• Recall this Book 55: David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld

    Author(s):
    Elizabeth Ferry, David Ferry, Roger Reeves
    Date:
    2021
    Subject(s):
    Poetry
    Item Type:
    Podcast
    Tag(s):
    poetics
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/gyx1-cb67
    Abstract:
    "Their tongues are ashes when they'd speak to us" David Ferry, Resemblance. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from time to time, especially from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David's poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and "listening to a conversation/With two or three others Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?" Roger reads "Grendel's Mother," in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel's mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he'd have to die.
    Notes:
    https://doi.org/10.48617/pod.258
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Podcast     Show details
    Pub. URL:
    https://newbooksnetwork.com/55-david-ferry-roger-reeves-and-the-underworld
    Publisher:
    Brandeis University
    Pub. Date:
    05/27/2021
    Episode:
    55
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    9 months ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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