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. I used Pythia to say something I wanted to say about the strange magic of the woman and the encounter. 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