Mrs. Silva and I arrived at the
Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
about a half hour before my appointed reading time as part of A Marathon Metamorphoses. We were
welcomed by the helpful and gracious
Pulitzer personnel, who gave me my instructions: here's the
book, here's where we are now (Sarah Bryan Miller was reading when I arrived),
sit here now, move to the hot seat
when you're next in line, stand when the
producer tells you it's time, change places with the
previous reader, sit down and read until you see the
next reader standing and end at the next stanza break.
"I can do this," I thought. I've participated in marathon
readings of James Joyce's Ulysses before,
back when Left Bank Books hosted 24-hour dawn-to-dawn from "Stately, plump Buck
Mulligan" to "Yes" in the Central West End store. The best of those included a keg
of Guinness and Irish stew from Duff's.
At the Pulitzer
we were fueled by the light and air
of the marvelous space, the looming St.
Jerome (I think) to the
readers' left. In these marathon affairs you rarely know where your reading spot is going to land in the text. You hope you don't get a catalogue
of names with twisted pronunciations. You hope you get something sexy.
I got Ulysses, bragging, but more than that, chewing up Ajax, laying him down and
spitting him out. "While your worth lies/ in nothing but bulk, mine lies in
mind..../In me, the head indeed
outweighs the hand;/ all of my power
lies in intellect."
And that was my concluding line! Sweet. Then my state House rep.
Rachel Storch took over. Ulysses won the
prize--Achilles' armor and shield--and Ajax
conquered himself with his own sword, a purple flower springing from his blood,
since these are tales of
metamorphoses.
What a nice gathering
of folks we saw listening to Ovid read by many St. Louis voices. Old friends and
acquaintances, some we hadn't seen in years. It's amazing what a great old poem
may draw. Afterward, Chris King, St. Louis
American editor and frequent Playbill
contributor, was at the Taproom, the downtown eatery/brewery that was the home of last year's Rest Is Noise Reading Group. He was so happy for his city. "This
week I actually heard people arguing over which was better, the Mandelbaum translation or the
Humphries."
Not a bad argument to have in this old city that came together near the
confluence of two great rivers, where Huck and Jim passed by on their raft, and young Tom Eliot first tried his hand
at verse, where Scott Joplin played a ragtime tune for a young German conductor
of a fledgling orchestra, and Ike and Tina played shows early and late on both
sides of the river. St. Louis doesn't acknowledge its own magic
often enough. In a space of architectural grandeur was heard an old Roman's
prophecy come true: "...my lines/ will be on people's lips; and through all
time--/ if poets' prophecies are ever right--/my name and fame are sure: I
shall have life."
