ludic
dreaming and liturgy. A strange kind of study guide, where Greek words are defined, and where
“[t]eachable [m]oments” occur. But who is speaking here? Like H.D., the speaker of these interludes
seems to be the translator herself. Carson and H.D. seem invested in guiding their readers, like
Virgil, through the passages of literary history. Yet inventions like knitting and a wind phone appear
in this Hollywood version, bringing the symbols of Penelope’s loom or the singing bird into the
twenty-first century. Even a Stevie Smith poem, “Persephone,” is invoked as another example of a
girl abducted. “Rape / is the story of Helen, / Persephone, / Norma Jean, / Troy. / War is the
context / and God is a boy.”
32

Josephine Balmer, a classist whose “transgressions” include making Catallus’ poems her own,
advances the idea that “by transforming the text, the translator, too, can be transformed as a writer,

104
finding their own voice by revoicing those of the past.”
33
Hidden in her assertion lies the notion that
because the art of translation requires some invention or magical thinking, the translator can
navigate a way back to the beginning of her voice. “Beginnings are special / because most of them
are fake” writes Carson in translator’s note as poem for the Bakkhai.

]
I drive up the PCH, admiring the Pacific Ocean on my left. The traffic is not terrible. A few needy
Volvos, a few despicable Porsches. The windows are down, and it’s still pretty warm, though the sun
is about to go down any minute. Crazy chaotic pink, the sky bewilders me. I feel a buzzing in my
ribs. My senses disorganized. I’ve been to the Getty Villa in Malibu a few times already with my
parents. It’s not far from my house and definitely easier to get to than UCLA’s Hammer museum.
After inhaling a tomato and cheese sandwich, my favorite pre-reading dinner, I’m alert and ready to
be captivated. The drive goes easy. The ocean smells salty and sweet at same time. I think of oysters
and clams and grilled squid. I wonder if Oswald can eat anything before she performs. I know the
setting tonight will be more austere than at the Hammer. Like usual, I am on time. More specifically,
I always arrive fifteen minutes early, a trait I cultivated from my father. I slowly walk up the garden
path from the parking garage, discreetly tucked into the side of mountain. The roses bloom
immaculately, stooping and slouching just right over the stone walkway. The wildflowers not yet
ready for bed, a galaxy of pixelated stars the jasmine bushes gently brush my arms in perfume. Not
too intrusive this faux Roman garden, but a cultivated wildness reminding me I have now entered a
sacred creative space. I hear fountains rushing. I wonder where my fellow Hammer audience
member, the “Latecomer” as I now call him, might be. Either in the bathroom, or getting a quick
coffee in the café. No, he’s still most likely on the PCH, trying to remember where exactly to turn
into the villa. Of course he hasn’t eaten dinner. The excitement and rush of today too great. And of

105
course he’s not even on the PCH yet, he’s still trapped in the rush hour traffic of downtown Santa
Monica, not remembering one must zig and zag the city streets from memory.

]
Oswald reads her entire poem, “Tithonus” in 46 minutes exactly. She calls upon Dawn, and as she
comes, gradually, slowly, the audience listens with a solemnity I have never experienced before
except in Catholic funeral Masses. The story goes like this: Dawn falls in love with Tithonus, but
when she asks Zeus to make her lover immortal she forgets to ask for his eternal youth as well. As a
result, Tithonus shrivels up like an old bug. Like a cicada, some versions tell us. Heartbroken, Dawn
puts him in a little room “where he still sits babbling to himself and waiting night after night for her
appearance.”
34
Sappho writes a Tithonus poem, which comes to us almost a complete work, as does
Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s dramatic monologue version. Affectionately, or not so affectionately, it is
often known as the old age poem. Oswald’s poem enacts the encounter between Dawn and
Tithonus. She writes in a performance note preceding the printed poem:
What you are about to hear is the sound of Tithonus meeting the dawn at midsummer. His
voice starts at 4.17, when the sun is six degrees below the horizon, and stops 46 minutes
later, at sunrise. The performance will begin in darkness.
35

Oswald holds a long wooden rattle in one hand and its complementary stick in the other. She will
mark off certain time signatures with the rattle. Five minutes have passed here, seven and half
minutes later. We begin in darkness, in prehistory. No blue light, the underground cave light of the
Trojan War representing classical history. No, we begin in total darkness. But “as soon as dawn
appears / as soon as dawn appears / 4:17 dressed only in her clouds” the light leaks in from above
shining on my leaves my leaves my face my legs and a rustling of thought breathes in—

106

1
H.D., Ion (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1986), 133.
2
D.S. Carne-Ross, “Translation and Transposition,” The Craft and the Context of Translation, eds. William Arrowsmith and
Roger Shattuck (Austin: Humanities Research Center-University of Texas Press, 1961), 7.
3
H.D., “From the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides,” Collected Poems: 1912-1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983), 82-83.
4
See Angela Leighton’s discussion of this term in Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: 2018).
5
Alice Oswald, Nobody (London: Jonathon Cape, 2019), 37.
6
Alice Oswald, Memorial (London, Faber & Faber, 2011), 1.
7
H.D., Iphigenia, 83.
8
H.D., Ion, 133.
9
Oswald, Memorial, 2.
10
Anne Carson, “On the Translation,” The Complete Sophocles, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 225.
11
Ibid., 221.
12
Oswald, Memorial, 2.
13
Claire Armistead and Emily Wilson, “Interview, Alice Oswald: ‘I like the way that the death of one thing is the
beginning of something else,” The Guardian, July 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/alice-
oswald-interview-falling-awake
14
Alice Oswald, Falling Awake (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), lines 1-4.
15
Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018), 38.
16
For further context regarding Samuel Beckett’s dictate to his performers of “having moonlight on their voices, listen
to Oswald’s first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry titled, “The Art of Erosion,” http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/art-
erosion.
17
Oswald, Memorial, 20.
18
Ben Purkert and Emily Wilson, “Back Draft: Emily Wilson,” Guernica, February 24, 2020,
https://www.guernicamag.com/back-draft-emily-wilson/
19
See Eileen Gregory’s H.D. and Hellenism and Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism.
20
H.D., end to torment (New York: New Directions, 1979), 35.
21
Kate Kellaway and Anne Carson, “Interview, Anne Carson: ‘I do not believe in art as therapy,” The Guardian, October
30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/30/anne-carson-do-not-believe-art-therapy-interview-float.
22
“These plays were Rhesos, Iphigenia at Aulis, Ion, Hippolytus, (these four in conjunction with the Poets’ Translation
Series); Helen, Trojan Women, and Andromache (indicated in allusions within poetry and prose,) and possibly the Bacchae.”
See Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), n.15, 276.

107

23
Anne Carson, An Oresteia (New York: FSG, 2009), 176.
24
Anne Carson, Norman Jeane Baker of Troy (New York: New Directions, 2019), 5.
25
Ibid., 1.
26
Ibid., 10.
27
Gregory, Hellenism, 145.
28
David Wiles, “Translating Greek Theater,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 59, No. 3, Theatre and Translation, 2007, 364.
29
Ibid., 363.
30
H.D., Ion, 8.
31
Carson, Norma Jean, 9.
32
Ibid., X.
33
Josephine Balmer, “Translating, Transgressing, and Creating,” Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 63.
34
Oswald, Falling Awake, 46.
35
Ibid.

108
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115

THE JASMINE YEARS:

IN THREE BOOKS

LOS ANGELES, 2013-2020

116

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead – or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

—Sappho, “Fragment 31”

117

BOOK 1

∞

SOPHIA

118

Little Oranges

Longer than a minute
or a density of teeth time.
Pagan or libidinal energies
take up a lot of space.
That’s precisely the point, no?

119
Treat Yourself Like a Sultan

The female reoccurs.
Sleeping. Dream
-ing. Dead. My head
washes ashore.
The blackest hair
free from robe,
a hanging bob
under a single-dang
light fixture.
Faith does not
limit, doubt does
not limit,
imagination itself
is belief system.
Both rustic glass
& open flame,
the sweetest kill.
Hair longer than
neck & neck perfect
pitch in tower-dark
ruin. Little metal trays
under all served.
City of sweet tea,
divans, Ottomans,
eggnog softness, salep,
one hangman claimed
in the adoption of
uniform. You need to
buy a separate ticket

120
for the harem. So we did
closing down choice.
Tile magnified in blue
ossies, knucklebones
of concubines who
sat on marble counters
chewing stones.
The first Open Studio.
Gold leaf splinters
bedded down, up the
backside, inlaid work,
unreal mother-of-pearl.
Chimney stack in need
of more fuel. So she is
bored reading verses off
the wall, milky-white
ostrich lay up. Later
a whole wall of
extinguished cigarettes.
O love! turbulent,
unwelcome, magnified
in darkened dioramas,
the farthest from innocence
I’ve ever been, magenta
lipstick worn first as
practice, then chore.
What a kingdom,
the first socialization
of herself in secret,
private soldering.
Beauty fills & empties
at the same time.

121

122
∞

I allow St. Anthony
of Padova one wish.
A vanish, a let go.
Ourselves blue light
illumination & brochure.
Ceiling bound, Constantine’s
capital alienates,
enshrines an empire—
Avignon, another example
of how the spider bit
my cheek in my sleep,
how I slept in a bed
that lit up from
underneath, a florescent
nightlight hooked
to a motion sensor.
Dancing in a Turkish
nightclub in my dreams.
I woke to dress
my wound & listened
to the cats hissing
in darkness. The photo-
grapher rocks (mad
motion) in time
to the swinging
light, her pilgrimage
is chanting silent
motion, the fall
off stool. What’s the
duration here?

123
How many times
could it happen?
She’s in the gallery
right now, black jeans,
black tank top, oversized
white button-down shirt.
I don’t notice
her shoes because
she’s talking about
her notebook: photos
pasted in, then
photographed again
with a cheap camera.
No trick—it doesn’t
close. The milky white,
a glass of clear raki
clouds into prominent
white when mixed
with water. “Are you
religious?” “No, I don’t
pray, but I do make
photographs.” “I make
pilgrimages.” “Mysteries.”
“God be with you.”
Con Dio, I whisper
to myself, drunk
in a side street café
well after midnight,
whirling dervishes
fueled by candlelight.

124

The breakfast table set with kaymak and honey. The graffiti wall waved in blue before the right turn
to the bathhouse. We unpacked clean seashells from our suitcases. The portable ones with
microphones, original to Cadiz. R takes the couch in the front room. The potato truck parks at the
corner for precisely ten minutes each morning. The following premonition inside every woman:
assault or brawl. A starry Morse code constellated underneath headscarves: Hair on fire but it never
burns. The airport bombing three years later: 44 killed, many wounded. A star above your head.
Translations sounded out on the kitchen table under the title, A Forgotten Melic. Everything
prepositional: the ancient buildings underneath old ones. “Meet you at the bathhouse at 2.” Sophia
standing inside a rinsed out seashell. The blue sea a mantle on her tanned shoulders.

125

∞

The call to prayer
five times a day,
strained throat,
a sunniness to cold
choice, the Italian
consulate at the top
of the hill we walk
down in search of
espresso, a lover’s
cough, shakiness, a drawing
itself, the glint
of mackerel’s skin
before shoved in
toast, a passing
shimmer. In a photo
I took two nights ago,
a man eyes us, his cigarette
uplifted. It’s not sexual, but
it’s not innocent either.
If we smoked we could
sit on carpets, watching
taxis & small trucks
jam up the street.
The photo is outside,
but what happens
inside me? Dearest angel
Gabriel, tell me how
it ends—does the spider
transform into two

126
butterflies & the inchworm
split several times
from its mama part?
The Sea of Marmara
opens just enough.
Ancient City, keep me
covered in red-halo,
salty recklessness,
dried chiles & fishes.
No new messages.
“Being happy means
being close to the one
you love.” No short-
cuts please, no suspicions,
no vanishings.
Related dreams: Sugarcane,
Home, Center, Tent,
Butterflies. I finally slept
through the night.
Related dreams: Coins, Rings,
Incense, Purse, Metra,
Pineapples. To drink pineapple
juice alters the taste-
appetite. Related dreams:
Saltwater, Cigarettes, Raki,
Mosaics, Pilgrims. When the
monster came, I longed
to be eaten alive
but woke to an empty
bed instead. I carry
a swatch of felt as
talisman & darken deeper.

127
I kismet embrace
the lights in photograph.
Paint is irrelevant.
The realization that I
scared my own monster
shamed me. Starry
night, open mouth—
you are my beginning
& beloved—skycrack of
tuberose & fruit.

128

“If language is the poet’s mask, why do you plague me, Sophia, for being my true doubled other?” A
whiskey spirit, a buxom woman on a can of sardines. A square of light, an alternate world viewed
within.

Static, moving interference. A line of ants skirts the breakfast table.

Sophia taps on a metallic part of the body. The departure traces the return. All floods of writing
open on the mountainside. Sophia writes beyond genre, “flung into concentric intimacy.” Rather
than courting the ear, instigate a verbal assault. A delirium, a confrontation with shaper self.
Alchemist of page. Circulating thoughts, a spiral sense of reasoning. A wall, an obstacle.

Sophia speaks to her dead aunt across a brushfire in the desert. Words are not an end to themselves.
A beginning Parthenon—a dance assembly, a puppet’s theater of life and death. The last book
translated as first breath (1977).

Back in Italy, Sophia wears a mink coat, posing in front of Dante’s tomb. The mosaics in Ravenna
greenly hued with fire blues. The pink alabaster windows pulling in the morning light. Her parents
eating wild mushrooms.

The need to translate a lightning bolt as a fire that doesn’t burn. A dark Turkish sky begins in
plentitude, a hot racy skyscript of stars. A permafrost of information, then confession—brittle
branches of enchantment. Sophia’s soft arms a garland.

The mask of accidental insight all mine.

129
∞

A young woman
washes up on the sea
banks terrorized by
her own humanness,
the sea a sunny Rome.
There, a coffin cypress.
Our senses construct
enough walls to call
an inside. Measure beach
feet, my love. If properly done—
to love truly & fail miserably,
a score blackening the earth.
The intuition to dwell
inside & outside experience.
Well, the decision to stay
in Chicago or go to
Los Angeles wasn’t graffiti
in my dreams, slick with rain
& momentous crowds.
No, it was lonelier, more like
a single bulb above a stove.
I slept in a bed piled
in white down, dreaming
dead near Galata Tower,
the Bosphorus a messy
mackerel shoved in the tightest
blackest jeans only waking
for prayers throat sung &
(meet me at the Ides) during
the night I thought I heard

130
a woman scream,
her sex open
in its full ripeness
of pleasure but it was only
the cats howling, the Ides
of March blooming
my shadow selves.
Six kilos worth
steamed & served.
Dinner doesn’t illuminate,
it satisfies, destroying
the diner mid-bite.
Be careful what you wish
for—see it manifest (no,
near the fountain!) into
Light, Presence,
numerous coasts of refuge.
I didn’t smile, I wore pink
lipstick instead, my speech
the loosest thing, coins
thrown in the Trevi fountain.

131
∞

I really shouldn’t.
My favorite part
was the ferry.
If he’s not courageous,
let him go.
Officially, it’s not
a function of time.
We learned eyes
can be used as arms.
There is quiet.
One is breathing.
One is called woman.
One is called into
the light. Did I know
how scary it would be?
Talk to tomorrow then.
How we hung light
off the stove.
The Pope resigned.
I know we had to
buy special coffee.
One is called fountain.
All the rush for nothing.
I misspoke cinnamon.
Clean your liver.
Just choose one.
Should I redo it?
Dream collective.
I add more.
From the series

132
How Many. The translation
project includes Mass.
Diary as title, even.
My lover loves
vegetables. From the
series Uncomplete.
From the series
Durations. Glasses
and glasses of lemon
water. From the Fine
Arts series.
Does he drink?
If you are here,
it tells me something.
The night & its super-
lative flowers.
I am in charge of
a particular ship.
It builds narrative
no matter what.
I lived a good life.
I slept in a hotel
and not in the Vatican.
My love killed herself
in a car crash.
I dreamed my sister
was pregnant.
The chocolate tastes
better warmed.
The poor thing uses
an inhaler now.

133
∞

The light under sea,
a leggy bubble bath,
a foamy white. Everything
elsewhere. On the ferry
ride across, hookah
smoke & simits trashed
out to seagulls.
Practice the art of Art
until a second authority
no longer exists &
you are only authority.
No changes from Privacy.
An apple seed stuck
to my foot is
the beginning & the end
of the story. Remember,
I am lost in the same
direction for a while
& “I feel like I’m in a trace.”
The Artists visit me
in my dreams, formidable
talents, a high beam.
Who sent them to me?
Why come in gauze &
green if the formation
only furthers mistrust.
See, it’s also reflective:
the mirror begins &
ends in light. Haloed,
my Madonna never cries.

134
∞

Gold fingertips, just
the two index, please.
Yes, in gold, routine
pyramid, my legs scissor
straight to pilgrimage.
We’ll pass pedestrians
dulled out by sunlight
as quickly as—“your time
will come,” my secretary
tells me. What’s the sacrifice?
You look great, you cannot be
35 & white hairs don’t show
but exist in burrows
of longevity in this chronic
condition, 3-headed Infirmity.
What little goat doesn’t bleat
when streets team with blood?

135

The voice-over narration perfect. Two seconds of discernable silence before the destruction.

(This film is in black and white.)

Women in their 40s. Concentrated, masked, Sophia knows what she wants. The aphorist as
aristocrat. Tumbleweed boss. Women in their 40s. Sheriffs in lawless towns. Diary: the first and only
story. Fragment: the entire shard made luminous in medias res. The serious student usually believes in
hope. A topos. The successful scholar waters bamboo. Men who spit on the street are like the
unpaved street. A single palm, a giant wish. The scholar works in the library. The writer works by
the pool. The scholar-writer sits in the trees, surveying the ocean.

Creating a container for grief. Words as sonorous forces—veils of travelling tulle— vessels of blue
light—

The point is not about making real gold anyway.

It’s the contrasts we remember.

136
∞

I ate the white
of the egg &
nothing else.
The goat cheese
strong & herby.
Three stomachs
worth off ten
plates, I ate
until bored, ready
to throw myself
into three-cubed feet
of neon light.
I don’t know
what I’m doing
& I don’t
know what it all
means & diamond-
like in my veins
the impulse
to communicate
nothing but
myself speaks
from my index
finger—a beam
of Hermes’ rosy
light. The rest of
my nails painted
pink to match
my lips, knot of self-
entry. What do tanned

137
legs mean, other
than the drift.
The drift is diamond
white. The drift has
no business consoling
you. You’ll wait until
it leaves you.
I mean, honestly
not long.

138
∞

A marquee light
works best & Joanna
converted to Quakerism
twelve years ago.
If he lost your card,
he’s not that into you,
but she had faith.
She wanted it to
happen, so she waited
in faith. “You look
pretty, standing in the
corner like that.”
J illumines with a kiss
while in the next room,
a married guest considers
a kiss from someone
other than his wife &
it saddens me how large &
indiscrete his feelings,
a burning matchstick stuck
from his lips. Cherries.
The cigarette lit
from within. Let’s
catch up a bit,
Catherine, I see you’re
sad & lonely. No, it’s
roses here & white
radio signals & “You’re so
cute,” a different man
whispers in my ear,

139
his fiancée elsewhere.
So many unloved
& hungry! but see
the hard-boiled eggs
on the zinc bar, eggs
in cream, eggs soft-boiled
with napkins, eggs in my
eyes, eggs baked in
cookies, no need for
such hunger! but alone
in sensorium, smarts in
otherness, I’m guilty of
much worse.

140

Sophia leans into the wavering hieroglyph. She pushes off its curved lines. Wandering through the
garden, her trench coat securely fastened. Its pinching belt. The buckles, the standoffish buttons, its
saber fabric muffling small body cries. A collection of words, multiple depictions. It’s all too much.
Sophia leans into Istanbul, a dream told in reverse. She woke up in a bad mood. The vibrating
stench of rotting lilies. A funeral procession in slow motion. The city’s many cats a terror, a
circulating wildness. The Campari and soda, a thicker sugar to coat the speaking, remembering
tongue. A diamond falls out of the engagement setting. Sophia catches a falling rock out of the
softening rot, victory of passing time. In a ceremony of voices, she rides the crest of wave. She
translates a disguise for herself, a beard of burning fire she dutifully wears at the dinner party. Sophia
stands at the threshold, the other side of night.

141

Sophia’s tongue flames out a local fire. It eats a charred edge. It eats a bloody center.
She speaks her center as a moving statue marbled in refrain. The first time Sophia spoke the
audience didn’t hear her, the second time we gave her a cloak of red flowers to drape across her
luminous body. The third time Sophia spoke, we opened our arms and slipped off her
dress….kissing her nipples, her shoulders, the length of her magnetic body hovering our tiny radio
frames, our polyphonies, our portals. We loved Sophia’s odor, her ordering of visions, her walls
honeycombed and pickled. We kissed and prayed for language to come find us different, changed.
Who would come after Sophia? We prayed to her beauty, for her bloody limbs to wash us pure. We
prayed for interior remembrances of spirit. Of hauntings. Of lovesick doors. For words of the body
and the spirit. For language—a treat we masticate with incisor questions. For imagination’s original
first fever. For the carrion-flesh of our friends fresh from dinner. For June, and her sisters, the hot
summer months on the horizon. We prayed and prayed, our hands bruised from clasping at
handheld distances, incorporating our comprehension of her infinite beauty into our grazing fingers
that smacked and trashed of honey. Eating pleasure points on the wrists. The mouth always
touching the bottom, the infinite wall of pure noise—O

142
∞

Desire is intuitive,
behaves in inappropriate
ways. Couldn’t tell
why the taste of a mouth
happens in an instant
but the past isn’t
remembered through
talking, I’ve already loved
a past thing. Luxxe, luxuriate,
the cat pawed you off
when you tried to pet it,
the wanting to put rum
into everything warm.
Doubt shouldn’t be
more warming than
faith, the same number
of footholds & costumes
& if praying encourages
a bristling, let it—clasped
in its own smallness,
a jasmine lantern.
My intuition in strangeness,
in acceptance of family
history. I ferry in &
around the darkest patches.
Turn around. Don’t look
at me, just listen. I don’t
want to impart information.
Do you hear that bird
cooing? No performances.

