Anastasios Mhalopoulas reviews John Tripoulas’s Polytropos, and Scott Cairns’ Correspondence with My Greeks, in Ergon Greek/American Arts and Letter.
“A professor of mine attributed to the poet Richard Howard a phrase he repeated all the time: “There is no such thing as reading in poetry, only re-reading.” I have since found the statement to be utterly true, especially when the poems at hand warrant such care. Poems should be handled slowly to track the sinews of form, to observe their aural topography on the tongue, and then one should step away, reflect, only to return to see them anew, to see how each line builds upon previous lines, and how whole poems work in conversation with other poems, and with preceding histories and myths. In a poem I often re-read, that I am in fact still learning to read, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats writes:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both…
Keats addresses and re-address the urn in a kind of unending apostrophe, a form of ekphrastic re-reading that draws the reader into the poem, creating an innate tension between the art-work Keats aims to describe and the undercurrent of grief he feels regarding his own mortality, but also after the loss of his mother and brother. In a sense, the urn becomes a kind of stand-in for art itself, and the work of a poet specifically. Every object, material or imaginary, we write and rewrite again, our words aiming to “haunt about the shape of” what came before us, what we re-inscribe with each artistic act.”
