Pythia - The Poet Speaks

Pythia arose from The Education of a Young Gentleman, a nonfiction short story which tells of the late-night encounter between a 19-year-old boy and a 29-year-old married woman in a highly charged sexual atmosphere. She is fixed and unattainable at the conclusion of the poem, like the characters on Keats Grecian urn.

My style tends to be sardonic. My words are on the definite side, they don't caress each other. My first sense of literature was from the 19^th century writers. My introduction into culture and politics was high school Latin. Pythia owes much to Catullus and Lesbia,  Thackeray and Vanity Fair, Eliot and Prufrock. 

Why poetry? A poem is an attempt to take the human, the historical, and the finite to the realm of the universal and infinite, which, on the face of it, is impossible using the materials of this world. Yet I try to distill feeling, emotion, what it is to be alive, and moments in life, in order to create an alternative world. I’m not above using fiction, rhythm and beauty to get at the truth. 

Each word carves out a specific cultural niche. Reading a poem allows you to enter that world and those niches, albeit not always what the writer has in mind. 

Poetry invites you to let loose; Pythia seeks power and sensuality.