Author2Author: Tom Payne & Zachary Mason

It’s been a long time since we’ve had an Author2Author conversation on Beatrice, but a few months back, when I received paperback copies of Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity and The Lost Books of the Odyssey relatively close to one another, I got to thinking that it would be fun to pair Tom Payne and Zachary Mason up and get them talking about our continuing relationship with the classical world, then see where the philosophical trail led them. (After they’d been talking to each other for a bit, I picked up on an idea that had been mentioned about reality television taking inspiration from mythology, and they ran with that, too!)

Zachary Mason: Your book draws parallels between modern celebrities and the Greek Olympians, twelve powerful gods whose spheres of influence cover more or less all of human experience. If there were twelve celebrity Olympians, who would they be, and what would be their spheres of influence?

Tom Payne: I’ve been reading your book with unpardonable stealth, and am greatly admiring it. I’m glad of your question, too, about modern equivalents to the Olympian gods. It’s really tempting to rattle off some answers (although I’ve been mulling this one over for a while now), but maybe I’ll hold back, (a) to maintain some suspense; (b) because who does what Artemis does?—certainly not Miley Cyrus; but mostly (c) because, now that I’ve been reading your book, I’m wondering if something big lies behind it, and I’d like to ask a question of my own.

About The Lost Books of the Odyssey: it’s splendidly unsettling. Your prose has all the calm and magic of myth, so that I’m seduced into the story-telling, so that your inspired deviations from the turns those myths take can startle the reader into thinking, “Hey, that’s not what happened! This would change western civilisation as we know it!” It makes me wonder how things would be if we had different myths.

Which leads me to my question—one I think would exercise us both. What do you think myth is for?

(more…)

15 April 2011 | author2author |

Rose Hunter, “The Statues of Illustrious Men”

These three
face the cathedral
and are the ones I can see from
where I’m sitting:
Marcelino García Barragán
(militar y gobernante),
a leg, a bite of torso,
a dangling arm;
Dr. Leonardo Oliva
(dr cientifico), bisected; and
Manuel M. Diéguez (general,
precursor, revolucionario);
sword obscured by the shrubs

beyond the fence and the inclining
lawn; leaves and red flowers
over his chest: an abandoned
pompom.

(—at the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres, Guadalajara)

To the River is a collection of poems from Rose Hunter. It also includes “Out of Detroit on the Greyhound” (originally published in Quay), “Walking into the Wynn, Las Vegas, and You Are Stitched Into” (Referential), “He Is No Pinkerton” (Juked), and “Even” (Leaf Press).

Hunter is also the founder of YB Poetry, an online journal that will be publishing its fourth issue this summer.

13 April 2011 | poetry |