143
No false integrations,
I dwell apart what decisions
to make, June. I’m outside
the scores & Time describes
a white terror, lovely as smoke
but I don’t know. So there’s
that & translucence.

144

145
A Work of Art

∞

Classic, dead, rotting perfume.
1964. Cypress trees, dare I stare
at Roman aqueducts,
blank-eyed statues.
Getting rid of the thing
after it’s made.
Afterwards, a Negroni.
Modernism
my favorite moment.
Is this because I’m patient?
Or because, like Erza Pound,
I don’t want to remember
that I’m stuck in a tent eating flies?

∞

Shadows, trees,
single file line,
a French farm boundary.
I had no idea
you could erase the “you.”
I didn’t realize others
pound podiums
in distress of excess.
Loyal energy,
I desire you, piss-smelling
Naples, the freedom
to confect sweetness
at any old time.

∞

How often does a work of art
register a high bacteria count?
Closed for swimming.
Open for sunbathing.
Just to be safe, I renewed
my faith, apologizing

146
to no one but myself,
swimming inside the water.
I am not your answer.
The waves backtrack
checking traffic. The avocado ripens
in time for breakfast.

∞

Wasn’t really listening
until he said,
“Style is superficial.”
Really? Monotone, high arch
all the same
to us ants?
I continued not to listen,
the man
megaphone
who couldn’t say synonyms
or facilitator
without a stutter.
Felt the urn within.
It pulsed in my body. It shrank-
blossomed
in alternating breaths,
the museum’s marble
more dead than alive,
wicked, excited about ending.

∞

High-crested crane,
the birds absolutely sing
louder here (a red conditioning)
in my mother’s garden.
Burdock root salad,
I could forgive
an inhumane act.
Over Japanese food,
we discussed the possibility
of humankind.
Why not, what’s the point

147
of not trying?
I am its only author.

∞

The kids tramp in the waves.
The kids tramp
in the rocks, tramp
in sideways glint sun.
When the sun’s out—
a fellowship of others—
a bruise darkening
on my suntanned leg.
The facts of my biography:
I grew up in a teepee,
distilled moonshine
from my tears,
mailed letters
from inside the rough,
left the matches
at the last camp site.
Recalibration,
I get too excited
starting again.

∞

“You gave him the best years
of your life,”
which could have been true
if I were someone else.
A rompy-stomp collector
of paint,
a perfection of hardness.
I move the beach towel
at the last minute, the pink
of my childhood
in the foreground.
The facts of myself
add up to no facts. The facts
of others implied.

∞

Vigor, sexual enthusiasm,

148
white hairs
in private. To be touched
like Odysseus, bathed and oiled
after washing up
on the beach.
The spirit of hospitality
creasing my body
in a million folds.
It doesn’t really matter
except here.
Just the facts:
You’re sentimental,
I’m not. The white billows.
Did I get that right?

∞

Authentic art,
does it exist
or spectator art or political or
labor or authentic recycling,
or bemused expression?
You lied!
I didn’t let you
suffer enough.
Authentic life, a grocery store list,
a diary excerpt
trashed in the car.
The cataracts falling
from my eyes.
See with my eyes,
what women did you miss?
Broken terra-cotta star,
airborne in every lifetime.

∞

Courtyard as oracle.
Complaint as oracle.
Castration as oracle.
Couple as oracle.
Crowd as oracle.
Contact as oracle.
Conversation as oracle.

149
Cassia as oracle.
Compare as oracle.
Coffin as oracle.
Civilian as oracle.
Circumference as oracle.
Catherine as oracle.

∞

One airplane
flies above the lake.
Blue, blue, green.
“I have an idea,”
to be fully open
dilated, generous
rejection,
you don’t scare me.
During the heat wave,
my body relaxed,
“confiscated studies”
a measure of yearning.
I inclined into my appetite,
hungry, insatiable.

∞

Catherine.
Catherine.
Catherine.
Catherine.
Catherine.
Catherine
Me.
Me.
Me.
Me.
Me.

∞

Woke up.
Coffee et cigarette.

150
Yoga et water.
Beach et sun.
Writing at desk.
Reading in bed.
Side ponytail.
Ingrown hair.
Shower, nakedness,
crème.
More bed.
Airplane tickets.
Built the fire.
Back in bed.
Got up to make drink.
Grilled vegetable
dinner.
Desk. Letters.
Cigarette.
Love letter.
Back to beach
to rescue lover
on wayward wave.
Back to bed.
Orgasm.
Back and forth
death dream.

∞

Ate dinner at my desk,
the quotidian cliffhanger.
The sausage perfectly cooked.
Until next time.
In the bridle of new forms,
the world itself cooked.
The fruit washed by hand,
eaten by hand,
picked by hand,
the hooks don’t care
if the rapture is forced.
Remember,
neither should you.

∞

Apologia returned to sender.
Postage due.

151
Nine pages worth of intention,
apologia, restatement, then
a clue. Hyperbole. The goddess
Isis mentioned.
Needy, improvised,
a twist. I don’t see
a twist at all.
“Please pass the mustard
for my sausage.”
Sometimes it lies straight.

∞

Candlelite. Canskate.
Candidate. Candente.
A dressing room, a fitting
room, you choose
texture, smokiness, heartiness, elasticity,
a Rogers Park corner coffee shop
before I can go swimming.
Coffee before beer. Singing before
kissing. Sunscreen before sun.
My navy blue shirt without
the bra. My tits shaped
against the wind.
Summer buzzed in.
A happy baby carrier.
Breastfeeding, and body
slings. Slave or straight,
a tuna casserole addressed
to everyone, and beer, cold sprung
chamomile-nettled spring.

∞

Tall willow teeth, tooth
blessing, tooth country, a tininess
described as unwieldy.
My lap.
A vaster plain. Work
where none existed
because that’s what I thought
was expected of me.
A wide worthiness
wears the wool of my work,

152
the tight plaid offspring
warps the wainscoting,
the senses de-sensed.
Not much accomplished
when it’s hot outside.
The beach closed, again,
the waves too high. The high
bacteria count. Someone is lying,
that’s how political office works.
I hear the mice search
for Parmigiano-Reggiano
a sweep scurrying! Romano!
Faster to crumb!

∞

The swaddling unnecessary.
I talk. I don’t listen.
I sit around
in my own room
in my bathing suit
in my pile of money,
interacting less with the world.
Objectively, and historically,
this is an improvement.

153

154

Buen Clima

Left hand as
dampening device.
Dirty & trashy
at the same time
my red nail polish
chipped off, half
moons, perfumed
Spanish botanicals
outsourced, skived
leather, overall sleeve.
Leather is sun & sun
feathers a palm
into shadow slats.
Tall sherry glasses
& rapping knuckles
in between. Eh, Paco!
strum spider thrum
on checkered cloth
shot with glasses &
smoke. Black & white
footage. Feathered hair,
turtlenecks in white.
Flamenco is fashion-
based. Keep what happens
a la mesa, please. Cigarette
pickup off edge. Willow
trance, raspy wood locusts
when the B flat patterns.
We first met at Bernard’s.
The subdivisions over-
emphasized. In-lick,
in-feel, make the sub-
divisions more subtle.
Little area for two
Scotches. I didn’t care
about catching his
fever, upstroke then
the thumb. Ah, lessons
in love, oysters & sherry,
second go-around.
Probably a stone in my
wheel, is what I said,
the right side talking

155
its way to Vera’s.
The term “reversion
of rights” is not correct.
Really, it’s termination
of rights. My music
back to mine after 35 years.
1978—Copyright act.
Any author can reclaim
no matter what
the original contract
says. Provide your notice
within 5 years time.
Veuve Clicquot.
Es Veuve. Estoy
feliz. What’s up,
Ese? He kissed me
on the check. I never
opened his door.
Later, perfumes of pine,
herbal notes, underbrush
sweet piss stink, the guitar
mailed from Spain
with 50 Euros tucked
in its red velvet case.
I treat my mother
to a Catalonian lunch.
Tuxedoed, a waiter
lights my smoke, I
interpret what I can.
Hours spent walking.
Feel my shin, it hurts
just the one. Sherry
& toasts (little anchovies
& Eureka! night smelts,
our reservation chez Moby
Dick’s ship). The flame-
nco dancers absent
from form itself &
how he made me smile.
Nutty cocoa butter.
Art’s indirection.
Footsteps ten. “You look
beautiful,” is all I said
in Spanish, a language
I never spoke.

156
∞

Miniature menus
corresponding to state
dinners. We held our
own, homemade
bouillon, the soup
course a getaway
before actual dinner
conversation.
The Sun’s never
a broken thing.
Folders of sheet
music & insects raspy.
My hair grows
back, softer in Aya-
sofya, Sagrada Família.
In my dreams, the rock
smashed, a vanity blued,
though I knew
it was a bad luck
I could escape from,
meaning, New Flamenco.
How did you know
in what direction
to send that young
man, my mother asks,
the Metro half a block
behind us now. Cepa
Adaluza being all title.
His years smoked
pearls, song-cry
chorus, a lowering
of crowns. He was in
a hurry. The look
of the Week: lovers
sitting in one another’s
laps on park benches.
Out in 1973, the album
deluxe in spirit &
harmony. I couldn’t help
but feel dexterity.
Rightly so, it’s cold
in the shade. Otherwise,
total possession. It’s the
contrasts we remember.

157
∞

Chorus an
outside voice
calling from
a cracked-clean
place.

I want to
finish before
it’s dark.

158
∞

Time’s collapsed.
Every time I look
up, there’s more—
a skirt to hike up
after the fish
course. I made a
lot of money
during those years.
Fountains pump.
Discography reads
as follows: All Is
Confection, I Am
Fire, The Good Climate,
Melville’s Constantinople.
Lullabies only work
if repeated, a drowsy
dream of speaking.
How many languages
I knew from listening
to guitar’s music.
Feeling satiated & so
ready to give a competence,
baroque fever pitched
to tree line, a stand
against disinterestedness.
Please, end it cleanly
or not at all. I can
feel the shape
in strumming, like
this, like this, like this.

159
∞

Interested in middle
distance, her neck
strains to realize what
the head’s up to. Return—
I can’t be held
responsible. A fine
example of Persian
rug weaving, a sweetness
borne from longing.

160

161
∞

My ear closed up
& it didn’t seem
to matter a stitch.
I screamed when
the opossum played
dead & twitched.
Shelley needed to
be walked home
so I sent you in my
place, paths rich
in spirits, arragon
charms, amulets
friendship-sewn before
readings: faux-crystal
burns. We fought
about money with all
the windows open.
Bamboo swayed
a little. Warmed
chocolate in white
ramekins, no, better
softened, time spoken
from points of privilege.
Dessert must go on.
Cherry cordial or
Kir Royal, ripeness
is all. I suspected
Stevens’s hand.
I’m not allowed to
air grievances but
the ringing in my ears!
won’t stop. Piles & piles
of hotel whites. You
talked on & on
at breakfast, French toast,
selfish-mute, the angry
mob marches ahead,
differences noted
& so, Identity. My
shawl a multi-colored
trash heap. Union with
the divine. Ear
softens just enough.

162
∞

Belief it can
handle anything.
It’s a lovely curtain,
Jessica tells me, but
what’s behind is
more real. All con-
fection & mistakes
of the strongest thread,
gold saturation in-
difference. Been told
several versions,
I hardly had time
for the right one
which means more
sherry, more cigar-
ettes, more strings
burned in declensions
of unrest. I carried my
chair back inside, a
bounded thing, my
magistrate crowned
in smoke, appeased
not, the appointment
nearly over & burning
tremendous flames.
We sat like disciples.
Work becoming
real in precise places.
I counted 10 fountains
& 10 leaps in emotion,
a system of mistakes
in action because it’s
voice, room tone
& contour. I licked her
page only once, my
mind reliving a flower-
ing, a welcome thing, in-
scription made plain,
characters kissing on
fountains, tumbling
to be heard & loved
a la mesa, singing &
ruin & destiny.

163
∞

A figure
of speech

or
a woman washing
herself clean
in a fountain—

Cascades
of it. Cascades.

164
∞

Cascading is what
I call it
if anyone asks.
Serially.
Cascading in
bedrooms & court-
yards & kitchen-libraries,
light finesse.
Roads slipperiest
a few minutes
after rain begins
falling. Missed only
4 on my test, but
I missed you more
when you had your
daughter & stopped
calling me in the
mornings, oil up
to new water levels.
I walked entrances,
knowing you’d send
the sweetest love
note not once
but thrice daily.
Spoiled-sweetest
soured milk, you’re
rich in calling,
capable of butters &
dancing drunkenness.
If it’s private, it’s
yours & I can’t help
you share it. Couldn’t
we dress the chorus
any way we wished?

165
∞

How much moths
move! How mouths
move little in precious
bunting. Ribbons
off-color & mount-
ainous divide. On
the telephone, no
less, you whisper-order
roasted pumpkin
tasting mescal &
limes, lips the outline
of smoke, lips
pursed in walking
orders, dress hiked
up the coverlet.
Scene: all windows
open. We order
each other around
bedposts, vintage
woodlands, tender
-like, budgeting
rolls of grosgrain
ribbon. I took the
trouble to fill
the pot, so what
of it? Soft curls.
Surroundings scanned.
We look to each
other for clues,
though mysteries
provide a kind
of welcome light,
a comfort grown
in intelligence.

166

∞

“This curtain is
purely imaginary.”

167

∞

To live & work
in white, what
did it mean
besides the most
obvious? I didn’t
pump the wine—it
needed to be drunk.
Don’t water here.
Make sure to water
back there, really
deep water, okay?
Elegies more for
the poet herself,
than the eulogized.
Yes, I’m still here,
my greeniness, my
outlaw stake, I’ll
shut the bed
-room doors
before I’ll shake
her hurtful tooth.
To taste, to taste
partly seasoning,
partly waste, if
New Wave cinema
is not French
enough, I don’t know
enough to pleasure
you. Grainy ending’s
a good climate,
grapes grown
in tradition, near
proper monuments,
adequately vilified,
I’m just saying.
What’s that poem
about her dancing
on my eyelids?

168
∞

Exporta. Things
register foreign.
Good morning,
Good morning, my
dear, empire-worry
multi-faceted,
creating uneven
-ness, streams
of reverie, straw
-berry guava trees
bearing out front
yards. You can eat its
fruit because sadness,
the only cohesion
of self, I don’t know
if this one’s ripe
attached to bough,
upright living
breaking constellated
before my eyes.
Try, you might like it
sour, half-sweet.
My preference
for ground, broken
-down rot tasting
sweeter, desert
grit stitched in
debris. Embrace,
I’m tired now,
night-gnostic visions
I’d rather find in bark
or in sleeves of deep
dark imagining. A
fox takes off running.
Stand here, listen.
We’re part of the
Baroque period,
my love, my crab
-apple. Ground
swells, sparks.

169
∞

Fruit bowl fragrant,
ripe, unpopulated
by flies, but soon—

Termites in door,
voracious.

My father, blue
-eyed,
falling, ever close

170
∞

The point is
not about
making real
gold,
anyway.

171

BOOK 2

∞

NAXOS

172
A Correspondence

the first letter is not
even a letter
it’s a dedication
in the form of a poem
in a favorite book
imagine beginning
in a love story
too luminous for a letter
how it walks beneath
a language of private longing

173
The Reservoir

It hasn’t happened for years now.
The reservoir filled
with industrial-grade cement.
It shone in the sun and simply sat.
It sat a still-life in grave indifference.
It sat protected, a personal property
a copyright so expensive no one
troubled themselves to buy it.

What myths were transcribed remained
buried underneath. The celebrities
and foreign residents who could afford
to live nearby had no idea.
They drank cocktails named after
exotic birds, not bothering to watch
the sunset from their balconies.
Lit pink from somewhere adjacent,
the heavens waiting to be believed in.

Around its perimeter, the trees and
flowers bloomed perfumes
even lovelier than before.
Every morning I walked around
it and called it “Dawn”
waiting for it to come to life.
I didn’t want to use my spells,
hoping it would rally on its own.

Years passed. I couldn’t be
bothered, I fell into a bad
pattern of clover. But then
one day, a fern shot up
from the cracked cement
grazing a prehistoric horizon.
A patch of smoke fumed
peculiar drapes at the base.
Flames ruptured a caldron.
The nets of origin burned.

I stood underneath a tree watching
the destruction with binoculars.
No strays, no floaters but when my retina
finally detaches, my eyes
will have cried at the singing.

174
On Not Visiting Keats’ Grave

First a dry hot wind,
then the Tiber river rushing in.

Green flamed my cheeks.
The moment of breaking

before actual fracture.
The title as “Actual Fracture.”

The title as “Open Form.”
Only in disintegration do we see

true form: “a pictorial buzzing”
or “dance-pictures.”

All phrases describe a crossing.
All paintings and statues enact

its horses and miracles (cavalli e miracoli).
The horses ate a blast of blatant spring,

a lilac rod between thorn
and horn begins. Beauty shared

between bodies passed between
bodies, never the one.

175
Under the Bloom

Hint of a fatal flaw.
Perhaps this is the entire point.
Why the crinkle of your leather jacket
announces a deep blue interior
of a violent fever come to rest.
The time waiting at wrong train stops.
Scent of musk on my wrist
or cheek. Open
beachfront of the past
where my many mistakes
litter his mouth on mine,
rocks wedged into rocks
into smaller rock formations.
My flaws in all black.
I sat on his lap
without being asked.
I dove into an opening
of myself disconnected
from linear lines.
All around presence of white.
Is this a Chorus, I hear,
making speeches & promises?
Lit-up images require distance.
I walk backwards
away from the cemetery, sharpening
my sword tip against headstones.
Cup of poison back at camp.
I revel at this life of mine,
not taking any notes
like water stones. The ritual
comes first.

176
On Not Understanding Greek

I’m in the deep woods.
I’m in the thicket
of deep listening
where understanding
my decadence
and re-living it
are two different things.

I finally carve my name
in the bark
of an oak tree.

Is this a nickname?
Is this a truth
disguised in hieroglyphs?
Is this a vision clouded in blue?
Was the knife first
sharpened in the fire?
I cannot know exactly
what it means,
standing underneath
the leafy brilliance
of language

sounding out the words
that will blacken out
my eardrums.

I can only listen.

177
The Educated Imagination

Riven by vixens, there’s a mosaic
in need of recalibrating.
See to it, sir,
if the desire pleases.
See to it, but do not disturb me.
I am busy. Make sure I am aware of the disorder
but only include me as dutiful actor
to its recuperative make believe.
This is how to live,
I swear the oath first as poet.
Hurry up before the art historian arrives.
My hands smell of the smokehouse
like the bologna handed out every Saturday
at the meat counter where I went shopping
with my grandmother, Christmas marzipan
and twine. Smoke pipe black licorice.
The smoke curling at the top
of a wintertime oil painting.
Or a simple cherry chimney.
Marsden Hartley’s fishing boat paintings
housed in a New York museum, or the poem about the
cathedral which is really code for moi,
the way our relationship went south
that winter
and then all the seasons afterwards.
Bend with the fragment,
the descriptive syllables
hidden within the fires of Notre-Dame.
The heart deserves to be on fire
in a landscape where nothing is green.
Poetry is all about the mystery.
So where are all the high priests and priestesses?
It’s no fun drinking wine alone.
Not even the effervescent ones
with chorus legs kicking.

178
Wattage

Rich in calcium, I read much of the night,
a lonely and solitary affair.
The chalky white soil, the saline dry smile,
my backbone sits me up straighter.
Smoky ash, dust bun hair.
The levees broken.
For what, the brawnier version
of a twice-told tale, a story inside a story,
a jasmine labyrinth or hopscotch knowing?
Italian and Spanish men of dubious origins?
Pages and pages of illumination flowing?
Hours and hours of spontaneous fermentation?
Old men make the best servants.
They know how to turn the pages
of Kafka or Proust at exactly the right moment,
they cook pots of lentils to be served
in small porcelain cups when the drinking
ebbs a bit before the final launch of sun.
And when they finally serve the dregs
of a forgotten, historical amphorae, I kiss
my forearm in a sweet-fruited, open-mouthed
conversation that begins with a question.
Parcel brother, find me a vestment
that isn’t covered in contraband kisses.
Find something I can sink my rotten tooth
into, the kind of knowledge not available
to men versed in volcanic exhaust.
Find me a cellar built only to protect
the root of a plant bearing no sustainable fruit.
Find me the tyrant of my imagination.

179
Wildfires

the horses back down
into meadows starched golden
the summer’s drought
the mountains crack fire
the painting roped off
smaller than the other masterpieces
but framed just the same
the smoke particles appear
in the dusky sky only to
disappear come night
ashy quiet veins pulsing
with the push and pull
of flame branding its name nearby
you who are curious can’t sleep
through the night I sing songs
about ships and we heave
and sway while California burns
without apology I call you baby
butterflies swarming around
us in protection while the moon
cascades your body in halo
I couldn’t think straight
but I could count the breaths
it took me to return to you
our sails entwined
winds carrying your name
coupled with mine
the way you hold light
in your tiny hands
in your mouth
a tiny candle
how you drop it
behind tapestries
behind curtains
behind bed sheets
how it throws a historical glow
upon my face
another painting
of the Virgin Mother and baby

180
A Carriage Ride Through the Park

the time of day didn’t matter
neither did the weather
whether it was gloomy
and cold or light and sun dappled
it had the presence
of a beautiful woman
washing herself
in a fancy Cubist shower
the streams crisscrossing insane
territories of variegated marble
her perfect thick thighs
soapy with bubbles
the faucets and spigots
a high metal cast
we see what we want—
seagulls on top
of university fountains
or Day of the Dead marigolds
piled high in the corners
of a famous restaurant
the palm tree mistaken
for a whale-fish
when fallen over on its side
I like to think I will teach
my son all about generosity
how it swells and contracts
depending on the trial at hand
but perhaps he already
lives in a tent tightened
by spokes newly growing
and glowing he sleeps
the deepest sleep after
I’ve sung to him about the night
sky when it crackles with crows

181
Affidamento

I’ll never forget how our mother bathed us
in rose water. The air hot and plentiful.
Summer winds, North African, whipped through
courtyards, back alleys—fierce stretches
of off-white linen breaking plants
petals hovering
over empty nodes of bloom
my sister a Pegasus most afternoons.

