D.M. Spitzer may I publish you? [by Philip Brady]

I am a sucker for those baseball stadium marriage proposals. The private moment gloriously public. The fan cam. The mock-embarrassment. The roar of the crowd. So, I thought I'd give it a try here, on the Best American Poetry Blog.

Last night, I spoke on the phone with a man I'd never met, D. M. Spitzer. He had submitted his manuscript, "A Heaven Wrought of Iron" to Etruscan for consideration. It's a long poem that is also a poetic reading of The Odyssey. Not criticism, or commentary, or pastiche. A companion, perhaps. A new rendering, in the mode of Alice Oswald's Memorial and Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey and Chris Logue's War Music. I loved it. It felt immediate, yet arrived from a far place--maybe an ancient blog excavated near Hisarlik, Anatonia. 

I told Mr. Spitzer that Etruscan was very interested, and that I'd be in touch again very soon with a decision.  

Mr. Spitzer said that he hadn't published sections of the manuscript in periodicals, because the work depended on the accretion of the voice, the lapping rhythms of an idiom that seem familiar yet strange, like dream echoes. So I'll refrain from quoting passages here. Bad marketing, perhaps, but this is my first public proposal.

Still, I make my plea before the assembled audience of BAP from the box seats of the blogosphere, in the knowledge that I will have departed the field before a response can be registered, and that the stadium will have to hold its breath until the publication date in the Spring of 2016, though of course they can check updates at www.etruscanpress.org.

D.M. Spitzer, will you accept my proposal of publication of "A Heaven Wrought of Iron"? I promise to take good care of it. Please call or write at your earliest convenience.

 

Later this morning....

D.M. Spitzer has accepted my proposal. I'm thrilled. The crowd roars. Here's a cutting from "A Heaven Wrought of Iron" forthcoming from Etruscan in 2016.

 

odyssey i:  turning

  

What is man but turning

out of himself towards

a beyond of difference,

into the region where risk swarms

in the wreckage and buries

the vast reflectivity of air

down into dust? 

 

Who but a god might sing

this flotsam and jetsam creature,

the turning already into otherness,

the othering itself?

  

 

“What I will say is bent and wanders

because it knows its course”

[Od. 1.179]

 

 “You are the child of suffering.

Upon your face, in your eyes

beauty lingers

for an instant, then

it takes you with it.

 

Remember all those beautiful ones

who once stormed and raised the dust

in their lengthening shadows?

They ran with your father

and they have gone beyond the sea.

 

You are the same.”

 

Now muster the only

human reply,

son of pain,

filled with the clear breath

of divinity:

 

“I do not know myself.”

  

At the end of speech

a grey shimmer

shakes the air

and is already gone.

 

Behind you and above

in the thin square of light

and red painted tiles,

the heavy, dark wing-beat

of the goddess

pulses the air

around you

alone

 

and her figure is a

charcoal cloud-bird

drawn on a cave wall,

a vulture’s penetrating

shadow with the sharp eyes

of an owl in the dark.

  

Beneath the heavy cloak of darkness

let a foot

fall

where you cannot see.

 

A god has cleared the way.

 

                                                                                                                                 whole night through

there

veiled and alone

[Od. 1.443]

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Creative Thesis: “A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey,” with Richard Jackson. Who is Richard jackson? I loved these stanzas--beautiful, provocative, satisfying beyond the reading. Brilliance. Thank you.