Joe Safdie, from SCHOLARSHIP: “Ovid in Exile” & “Coda: On a British Literary Debate”

 Ovid in Exile

           After some years at the height of fame in the center of the

           world, he was abruptly exiled to the far reaches of the

            empire on the weather-beaten shore of the Black Sea, 

            where, he complained bitterly, the barbarous

            inhabitants couldn’t even understand Latin.  

                 --David L. Pike, “Ovid,” The Longman Anthology

                    of World Literature

when leaving St. Elizabeths

Pound said that Ovid
had had it worse

his last nine years

on the Black Sea coast
modern Romania     not too bad

except for the Romanian part

he wrote his last poems there
Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto

letters to the emperor

and his third wife
to whom he longed to return

belying his reputation

as a womanizer.
But Augustus Caesar –

Virgil’s patron

and a priggish moralist
in Antony and Cleopatra,

HBO’s Rome, and all other

known histories –
exiled him, blaming

his scandalous poetry

(a joke even then) –
he had just worked six years

on the Metamorphoses,

more tenuous
than the endlessly repeated

thesis statement

of The Aeneid:
“This is you, Romans!”

*

            This study considers exile as a place of genuine suffering
            and a metaphor for poetry's marginalization from the
            imperial city . . .  [u]nderstanding Ovid’s exile as a
            poetic place, a literary construct deeply informed by
             an actual reality.
                         --Matthew M. McGowan, Ovid in Exile

I killed a woman

I lied to her
abandoned her

and as a result

have been exiled
to southern California

I’m guilty and my punishment

shows it      myths arise
from ordinary events

careless remarks

offhand slights
the everyday being

taken for granted

all in the name of poetry
Omnia vincet Amor: et nos cedamus Amori.

“Love conquers all; we too must yield to Love” -- Virgil

Et mihi cedet Amor
“Love too shall yield to me” – Ovid

*

            Virgil seems to have been homosexual, Horace
            liked Greek flute-girls and mirror-lined bedrooms,
            Tibullus and Propertius suffered, with articulate
            masochism, under demanding or indifferent
            mistresses.  Ovid may not have been the ideal
            husband, but at least he tried.                                                                                 
              ---David Green, Introduction to The Erotic Poems

his greatest transformation

was himself,
Roman sophisticate hurtled back

to primitive times,

Geats and Greeks
and Sarmatians,

riding down the streets

on horseback or tall bicycles
with their ever-present quivers

of poisoned arrows and surfboards

which they are not reluctant to use.
They dressed in skins,

wore their hair and beards long,

went about armed . . .
wine froze in the jar

and was served in pieces . . .

fawning notes to the emperor
composed in the same meter

as the erotic poems

that had gotten him exiled.
No longer seeking out scandal

but mocking the official line,

the author of The Art of Love
never wrote about it again . . .

Coda: On A British Literary Debate

What is “fantasy”?

To what extent is Grendel
an analogue to marauding tribes
and the poem an Anglo-Saxon dream
of liberation? The Arthurian legend
started with Virgil’s Aeneid,

even more fictitious

than Romulus and Remus,
but it did give Rome some
cosmopolitan flair, somewhat removed
from their jackass rustic morality –
the Republic, still invoked

by followers of Ayn Rand,

lasted 500 years, until Augustus,
27 BC, Virgil changes poetry
into minor court entertainment,
Ovid discovers sex, realism
follows romance, Philip Larkin wakes

from Uncle William’s

enchantment – “all that crap
about masks and Crazy Jane . . .
It all rang so completely unreal” –
the princess awakes, Orpheus
returns from the underworld

 
 

[Author’s Note On “Scholarship”: There are some lines in Pound’s early version of The Cantos that have always stuck with me: 

                       say I take your whole bag of tricks,
       Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing's an art-form,
       Your Sordello, and that the modern world
      Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in

They’re highly conditional propositions, of course, but this manuscript is indeed a kind of rag-bag in which I’ve tried to stuff a lot of things – history, myth, contemporary politics, speculations about poetry and the poetry world, autobiographical narrative, criticism, prose – while still writing “poetry.” Hope it works, for at least a few people . . .]