The salt fell off our suntanned bodies
filling empty suitcases
a chest of cherry tombs.
We slid under wardrobes
to feel the marble ache of cold
hidden as banned books
or as packs of Marlboros.

No one else taught us
how to peel a pear.
She let us dare about ourselves.
She let us all utensils—double-bladed
fruit knives or cigar scissors.

My mother washes an espresso cup.
The transition of a morning visit
to the more formal serving of lunch.
One by one, each guest sits down
to clouds of cigarette smoke
and the exhaustion small-town gossip
bestows upon the nerves.

But is there love? She asks years later,
I hesitate feel my lips
upon my face instead of telling her what I do not know
but hold in prayer—
a pin prick
a spark of errant daylight,
a miraculous blossoming of rod
to warm the coil within.

What strange questions they asked us children.
Arrivderla! Ci vediamo! we shout
not bothering with answers.
A plate of almond cookies never served.

182

A Whole Army to Feed

Inside my throat, sounding
an octagonal room, a mare’s hooves
strumming fleshy cords, tunnel turning
to tower, now a nun galloping up the bell rope
un-arrowed, light as a breeze, war-blown
battered church my parents desired
as marriage altar. Many mornings I slipped

2

up its bell tower, nuns in tow,
inside a whiteness perceived as ironed dress.
Etna to the left, green sea in front,
rope burning my hand. Volcanic lands.
What can you hear all at once? Recorded
bells, rain, midnight vespers, hush slush
of travellers leveling newspapers under sleeves

3

rose scented bed sheets, more than
music a sound wave, an arrow island
where all metered noise is outlawed.
Your lips a perfect fullness. Sight of another
woman rough and rude. Your Grecian nose
before a Turner painting at the Tate.
You wished me marveling powers on Friday

183
4

by Tuesday I felt capture nearing.
Venus, having fixed darts in her heart,
hooks the freer lover into adventure.
Can you hear me better if I whisper?
If closer, a kiss near bombed-out temple white?
Opera for a room plays daily marine
syntax of birdsong, lulling cast-away lovers

5

into recognizing how blown instruments
provide a softer tune than brass. Reeds
harnessing the power of the star system,
where notation plucks a stranger form.
You tell me to listen for color.
“And the palette—blue, black, and white—
and the materials—lots of stone and rock.

6

Hard and stuck, perhaps, or immoveable.”
Savage rock-face, you don’t bother
with the waltz, as you haven’t the arms
to deface my monstrous appetite.
Forgetting you completely, I trace
another fragrant cavity, Torches. Gemini-Helen,
iconic if not cyclonic. Lamps lit as fiery

7

torches carrying visions of bodies,
arms outstretched, a piano, when your
voice comes out to greet me, I weep
pleasure registered in smells off-
brocade, tapestry abounding in hooks
collapsed his cheek against mine own, twinned
and pinned a kiss, hand tender upper side

184

8

chemistry complete: beaker, glass, scale.
Speeches recorded in St. Petersburg,
drinking tea in the garden. Putting you in
my mouth, what would that mean?
Stories passed between outstretched legs,
myself a rush, soft reeds, your tallness
ushers a walk, fig trees, feather breath

9

needles dripped as tongued florescence,
song thrushes singing of sinking ships,
fixed, knit these bonds of possession firm
in well-matched French caves, our honey
-moon in Morocco, salmon-pink blossom
trains. Blossom here, 1973. Petals repeating,
2015. Both in color and in military use, navy

10

blue is my favorite color. My mother
wouldn’t approve, but that’s the whole
reason I’m compromised, see? I couldn’t
make good, all bells, all at once, explosives
and dynamite my chosen power tool. Staccato
force, especially when you remember that photo
-graph of me standing on mount Etna

11

in a sundress and lace socks, steam hissing
off the jetted black rock, holding a boulder
in my hand, half the size of my head, mouth
frozen open shouting, it’s hot, it’s hot, mama,

185
words invisible, words as dissipated smoke
casting song spells, spin-art patterns revolved
around passions, razor-licked and yet to come,

12

why I’m afraid to fall in love with silences,
and you. Mother’s rusty restaurant signage, white
tablecloth for blackened letters, handwritten
letters—no revisions necessary I wrote to both
of the men I was seeing, I couldn’t decide
how much time I needed to spend at my desk
recreating vast sunken treasures, or salt-curing

13

tuna steaks my grandfather’s boat pulled in.
Phoenicians, a whole army to feed. Then what?
How much longer do I stay and wait,
to what end does the tandem performance serve,
strummed and fluted in fine greenery?
From the location of my heart, I ask for mercy.
Forgetful, I reinvent myself in revision,

14

in furtiveness, in passion’s hidden embraces.
When a wild beast is startled from his lair,
it’s not the one who finally catches him
entitled to love’s prize, but the woman who first
enters the cave. When a baby appears
onstage in a Greek play, we know these lines
to be added by a Roman. Sweetness coming later.

186
The Living Joints

The sailor never asked what direction
for he intuitively sailed
out past the remainder
of nothingness.

I admired him for his bravery
and his blue eyes
locked in present accountings.
I admired his smoky, tattered clothes,
the hole in his cashmere sweater
right below the left armpit.
I admired his chicken stock,
slightly over salted and sedimentary
in flavor. Tortellini in brodo
better than my mother’s even,
hand delivered to my room once
the deck lanterns had been lit.

All my life
I have asked for things
sideways
at an angle, afraid
of the full-shock:
the whole gaze of you.

And so, I signed up for maritime work,
knowing the sun would warm me, and the sea
would rock me to sleep, and I could be
part of the invisible army of many.

In time, I flee from the unending
monotony of seafaring days.
Each day exactly as the last—
high adventure
but displaced from anyone,
never lasting in imprint, its conditions
destroying the score mark
upon the memory. Water
a never disaster condition.

When you eat a ripe plum,
swallow the pit.
Learn to feel its weight inside of you.

187
Dear Incognito,

You speak for yourself

And so I listen
The wind calling us

to step out from beyond
a young copse of birch

[turn the page, see a folk painting
with red and white birds chirping
in the branches silver
whiteness of peeling bark]

Your fondness to move inside
these brackets—whispered second

thoughts striking a network
of branches I’ve waited years
to see Where were you all those

times I left my house in search of
my one true Reader The one whose hands
held a small blue book
delicately between the field of grassy text
and the avenue of graphs

188

[“If Poetry comes not as naturally
as the Leaves to a tree
it had better not come at all.”]

whose hands vivified
a grace of longing Keatsian finesse
proportioned limbs

Was I only interested in Reverie
imagined new in a relentless Desire
capturing my body as my own reed
maker of sound Was I not listening

for your gentle step was I that selfish
unhearing blind to the leaves
you fashioned in other cities
which I read about later Beginning later
opening disarray now a Once

189

Auroras and all calling me
a window birthed in
magnetic midnight and your muscular torso
resplendent I field in the air above me
a flying

I knew your voice once performed
a southern dang echoed in a Spanish moss
because I have the book
of hands to prove it

In willows in stitches
In skeins once whispered Once I held
out both of my hands Like the Fates

Strumming a tiny dance in reddish yarns
A charm of winds
curtained in

190

But since there are only two of us here
Time is not the third concern

‘[a pretend pear dangles in the tree]’

Hands as dancing mouths We speak a clip

An opening disarray
of desire yellow leaves on the bough do hang
my arms contoured in intuition
comes morning comes a clip

a cave where Plato depraved, deprived

because you let me turn back to you
I flew

191

without fairness I flew
into star-glazed crevasses
creased upon your body

stellification I stole from you
having stolen it from Ashbery He having it
leave his body in a field of daffodils
perfumed and out of view

[threads filaments strands spokes notes
oceans of filamented light]

practicing in the light
eye of the beholder eye of needle
practicing in the dark
You were never someone else

192

I thread the needle
with newness and the now
kept coming Sidney. 1585.
Crazy weather he endured

In a hat, Sidney launched filament
after filament
a pouring forth of Poetry
as rainwater
as the same as what
remained as free
form in the mixture
of mud of clouds of lilied air

Rhyme as a way to be
in three different places at the same time
Rhyme as spiders in the rafters
calling wind calling desire

Clad in gold, we rode away
The night soldier spiders drawing
metal bridges to souls

Erotic revolutions or poetic revolutions or
a Skittles bookmark in the Book of Wolves

Even new, now to the next now

193

We imagine all kinds of afters:

Paradise
Dinner
Disaster
Master
Intimacy
Reverie
Time
Irony

In the crown of an eye
aftering transcribes: a nocturnal passage

And all this without fabric
without clasps or doors

Climbing into the mountain
making rope echoes
nowhere noise

Recalling a reverberation how it
rebounds never destroys

Color as hormonal
Artist as boundary-maker

You make me woozy
better than Deleuze

194

The barmaid finds us
without drink
but captured into ourselves

Serious deficiency until you
you two are the sweetest, she says

Voice machine
Love machine
Poem machine
A veridical moment

Where true speech says
seeing stars

We write as we listen

I see stars Something we say
when we hit our heads
on bathroom vanities
on the living room wall of white
where depth perception moves off
a kiss What’s the true color

of a white lie
or a lie of omission?

When she tells me I can’t say,
“This is real,” I will say
This is real.

195

Post fall,
a Chagall
Adam and Eve printed in color
unavailable in most places

The real experience a martyr might have
Everything has form
even white lies

The rest is ancient history:
Messenger, martyr, maven

We had been traveling so fast
finally a roughed-out edge
in the crumbs of a half-eaten croissant

Why are you carried away?
Where do you go in the those moments
when I do not see you?

Moments of still living
no movement just yet
but the assumption of a vitality
that is present pulsing Touch me

make me weep
in speech

196

Part of the earth
is the attempt
to love is to write a letter to write a poem to stage an emotion

Forlorn gets picked up again
Pebbles on the ground
Shingles on the roof
What does the footnote say?

Whether it’s fret or fearfulness, forlorn gets it
A nightingale builds a nest Moment in

time [now that’s frail]

Leaden limbs,
how do we get from the first
meditation on death
to the meditation
on love,
then back again?

[Refrain
Refrain]

If the urn is speaking I’m ambivalent
The full moon speaks a clue

An angel by the ocean listens

197

In a like scale of measure

the fall is always the beginning Enchantment
like a fluted holding

material things, such as silks, glass, gold, cream, etc.
In the case of double vision

silks, glass, gold, cream, etc.

Perception comes
second to knowledge
but since I’m a poet, and not a philosopher
I’ll take the spell
of the lettered letters littered

here
in a telepathy of poems
talking to one another across time Yes, I said

that Quote me

198

Dear Incognito,

Will you attend a performance
with me? Pressed seaweed
a strange language

when tickets are not yet reserved
[the mind being both inside & outside

Jeffers’ bone vault

a sacramental poetics

unlike or like HD]

Sign, mark of absence,
why do you torment me so

though perhaps you are a
indecipherable hieroglyph Remarkable catalyst

A sign, a mark, a token, a proof
of our love

Love,
Yr Secret Admirer

199

speech seems connected
to obligation a social contract
But what of footsteps

shushing in gravel

the rain gods showering down
midnight walk
white flowers

formlessness antinomian

we kissed for rain & the heavens opened
our wish

lines from a cummings poem
left on the table

wildness & freedom
provided to us by the gods

[rain again during the night]

this time thunder
this time lightening
from a Midwestern plain

a pirate bootleg radio station

tiny disasters all piled up

we moved beyond fracture
into a quicksand measure
of fullness

your glorious sex in morning

200

Bacchic shade
shades and shades and shades
living beyond infinity
in medicinal use
or mathematical use The Sublime

a tiny eggplant
a nightshade grown

a Foradori 2012
at Dudley’s Market where the Teroldego

grape is like a Nebbiolo but more like
tart cherries we form as kisses

[my leg brushes up against yours
pull the stool closer, my rainy night first date]

Dark cherries, juniper berries, smoke
tobacco and saddle leather take shape

from on “tirelle” or on a wire harness
the grapes are grown
acidic, elegant praising
of minerals lands
the high ridge where I see you

there are other local varieties
a Jacuss Colli Orientali del Friuli Schioppettino
Fuc & Flamis (2005)

Another local variety where
Schioppettino whose name translates
as tiny gunshots pock pock pock

the hills of Italy are calling us
cacciatore a caccia

hunted & hunted
only ever by each other

201

Attractive tyranny
of transcendence

Fragile sense Flimsy ink
or stable fixed

Counterpoint trick
letting what remains
in gray scale

Divergent elsewhere
This - that

Elsewhere
where
over there
the other writing

202

Freedom is always found
in beginning

beginning again in the source
of all materials

Deciduous or sensuous
the same difference, really

falling off the bough
falling leaves
in love
with falling

Letting the disaster speak
from inside the wave

“Torn Curtain” Wilderness
You are teaching me
how the power of poetry lies in its future

How did beginning again escape me all these years

Advent of a cataract

He tried yelling me off a cliff
but I refused choosing the shade
of your arms
falling first in rites of spring

Your lips a language
of first contact

suppressed orator

A fire speaking in us

203

Consisting of bitter flavors
from the wild (bitter greens, roots, and barks)

life is meant to be taste like this

Lead by example: chopped dill on
roasted carrots, dill in yogurt sauce
dill as transition to discipline

Are we imposing?
Am I imposed?

Closer to the devouring Awake, dented
into perfect morning

your eyes everything sun
your hair grand design in filaments spun
your smell sweet orange celebration
where we nap a coherent splendor

204

if scenery be slight
if food be non-existent
if prayer be taken way
if poems remain unwritten

write me into the earthquake
of true delight

your flaming imagination lives in mine

205
Unlived

A gardener still
manages the unlived’s
lawn: ivy twists

and grass brown scrapings
windswept seeds
shadowhungry nightshade.

But it is God’s wish
to let live the cypress
where no one stood.

Who am I to judge
when we seem both
equally loved.

(gray light/Arabian moon).

Upright pines
column our souls.
A flag of red

is all a hummingbird needs.
I know the pleasure
is in the speed.

(crickets hum, apses fall)
Knowledge is thoroughbred
while stillness is God’s domain.

206
Beach Photographs

Your voice in my ear again—
the occasional delusions of lunch.

Who ate all my figs? Should we order more wine?

The polished white rocks
under the tremble of green-blue water.

When we pushed you under
we lost your glasses.
A local boy found them
hissing and bubbling
at the bottom of the seafloor.
Everything back in balance.

Back in Agrigento, the sun warmed
my thighs before we got on the bus.

Lemons cut into quarters
dusted with rock salt.

How we greedily drank
the expensive glass bottles of Coke
we ordered from tidy waiters in coats.

In Naxos, we slept in rented rooms.
The mysterious curtains
almost like the ones back home.

Something lost or stolen, returned
to her original owner.

In the imaginary brightness
I am missing my rock
my tooth, my cavity of dried seahorses.

207
The Ruins

announcing an exit
with the sound of a wind
or a river rushing in
timpani thyme drying out
in the high gusts of wind
where two women sit
in between two
languages of song
like an actor
who speaks her lines
like a translator
who interprets
a voicing she hears
in “a song note
that brought her back
to a body” vibrating
here and there
static and vibrating
her body a tuning fork
her body centered
by Greek entrances
centered through
the night thicket
where jasmine
wind blows
near a barbed wire fence
near a river
“And was it Goethe
who said, ‘another language
is another soul?’
Anyhow, another river is—
but we must find
our own river first—
rivers of paradise
or what you will.”
under a joyful swerve
the two women paint in
the lapis blue
of the statue’s eyes
dipping their paintbrushes
into the river
passing the color
between them

208
Ionian Coast

Greened topiary horse, I rush past you, fresh
flower bouquet—star gazer lilies, healthy
as young clams tight in the surf one minute,
then languidly opening in the steam
of tonight’s dinner stew. Sweets, I just got home,
just this second, pretty much delirious
with lots to report, odds and ends, a frill,
a flounce, a ruffle lace in pre-language motifs,
and Ganymede, love-toy to Jove, bringing up
the rear. A glance at the menu tells you
how hungry we’ll be later tonight when
jasmine knocks us down by the front door,
sleepy note of nightshade, this togetherness
we fashion in spontaneous slow dances
rare and unexpected for others but always on
beat, waves, deep blue-greens among shadows.
Perfect pressure washing out gemstones.
To wear a pigment of you on my breathing body.
To simply wear you. It’s quiet here. The waitress
sets down a glass of wine and a pistachio croissant
I will later eat on street, white napkin fluttering
against my cheek. Thinking of you in Mexico,
building chandeliers to string in trees, polishing
cut glass, or stone. Swimming in the morning
most likely, not full body but half body first, remember
it took awhile. A closed kiss on a deserted street,
eggs and spinach at midnight, a dollop of fresh crème.
Held off, pray you call me, notes unsprung, never
-minding what illusions we are under, we carry this thinking
with our hands, enclosed in coasts of trouser legs
from the nineteenth century, orchestrated dance
or circle of rustic dancing, take this note, let it rest
with us here, not transcription but test reflection—
a mirror, a vision, protected waters deep and clear.

209
Song

Take apart the anthem.
Put it in a bowl of stitching,
every last one. See what I care
when the requiem falls
flat at the funeral procession.
The bamboo light here,
the bamboo light there.
I’m fed up with miniature revolutions.
Make them bigger and brighter.
Make the circulation of bad
ideas more explicit.
Hang the chandelier inside
the grave. Remember, I don’t care
what volume for the orchid’s repair.
Let them further stoop by the minute.

210

Tree of Life, Unfinished

I grew flowers
lovely pink and white
ones blooming all across

midsection and upper
torso.

The stems pricked
my navel
scrapping out
a false hollow bowl.

211
Last Things

I used to have a thing for novelists
and painters.

Now I have a thing for babies
and speedy waiters.

The last things required an appointment
to be seen. And they didn’t take new appointments
when someone cancelled.

See you next time, their auto-message read.

The baby with my daybook
didn’t see what the fuss was about.

What’s the point,
won’t they be around until the end?

The baby had a point.

Stones and bones.
Oceans and birds.

Better put those things off
until tomorrow.

I poured an amulet
of wine down my throat
and got back to work.

212
Sentences

You try to put a rock in my mouth
your clenched hand thrusting up
against my chin.

You push it up, again,
near my mouth.

Not for mama,
I say.

Mama like mountains, I say
hoping you’ll say it back.

You try again, hand of chert.
My messenger-clerk.
My Hermes.
My mischief-maker.

But there’s already a rock
in my mouth that won’t fall out.
No matter what
I do, I cannot dislodge it.

The rock says, stop.
You say, st---oop.
The rock says, bubbles.
You say, bubbs.

We pass the rock
back and forth, walking up
the trail, the trees casting shadows
on our faces, our movements
familiar and sacred
until the trees finally say,

sing us a song,
we are tired of the silence here.

213
This Art

leaves me for dead, or just short of that
I fell for it, the possibility the dreams the revelations
sizing me stalking me down
over cracked stones
asking to be lit like stations
of the cross where the blue of Giotto’s world
cannot be endured and so dissatisfied they ask
for versions burned on the altar instead
never mind the holy corridors’ fragrant darkness
incense myrrh the wish to procure destruktion
what can I do but
pay the tithe, light the candles dripping
for those you seek today
have gone way under
deep down dead
no talking or communing matter here

214
The Vacant Seat

This confession will be my last.
Like being inside a taut muscle
engorged from misuse.
I will inherit all the citations
in my poems from the writer
who left me standing in the river
alone, without shoes or a boat.
Mine now, the endless cascading
versions of blue sky, the trees
blossoming into foreshadowing,
lake deposits stacked in a sedimentary
experience registering a pleasure
cracked deep from one’s mineral self.
Flinty rock of running water.
Rumor of a snapdragon.
Rumor of a pea, the salt water washes
off what’s seen: a handwritten sign
at the side of the road, a bridge
built over the pretty flicker
of bamboo. Dawn changes
the very act of decay, misfortune
my better hand. The way one holds
a baby for however long it takes.

215

BOOK 3

∞

L’AVVENTURA

216

L’avventura, a prologue

L’avventura/the adventure is an unsettling. An event you choose to participate in. It only comes into
being when you see fit. When you decide the story will be told in language, in whatever point of
view or description of shoe or melody trace upon the scape. That’s for you to decide.

A proposal.

A voice-over, a replay, a drama performed off-stage. An inhabitation.

A poetic revolution with no touches of irony or sentimentality. Thankfully, we’re done with all that.

The adventure catches you as you wish to be caught, a pine-scented perfume turning you around
and around like the meandering ribbon on an upright loom. Go with it, relax. Let it be star-shaped
and folded half in a remove. Let it lead with dawn’s fingers, the early morning light.

We cannot comment on how they do things in other places. In fact, we’d rather not comment on
the shade of green or the songs or the theories spun in place, latticed to walls like spider web plants.
We urge you to listen closely to the dead spirits of a place. They will tell you things across the
graveyards of the centuries.

People, pets, and objects will interfere. Let them rearrange your expectations.

For example:

The dog returns smelling of cheap roast beef and toast. What adventures he must have had inside
that giant house next door! We can’t imagine what he must have been through. We decide to keep
him however, ruffling up a clean towel around him as he is placed in bed beside us. Our newborn.
Our Christmas season, our event lit from within. The dog nestles in, dreaming of a future event he
will lead us to.

