Omophagos1

Wanda O'Connor

              Whatever sliced first, fell


A stone to the sea
              raw-eater            and ignorant of it      
                                                         or such a woman possessed of a wandering figure

             carried from superstition,
                      that grievous thing             you grievous thing.
All of your acts in servitude             and of Pythian stream     f ff –              fated.

                     I liked every one.2  

 
Negatives burn the summation bearer  –

                                                                                 divine water from afar knotted her alertness
in two.

 
μέδεα made
          made CHARTERING
                                    ξένος        –         stranger 
               into stranger things       

           
                                    Cry out! Where  –   Law! Where breaking nearer to  
                                                                                                the full-lengthed waiting –

      
                               twin chorusing
                          twins the ordinary task of day breaking.


1raw-eater –
                     crude
undressed                             of parts below the head          
                                                                                                                                    2She so loved the insult that it became the body.
*


How cool, entering the seven-mouthed metaphor, so many above, above unlocked night, falling inside what inside longed-for to be;

                 Suddenly, a wild secret in exchange for ordinary things
                 Suddenly, wild rewinding, precisions the feet, heart, what conquers peaceably
                 Suddenly easy migration, falling out, offing the chorus.

Bringing hollow to self
here, blush the Bacchic prisoner            pale shame tossed;

That sudden good advice    
         some pools rely upon initiation,
         precisions not as they should be.              (Where sudden rearings can’t be undone.)

                                                    I climbed and climbed a beckoning wall

                                       in all
                                       ventriloquized wasting                                  forging faith       
                                       fortifying        
                                                                                                        joyfully unlocked,       
                                       what is it
                                                     what quiets the continually emptying room.


Buffeted

   from the outskirts the whole attention for which she alludes to beckoning far astern   –


                    O new weave,
          have this twittering bird          have this great new trumpeter.
*


Her element a pressing together                and after, what silent spread
slipping takes as slipping takes to sea

             to have at a greater new fitting                  (a gala).

             All new bloods projected as glittering field        all new projects
             elaborate castoffings.

A mother who does not stomach her children.                            I am more than this.

Dare to set the horrible thing you carry in the cast of a new affliction.
*


I see now many doubles: the ever-natural pushing down, the surprising refrain

How advice is stalewater
under the telescope of the bodied      –

                      Clashing together
                            a mobile entrance    a probable smashing     
                                                         Συμπληγάδeς3       
unsimpled the gates.    


*


What plaster is ground up into the skin

what sighs deeply
 

                                              it is best not to open the mouth,


                                      


3clashing rocks     having been most carefully selected.     
*


Firm beneath strange things           pooling makes a bad citizen.

Coming nearer to being bound up again,
it will feather, braising the new long feeling.

A cure revels       part wild part hands against heaven

                                          You’d think she’d been sewn up into the thigh.


What stands above others is all our woe
                                                  A panic seizes women in their love
Most grievous is identity
                                                 What do you make of it?
I make of it summoning
                                                 Sleep giveth the rank of speaking
*


Deleted by a rule

                                         I did it to protect you.

Suddenly leaving whatever strange things, adamantine.

The fine complexion runs and runs.

For every horror I’ll add the sentence: clever are the schemes composed of meadows.

                                                 What gallery is for my own amusement?

 The land lands in the lap like arrows from the mountain.

                                                 All beasts are words, clashing.

 You’d come praying, too.

                                                 Breasts struck, burdening the bushes to dance.

I hurled every bit: pine trees, echoes that formed from the larger structure of deteriorating.

                         For the best pleasure lies in considering, the best grief in announcing the
                                consideration.

Changing one’s mind you will learn the way of answering outrageously.

                         I am better without tools.

Having walked the ordinary river off limits.

              I I II I           in
       exiting, leave behind the mark of getting away
of guiding          of clattering lonely places willingly held out for the flawless life.

Here swoon the wild encampment
sharp fingers in the earth
                         some of us cradled, herded.              Listen.

translated from the Ancient Greek of Euripides

Medea, she of masterful manipulation, drives the chorus to support her plan to escape being exiled (in what turns out to be a series of exile acts). My idea was to induce sparagmos, the sensation of being torn apart—a classically Greek amusement—and to follow up by literally tearing the work apart.

This translation underwent several transformations. First, I translated sections of Euripides’ Medea from Ancient Greek. Then I tracked alternate English translations from Medea and from the Bacchae—to instill the work with Bacchic stepping—and formed the foundation of a hybrid text via a cut-up machine. This was combined with a few phrases from my own interpretations of the Medea figure and folded into the fragmented material. The resulting collage model included antiquated words and verbs to implicate thrown gestures—in keeping with the nature of Medea’s situation, that of being tossed out, which also indicated a double thrownness from herself (in the final act of filicide) and from the unsympathetic state.

This is a project of broken ends, reformed starts, staccato’d and amalgam parts that help to situate and trace the passage of Medea in her dynamic turning room. The poem is filmic, noting her foundations as water, clattering horror and Socratic trick. Her potentials are thicknesses and galleries of binding.

Found notation marks another system of turning and ciphering, reflecting the tendency of the language-image to delay, hinder, and to both frame and unframe surrounding context. Cinders form from the vitals of alertness, wading, offing, beckoning. What is left is the predicament of leavings, the remnants of what once was and a clawing to get past surface. Medea’s falling is both a celebration and a meditation on falling. Medea’s remainder is a weaving of vigorous interruptions in narrative, where what is left over can constitute a new practice of entering. Why? Because pooling makes a bad citizen.


Source texts:
Euripides. Bacchae. Trans. Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999.
Euripides. Medea. Trans. David Kovacs. Ancient Greek text via Perseus online.
Euripides. Medea (film). Trans. Robinson Jeffers. Featuring Zoe Caldwell as Medea (1983).

Euripides (c. 485–c. 406 B.C.E.) was an Athenian tragedian. He is known to have composed ninety-two plays, of which nineteen are extant. Alkestis, first performed in 438 B.C.E., is the earliest of these and was part of a tetralogy with the lost plays Telephos, Alkmaion in Psophis, and Cretan Women.

Wanda O'Connor divides her time between the UK and Montreal. Formerly a classics scholar, she is now a doctoral candidate in Critical and Creative Writing at Cardiff University. Her peripatetic poetry is concerned with the contemporary projective and explores notions of pathology and hesitation within the spatial architecture of the page. Recent work is available or forthcoming in Magma, Datableed, Poetry Wales, and The Best Canadian Poetry 2014. Her latest chapbook is damascene road passaggio (above/ground press).