Tuesday, December 05, 2006

"Let Us Compare Mythologies..."

Write a poem -- say a dramatic monologue -- from the point of view of a character from the Bible and just try to get it published in today's literary journals... you will find this a particularly hard go. This is just not cool today. You will probably end up having to resort to the cloying sub-realms of "Spiritual" journals. Ibid for almost anything that comes out of our greco-roman mythological tradition. Ibid for other mythological traditions, generally considered too obscure (they're all obscure). Except perhaps Icharus. Icharus is particularly emblematic of our times, as our planet warms and our wings melt, as we veer closer to the sun.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So you have to be sneaky about it and have it not be obvious on the surface that it is a Bible story! :-)

This is actually a change, isn't it? 15 years or so ago there were lots of revisions of Bible stories (Elinor Wilner's come to mind immediately) and Greek-Roman myths popping up. The issue reminds me of C. Dale Young's recent post about the patterns he had identified in the submissions he receives for NER.