We fall into ecstasy, and later tragedy, and back through the other side of marvel, boredom, and
wonder. We move our bodies in unison, we chant a hymnal message of tone. We eat dry crackers
when our stomachs cannot settle or spread buttercream on prosciutto when the night consumes us
in drunkenness. We excel at extreme adventure. We salt the extra fish at the threshold.

We don’t even have to research, train, or pay a guide to get us there, we know the way, our feet
tapping out the drum beats, a made-up language we store in our scrolls, our bodies preserving the
Morse code taps of intelligence and radiance.

217
Come, be entertained and expect nothing in return.

It circles round.

218

How Far the Fall: On Medea in 20 Acts

“Drama is the most social of literary forms. It exists fully only by virtue of its public performance.”
—George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy
1

“The truth is that in this play Medea herself is the dea ex machinâ.”
—Gilbert Murray
2

1

I ask my ex-boyfriend to come with me to see Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles at the Getty Villa. He
declines. When I ask my friend Shelley to come with me, she declines as well. She says she never
attends any Shakespeare or classical Greek plays because she’s been burned in the past. “I’ve been
burned too many times with live theatre myself!” is what my ex-boyfriend says when I tell him the
story. I plan on asking another friend, but then get distracted and completely forget about getting
tickets altogether. Then at a Hollywood Hills dinner party, a couple mentions how wonderful Mojada
is. So when my ex-boyfriend (the television writer) turns to me and says, “Let’s get tickets. Shouldn’t
we go?” I almost want to to tell him he’s lost his chance. That I’ve already invited my other
boyfriend.

2

On the subject of tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore writes, “…we are most ourselves when we are this
destructive, dangerous and suffering state of freedom, violating the restraints of the very history that
has produced us.”
3
Dollimore goes on to pursue this line of thinking citing Nietzsche as inheritor of
this view (as he understood it from Shakespeare), taking care to make plain that there is a kind of
knowledge that does not strengthen civilization but endangers it. What kind of knowledge is this?

3

Would you rather suffer from a superabundance of life or from an impoverishment of life?

4

219
If the artist-philosopher knows too much and can see through her fictions of civilization, unleashing
all subversive desires in a fiery affirmation of a powerful destructive life force, isn’t it better to know
than to not know? And isn’t the theatre the perfect place to stage such knowledge not as moral
instruction but as pure pleasure?

And what of forgiveness?

5

For the past few years I’ve been trying to write my own version of the Medea story in a dramatic
sequence. In some drafts, my Medea lives in ancient times. In other drafts, she lives in the
mountains of Montana circa 2001. Sometimes MEDEA is written as a verse play, other times it’s
written as an experimental poetic sequence. Euripides’ Medea was the first piece of literature I ever
taught. It was for a general education literature class at the University of Iowa. It remains one of my
favorite experiences. I was surprised at how condemning the students in the class were about
Medea’s behavior. “The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice—that is, the
assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favor of an individual.”
4
At 25 years old, I
wasn’t that much older than my 19-year-old students, so why was I so compellingly drawn to Medea
and her unfortunate plot? Why did I admire her strangeness? Why did I see her as a life force acting
out the incoherence I sometimes felt in my own life? “Isn’t literature supposed to be destructive in
some way?” I asked my students.

6

Because I was a well-behaved young woman, who attended Catholic school and endured long hours
in Mass, I looked for any opportunity to reinforce the destructiveness I felt in my spirit. There were
many other young women like me, feeling vibrations in the air, feeling chaos and hearing it as
refrain. “Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”
5

Refrain, revolution, twilight. In some way, we were being asked “how to consolidate the material,
make it consistent, so it can harness the unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces.”
6
In rhythm
with ruin, in the fragment, in rhythm with alienation. The auditory hallucinations I was experiencing
called me to write everything down. And so, I wrote. I looked for the experience of art to change me
because I felt there was perverted truth in that experience.

7

Why do we attend the theatre today?
Refrain, revolution, twilight.
I wanted it like the Catholic Mass but without a male godhead.

8

220
It’s a beautiful autumn night in Los Angeles. The sun has just set, and it’s a touch cool. The
amphitheater is completely full. The Getty Villa shines in the slick look of new money. Note the
smell of rose perfume.

Stage goes dark. A woman enters carrying two large palms fronds and flaps them up and down as if
they were giant feathery wings. She is older, perhaps in her early 60s, and wears a long white toga
over modern-day clothes. The flapping and swooshing of the palms is audible. She takes off her toga
as if taking off years of ancient and Elizabethan tradition, and addresses the audience as Nurse.

Is this theatre or spectacle?

9

Your lines are labored, far too superficial—
The learned myths they treat are artificial.
Give up Medeas, sacrilegious dinners.
And all the tales of innovative sinners.
To make your poetry appropriate,
Some natural catastrophe relate.

—Martial, 5.53
7

10

As George Steiner notes in The Death of Tragedy, one cannot separate the state of drama from its
audience, or its social and political community.
8
Steiner’s entire project cannot help but question if
European literature after the seventeenth century ceased to produce tragic art because there simply
was no audience in need of it. It’s a tricky question to consider since we cannot know for sure what
Athenian or Elizabethan audiences were actually like. Steiner goes on to ask: Were ancient audiences
forced to attend the theatre as part of a religious service? Were Elizabethan audiences, comprising of
everyone from noblemen to carpenters, in need of pure entertainment, the kind that embraced
sensations of impurity, destruction, ruin, and otherness that Shakespeare so often advances.
Personally, I’m interested in the private experience of watching a play, among a group of people, in a
public space.

Revision: I’m interested in ideas of order and disorder.

11

I like my catastrophes artificial. I cannot agree with Martial on this point. “There is a bareness and
abruptness in their literature which grates upon taste accustomed to the intricacy and finish of
printed books. We have to stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of the prettiness of detail or
the emphasis of eloquence.”
9
For Virginia Woolf and other modernist writers who experienced the
catastrophe of war, the Greek way of looking directly into the “heart of light, the silence” did seem
brave yet brutal.
10
But the Greeks knew Time was short, and Fate ruthless. From the impersonality

221
of Greek literature comes it originality. Woolf recognized this phenomenon as a dynamic freed from
Christian comforts, and a place where language could “move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all
alive, but controlled.”
11

12

Woolf also felt like there was no point in reading Greek translations. Greekless Reader, go away, go
home to bed without any supper! She’s quite adamant about this point. What would have happened
to the history of philology if Woolf felt differently? If Woolf had tried her hand at translating ancient
plays? But Woolf accepted certain luxuries that allowed her to write original texts, an endeavor that
was not extended to women in the early modern period.

Translation is always an act of interpretation.
12

Translation denies and asserts the translator in varying degrees.
13

Translation is only echo, only association.
14

What’s peculiar is that for women in the early modern period, the art of translation offered a way
inside a scholarly literary conversation they were not welcomed into. Women with means, with
access to books and time and money, were generally restricted to reading vernacular texts. In order
to gain access to scholarly texts, women started working as translators—hiding out in plain sight of
language.

Lady Jane Lumley was finally given credit for having produced the first known English-language
translation from the Greek. Initially, the Jocasta of George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe
claimed the credit as first Greek tragedy in English in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance
Drama.
15
Scholars have since dated Lady Lumley’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis,
preserved at the British Museum, to 1554.
16
Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta was performed at
Gray’s Inn in 1556, but not published until 1572.
17

Why did we forget about Lady Lumley? Harold H. Child dutifully arranged an edition of her
translation for the Malone Society in 1909, but Henrietta Palmer seems to have missed it when she
compiled List of English Editions and Translations of the Classics Printed before 1641. It wasn’t until 1998
that Diane Purkiss published Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women that we fully realized our mistake.
18

Two different classicists, in separate articles published in the 1940s, did question whether Lumley
translated directly from the Greek, or if she was aided by Erasmus’ Latin translation. Either way, it
seems neither classicist nor Palmer thought much of Lumley’s work.

Many scholars have noted that Lumley’s translation is corrupt. But even so, what’s remarkable about
her work is that it uses an Elizabethan English “unenriched by Shakespeare.”
19
Lumley cuts out large
sections of the choral odes, softens Euripides’ cruelty, and refuses to use Greek names. Walton
reads Lumley’s translation of Iphigenia’s sacrifice as a repositioning of Elizabethan economic ideals
rather than the brutal hand of ancient Fate. As such, Lumley questions the disposability of a
woman’s life perhaps in a different way than Euripides had intended. Perhaps Lady Lumley wrote an
original play, and not a translation.

222

13

Why did early modern writers adapt Euripides’ stories? Why did early modern translations of
Euripides begin to appear? Perhaps it has something to do with Woolf’s claim on originality,
impersonality, and the ability to fill a willing vessel constructed of durable bronze.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this—a good story can be performed ad infinitum.

14

Remember we’re not allowed to talk about audiences with any historical certainty. But I do know
that the amphitheater at the Getty Villa on Friday, October 2, 2015 was nearly full for the
production of Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles. I know I sat next to a young woman, who drank a
glass of rosé wine, with my ex-boyfriend on the other side of me also drinking rosé. I was drinking a
glass of rosé of my own, though not as quickly as the lady to my right or my ex-boyfriend. We drove
to the Getty Villa via Pacific Coast Highway 1. Parking was an additional $10 for parking even
though the tickets were $48 dollars each without service tax. I know my ex-boyfriend paid $55
dollars for a light supper, including the two glasses of rosé wine. (He later went back to get two
more glasses.) As audience members, we did not talk to one another, save for the people we came
with to the theater. In fact, several audience members arrived by themselves, sat by themselves, and
spoke to no one before and after the performance. I remember laughing a lot, and feeling a slight
chill in the air. We took a photograph of ourselves after the play ended. There was no intermission
since all Getty performances must end by 10 pm.

I wore a pink cashmere sweater. My ex-boyfriend wore a red flannel shirt. My drama is not pure
entertainment. I remain “prepared to take the risks of terror and revelation implicit in tragedy.”
20
I
cannot help the age I was born in. Please forgive me.

I often think about Woolf’s essays and her stunning articulations about the importance of language’s
aural and sonic qualities—its ability to rush into our bodies forcibly. Most of Woolf’s writing hits me
like a vector, an arrow of pure expressed thought. What is this need for instant impact? Why are we
gathered around this dark stage waiting to catch our first glimpse of Medea? It’s the ignition of the
imaginative world we hope to catch. Forever I am hoping the world entire burns in flame.

15

Seneca liked Euripides’ Medea enough to make a version of his own. Most likely Seneca’s audiences
were accustomed to the hyper-reality and extreme violence “in accordance with Hellenic modes and
what seems to have been standard Roman republic practice.”
21
These same Roman audiences
probably stomached the public killings of gladiators and criminals with relish. Seneca refashions

223
Euripides’ Medea by making changes to the story as a way to control the narrative of violence so as
to be in conversation with the bloody experience of sitting at gladiatorial games.

Seneca is interested in anger. He writes about it in his prose works. So it only seems natural that
Seneca is interested in the Medea myth known to him through Hesiod. Seneca plays out Medea’s
anger, and its inherent violence, as a way to determine what is appropriate within a civilizing social
order. Unlike Euripides, Seneca’s play opens with a dialogue from Medea. “Gods of wedlock, and
thou, Lucina guard / Of the marriage bed…”
22
By not giving the Nurse the first speech, Seneca
immediately places the character of Medea as our central focus point. As such, Medea assumes great
authority in her appeal to the gods. What’s also curious is how Seneca’s play begins with the word
“Gods” and ends with “there are no gods.”
23
His finely wound circle begins in media res and ends
back in the same middle. When Medea’s appeal quickly turns into a revenge speech, her presence is
only further heightened.

Entrancing and mesmerizing, we turn ourselves over to Medea when she utters, “It’s born now—
vengeance—born: / I’ve given birth.”
24
We now know there is no turning back. We’re implicated,
family now with this pronouncement. And who is the head of this family? Within the first ten lines
of the play, Medea names herself. This self-naming creates another power structure within the play.
Medea proclaims her authority to all those listening, as well as to herself. Self-consciously, she sees
herself and creates herself like this: “Of silent rites—and gods by whom Jason / Swore oaths to me
and whom Medea more / Rightly invokes…”
25

As A.G. Boyle outlines in notes to his translation of Seneca’s play, Medea positions herself as
character very much aware of herself and, as such, in control. In this way Medea enacts the
theatrically powerful customs and practices found in imperial Rome. Compare Seneca’s version to
the opening speech made by the Nurse in Euripides’ version as translated by Gilbert Murray (T.S.
Eliot hated his translation): “Would God no Argo e’re had winged the seas / To Colchis through the
blue Symplegades:”
26
Not only are we kept away from Medea, but she is described as “her spirit
wounded sore with love of Jason.”
27
The Nurse goes on to describe Medea’s ill health and sorry
state. In this version Medea, lovesick and weak, does not impress us.

16

Strange thing but William Shakespeare’s impurity is his admission ticket. Printed on his ticket reads
the following:

dismembering the sacred for years to come

Steiner believes Shakespeare to be lucky since he missed the Greeks and the heavy weight of their
influence. Uninhibited by these originals, Shakespeare was able to roam freely in experimentation,
picking and choosing narrative strains from a variety of sources. Many of Shakespeare’s plays
question the social order within worlds, both real and imaginative, but they should not be drunk as
moral instruction.

As Katherine Heavey acknowledges in Early Modern Medea, many early modern writers were familiar
with Ovid’s version of Medea as a sorceress, and they exaggerated her ferocity because they were
interested in highlighting issues of “witchcraft, security of government, or women’s conduct.”
28

224
Because Medea is resistant to male modes of control and because she goes unpunished for her
crimes, her story is an affirmation of liberty.
29
Shakespeare-the-writer knew all about the power of
suggestion and, like all writers, he could use the Medea myth to address current political and social
circumstances.

In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, it is Tamora who resembles Medea “[i]n her foreignness and
particularly in her desire for bloody revenge….”
30
Her son, Alarbus (“the proudest prisoner of the
Goths”
31
) is cut up at the start of the play despite Tamora’s pleads. Heavey reminds us that Tamora
is described as a “tiger” in Shakespeare’s play, an epithet given in both Golding’s Metamorphoses and
Studley’s Medea.
32
But when Tamora enacts revenge on Lavinia by having her tongue cut out, she
relies on the handiwork of her two sons. Because of this difference, Tamora does seem not as
powerful as our Euripidean Medea since Demetrius and Chiron knowingly carry out their mother’s
plan of revenge, relishing in the rape and savagery of Lavinia with a pleasure all their own. Language
stolen from those who need it most.

On the other hand, Tamora’s coupling up with Aaron provides a striking resemblance to the Medea
narrative. Because Tamora is a Goth who sleeps with Aaron, a Moor, they function as outsiders in
Shakespeare’s play. They meet and make love outside the city walls, outside civilization. Aaron keeps
the forest as his own. Medea, having to flee her own land because of her love and commitment to
Jason, holds this outsider status as well. But Tamora is visibly upset when she learns Titus has killed
Demetrius and Chiron, unlike Medea who personally dismembers her sons. An unlike Medea,
Tamora must be killed in order to preserve the sanctity of order.

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is unusual in the sense that it draws up on multiple classical stories—
just think about Lavinia as Philomel from Ovid, but also as Lucretia, the ancient Roman matron
raped by Tarquin or Virgil, too. Shakespeare does not follow one set story or model. Corruption,
impurities, multiple versioning…was Shakespeare enjoying himself or what?

17

Is it too late to mend the ruins?

Perhaps because Euripides asked so many difficult questions.

And what of forgiveness?

Perhaps because Euripides staged surprise so well.

Perhaps because he ended five of his plays with the same language.

How can I “serve my madness, not my reason.”
33

18

I drank, to give my burning veins some peace,

225
A poison which Medea brought to Greece.
Already, to my heart, the venom gives
An alien coldness, so that it scarcely lives;
34

19

Who drinks to extinguish her burning veins? Medea and her poison will pave a slow road of death.
Medea’s reputation as a powerful sorceress extends into various plays. Her presence stains,
permeates, bleeds over—

20

And what of pleasure? And what of forgiveness? Pity and terror moves us, Euripides knew as much.
And we humans are ever forgetful, sometimes most contrary. In our best moments, we are
prophetic.

Epilogue: “Very few treat art seriously. There are those who treat it solemnly, and will continue to
write poetic pastiches of Euripides and Shakespeare; and there are others who treat it as a joke.”
35

Which are you, dear Reader?

226
Something Like the Missalette

“And this is the Word of the Lord.” Reconstituting the text as a validating source in order to feel its
presence. The Catholic missalette trimmed in gold, red leather cover, a curious weight in my hands.
In “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” Sigmund Freud describes writing as “permanent
memory-trace.” What is brought exactly into being? Something like the Word made flesh.

“Thanks be to God,” you remember to say, though you haven’t been in church in over a year, sitting
back down on cue, the wooden pew sheltering you from attendant views, the responsorial psalm
about to begin. Will you wholly listen, as you fumble for Kleenex in your purse, or will you
daydream about sex? What position? Listen, forget about marking yourself corrupt in thought. Note
the strike pad on your birthday box of matches, its intricate patterning, a mosaic of roughed
phosphorus. The desire for a cigarette you used to smoke. Nat Shermans. Dunhills. The red and
gold packaging the same colors as your Sacred Heart uniform. “The origin is always deferred,”
writes Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers.

Something like a mistake knitted in, a slip in wording from “Kendal green” to “Kensal green” you
remember from an article you read in the library that burned. What you remember as placeholder, a
taste of toast for real host.

The body of Christ, why would I eat you?

When you remember—picking up the dismembered limbs strewn across the cemetery—you are
priest and congregant all at once. The lost original restructured in a performance of re-invention. You
are not allowed to attend the drunkard’s mass, your Father reminds you every Saturday night.
“Noon is too late a date, it must be like new.”

If needing ocular proof, seek the archive.

If needing bright phenomenon, stay here in performance.

Before you go, note the position of the celebrant’s left arm—how the embroidered gold flames out
against the deep velvet background of his ceremonial vestment—or hear his throaty off-keyed voice.
As stand-in, as body double, tracking infelicities, discrepancies and deviations, the priest within a
liturgical scenario has no use for trapdoors.

The trapdoor boarded up, carpeted over as a fine Persian rug alla Henry James.
All imagining. Something like living materially.

Look at his white robes, the flower arrangements near the pulpit, the candles lit. What exceeds his
knowledge of divine flesh? You remember all the priests from your childhood—the nice ones, the
phonies, the creepy ones, the Jesuits, the normal one who married your sister and brother-in-law, the
one who joined in last year’s Christmas dinner celebration and never asked you a question.

Memory itself is haunting.
The burial ground never deep enough.

227
This is but a trace—

(singing together)

Alleluia. Alleluia. Al - le- lu –ia!
Alleluia. Alleluia. Al - le- lu –ia!

(exit in a small procession of light)

228

Speechless Complainer, What Is It Like?

“Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed
method, one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism
36

“Ah, but I love to draw beautiful words, like trumpets of light…I adore you, words who are
sensitive to our sufferings, words in red and lemon yellow, words in the steel-blue colour of certain
insects, words with the scent of vibrant skills, subtle words of fragrant roses and seaweed, prickly
words of sky-blue wasps.”
—James Ensor, Belgian artist
37

1

Nagel, I am not. Shakespeare, I am not. Gregor Samsa, I am not. Please don’t mistake me for Murr
the Cat, though I wouldn’t mind the title of “shredder and author.”
38
I am Titus Andronicus. And
you, My Sweet, are to dutifully imagine Rome’s cypress trees swaying above us now, here in our
bracketed text of marvel, a tapestry of certain revelations, imagining Rome as so many of us do
when our spirits are confused. Rome is like a straight arrow. Rome is like strong tonic. It rights us
out when knotted up, and together we stand outside its city gates, readying our bodies for war and
perfumed encounters.

2

Remember when I said: “Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought.
39
”

3

Remember how smooth, how soft? I have lived a long time in this body. That’s one end of the
continuum, I say! Like a compass, my body-speech directs me always to Rome. Have you ever been
to that Place, the city of the seven hills? If you are so lucky and if the Place allows, you might find a
chapel—inside la Chiesa di San Luigi dei Francesi—called Capella Contarelli, which houses three
marvelous Caravaggio paintings of St. Matthew, author of the Gospel. When I stare into
Caravaggio’s decadently illustrated shadows, I can almost make out the flash, the flicker of myself as
figure behind a curtain—but then the moment sadly passes. I can impersonate myself as character in

229
quotations quite easily. I’m talented, I know my way around. But can I turn the reportage inward and
know my daughter’s thoughts?

4

“Gracious, Lavinia. Rome’s rich ornament.”
40
As rich ornament, Lavinia was admired by many—
Bassianus, Saturninus, Demetrius, Chiron, and the great Unnamed. As my artifact-daughter, I love
her. As object, she created grassy fields of perception all around her, where men and women took to
lounging, painting colors and stringing melodic bands upon her maidenhead. Look, you’ll find her
drinking tea on the veranda. But please, do not disturb her quiet. I have placed all the lounge chairs
around here, bracing, bracketing her against any arrows of thought misfired in her direction.

5

A bloody absence involves a bloodier presence.

6

Before the savage act, it is recorded that Lavinia begs Tamora, “O, keep me from their worse-than-
killing lust, /And tumble me into some loathsome pit / Where never man’s eye may behold my
body.”
41
Lavinia knows to fear the wandering eye that devours her in judgment, and so calls on
Tamora to be the charitable witness she can never be. My daughter’s last spoken words underneath
the falling debris? A rightful invocation to destruction: fallen limbs, blood flames.

7

All of us paradoxes! Lavinia’s bloody stumps themselves the sensing and living contradiction
between mind and body. Her mouth filled with blood, a red haunting hunting for words.

8

How can I respond to my doe-like child, when I can only “insinuate…. [my]….self at the scene of
knowing, but not at its center.”
42
“Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so, / An if thy stumps
will let thee play scribe.”
43
A cruel torment from two rotten brothers who can’t even imagine a Pater
Scribe like me, who transcribes his daughter’s thoughts as if they were his own. Yes, I might err, for
it is subjective this ascription of experience. Who else but a loving father is able to understand and
bear the difference between first person and third person accounts?
44
Lavinia is of my body, and as
such, an extension of some kind of sameness. Not exactly a duplicate, but with a generative caste of
mind, I must try to sew her scene in a sampler’s time.

9

230
Oh empty night, why do you torment me? Tell Hegel your answer, if not me!

10

A famous critic writes, “[e]xperience requires a plan.”
45
Experience or experiments, my plan’s called
delusion. It’s the one word I keep writing in the margins of all my playbooks. I write with my
mouth, like this: Deluuuuusion. Come into the thicket, the bracketed wor(l)d with me. Made into a
representation of an artifact, the text welcomes us as Readers in a privileged place, not as center
beam. Either looking at outward oddities like Bacon, or inward pleasures like Descartes, not all
thoughts (those nebulous things comprised of sensations, imaginings, emotions, acts of will) are
created equally. Descartes stresses the importance of perceptions that are “clear” and “distinct.” The
best way to know size or shape is not through the senses? Ha! I can’t be bothered with geometrical
drawings, I’d rather grab a branch of fruit and know its ripeness-rot. Although, without my other
hand to guide me, perhaps my imbalance is now more pronounced. Husserl’s framing is more my
speed, especially as I’m constantly stepping into the scene’s imagined frame as player extraordinaire.
He, too, is outward-looking, but recognizes how “the objects are implicated in the observer.”
46
My
potent seed grew into a flowering lilac tree, whose fragrance I can still smell despite the absence of
her flowers.

11

(inhaling loudly through the nose) What are the ways in which we give attention? The critic goes on to
read Husserl as able to exist in the in between; “neither objective nor subjective” but somewhere
else. “For phenomenologists, knowledge does not exist apart from the knower and the
circumstances of coming-to-know.”
47
The critic then sets forth a fascinating question about
intersubjectvity,
48
and “the illusion of presence.”
49
For remember, the text is not an object itself, but
rather a representation of an object. We submit ourselves as Readers (yes, even me) to experience a
staged presence. A marveling connected to text and a halo of energia emanating from its spine.

12

“Marvel is the love of wisdom,” Bacon once told me. He said he learned it from a Greek woman he
used to see.

13

“Speaking comes from my body.” Repeat it back to me. A sound mirror you can harmonize with
your inner-touched voice. That’s our experience after our tongues are discovered to us, or after
they’ve been taken away. The perceptions of our bodies are available to us, the critic gently reminds
us—via Lyotard, Derrida, and Lacan—so we are free to project ourselves into the viole(n)t fields.

231
Even when we are wanting (of hands, of revenge, of imagined Rome), we can regulate our talk. “Fie,
fie, how franticly I square my talk.”
50

14

So let’s set up the parameters. What’s my basic paradigm? A part of it must include reading with
remembering and dismemberment….my favorite part of breaking marrow from the bone. Yes, I’m
Titus, but more important to the story is you-the-Reader. You receive my world as witness. We are
all witness to a version of the Real. Remember Caravaggio’s shadows? Indeed, we’re all allowed to
inhabit the evidence for a short while.

15

Remember when I said: “Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought.”
51

16

[Enter a Line of True Antiques, Collectors of Artifacts, The Pushers, & A Group of
Friendly Fakes]

For those collectors titillated by the Real, what happens when the vision is too great? When it
becomes too much for the body to bear? Do we shout, “Fake! Fake! It’s a fake!” For practitioners in
the field, why do you conceal in one line what was revealed in a previous one? Limb as line of
thought, limb as living mode, limb as Sapphic fragment, limb as precursor to eternal wholeness? Do
we consider the art of the fallen limb as revelatory? Hard to describe since it covers its own tracks.
But I know this kind of fakery. Poet Kenneth Koch’s hasosismo, a mock-hoax centered on
Argentinian verse, where “startling insights emerge and are subsequently concealed.”
52

17

Strange to read in The Atlantic Monthly some years ago of patients sense-aching for their missing
limbs. Though isn’t it stranger to not feel irritated at the seams and stitches of our body’s connected
wholeness?
53
When Lavinia turned the Ovid with her lips, I remembered Philomena and her
luxurious drapery. A curtain of thought inside that drapery; one that opens & closes, revealing
revelations, a rape. How does it feel to be framed in tapestry, framed inside a border of disclosure?
Worse, how does it feel to be beholden to a monster whose “seen those lily hands/Tremble like
aspen leaves upon a lute”
54
and did not drop his knife?

18

“Ay me, this object kills me.”
55
What is it like O Object, O Lavina? I consider chopping off my
hands and telling everyone. I dish out this threat twice before Aaron actually does the deed. And
then twice after my hand is finally cut, do I long for (am still longing) my hand, then immediately
regret seeking after it, maniacally taking on and off the yellow leaves of an earlier playbook or like in
my sonnet-trees. I transcribe Lavinia’s experience so I can be closer to my own. To mirror myself,

232
the highest comfort I can think of giving her. Mirrors everywhere! Mirrors dangling off the trees in
Rome. Rome, my virtuous teacher.

19

I live in the night as it finds me. The smokiness a sign my nose already knows, leading me to rightful
knowledge. Nascio, my little pet, how do you know my true condition? Wait, I meant to say,
“Nascio, my little pet, can you smell my presence here?” A mixture of lilac and wet smoke? Does
one really need an object to focus on? A severed hand will do in a pinch. If not, my sons’ severed
heads might bring us into sharp focus. But really, I am knowing me through Lavinia.

20

Newly doubled, newly twinned, as Pater-Scribe-Lavinia all in one? No. I must remain separate if I’m
to “wrest an alphabet”
56
and bring the logos to the flesh. My eye is not a judgmental eye, it’s one
haloed as a body part so you can share my violent & smoky field and nominate yourself as Sensor,
nominate your sensing self as “internal and immaterial,” nominate yourself to be a present force on
the continuum.

233

Catastrophe Diary: Construction of a Poets’ Theatre

“I confess I do not believe in time…”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak-Memory
57

“All theatre comes from the dank confined places. All true theatre has the strong stench of a rotting
moon.”
—Federico Garcia Lorca, The Public
58

“Hesiod’s legacy suggests that poetic interiority is mesmerizing because of its alterity. The poet’s
voice both is and is not that of the person, just as words are and are not true, and the force of an
event retained in the mind is distinct from—and so develops differently from—the original
stimulus.”
—Jed Rasula, “Poetry’s Voice-Over”
59

Friday

Under normal circumstances, the proper authorities would have been called.

I was called late Friday night. The woman on the phone was calm, pleasant even. Her voice sounded
like a singer’s I had recently heard at a private concert in Malibu at the home of one of the illustrious
Kennedys. She gave me the address, and then thanked me for my time. “I hear you take excellent
notes,” was the last thing she said to me before hanging up. I heard the click and drone of a dial
tone, a sound I hadn’t heard in years.

234
Earlier on Friday

Giant fire in the library. It spreads to the adjoining public theatre space. Almost no books remain.
All the partitions of the stage have been burned down. The orchestra pit a big black hole of
unbound sound. Devastation. What remains in both spaces is only a slight vibrational hum. I have
the distinct feeling I’ve been here before. Screens propped up against the blown-out stage door look
more like black windows.

Back in the library, my hand sweeps over a leather chair not too badly damaged in the fire. A tiny
stack of books is jammed under the overstuffed seat cushion. Astonished, I pull out Samuel
Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Play Without a Title, and Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha’s From Vampyr and Reveille dans la brume.

I shove the plays deep inside the pockets of my red raincoat. I smell my hands, letting the trace of
char and smoke tickle my nostrils.

“So it’s poetry this time,” I say to myself. Or is it about the theatre? Europeans never worry about
such classifications….

235
Saturday

“We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach
us that first of all.”
60

Generally, it’s understood I don’t work for free. The money doesn’t always come when it’s supposed
to, but I make do. Sometimes I’m asked to investigate literary crimes according to a strict set of
prescribed outcomes. Often, I am given free rein to go where I please. I don’t have a partner. I set
my own schedule, but I am not free.

Both Gertrude Stein and Antonin Artaud wrote on the subject of masterpieces. Stein argues
“expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered,”

while Artaud takes it one step farther,
throwing all texts into a giant bonfire.
61
Bound and gagged, the text has no use for him. It’s dead
wood, a useless thing. Artaud prefers live action—the pulsation of a true animating life force moving
beyond the printed page and onto the stage. Stein, on the other hand, isn’t as cruel. She maintains
that a select group of texts exists in the world as masterpieces. She goes on to clarify her thinking
about memory and writing: “The minute your memory functions while you are doing anything it
may be very popular but actually it is dull. And that is what a master-piece is not, it may be
unwelcome but it is never dull.”
62
For Stein, the structure of memory is crucial to the structure of
experience in that it always seems to get in the way.

For Artaud, the secret in warding off such dullness was to place the spectator in the center of her
theater, where she can feel the sonic vibrations upon her body. He makes clear the “vibratory action
upon the sensibility”
63
must be felt as force, intrusion, blow, break, split, rift, cleave, clock. In this way,
language or voice exists as vibration; as something other than representation.
64
Stein is not interested
in breaking the frame. In fact, her mode is live in the continuous present, extending the frame for as
far as she can into a kind of infinite horizon—a landscape laid out under the midday sun where
nothing marks the passage of time. The importance of geographical framing within her plays, as well
as a related discussion of how spectators come and go across the threshold of a theatre space is an
avenue rich in possibility.
65
Indeed, it is Stein who brings the autobiographical into the theatre. But
since Stein does not want to remember anything, she doesn’t use autobiography in a personal way.

What’s curious to me is that the books not destroyed in the fire are plays written by poets. What is
poets’ theatre exactly? For our purposes here, the tradition of a poets’ theatre appears to be
intimately related to a particular milieu, where collaboration between various writers and artists can
create a social scene not represented in true life. Constructing a flexible, fluid, performative arena
where matters of the pretend are just as important as the real, poet-playwrights are able to exist in a
highly imagined world where cathartic transformations can take place. Often times, the only trace
left is a performance date and the odd box of props. Poet-playwrights might also have been
preoccupied with expanding their audience base beyond the small group of poetry readers, as some
critics have suggested.

Stein remains part of modernist poetic drama that often relies on principles of anti-theatricality,
while Artaud represents a more avant-garde theatricalism. What’s also curious is how the modernist
tradition is often defined in terms of its opposition to performance when so many of its leading
writers would eventually inhabit the public space with a vigorous originality all their own. Poetic

236
drama written after World War II still wrestles with issues of stagability and performance, but it does
so through the complicated lens of Modernism.

Assuming such a poetic theater tradition does indeed exist, if we think of writers like Samuel Beckett
and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as participating in a theater of interiority—a theatre more explicitly
situated in a realm of language rather than action—what exactly is the place and function of memory
within this particular notion of theatre?

Beckett and Cha incorporate techniques and technologies particular to life after World War II to
chart inner territories and alternate worlds in modes that are exclusively self-referential, meta-
theatrical, and fragmentary. Written in the summer of 1935, Lorca’s Play Without A Title was first
performed in 1989. Because of these unusual circumstances, Lorca’s play operates in a nebulous
zone of reception. Since drama is only produced via live bodies performing on a stage, perhaps it
didn’t fully exist until 1989? As we shall see through a reading of their work, Beckett, Cha, and Lorca
are all fascinated with binaries of inwardness, doubleness, and fracture—in breaking the structure
just enough to undercover what’s pulsing in lightness and darkness underneath. The skeleton is
polished to a high glow and catalogued, while its metallic hide is displayed in a separate room. As
such, these poets remain bound by notions of time and memory. They remain trapped in refrain, in
ghosting, in multiple temporal overlays.

The poetic theater tradition is distinct from any other theatrical tradition because it is primarily
interested in voiced language, in the otherness of voice, in a cacophony of voices strung out,
unattached to seemingly responsible bodies. In fact, poets’ theater illustrates how notions of self and
personhood are not connected to any one stable and verifiable entity. In a sense, a poetic interiority
allows for the processional entrance of multiple characters. Like memory itself, a poetic theatre
tradition is Destructive at its core. With a Vesuvian face, it burns yellow and gold, ringing in
explosions and echoes.

Poetic drama is also equally interested in the literary quality of the script. The script of a poetic
drama must illustrate both its performative and literary quality. Poetic drama (modernist and
postmodernist) uses all kinds of verse. It’s not limited to rhymed couplets or strict meter. What’s
distinct about poetic drama, and what sets it apart from other dramatic forms, is that it uses language
and line structure as a prominent feature in its composition: lines stand at attention, while detailed
stage notes are back pinned for reference.

Since poetic theater uses modes of exploration that rely on bodily and sensory perception (including
intuition), the final creation is not concerned with traditional modes of realism. Remember,
“landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.”
66
I don’t think it’s fair, however to
categorize Beckett’s or Cha’s plays as fantastical. Rather, we should consider how this might be the
cultivation of an interior zone that lies somewhere on the underside of both public and private,
where memory functions as the triggering cue calling us back to the presence of an existing body
either through the recognition of an image or a heard vibration. For these poet-playwrights, it’s the
physical shock of language, waking everyone up to “to consider language as the form of
incantation.”
67

Note—Re-read all three plays immediately, preferably each one in only one sitting. The temporal
seems important. Where was Artaud on Friday around 5 pm? Who was last seen in the library?

237
Unrelated to work—went to a poetry reading last night. Poet said, “Memory forgets, imagination
never.”

238
Saturday Night (as I Remember It)

In “Some Motifs on Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin outlines a line of thinking via Theodor Reik and
Sigmund Freud describing memory as both conservative and destructive since the “emerging
consciousness takes the place of a memory trace.”
68
In other words, consciousness is not able to
receive memory traces because it’s engaged in a far more important endeavor—namely, to protect
the mind from dangerous stimuli. If the mind does not protect itself against these energies, exposure
to a series of traumatic shocks is possible. So what does the poet do with the perceptions she’s
collected along the way? For the poet Paul Valery, whose poetic lineage Benjamin traces back to
Baudelaire, the act of recollection affords us the time to organize the impressions we couldn’t
properly respond to when our mind was too busy protecting itself. As such, these sense perceptions
(perfumed bruise & hush buzz of lips) are the surprises necessary to the poetic experience. But what
about the matter of the mist?

239
Saturday Night (as You Remember It)

Memory obliterates what it wants to remember so it can sew a new shirt with seams showing.

You wore a red flannel shirt. You are my shock experience, the center of my art. You watched me
read Beckett, Lorca, and Cha in the living room, in the kitchen, outside in the garden under tiny
bulbs of firefly light. You even let me bring the charred books in bed with us. You sneezed because
you were not used to the smokiness.

You wanted me to write you a new poem on my grandmother’s typewriter, but I told you I was too
busy.

You looked at me, then asked,

“Remember what happened to you when you came
to your poem, any poem whose truth overcame all
inertia in you at that moment, so that your slow mortality
took its proper place, and before it the light of a new
awareness was not something new, but something you
recognized. That is the multiple time-sense in poetry, that
is the ever new, which is recognized as something already
in ourselves, but not discovered.”
69

240
Saturday, Midnight

I remember moving gas cans to the back of the garage. I remember thinking I must wash your red
flannel shirt before you came home.

“When you start remembering something, you instantly forget it.”
70
But considered in this way,
memory is actually constructive. It builds a more up-to-date structure on top of an old foundation.
“One is always at home in one’s past,” Nabokov reminds us.
71

What are we actually doing when we are remembering someone, an experience, or an object? We are
paying homage to an absence. We are building invisible memorials celebrating the spirit and not the
manifestation of matter. In terms of the theatre, as Marvin Carlson notes, this phenomenon of
inhabiting becomes a kind of haunting. Just as all texts in some way are haunted by other texts, the
stage is haunted by its past performances. The reception of a play is deeply connected to memory.
No two audience members will experience the action the same way, and every performance will be
the ghost of an earlier performance. Art forces us to live in the present moment—this is no real
news—and yet, when it asks us to descend, to dive down below the ground of the real, we must
forget everything we’ve ever known.

“The past survives under two distinct forms first, in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent
recollections.”
72
Riddled with contradictions, blighted by paradoxes, Henri Bergson’s Matter and
Memory identifies three processes in the durability of an image: pure memory, memory-image, and
perception. Consciousness makes use of these processes, but unfortunately it’s difficult to pinpoint
where memory ends and where perception begins as they function on a fluid continuum. Bergson
remains interested in his present because it summons him to action. He even ventures as far as to
say, “my past is essentially powerless.” Because pure memory is detached from life—in the sense
that it does not ask the body to experience certain sensations—Bergson’s present is far more
fascinating to him because it continuously asks him to use his body in experiencing felt sensations.

But is the body really only a conductor as Bergson suggests? Is learning something by heart just a
habit of the body? Nothing more than a cerebral mechanism?
73
Bergson complicates matters by
stating that memory is a function of the brain, and is something other than a function of the brain,
“and there is not a merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection.”
74
When the 39-
year old Krapp asks, “What’s a year now?”
75
we cringe alongside his 69-year body. It used to be that
book and body were made to look like one another, now body becomes tape recorder in recollection
of missing limbs.
76
Unlike Bergson, Krapp’s past is not powerless. The audio recording calls him
into a new kind of attention where he is forced to recalibrate his body as new member.

241
Sunday Morning, Interrogation of a Witness

Theis: If a loss of memory illustrates a rupture of identity…

Artaud: Excuse me, why do we have to characterize it as a break in identity? Why couldn’t we view it
as a continuation of identity, a union, or a fastening of fragmented possibilities?

Theis: Why would anyone want to burn a library down?

Artaud: I can think of plenty of reasons….

242
Sunday Night

On the way to dinner, I find a theatre ticket for Phèdre in my coat pocket. Funny, but I don’t
remember going. I wonder who borrowed my coat.

243
Sunday Night, Repeated

Delicious dinner at Lucques. Had the smoked oysters, and a salad. I prefer sitting at the bar in the
front. The bartender knows me. You were not with me. If you had been, we would have sat outside
on the patio with cascades of white light.

In Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, we cannot escape Time’s little fool.
77
Earlier in my career, I remember
using hand-held tape recorders to record my thoughts while walking a crime scene, or interviewing
witnesses. Now I use my smart phone to take photos, make audio recordings, and upload files to a
central server. In 1948, the first American patent was issued for a magnetic recording machine. By
the late 1950s, it was possible for the public to inscribe a person’s voice with the tape recorder, but
also to alter its record with interrupted moments snatched from the present.

How memory functions as a taped echo. All echo. Some distortion.

Krapp’s homemade birthday tapes unspools his recollected history in deference to the eldest of the
three Krapps. Beckett’s play showcases a 69-year-old man hunched over his tape recorder listening
to his 39-year-old self reminisce about his 29-year-old self. “Sound as a bell…” is how he describes
himself on his 39
th
birthday.
78
With detailed directives regarding listening postures, and several
interruptions fast-forwarding swaths of painful memories, this play pits voice against voice in a
running commentary about the construction of a self.

Beckett’s use of the tape recorder allows him to create and play within an open system of perception
and recollection, which keeps his protagonist Krapp locked (until the tape is stopped) into a perceiving
present that uses language, and not action, as the triggering cue. Krapp’s vigorous voice on tape
mesmerizes his elder body, and we perceive them as two distinct bodies. Upon hearing his younger
self on tape, Krapp is equally amused, startled, and offended. And his body language on stage
registers such reactions accordingly. But Krapp’s range of motion is limited, and he only moves
short distances. For remember, the ritual of language in this play describes and, at the same time,
enacts an interior world of a slipping self. In fact, the play is an exercise of extreme listening. “He
comes back into light carrying an old ledger and sits down at the table.”
79
Only occasionally, does
Krapp move in and out of prescribed cones of light on stage, forcing us to simultaneously see
language as illuminative, a candle lit within the cavernous in between.

Because Krapp has the ability to corrupt the tape (“…he knocks one of the boxes off the table,
curses, switches off…”
80
) we witness firsthand as spectators the disruptive nature of his playback.
The play relishes in its binaries: between light and dark, in remembering and forgetting, in on-staging
and off-staging. Krapp’s 69-year-old body (his final night) articulates a slow shuddering, an opening
up of a sonic memory field. Beckett is able to write a script that aggressively interviews a poetic
interiority at two differing points in time, as well as questioning the stagability of Time itself. See
Beckett’s initial staging directions, which include the following problematic note: “A late evening in
the future.”
81
His voice is not his voice.

Diction in the play includes a limited vocabulary of aural references: “Extraordinary silence this
evening, I strain my ears and do not hear a sound.”
82
Even the waves and the rocking of love’s boat

244
don’t impress Krapp to ditch his grueling binaries. Krapp-on-stage doesn’t move, but he whirls in
Time’s echo chamber of language.

He could be thinking, “I rearrange time. It’s confused in me.”
83

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Monday

For Lorca, the theater allowed him to interact with an audience who just might accept him as he
was, without prejudice. The Public wrestled with autobiographical material as a way to talk about
Lorca’s sexuality. It barricades and divides us. Play Without A Title however removes any barrier (any
protective Chorus) between audience members and Lorca’s characters. As spectators, we share the
audience space with Lorca’s characters, who debate and argue over the Author’s agenda to free us.
What is he intending to do, exactly, except take off the roof? And what does the Author mean when
he says, “It’s the last day I will set foot in the theater?”
84
If gunfire outside the theater does not
frighten us, the flames rising higher and higher sure will. “The light changes slowly into a blue moonlight.”
85

Author: “In which book did you read those / lines?”
Theis: In every book the light changes. You must look for it.

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Tuesday & Wednesday

Today and yesterday a blur. I’m having trouble remembering things. I come home to signs posted:
“EVERTHING IS LIGHT” and “EVERYTHING IS DARK.” Language like a sound track with
an image track. Artaud was having dinner with Lorca on Friday night. Their alibi checks out.
Everyone who had access to the library checks out. “I walk over to the microphone and slowly
recite—

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Thursday

EVERTHING IS LIGHT
EVERYTHING IS DARK.”
86

In slowness and ritual, something is happening now. A match is lit. “the gesture of lighting the
match is repeated and ends with the voice.”
87

Like Beckett, Cha works in language of displacement and rupture. Dialogue is kept at a minimum.
More often, language is incomplete. Like Beckett, Cha used whatever newer technologies were
available to her to advance an artistic vision that often blurs memory and distorts time. Before the
widespread inclusion of digital art into gallery spaces and museums, Cha used cinematic techniques
of editing and montage to enact how memory reshuffles an unfixed order. Her still images and
voice-overs work in unison with one another much like the way Krapp’s body and voice
react/perform for one another. In her performance “Reveille dans la brume,” we’re called to
assembly in a dark room. Like Beckett, Cha works in binaries: light and dark, heard and unheard,
faraway and close-up, beginning and ending. Silences are marked as “ABSOLUTE,” “REDUCED,”
or “GUARDED.” Cha’s body—and the duplication of her body in multiple images—are markers of
the sacred in-between. Because she often moves slowly, we cannot help but see these performances
as rituals.

Cha appears in the middle of the performance space, lighting a match. Her gestures become
language itself, scored text, endured and lit by fireflies and glow worms, because she plays a
recording of her voice in tandem to her staged movements. Not only that, but Cha speaks the break
as “PAUSE” and she also asks “NOW?” and she says, “NOT JUST YET.”
88
By articulating these
temporal markers into speech, we come to understand them as something other than simple stage
direction or as a musical score. Strangely voiced, this language talks from within the generative
darkness of her space. An interiority made of vanishing points.

In another play “From Vampyr,” the match is replaced with a candle. There is also the matter of a
ticking clock. Cha traces and follows the words on the screen space. “the cloth with poem on it to
reveal the inversion….”
89

Cha’s interest in language and time-memory beautifully collide when the projectors are turned on.
Actual images of text, words are projected in a five-second dissolve onto a door located in the back
of the space. Some words include: “EXIT” and “ECLIPSE” and “GO” and “BE GONE.”
90

Language’s family photos are been shown. We remember what “THIS WORD SAID” and “WHEN
IT LEAVES.” We remember how language got dressed in the vestibules, how it languished in the
peep shows, how it felt itself as phenomenon. At the end of this piece, when Cha walks into the
middle of the space (the mist) to walk inside the image, she is walking into the blackness of language,
its open mouth-orifice-portico-porch-portal. The final track says, “ BE THIS WORD.”
91

Language is Character here, trying to remember what it was like to be “SOME WHERE BE FORE
THIS WORD.”
92

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Saturday

Awakened in the Mist, the sounding of a bugle. The strange thing is— I remember taking Cha into
the library with me on Friday night. I remember curling up on the leather chairs and asking
questions about her performance notes. I had a copy of Beckett and Lorca with me. Then there was
an “implosion / underneath is again an empty cloth.” Flash of white.

249

250
Under Stage,
Under Study,
Under Siege

“Theater brings about an encounter between eternity and the instant within an artificial time. Say:
Hamlet, such as he is latent in the Shakespearian text, is an eternal figure. In the theatre, he exists
only in the instant.”

—Alain Badiou, Theatre and Philosophy

1
Stage as a porous but locatable physical plane excited by the instantaneous. Earthquakes. How to
stage elemental forces? Note the snow-capped volcano in the distance. Hold a fiery torch in your
entrance at Prologue. A confidence game of betted encounters with the eternal body dug from
grave. Gaps in thinking, the open ditches and perfume of funeral lilies. I got rid of the thing. I deep-
sixed it, I threw it away. What deviance comes from a spell being broken, what quality of perversion
in the busted frame, the open (once hidden) place where arguments and conflicts reign? If accessibility
is our keyword, I’m in trouble. Stationed in between the telescope’s primary mirror and focusing
mask, my sense of time is trapped in material designs. It requires an unhinging, a re-shingling, where
glass is smashed, and earth is upturned and placed fresh as monument, a territorializing Refrain.
Here marks the colonnade of stage….

2
Philosopher and playwright Alain Badiou writes about the theater’s ability to produce “in itself and
by itself a singular and irreducible effect of truth.” This idea that art is able to produce a truth that is
not external but immanent to the work itself seems important to performance and performance art.
His theater-truths or theater-ideas resemble my own sense of how performance-truths rise up inside
its event, ideas that can only “come to arrive in the perishable actuality of the scene.”
93
Check to see
if you can sense the eternal in an instant, if the instant rests upon a stone, a slate shingle, a platform,
a podium, a piece of limestone unearthed from the ground.

3
As usual, I’m early. Or, I have no idea what time it is, or where I am exactly. No demarcation noted,
no dusting of chalk on the sidewalk, no stones have been stacked at the perimeter of Trevor Hall,
and I cannot tell which entrance to use. The ticket in my pocket reads: A performance of H.D.’s
Iphigenia at Aulis, a choral ode, McGill University, April 30, 2016. I walk up a musty flight of carpeted
steps in a repurposed mansion only to sit in a ratty sofa chair near the landing. The hallway hasn’t
been aired out in years. A young Oxford professor thinks there is a Chagall print above my head.

251
She smiles as she approaches me, and leans in, resting her hand on the arm of my chair. I can smell
precisely the one whiskey she has taken in her hotel room. “Voices and bodies are crucial, but only
because they are the matter of time, the time that each evening is experimented on the stage,”
94
the
PA system reminds us. “Should we find a table near the bar? I think the performance is happening
in the other room.” Where do we stand in such scattered light? H.D. would have asked.

4
The poet Hilda Doolittle translated several tragedies of Euripides from the Greek. The female
voices in H.D’s work ask questions regarding right speech, sacrifice, artistic representation, and the
personality of the poet. Her translations should not be classified as scholarly, but what I call re-
imaginings. Translation as reinvigoration might be another way to describe this phenomenon. H.D.
remains part of high modernist poetic drama tradition that often relies on principles of anti-
theatricality, while other writers such as Antoine Artaud represents a more avant-garde theatricalism.
Curiously, she lifted entire sections of choral odes from Euripides’ plays and orchestrated them as
free-standing song-sequences. Instances of pure refrain. These odes stand apart from the longer
works. Why does H.D. feel it necessary to transport the chorus from Iphigenia at Aulis away from the
other action in the play? The performance of a classical Greek tragedy creates distance, strangeness,
because its elevated verse separates the audience from the action. As audience members, we cannot
get too close to tragic protagonists because they speak so differently from us.
95

5
Bar tables surround as an amphitheater of ruin. In three weeks time, I will read a Marvin Carlson
article, which outlines a definition of performance to include “a consciousness of doubling” and that
seems right to me. After the choral ode is performed, I’m to read my new poems. (This is not
printed on the program.) Tomorrow my conference paper will be delivered at 1:15 pm. Do I
introduce myself as poet, playwright, translator, accidental detective, or critic? Doubled and
refracted, it makes no difference how multiple my performance (I’ve been doing this for years!) but
it’s the material quality of stagescape that now interests me—the physical act of ferrying
performance ideas across a semblance of forested stage. Where am I? What are my coordinates?
Funny, but this Classics conference at McGill has taken place inside such a forest. The back window
blinds of another university building printed with repeating scenes of ponderosa pine.

6
Stay away from me, but do lean in, the chorus howls. All of sudden, we are in their appearance.
Apparition of three petals on wet black bough. Three young women encircle themselves in a group
embrace. They raise their hands above their heads, slipping slender arms into each other’s
upstretched columns. Speaking in unison, their voices echo in imperfect cadence. The noise
unbearable, reverberating, but they remain frozen as living statue. As singing sculpture, this chorus
at once names themselves, as well as inscribing the performance space into being. A physical marker
on the horizon line of artificial time. Suddenly, in an instant, Iphigenia appears, and simultaneously,
we see her death in the distance. Her white silk robe falls brighter than the others. As audience
Artemis we listen to her hymn, recalling Clytemnestra’s bloody robes that will inevitability re-appear.
Is that a deer? No, Euripides didn’t write that note. It was appended much later.

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Pre-chive: Towards a Theory of a Performative Archive

[5.20.16]

Tragedy speaks to me, through
me, and for me. If tragedy is
moral ambiguity, as Aaron
reads from Simon Critchley’s
The Problem with Levinas, and if
justice is conflict, I remain
dedicated in returning home to
a divided house. Heated
arguments solidify one’s
position in the world. Don’t
move a muscle. Let me kiss you, right
here. We open and close doors
in the tragic landscape. We
measure shouting, as well as
kissing, distances from each
other. I would never do that, my
sister says. Is that what you want,
my mother asks. Drink this wine,
my father orders. (My family,
my Freud.) In the same breath,
we all seek returns from the
Dead.

Matthew Reason writes:
“Disappearance and
documentation seem to go
hand in hand.”

It’s true. The more I try to
document my adventures, the
more they seem to disappear,
fog out of view.

At least we have a photograph.
It’s here somewhere. Let me
have a look….

A photograph of a devious
looking woman dressed in
flame, with a tower of flame on
her head. Because intuition is part of how performance and photography work, the image records an

253
inner speech at work in the actor.
96
What catastrophe, what turning loose does she seek to unleash?
The inner speech, can we call it Threshold Poetics?

I don’t remember taking this photograph of “The Chorus of Flames” from a theatrical production
of MEDEA, performed in at the Comfort Station in Chicago. The actor’s cool face in fricative odds
with the wild headdress of light. She looks like the actor who played “The Milky Way” in a blue silk
dress with sequins and flashing ice. What I admire about Greek tragedy is its willingness to
transcend history, atmosphere. Tragedy stands apart in timelessness, a presence invisibly hovering
above or in between the shutter of camera lens.

In all my worst nightmares, I suffer aphonia, the condition of being voiceless, without voice. Perhaps
this is why I write plays and poetry. Perhaps this is why in certain public situations I prefer to listen,
registering my resistance to those speaking so easily. In my own work, the cultivation of an
acoustical imagination allows me generatively explore how the invisible forces of the world impress
me. The language of the lyric, with it ability to create refrain, leads me to wonder how voice might
claim ownership of a territory. Historically, “voice” has been difficult to define. For our purposes
here, let’s define voice as a vocal presence (speech or sound) within a dramatic text or within a body,
as well as extending our definition to include voice as being capable of traveling disembodied, detached
from a body of origin. Heard in this way, the theatrical stage functions as a physical sound chamber
holding, hiding, and disguising multiple voices either in the form of a character, music, silence,
natural element, or an omnipotence. In MEDEA, the Chorus of Flames sings to the audience,
notating its conversation with Medea-the-character. How do we make sense of multiple voices
chanting in unison? A cloud of smoke also speaks to the audience. Is a cloud of smoke a voice?

Walter Ong argues that writing is an extension of speaking, and refers to the term voice in his
treatment of both orality and literacy.
97
Like lyric poems, words spoken in the theatre are wingéd
words, traveling out beyond the speaker’s body to the audience. When we listen to characters talking
in the theater—throwing their voices, so to speak—ultimately, what we are trying to do is decode or
unearth meaning from the underside of sounds. We are straining to hear a character’s rich interiority.
We inch ourselves closer to the stage to get a better listen. And so, another question forms: Does
the listening audience have a voice?

I will be using the term “decreation” from Simone Weil, as appropriated by Anne Carson, to discuss
a complex sound studies concept, transduction: the conversion of sound energy. When sound, as a
form of energy, is transmitted via an actor’s voice to our ears, it crosses over, or transduces from
one medium to another. Like a microphone, the ear is a transducer. What recent work in sound
studies offers is how sound can be understood and analyzed not simply in terms of its production
but in its reception. Transduction is important to performance criticism because it allows us to
investigate the historically and culturally-specific infrastructures where transduction occurs, as well as
the situated bodies who are listening.

In her work with “room- and body-shaking bass of reggae and dub sound systems,” Julian
Henriques writes how the entire human body can be used as a sensory transducer that both hears
the music from loudspeakers and feels its vibrations as pockets of pulsating air. In this instance,
sonic energy transforms to kinetic energy, allowing the listener to enter into a sonic immersion,
which transcends dualities such as form/content or matter/spirit. In analyzing Henriques’ work,
Stefan Heimreich articulates how sonic immersion is both meaningful and material, “reaching across
(while also exceeding) sensory, cognitive registers.”
98
Sonic immersion is made possible by various

254
structures of transduction (water and hydrophones, test tubes and vibrating yeast cells). These
infrastructures create auditory emanations. Think of the shaking floor at a house party. These
auditory emanations have an “experiential realness” to them because they are unmediated auditory
presences of a certain sensation or feeling. Your dancing feet feel the floor as vibratory field. When
the work of transduction is not interrupted, it might even produce “a sense of a seamless presence.”
This seamlessness is important if we want to have discussions regarding the boundaries of vibratory
phenomena, or how “undersound”—vibration that exists below the level of human hearing—works.

[5.21.16]

My good friend Jessica teaches an undergraduate poetry workshop at the University of Chicago. In
the past, she has invited me to read my work and give a craft talk to these young writers. Since I
have an epistolary poem in my first book, her students often write me their artistic concerns, ideas,
questions, and meditations in long thoughtful letters. I have saved every one of their letters.
Handwritten, printed, typewritten, drawn, sewn, embossed, embellished, water-colored, bleeding
from snow, drawn from smoke they travel with me inside a folded up piece of butcher paper fasted
with kitchen twine. Every now and then, I pull the twine loose, remembering the true spirit of
poetry; its collaborative, familial, and renegade freedoms.

I met Eric a few years ago in Jessica’s class. I don’t remember his letter. Did I lose it? Was it not
returned to the butcher’s bundle? (At the moment, I’m not interested in this letter archive.) What I
do know about Eric is his wide-ranging intelligence and capacity for compassion. He understands
what it means to create and cultivate an imaginative life, and how important the mystery and power
of an imaginative experience can be in one’s life. My first experience with Eric’s dramatic work
included his play Tiresias. As spectator, I was mesmerized by the vitality of the language—its
strength, force and wit. Because Eric intimately knows and understands classical literature, his work
is steeped in allusions, nuanced references, and canonical traditions. And yet, his work challenges
those influences, re-imagining versions of performance as “[a]n act of memory and an act of
creation….”
99

When we began exchanging work with one another, it seemed natural, inevitable. Eric continues to
work as a writer, director, and producer in the theater world in Chicago. When he asked if he could
produce my play, MEDEA, alongside his version of Racine’s Phaedra for his company called Poetry Is
Theater, I felt honored, knowing it would bring all kinds of generative possibility. And it did. Within
six months, Tyler, publisher of Plays Inverse Press, wrote me a letter asking if he couldn’t publish
MEDEA in their upcoming 2016-17 catalogue. After my initial shock wave of happiness, I panicked.
Shouldn’t I wait to have it printed since Eric was presently producing it? What’s the proper amount
of time to wait between the performance of text and its publication? When considering this question
in relation to the publication of Shakespeare’s plays, Lukas Erne via Peter Blayney invites us to
consider how a play’s two forms of publication (performance and print) might work synergistically
with one another.
100
Fine. But shouldn’t I ask my lawyer about the potential copyright issues? Did I
finish applying for the copyright?

[4.12.16]

Emails back and forth about casting calls.

255
Too busy to read them all.
Take a message, patch the call through.
But I can see characters
streaming from the corners
of my downturned eyes.

[5.25.16, Wednesday]

The Poetry Is Theater archive includes nine folders and five standalone texts. The archive is housed on
a shared Google drive for actors, producers, writers, and directors. As writer, I’m permitted access
and editorial use of all items.

In this way, performance persists. It is not a haunting. It is a permanent trace.

For Diana Taylor, the “archive” consists of enduring texts, records and documents, what we might
call the intellectual materials of memory, while the “repertoire” consists of the bodily materials of a
performance—its embodied memories: spoken language, gesture, and ritual.

Practically speaking, various audio files and text files associated with the upcoming production of
MEDEA are not open to the public but by private invitation only. If the archivist only invites those
she deems as suitable guests, what do we do with the rest? Obviously, this is not the case with all
archives but this idea of access should be a concern when considering how archives are established
and run. How open? How closed?

Along with MEDEA, the festival will showcase Eric’s play Phaedra, Released. Folders are titled as
follows: Comfort Station, Dramaturgy, Marketing, MEDEA, Music, Old Housekeeping, Phaedra
Released, Rehearsal Reports, and Scenic/Props. The five standalone texts are as follows: Box Office
Guide, Rehearsal Schedule, Festival 2016 Team (Cast of Characters), Festival 2016 Schedule, and a
Tech Schedule. Because you might not know, Comfort Station is the name of the theater in
Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Here is a screenshot of how the archive is constructed:

While not a large house, it’s well-constructed and materially sound. Within each main folder, you can
find discoveries and decisions.
101
I can’t believe my good fortune. Among the “fragments, scraps, and
orts” are Photograph Stills of a Theatre Space, Video Recordings of a Theatre Space, Audio
Recordings of a Theater Space’s Ambient Noise, Blueprints of a Platform, Rehearsal Reports,
Incident Reports, Interviews, and Overviews. All this documentation makes me paradoxically feel as
if I’ve been in Chicago all along for the inception of production, as well as the sense that MEDEA

256
simply does not exist. It must be a dream—she is everywhere to all players interested. Did I mention
the play will be performed outside on the lawn? I move the lawn chairs as folders around, thinking
about Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, one of my favorite books. I’m sure Eric agrees.

In the Dramaturgy folder, there’s a curious specimen called “Actor’s Packet,” anonymously written.
It calls for “an infiltration of the stage.” It describes poets’ theater as follows:

The further one dives into it, the contradictions within the form not only become more
apparent, but show themselves to be intrinsically a part of the form, the fire that fuels the
engine. It is always meant to carve out a specific place in time, the time being this current
moment. These often timeless texts are neither poem, theater, nor literature, and venturing
too far into either area makes it none of them. The actors are not actors per se, but players,
agents of action, their physical being is of little importance when compared to the needs of
activity, tempo, and text. This is, above all else, a demonstration of language, an exploration
of text, an outfolding of intents and actions, all independent of each other.
102

[5.26.16]
The archive of MEDEA is not performance. Rather, it is a series of working notes toward un-
making performance. An arrow pointing to something not yet heard, never given, never returned. It
exists in the conditional. The archive of Medea works on the burn of desire. Instead of creating, it
calls and listens for its own decreation, a new kind of self not made in notions of “I” but in a
collective unconscious straining to hear a seamless presence.

I want to push against the idea of an archive as a viable way to perform cultural memory as
understood by some performance studies scholars. “Why do you feel threatened by the idea of
archive?” a colleague of mine once asked me. I hardly realized how palpable my disdain for the
medium was. Why did I feel that the archive was a dangerous idea or place for performance, artist,
actor, and producer alike?

My intuitive resistance to the archive—my sense that archives can only exist as gestures of
approximations—no doubt originates from my practice as a working writer. The desire to
document—to save whatever we think, feel and hold dear in voiced language of texts, in
photography, in song —is a luxurious endeavor, especially when we come to understand how
corrupt our memories are in relation to actual events. Why do we become so invested in saving what
the world gives us? At this point in my life, I need no proof. If that is indeed true, why do I keep on
writing plays and poetry? The pleasure that comes from writing poetry and plays, in my case, is
based upon the very premise that I’ll get it quite wrong.

All of it. All of the time.

My intervention advances this notion of the pre-chive: a collection of historical texts or documents
recording phenomena before the theatrical event has occurred. By changing the temporal emphasis,
the pre-chive does not have to concern itself with successfully, or accurately, with documenting the
theatrical event. It never exposes itself as fraud. Instead, it offers a generative site for production, for

257
endless reproductions and new imaginings. As such, it maps modes of decreation. I’m much more
interested in thinking about the sound pre-chive as a leaky container, a sieve retaining remnants of
sound but never the sound entire. Or, as a disintegrating springboard, where once you stood, about to
dive into a sea of redemptive silence. Silence always being regenerative and redemptive.

After that, nothing happened.

Or, before that, nothing was about to happen.

The pre-chive should allow for possibility. Its potentiality does not allow for the saving and
recuperation of a repertoire. Instead, it should push its listeners to a forgetting that allows them re-
imagine what they once heard, what they were supposed to hear, or what will be. In doing so, it
exposes a generative and creative mode of composition that, at the same time, breaks down material
in its issuance of new material. Here, it might be useful to think about the echo. The echo repeats
itself but in difference. Both Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost advance this idea of the echo
as having an original sound.
103
That is, each echo emitted into the world distinguishes itself from its
original sound as an original difference. This line of thinking might be useful when thinking about the
disembodied voice, as it calls out the act of creation as the rightful surrogate in a lineage of new
sounds.

Because this staging of MEDEA takes place under the stars in an outdoor theater, a certain kind of
soundproofing needs to be noted. The fire that fuels the engine. Why do we need measures that
offer resistance to the passage of sound? Aren’t all the ambient sounds of the theater chamber part
of the performance? Are we moving too far to the left? Where do the boundaries of stage and off-
stage begin and end? If the theater is the reclaimed religious site, how far beyond the site does the
sacred land extend?

While I did write The Milky Way as character, I did not realize she would be so at home in the navy
blue firmament of evening night. Poetry Is Theater’s artistic director, Eric, narrates various clips.
The sound pre-chive alerts you to the possibility of disturbances, stemming from ambient noise or
internal echoes of what each spectator might hear in their respective bodies. When I see you next,
I’ll play the recordings so you can hear what Eric hears. What do you really hear when you listen?
The sound of cars honking in the street, the uncomfortable sounds not announced here but
imagined in your own dark hearts? What can go weather wrong? What roving sirens might distract
us from immersive experience?

What’s curious about the audio recordings in MEDEA’s pre-chive is its insistence in time and place.
The Comfort Station is a multi-disciplinary art space in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago.
The actual structure, which houses the theater, is a 1926 warming building/public restroom located
near a transit line. Note the excessive clapping of hands and stomping of feet to warm the visible
bodies. But since it is summertime, Medea ventures outside, seeking an audience excited about the
expansiveness of warm weather. A stage, complete with trap door, has been built specifically for this
performance. Isn’t it romantic to think we can be sitting on a green lawn, drinking Monte Tondo, a
delicious Italian Soave, having just finished a nearby meal at Longman & Eagle, the only Michelin
starred gastro pub in the United States, ready to see a play performed? Twenty years ago, one
couldn’t even stand in Comfort Station park for five minutes without being molested by
gangbangers.

258
(Recording is played without fanfare. The Archivist is nowhere to be seen. Only a shadow of a voice. A shell.)

The time is ten minutes before 7, ten minutes before curtain. When we hear the rattle of wind in the
recording, we register its tattering and flapping presence as sonic and material, but might we also
begin to think about wind as generative force and its ability to inspire future creative acts? In this
sense, transduction mirrors the ongoingness of cognition—how our sense impressions inform what
we think, how we think. In the Deleuzean sense, we are forever regulating a refrain, recalibrating
voices from interior and exterior worlds. The recording we just listened to is the cue before the cue
of sonic immersion, the threat of wild, unregulated noise. As audience members, what do we
imagine as the most de-habilitating noise?

(Observe a note of silence here. Conference reader stands at attention.)
Dry roast, dry rusk
of toast breakfast burned

Memories stacked in
Proustian description
Poisoned children
All those unborn

My eyes burn

Flaming diadem melts skin to bone

Why did you do it?
—excerpt from MEDEA
So then what is our real cue? A spell in my original script of MEDEA begins like this: “Smoke!
Roof’s a good place to start. Dry roast. Dry rusk of toast. Breakfast burned.” The recording of this
spell hisses words as vapor asking you to see the smoke circling round your limbs, as it did in the
actual performance where a fog machine was used. Medea’s final catastrophes (the poisoned fall of
lovers, the flames) includes the Deleuzian refrain, or “how to consolidate the material, make it
consistent, so it can harness the unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces.” At this point in the
play, Medea is in dialogue with a Chorus of Flames. At key moments in the play, the script uses
charm-melos as a technique to agitate its audience, cueing bodies into attention. The smoky spell
recited both by Medea and the Chorus of Flames is an example of a charm-melos at work.

Poets often can be heard humming or casting spells as they write. The OED defines “melos” from
the Greek as “song” and “melody,” specifically as the “succession of tones considered apart from
rhythm: an uninterrupted flow of melody.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines melos
as “member,” as well as “song.” Melic poetry, different than epic, dramatic, elegy or iambic, refers to
poems composed during the seventh through the fifth century BCE in Greece, and sung to the
accompaniment of lyre or woodwinds or sometimes both. There are two main categories of melic
poetry: monodic and choral. Sappho’s poems are an example of monodic melic poetry as they
consisted of short stanzas sung in a solo voice. Ezra Pound famously described melopoeia as language
that is “charged or energized” with some musical property, taking it beyond plain meaning. Simple
mimesis, such as a bird song, can be considered melopoeia, but Pound goes on to distinguish it as 1)

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language made to be sung to a tune, 2) intoned as chant, or 3) made to be spoken. There is a charm-
melos in MEDEA, which works to disturb the spectator, bring about a transformation in the action
of play, and introduce a cloud of smoke as viable voice, or presence upon the scene.

(Play recording. Be quick. Remember time has value.
A scratchy recording is heard in the distance.)

Dry roast, dry rusk
of toast breakfast burned

Memories stacked in
Proustian description
Poisoned children
All those unborn

My eyes burn

Flaming diadem melts skin to bone

This example of choral melic poetry, stylized and performed as incantatory chant, is intended to
shock or surprise an audience with its energetic and atonal musical quality. Its affect is further
heightened by the presence of multiple voices speaking in unison, or overlapping one another at
various moments. As twenty-first century listeners, we are not in the habit of hearing choral odes.
The strangeness of such a collective voice interrupts our singular interiority. We must contend with
forces coming from all sides. Invasion. By inviting the audience to enter into the materiality of
sound as texture, my hope is the experience of sonic immersion. Excessive use of rhyme, rhythm,
and repetition in MEDEA points to a literary practice invested in participatory song and ritual. Can
auditory transformations be cued by the actual vibration of eardrum? Do you believe in mean-
making trance?

It’s not uncommon for successful storytellers to have shaking, dancing, clapping, rocking, humming
bodies in their audiences. In his construction of a “poor theater,” Jerzy Grotowski speaks of an
actor’s ripeness—the ability to give herself completely as a “total gift” in performance. This ability of
technique becomes equated with trance, and “the integration of all the actor’s psychic and bodily
powers which emerge from the most intimate layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a
sort of ‘translumination.’”
104
This intimacy calls for a continual breaking down of self, as it
recognizes that only by reciting a silent score of the script to herself can the actor truly bring the
encounter of the theater to the spectator.

My hope with MEDEA is that the spectator will acknowledge how difficult the act of listening can
be, both in the pre-chive of its intended production and in its eventual production. Theatrical works
challenge ideas about performativity, theatricality, and the textual with their use of embodied
language. MEDEA attempts to challenge how characters and spectators come to understand the

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world around them through phenomenological cues; through language that is voiced, vibrational.
Echoes calling us back.

[5.27.16]

The past is my own, even if it’s the past of others.

Poets begin by rebelling, that is our first act of anti-naturalism.

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Indecipherable Hieroglyph

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)’s theatrical adaptations of Euripides—what we might call reinvigorations—
influence her poems, and her poems influence her dramatic work. I argue that the poet H.D. uses
drama in a way that is different than other poets working within this modernist poetic tradition.
H.D. distinguishes herself in this regard in her use of source material and translation work.

H.D. carries out these creative transductions, moving elemental matter (both material and mystical)
across territories, across time. H.D. operates as a mythopoetic writer, rewriting the eternal dramas of
myth into self-knowledge. For example, I claim that by removing the chorus of women from her
translations of Euripides’ The Bacchae and placing them in free-standing poems, H.D. challenges
traditional ideas about classical reception and translation.

I am interested in how H.D.’s work inhabits literary landscapes, often rewriting the landscape when
“the rock breaks or falls into ruins,” flooding the cracks with cataracts of new language. The shards
of past stories might fling up and prick our bodies, but we start at the beginning, at rupture. H.D.
showcases female characters acting as Promethean boundary makers, speaking a new language into
being. As such, her work prefers to take on the rhythm of a dramatic narrator who speaks in
conversation and who speaks with a tragic lyric voice—thereby creating a collective voice that
upholds the rituals of tragedy while improvising upon and improving them.

My hope is to illuminate how the creation of theatrical work functions as an important imaginative
gateway, or portal, in the discovery of new poetic forms. In her unpublished “Notes on Euripides,”
H.D. writes about the power of Greek words functioning “as portals, as windows, as portholes I am
tempted to say that look out from our ship, our world, our restricted lives, on to a sea that moves
and changes and bears us up, and is friendly and vicious in turn. These words are to me portals,
gates.”
105
As a poet who translated Greek drama, the dialogic nature of translating and adapting
classical Greek tragedies grants H.D. the freedom to be visionary or “original,” acknowledging how
the mark of true originality stems, in part, from the ability to use source material in a new way. Her
adaptations pulsate with the regenerative spirit of a dangerous female energy. Her deeply gendered

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sense of the theater stage operates as the perfect place to distill an essence of the tension between
private and public selves.

My project's insistence on a form that creatively and meditatively explores its subject will be
paramount. It seeks to intervene and enlarge the discussion on how a feminist visionary like H.D.
contributes to what female narratives sound like—both in lyric and theatrical traditions—and the
importance of staging such narratives. What follows are scenes pulled from various sites of interest:
the poet’s notebook, the scholar’s library notes, a conversation between friends, a dissertation’s
corrupt beginning, a love letter, the mind’s scholia, a vibrating melody pulled from the air.

— Catherine Theis, Santa Monica (2020)

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SCENE ONE:

L'Orecchio di Dionisio

“There’s nothing ornamental about the style of the real poet. Everything is a necessary hieroglyph.”

—Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragment No. 173”

In Dionysus’ Ear (L'Orecchio di Dionisio), one can hear echoes, songs of past performances.
Dionysus’ Ear is a real place in Syracuse, Sicily. A cave built from the neighboring limestone cliffs,
its reputation as a dynamic acoustical space surrounds the island. Once upon a time, its acoustics
were so precise you could hear the screams of the prisoners locked inside. H.D. writes herself into
the lyric and dramatic tradition by way of noise, by way of the Greek god, Hermes. Michel Serres
speaks of the creative and productive spaces of transformation, where “noise, through its presence
and absence, the intermittence of the signal, produces the new system, that is to say, oscillation.”
106

Serres describes a phenomenon H.D. knew quite well. As “original rune-maker, the majic-maker,”
H.D. stands outside various systems (of genre, form, and language), translating the interference into
new orders of poetic language.
107
See her free-standing choral translations of Euripides’ Bacchae in
Red Roses for Bronze. See her translation of Ion, finally published in 1937 but begun in 1916. H.D.
speaks to the dead, on behalf of the dead, as a sympathetic transformer. Her peculiar ability to pick
up—distinguish the crash and fall of rising waves in a neighboring kingdom—speaks to her
radicalness as a true innovator of modernist forms.

This scene is an echoing cave, cut from wet limestone rocks. This scene is a type of container, a
vessel, an amphora. It carries voices that cannot be expressed.

Writing beyond the brink of one’s beyond body. Breaking self—something outside of self’s limited
lunacy. That secret self hidden in reserve for just such acts of breaking. Disclosure or exposure or
revelation—they’re all of the same idea. An unfolding in static time of hidden visionary spaces.

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Beyond the bride of oneself, the ultimate sacrifice. According to Roland Barthes, I cannot give you
this language but I can dedicate my giving it to you.

Not breaking walls, but building them, paving an ecstatic bridge to beyond self. Building walls so
new chambers can be created, a sonic space, as well an inscription surface. Song pushed to the
selfsameness, a strange noise pulsing underneath the earth. For Alain Badiou, the theater offers a
“fascination with the visible. For H.D., it’s the fascination with the aural that haunts her work. H.D.’s
fascination with the audible places her in front of the shell—the band shell, the acoustical shell, the
choral shell that provides a hard surface for the reflection of sound. H.D. writes: “We wander
through a labyrinth. If we cut straight through, we destroy the shell-like curves and involutions.
Where logic is, where reason dictates, we have walls, broad highways, bridges, causeways.”
108
The
shell’s ability to provide passive sound amplification immerses us in sonic vibrations. Plenty of
books ruminate on H.D.’s relationship to the image but few speak to the sonic dressings and modes
she employs in her work.
109

If the poet’s responsibility lies in the preservation and restoration of cultural memories, H.D.’s sonic
transmissions, rosemary-scented, cascade generatively down through the generations. (Smell the sprigs
of rosemary stashed around her house. Rosemary for remembrance. ) H.D.’s revolutionary and multiple forms,
which include the poem and dramatic script, encourage a phenomenological memory-making where
her necessary hieroglyphs, her wavering hieroglyphs, can be seen as continuance and endurance,
entire worlds endlessly interpreted from sacred words.
110

H.D.’s hieroglyphs do not represent the sound of language but the noisy sounds of an inhabited
world studded with Greek rocks. Stop at the noisy river: hear it flow, see it bend into multiple
streams—a complex system that not only transforms in time, but collects and releases Time itself.
Our ears perk up when we hear music and emotions in poems. Although we expect such things in
poems, we often grow tired waiting and listening for them.

Hermione: “Words make tin pan noises, little tin pan against my ear and words striking, beating on
it, bella, bella, molta bella, belissima, you are, he was saying belissima and he must see Belissima.”
111

265
In her memoir, end to torment, H.D. writes on April 9, 1958: “No, my poetry was not dead but it was
built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano.”
112

Dramatic, dialogic, H.D’s original poems exhibit setting, character, voice, and movement
reminiscent of an embodied theatrical performance. In H.D.’s poem “Eurydice,” the speaker
explicitly places blame on Orpheus for her banishment and loss of earth’s pleasures. Eurydice
complains of Orpheus’s love. Relentless in her questioning, she makes quite clear how his
“arrogance” and “ruthlessness” have stolen the flowers and people from her life. “Here only flame
upon flame / and black among the red sparks,” her life painted in a tapestry of black.
113
What does it
mean to brave fire? Already in the second stanza, the “moss of ash” coats the room. Once the “fire
of your own presence” is realized as double-saffron flamed-hue on both their faces, her new home
inevitably turns black.
Curiously however, Eurydice’s description of the blackness (“everything is crossed with
black, / black upon black / and worse than black, / this colourless light.”) calls to mind the poem’s
very inscription upon the listening world; a world part in air, part in stone. The etching of the
speaker’s questions in all black letters is the presence of her speaking voice. Thus, the strength in
Eurydice’s assertion at the of the poem that “[a]t least I have the flowers of myself, / and my
thoughts, no god / can take that;” rings true. If the listening world is but a blackness “small against
the formless rocks,” and the poem’s lines themselves jet-black, who then is the light?

Poetic, her dramatic translations sing in felt intensities. See Scene Nineteen.

Her translation as performance. The Chorus marches across the stony landscape. It carries volcanic rock and the
power of incantation: calling forth presences, the Greek texture of limestone. An instruction.

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SCENE TWO:

Greek Instruction

Through a veil, translation appears.
All of translation makeshift: floating
islands on caramel seas of spun sugar.
Translation collaborative in nature,
a tulle netting hiding cross-hatched lines.
Chorus as translator: blocking scenes
of instruction, blocking scenes of feeling.
On the matter of choral odes, however,
we conclude they are dangerous
volatile places. Either discarded
by Greek teachers for their intensity
of feeling or read slowly in private
make believes. No one knows
what to make of Greek prosody,
perhaps the reason why H.D.
was so drawn to it. Especially the odes
with a band of women speaking
in lyric meter, performing a newly formed
women’s university, dead-dark Greek
letters, volcanic rocks hot to the touch.
We poets feel most at home in lyric meters
rather than in the dramatic dialogues
T.S. Eliot wrote. H.D. repurposes
tragedies into hauled-offed fragments.
In her translation of Ion, she smashes
the mosaic of Euripides’ decadence
into glittering pieces, black eighth notes.

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SCENE THREE:

From the Commonplace Book of C. Theis

“The translation would not seek to say this or that, to transport this or that content, to communicate
some particular charge of meaning, but to re-mark the affinity among the languages, to exhibit its
own possibility. And this, which holds for the literary text or the sacred text, perhaps defines the
very essence of the literary and the sacred, at their common root. I said re-mark the affinity among
the languages so as to name the strangeness of an "expression" ("to express the most intimate
relation among the languages") that is neither a simple "presentation" nor simply anything else.”

—Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel”

“…a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense….”
—Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”

“One thing is clear: every language-act has a temporal determinant. No sematic form is timeless.
When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history.”

—George Steiner, After Babel

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SCENES FOUR THROUGH SIXTEEN:

Place—BENEICKE RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, New Haven, Connecticut
Time—TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
Text— ION

What will the choros comment on?

Rough proofs & this and that (1936)

H.D. scratches out “a” before “god”

and writes in “the” when naming Hermes

as to “distinguish the different qualities

and intensities”

269

Remember, the choros’ function is spiritual

(hear the outside voice of the collective)

Its “decorative expression” its accordion pleating trans-

forms as it dances across the stage

Remember, the choros’ function is psychological

(feel the inner mood)

Remember, the choros’ function is utilitarian

(see curtain)

270

Betrayal happens first, then the leaving [transpose please] (44)

H.D. the editor makes the proper edits here:

[leave betray

betray leave]

“is hence, outcast” “will be banished” (97)

The future has arrived

Block? Frustrate? Thwart? (104)

“wind-olives” to “wild-olives” (114)

The same worry re placement of the final words of the play

271

What’s a king without a child?

A flowerless court budding dead buds

What does Euripides really mean today?

H.D. cuts from the newspaper Dr. Murray’s reviews

in which she is sometimes referenced:

“Her translation of the Ion reads as if she had reassembled, piece by glittering piece, the shattered
fragments of the play just recovered from the sands of time. It may profitably be compared with Dr.
Murray’s.”

272

Some men see H.D.’s freshness

Her refusal of dead poetic customs

Some men hear in “rattle of short lines”

the emotion behind acts of language

Some men say the “sanctuary taken in her notes”

offers a holy place

But some men hear a tedious prattle

like Pater’s meditations on the Mona Lisa rings false

Some men say a skeletal translation

might work well on the stage

273

A woman reviewer says of Ion:

“It is Greek, and it is poetry. It could not be acted as straight drama, but it might be danced.”

She recognizes H.D.’s bird motif

“Translated with commentaries by H.D.”

is how her newspaper lists her translation of Euripides’ Ion

“Dawn translations” is what I call it

274

“As an adolescent, I loved the Murray translations, and they had a great influence on me, but now I
want something different, some turning up of another side of the Hellenic world. H.D. is in some
ways more like Murray; she gets the “early morning” feeling, the edge between horror and God.”

The “Ion” of Euripides as BBC recording so the page is left blank

Empty seashell of listening

so much so little

a tulle travelling veil

words as textured sonorous forces

275
INTERMISSION

In the Yale catalogue one series of H.D.’s writings are described as follows:

Series II. Writings 1918-77
11.0' (27 boxes)

Series II, Writings, contains 27 boxes of writings. The material consists of Novels, Poetry, Short
Stories, Autobiographical Writings, and Miscellaneous Writings. The arrangement is alphabetical by title
within each subseries. Two boxes of Writings of Others are placed at the end of the series and are
arranged alphabetically by author.
Series II, Writings, contains 27 boxes of writings. The material consists of Novels, Poetry, Short Stories, Autobiographical Writings,
and Miscellaneous Writings. The arrangement is alphabetical by title within each subseries. Two boxes of Writings of Others are
placed at the end of the series and are arranged alphabetically by author.

No folder marked as “Translations” per se

Again, choros as inevitable “curtain”

A curtain of flowers like in a love poem

“If people would forget a bit more, we might have a real love poetry.” (Ezra Pound)

“meadow-floret” from “tiny floret”

a column of “I” running down the left margin—a curtain of earthly delights

But are we too forgetful?

Do we drink too much from the river Lethe?

Felt on the inside

Or described from the outside

What is the true task of the chorus?

“Where a Greek voice speaks there are rocks.” (opening sentence from unpublished “Curled
Thyme”)

Into that “noon-heat” where the revising rocks lie

“‘I am no Greek’ you said” (To W.B.)

276

In her unedited “Notes on Thoughts and Visions” H.D. labels certain sections as “Conversation I”

“May I interrupt? / Do you ever do anything else?” (retracted text)

Reminding me of all her versions of Cassandra

Multiple cross-hatchings of lines, scores, traced texts

The nakedness of her speech

The material heaviness of language litters the poem

“written in a time of war” and “lapidary” reviewers tell us of her poems

(….time passes….)

The time is 3:42 (ET) when I find “Prose Corybantic” or “Proses Choruses (incomplete)”

Are these prose poems? What are you,

little seashell, pulled from ocean blue?

Selections published in 1929 in Blues

I search under “translation” “translations” “chorus” “choral odes” “Bacchae” “The Bacchae”
“Euripides”

But I cannot find any of her translation notes for “Choros Translations”

Prose chorus uses strophes (a long-limbed turning), antistrophes (a reverse swerving) and epodes (a
mismatched couple who line dances for the win)

Constant conversation, constant chatter and interrogation

Cassandra, the Barbarian, makes an appearance in the epode

“pasteboard pomegranates”

“shut you up in strophes”

The choros is directed to sing of Beauty

The choros is directed to sing of Beauty
The choros is directed to sing of Beauty

277
The choros is directed to sing of Beauty
The choros is directed to sing of Beauty
(ad infinitum)

Is this what the choros sounds like

without a dramatic script?

No Cithaeron mountain?

Serpents in their hair stung-in bugged in

chirped out disastrous notes? What notes?

Choros trapped in flame, in volcanic rock

“a solid wall written over and over with still

rarer phrase, painted with stranger pictures.”

(“Those Near the Sea”)

Sound of waves.
Sound of rain.
Sound of birds singing.
Sound of turning pages.

“Hurry up,”

the chorus a silent tomb.

Time passes.

(over intercom): The library will be closing in one hour. Please see the desk for any final materials
you would like paged. We cannot fulfill requests past four-fifteen. The library will open tomorrow at
nine o’clock. Thank you for your attention.

278
SCENE NINETEEN:

Ionic Iconicity: Reading as Performance

Dramatic poems and theatrical works challenge ideas about performativity, theatricality, and the
textual with their use of embodied language. When H.D. translates Euripides, she initiates a dialogic
exchange. In her adaptation of Ion, this conversation includes fields of interrupting prose sections
inserted into the play’s lineated lines. By working with Euripides’ lesser-known plays, H.D. invites us
to consider a formula of subtraction, a highly stylized negation; a privately funded laboratory
researching alchemical powers in the wild. H.D. ghosts around Euripides’ stories but leaves her own
stony mark, the prose sections in Ion being a clear indication of such a material presence. What’s
curious is the extent to which H.D. layers several voices in an already densely populated play. Poised
for interrogation, her work queries and is the question. For H.D., this imaginative back and forth, this
questioning also occurs in her early lyric poems.
Of her stony marks in Ion, the nineteen explanatory notes H.D. adds before each division in
the play, consider them new entrances and exits built onto the play’s pre-existing structure. H.D.’s
notes appear as italicized paragraphs within the theatrical text. Euripides’ plot revolves around Ion,
rescued by Hermes when Kreousa abandons the newborn to keep her rape by Apollo a secret.
Thinking he is an orphan, Ion serves as attendant at Delphi until the play’s turn of events place him
in Athens to found the Ionian race. H.D.’s prose sections function like sedimentary rock, layers
which include statements of poetics, translation theories, as well as individual lines of poetry. Its
anti-theatricality is underscored by various presences operating within the text—that of translator, as
well as poet-visionary. H.D.’s work embraces form—the organization of a material, acoustic space,
as well as a textual space—as a way to control the chaos of creation. Her translation efforts stem

279
from a simultaneous desire to rupture and contain new pockets of chaos. In the harnessing of a
refrain, H.D.’s speakers sound out the terra, scoring boundary lines.
H.D. formulates a theory of poetics in which her writing corresponds to the construction of
an imaginary dwelling. In Ion, she builds onto the existing structure of Euripides’ play but the new
tile does not match the old. H.D. showcases the incongruities because they reveal a literary history.
Her work opens up a fracturing in time, a palimpsestic condition where the ancient past emerges
into present view. H.D. replaces various stylistic choices of Euripides with her own sense of
ornamentation: “What time is it? Greek unity give us freedom, it expands and contracts at will, it is
time-in-time and time-out-of-time together, it predicts modern-time estimates.”
114
Ancient Greek
theater relied on a synthesis of various codes and practices, giving it a fixed structure. Playwrights
freely worked within this structure, giving shape to wildly unbounded content. The prose passages
catalogue the admissions, revisions, and omissions of a shared theater tradition, as well as the
physical stage of an imagined Delphi.
H.D.’s poetics are often tied to spatial metaphors. The opening in the wall creates the free-
fall of imagination into language. The ancient theater tradition provided H.D. a complimentary way
of thinking through contradictory temporal states. She could fall into a mythic time, similarly
required of the Greek citizens during the theater festival’s days of religious obligation. The theater as
a physical, architectural space harmonized with H.D.’s preoccupations. Theater festivals were held in
open-air theaters, where actors and spectators braved the natural elements. The spirit of Greek
theater relied on this circularity of space and weather. It’s no wonder the unbounded blue of sky
figures predominately in H.D.’s translation of Ion.
Of Kreousa’s ladies-in-waiting, H.D. writes: “Personally, I visualize them in blue, one colour
of various shades”).
115
When H.D.’s physic imagination equates the chorus’ refrain with blue, she
prepares us for Kreousa’s robes falling in stone folds made of blue lapis. Then a crash. What to do

280
with a woman who “has the inhumanity of a meteor, sunk in sea”.
116
Kreousa’s lyric entrance into
the play is mediated by Ion’s understanding of her as elemental: as rock and air, wings of loneliness.
Perhaps H.D.’s unwavering belief in the power of language assures her the unearthing of a living
statue rather than a dead body. When mother and son unknowingly meet at the temple (look! are her
eyes finally open?) H.D. condenses the language into staccato free verse. In a daring game of
acquaintance, mother and son throw familiar rocks at one another, remembering the earthquakes
and sea-waves that once threw them. Sizing each other up in the phenomenology of stone, both
characters chisel lineage, facts.
The composition of Ion probably began in 1916, though an announcement was made in The
Egoist in January 1916 that translations were forthcoming, intimating that the idea for the project
most likely occurred to H.D. prior to that date.
117
Finally published in 1937, its composition cycle
mirrors the circuitous narrative arc of the play itself. Embedded in its double voicing (in lyric lines
and prose) is the wish to go beyond duality. Its suspension in translation of nearly nineteen years
corresponds to the nineteen entrances she ascribes. Her essayistic hybrid text captures twinned
moments of recomposition in its doubled beginnings. Here, Kreousa and Ion constellate a
submerged frame, a ruin of speech:

Ion —whose wife are you?
Kreousa —of a stranger—
Ion —but a great prince?
Kreousa —grand-son of Zeus—
Ion —strange to your rocks?
118

281
Short lines (two to three words condensed from the original) radiate between this “childless woman”
and “motherless boy” in their newly built temple of weaving words. H.D. translation interrupts the
sustained narrative. Her “broken, exclamatory or evocative vers-libre” reminds us of our inadequacies
in Greek, our preference for radical staging (we are no “mummers in masks”), and how Kreousa and
Ion talk to one another across a stage of haunted performances. Ion wonders why this woman
speaks so cryptically, like a stone moved from mouth of tomb. H.D.’s Kreousa, more than
Euripidean outline, breathes blue fire. Ion does not yet know Kreousa and her husband-king will
adopt him. Against the horizon of Greek time, H.D.’s chorus marches across new psychological
terrain. The chorus trimmed in blue and gold “so singularly a unit yet breaking occasionally apart like
dancers, to show individual, human Athenian women of the period, to merge once more into a
closed circle of abstract joy or sorrow.”
119
The chorus in Ion ceases to be mere ornamentation. All of
poetry the animating threshold.

282
SCENE TWENTY:

Translation as Processional

Announcing an exit with the sound
of a wind or a river rushing in
timpani thyme drying out
in the high gusts of wind
where two women sit
in between two languages of song

Like an actor who speaks her lines
like a translator who interprets
a voicing she hears in “a song note
that brought her back to a body that was vibrating,
that was static yet vibrating
here and there.”

Her body a tuning fork
Her body centered by Greek entrances
centered through the night thicket
where the jasmine wind blows
near a barbed wire fence
near a river

“And was it Goethe said, ‘another language is another soul?’
Anyhow, another river is—
but we must find our own river first—
rivers of paradise or what you will.”

Under the intimate joyful swerve
the two women paint in
the lapis blue
of the statue’s eyes
dipping their paintbrushes into the river
passing the color between them

283
SCENE TWENTY-ONE:

Meditation on Yopie Prins’ Ladies Greek

If amateurs are often the best transmitters of knowledge,
who then is the ideal receiver?

“Unlettered in Greek”
but rich in thought
HD hums the indecipherable
hieroglyph into her forearm

“Poem Called New Haven” transcribed
on typewriter, posted
to fridge come morning:

A blade of wet Connecticut grass
placed lengthwise across joined thumbs
**inhale** now blow out
a horn signaling the end of days
The library’s doors cooling themselves
as if a winged thing had no better place

Because ancient prosody is unknown (see Marjorie Dale)
consider the choral odes as leftovers
Because teachers do not devote lessons to the unknown
metric prosody becomes a site of invention
Because in going beyond the boundaries of self
you become part of a collective experience
Because in trying to make Greek letters dance
through an experience of kinesthesia
you invite strange lovely unknown bodies you bring rhythmic bodies
performing knowledge in linguistic strangeness
a blue cloud of smoke you can rough up in your hands

[The act of translation is always already performance
In the reading room,
In the archive of doubled bloom
In the performance tomb
where you and your lover comingle
and paint false eyelashes on one another]

“Translation, the ultimate fragment”
A t-shirt slogan you discuss over dinner
Hummus and pita chips, the re-telling
of a story you know quite well
HD translates corrupt texts

284
Making lines smaller and
smaller the joint
or blade of vibrating grass
into vibrating joy
Euripides subordinates the whole to the melody of its parts (Symonds)
Euripides corrupts the unified whole
writing for the ear
and not the eye like his predecessors

We decide to walk to the liquor store
and forego drinking the cheap beer in our host’s fridge
a local brand with an old ship sailing
across the curve of horizon
an orange-golden can with red letters
or black, we can’t remember its name or why
we didn’t order the pizza with fresh clams and bacon
when we had the chance, Oh Sally!
only that the apartment was hot always hot and sweaty
when we returned from a different pizza parlor
each night after visiting the Beneicke
and needed its windows opened like taking the buttons off
an old button-down wrinkled shirt
collapsing into the muggy summer cricket east coast night
a record player cooing the sounds
of our long lost west coast lullaby

We brought the bottle of wine
to bed, and watched a detective show
our parents might have recognized
as Columbo-like
The fire escape casting shadows on the white sheets
A dove in paradise
The moon a whisper wish
or an actor impersonating the task of the translator
a living embodiment of the Greek ideal
a medium between the living and the dead
renewing culture at every turn
every pothole unearthed, broken-down asphalt
churned and sifted
into memory and event
Remembrance
The ghosts of words
To remember to repeat a pattern inside the sea
-shell, eternals rhythm drawing
“sustenance from the dead”

285
SCENE TWENTY-TWO:

Sparagos (Dismemberment) as Slowdown

The gift of translation remains one of loss. H.D. disallows a conversation between Pentheus and
Dionysus in her translations of The Bacchae. Their dialogue remains buried underneath mounds of
Greek. H.D. translates the frenzy of the fourth ode describing the hunt for king Pentheus, but this
transcription merely records a stylized ritual to drive out a godless man. It is not a true exorcism,
only an imagined one the bacchants devise to keep their landscape free from desecration. As actors,
they enact a scene of their freedom. And this point proves crucial: H.D.’s bacchants only speak this
murderous refrain from the original play—“slash him across the throat”— as way to remember past
offenses. Although the dismemberment of Pentheus proves inevitable, the ritual of performance or
a ritualized reading will never make us whole. And sonic memorials—monuments where wisdom
resides as vibrating language in our open mouths—can only offer temporary consolation. Agave
erects such a sonic memorial for her shared sisterhood of the theatre. And yet, the bacchants do not
convince Agave to renew her contract with the show. She hands off her tragic language, a
democratic property, to the band of women seizing the last stretches of a territory in translation.
“The thyrsus shall pass on / to other Dionysians;” Agave laments, adding, “O let me never see /
haunted, mad Cithaeron / nor Cithaeron / see me”.

286
SCENE TWENTY-THREE:

Spargamos

The corruption in a play
like the Bacchae (H.D. first translates this in 1920)
blooms out
a darkness over mount Cytheron (Robinson Jeffers seen lurking
in the distance)
Penthesus put together
pulled apart
a play of words
ending in dismemberment
I remember it all so well
It begins again
falls apart

The great opening in the
maternal
earth receives him
entrances and exits
The audience as processional as persuasion itself

If the chorus represents formulated thought in action,
how does HD push back on this claim
for you know she does
push back
every day, pushing back
a wave
Riding the crest of wave

Poetry’s form creates a space
and vacates that space
making room
to leave a room

Stand your ground
as in stanza

A sense of injustice leads scholars
to insert the personal
in their forewords

Here you find me
Unscholarly yet personal
Public private clamshell
I make my own disastrous noise

287
PLAYBILL NOTES

Scenes Four through Eighteen include language and phrasing from H.D.’s unpublished papers at the
Beneicke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, specifically, boxes 31, 35, 43, 44, and 63. The Ezra
Pound quotation is from his collection, box 65.

In “Scene Twenty” the phrase, “a song note that brought her back to a body that was vibrating, that
was static yet vibrating here and there.” is from H.D.’s HERmione.

In “Scene Twenty” the following is from an undated letter H.D. wrote to Norman Holmes Pearson:
“And was it Goethe said, ‘another language is another soul?’ Anyhow, another river is—but we must
find our own river first—rivers of paradise or what you will.”

288

At the Getty Villa

A modern performance of the Bacchae with Mick Jagger instead of Elvis.

*
A modern performance made out of California wine.
Pinot noir or Chardonnay,
the truest expression of these hills.
The ills of the feminine swerve.
Diotima in attendance.

*
A modern performance with a chorus that continues to honor Dionysus, and so by extension: wine,
theatre, transformation, and illusion.

This is no rewrite: just a shared starting point.

*
The performance itself one giant masquerade.
It never pretends to be reality.
How freeing.

*
A modern performance with your father and husband in good company.

289

*
A modern performance with a chorus dressed in charcoal blazers, long pleated skirts, and sneakers.

Scottish businesspersons carrying wooden broomsticks
and imaginary microphones.

*
In my version, the chorus wears waves of white
and high steps on pointed rocks of gold.

In your version, the chorus prepares a dinner of roasted lamb and potatoes.
From your pocket, you pull a packet of chunky gray salt from Normandy and sprinkle the dull-ache
of crystals on the glistening meat and oil-soaked tubers.

In your father’s version, the chorus kisses him on his sleeping forehead as gently as the star jasmine
opens its petals for the moon.

*
You bought dinner tickets for the performance, but changed your mind at the last minute. You
didn’t feel like eating overpriced duck l’orange when you could eat sustainably-made, house-made
salami and pickles and pizza at your neighborhood Italian spot. Globes of pink wine hang from the
ceiling on strings. You eat on the back patio at 5 o’clock. Only two minor celebrities in attendance.
You never take off your sunglasses at dinner. You take a matchbook from the hostess’ stand.

*
A modern performance underneath modern skies of pink and pollution.

*
Eating dinner at your neighborhood restaurant, you remember a recipe a friend recently sent for a
pineapple upside down cake made with fennel instead of pineapple. In the illustration, the green
silky fronds of the fennel bulb swayed like seaweed over an ocean of cake batter. The waves in Big
Sur follow their own rhythm of transport and seduction. After the performance, you plan on serving
a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting for your husband’s birthday. The sea lions bark at each
other

from the neighbor rock,
the world stands in ancient order.

290

*
Location is everything.
Place as the main move.
Susan Howe calls this the geoaffect.

*
You forget how much talking happens in a Greek play.
So much accounting for, and re-telling.
Reverberations resounding in hidden caves of choir.

*
Agave speaks in Japanese to the English-speaking audience.
Her cries closer to your ear than English
but still cutting your body
into precise rigid strips of bloodied ribbon.

*
The distance greater than or less than?

*
The infinity sign marks the exit sign.
Your father catches himself before he falls into deep sleep.

*
Even the soft spots in marble do not cushion a fall.

*
There’s a measure of pressure the ear resists.

291

*
Who pays the price for impiety?

*
You see double and think nothing of it.
That is the nature of the theater.

*
A mountain lion’s head an appropriate trophy.
Until the trophy resembles the impropriator’s head.

*
Does a modern chorus prevent intimacy?
Does an ancient chorus prevent intimacy?
Does a Euripidean chorus flaunt its flamboyance?

*
What’s lost in the past becomes present in the theater.
It fills a hollow swallow of noise.

*
You hang the theater program in your living room long after opening night.
The purple silk frame looks gaudy bright.
Creation always an act of resistance.
Creation stages a freedom.

*
More than visual or auditory, theater is vibrational.

*
The messenger sweating under his gray blazer.

292

*
Pentheus and Dionysus both contrarians in their own right.

*
The world of theater like the world of dreams,
Freud knows.

*
Theater is future-facing while narrative looks to the past,
is that right, C?
The chorus as contrary thread.
The disruptive seam
threatening altering the story
while still remembering the story.

*
Today, Malibu covered in wildfire.
The Getty closed for the day.
And tomorrow, and tomorrow
and tomorrow,
the tomorrow after.

*
Still the restlessness,
the snowy mountains.
The spirit intrigues you—
forward into the wilderness

293

1
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1961), 113.
2
Gilbert Murray, “Introduction,” Medea, (London: G. Allen & Company, 1913), xi.
3
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), xxxv.
4
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2005), 81.
5
Euripides, trans. Paul Roche, “Medea” Three Plays of Euripides (New York: Norton, 1974), lines 230-231.
6
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “The Refrain,” A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 345.
7
Martial, trans. Garry Wills, Martial’s Epigrams (New York: Viking, 2008), 93.
8
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1961), 113.
9
Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984), 34.
10
T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1963) line 41.
11
Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984), 36.
12
This statement is attributed to half of the poet-translators I know.
13
This statement is attributed to the other half of the poet-translators I know.
14
Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984), 36.
15
J. Michael Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27.
16
Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Reading Early Modern Women Writers (New York & London: Routledge,
2004), 327.
17
Michael Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27.
18
Ibid., 27.
19
Ibid., 29.
20
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1961), 116.
21
A.G. Boyle, Seneca’s Medea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) l.
22
Ibid., 5, lines 1-2.
23
Ibid., line 79.
24
Ibid., 5, lines 25-6.
25
Ibid., 5, lines 6-9.
26
Gilbert Murray, “Introduction,” Medea, (London: G. Allen & Company, 1913), 3, lines 1-2.
27
Ibid., 3, lines 7-8.
28
Katherine Heavey, Early Modern Medea (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.
29
Ibid., 5.
30
Ibid., 106.
31
William Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, “Titus Andronicus,” The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2008), Act 1, Scene 1, line 96.
32
Katherine Heavey, Early Modern Medea (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 106.
33
Jean Racine, trans. Richard Wilbur, Phaedra (Orlando: Harvest Book, 1986), 56, Act Three, Scene 1, line 58.
34
Ibid., Act 5, Scene 7, lines 45-48.
35
T.S. Eliot, “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1966), 70.
36
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism
.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 13.
37
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon (New York: Mariner
Books, 2003), 148.
38
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 19.
39
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), Act 3, Scene 2, line 39.
40
Ibid., Act 1, Scene 1, line 53.
41
Ibid., Act 2, Scene 3, ll. 175-177.
42
Bruce R. Smith, “As It Likes You,” Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 27.
43
Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 4, ll. 3-4.
44
Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review (Durham: Duke University, 1974).
45
Smith, 31.
46
Ibid., 20.
47
Ibid., 22.
48
Ibid., 24.
49
Ibid., 27.
50
Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 4, ll. 3-4.
51
Ibid., Act 3, Scene 2, line 39.

294

52
Jordan Davis, “Gone/Economies,” Constant Critic, http://www.constantcritic.com/jordan_davis/gone_economics (July 13,
2003).
53
Heller-Roazen, Chapter 9.
54
Shakespeare, Act 3, Scene 1, ll. 44-45.
55
Ibid., Act 3, Scene 1, line 64.
56
Ibid., Act 3, Scene 2, line 45.
57
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak-Memory (New York: Vintage, 1947), 124.
58
Federico Garcia Lorca, “The Public,” Lorca Plays: 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), Scene 6, lines 52-4.
59
Jed Rasula, “Poetry’s Voice-Over,” Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill and London:
University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 285.
60
Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 79.
61
Gertrude Stein, “What are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?” Look at Me Now and Here I Am
(London: Penguin, 197), 152.
62
Ibid., 152.
63
Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 89.
64
Ibid., 81.
65
For an introductory reading of Stein’s dramatic work, please see an attempt titled: “Modernist Dialogic Poetics in Fields
of Sensory Embodiment.”
66
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
2003), 341.
67
Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove, 1958), 46.
68
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
2003), 317.
69
Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996), 31.
70
Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York: Mariner Books, 2008), 85.
71
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak-Memory (New York: Vintage, 1947), 99.
72
Henri Bergson, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Matter and Memory (Boston: Digireads Publishing,
2010), 40.
73
Ibid., 41.
74
Ibid., 127.
75
Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” The Collected Shorter Works (New York: Grove, 1984) 56.
76
Katherine Hayles, “Voices Out of Bodies, Bodies Out of Voices,” Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical
Technologies (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 78.
77
See William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: “Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending
sickle's compass come.”
78
Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” The Collected Shorter Works (New York: Grove, 1984), 51.
79
Ibid., 50.
80
Ibid., 51.
81
Ibid., 49.
82
Ibid., 51.
83
Robert Seydel, Book of Ruth, (Los Angeles: Siglio Books, 2011), 67.
84
Federico Garcia Lorca, “Play Without a Title,” Lorca Plays: 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), lines 421-2.
85
Ibid., 487.
86
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Reveille dans la brume,” The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater (Berkeley: Kenning Editions,
2010), 295.
87
Ibid., 295.
88
Ibid., 296.
89
Ibid., 293.
90
Ibid., 296-7.
91
Ibid., 298.
92
Ibid., 298.
93
Alain Badiou,” Theater and Philosophy,” Rhapsody for the Theatre (London & New York: Verso Books, 2013), 101.
94
Ibid., 102.
95
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1968), 241.
96
Barbara Hodgdon, “Photography, Theatre, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still,” Theorizing Practice:
Redefining Theatre History (New York: Palgrave, 2003) 91.

295

97
See the entry for “Voice” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2012).
98
Stefan Heimreich, “Transduction,” keywords in sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) 225.
99
W.B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA, 113.5 (1998) 1101.
100
Lukas Erne, “Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays, Shakespeare Quarterly, 53.1 (2002) 14.
101
W.B. Worthen’s “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA, 113.5 (1998) 1094.
102
Anonymous, “Actor’s Packet,” most likely composed in 2015-2016.
103
See John Holland’s The Figure of Echo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981) 20.
104
Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theater (London: Methuen, 1991) 16.
105
H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion: Adaptations of Two Plays by Euripides (New York: New Directions, 2003): 278.
106
Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 52.
107
Donna Krolik Hollenberg, ed., Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. And Norman Holmes Pearson (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press): 30.
108
H.D., By Avon River (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017): 34.
109
For those books do speak to the aural qualities of H.D.’s work, see Adelaide Morris’ How to Live/What to Do: H.D.'s
Cultural Poetics (2008) and Yopie Prins’ Ladies Greek (2017).
110
From H.D.’s novel HERmione: “She trailed feet across a space of immaculate clarity, leaving her wavering hieroglyph
as upon white parchment.”
111
H.D., HERmione (New York: New Directions, 1981): 42.
112
H.D., end to torment (New York: New Directions, 1979): 35.
113
H.D., Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983): 51-55.
114
H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion: Adaptations of Two Plays by Euripides (New York: New Directions, 2003): 185.
115
Ibid., 166.
116
Ibid., 171.
117
Eileen Gregory, H. D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (London: Cambridge University, 1997): 281.
118
H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion: Adaptations of Two Plays by Euripides (New York: New Directions, 2003): 175.
119
Ibid., 254.

296
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement to the following journals where selected poems and essays from “The
Jasmine Years” first appeared:

Diagram, Dream Pop Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, The Spectacle,
Tarpaulin Sky, and Yalobusha Review.

Selections from “Treat Yourself Like a Sultan” appeared in the exhibition book Light and the Unseen
(Hyde Park Art Center, 2013).

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Creator Theis, Catherine Marion (author)

Core Title H.D.'s dramatic poetics: tragedy, translation, and processional poems; &, The jasmine years: in three books, Los Angeles, 2013-2020

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/26/2020

Defense Date 05/05/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag adaptations,choral odes,chorus,Drama,Euripides,H.D.,Hilda Doolittle,L'avventura,lyric,modernism,Naxos,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,procession,Sicily,Sophia,Theater,tragedy,transduction,translation

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

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