HOMER WAS AN EPIC POET Idiots’Books Volume XXIX
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HOMER WAS AN EPIC POET
By Matthew Swanson Illustrated by Robbi Behr
To the siren song
Homer was an epic poet. He told a tale or two. We quote him, carve his noble bust, and drop his name at happy hour. He is our compass and our calling card, our literary anchor. But how much do we know about him really—this ancient bard, this storied Greek of yore?
This much we know: Homer wore sandals on his feet. He was blind but had a rare perspective. He lived in Greece before it was a trendy destination. Homer flicked his pen and made the world. But not an actual pen, of course. And not the actual world.
He was, apparently, a really good poet. We know because he’s in anthologies. We know because we have to read his work in school. Are the lines themselves remarkable? Certainly there are more attractive poems we could read in second period— but no others authored prior to the 8th century, B.C. Sometimes, it is enough to have come first.
When Homer came up with a poem, he didn’t write it down. Instead, he remembered every word. The Odyssey is long. The Iliad is even longer. What do we make of his approach? Did he have a really sexy voice? Was he trying to appeal to the ladies who gathered around ancient Greek campfires?
One might argue that Homer could have put a memory like that to better use—recording the average rainfall or the price of wine or the sundry other riddles of an early age. We wonder why he did not inscribe his words in stone. It’s true this might have yielded shorter epic poems, but we’re not sure that would have been a bad thing.
Homer’s parents did not want him to be an epic poet. His father hoped his son would join the family business, selling urns. His mother prayed he’d meet a nice Greek girl. He stole a horse at age 14, rode off, and trampled a philosopher. Some say that this inspired him. He learned that he was capable of greatness, or at least, of changing norms. In his final years, Homer wrote a memoir reflecting on his adolescent pains. By all reports, it was a riveting account, rife with humiliating, yet instructive, anecdotes. But no one else had a sharp enough mind to remember it all, and so the story is lost to posterity.
In college, Homer bloomed into a toga-wearing kind of guy in constant party mode. Back then, they lacked the means to make light beer, so Homer drank the hard stuff day and night. Things like the Cyclops and the crazy hot chicks who kill you if you’re not tied to the mast make more sense in this context.
The things we don’t know about Homer could fill a book. Only, we’d make sure it was a real book that we actually wrote on actual paper, not some windbag poem that someone else transcribed after listening to a bunch of epic rambling. In this way, we feel superior to Homer. In this way, Homer has a lot to learn from us.
I wonder if Homer smoked and sulked around in black and said pretentious things? Was he insecure deep down, in spite of all his learning and accomplishment? Was he just as troubled as we are? Was it just as hard to be a person way back then?
Homer was a bachelor, but not a favorite of the ladies. Even back in ancient Greece, the girls were interested in the bankers and attorneys. Even then, poets were pretty much penniless dupes, even the ones with impressive memories and great hair. Homer had great hair. And still the girls were not impressed. What does this tell us of his other flaws?
Was Homer satisfied? Was Homer fulfilled? We consult the timeline of man’s progress, and assume that he was not. Homer did not have a smart phone. He did not know the pleasures of surround sound. If only Homer could have had a crack at Jesus, he might have found salvation. It must have been so dark before the advent of compassion. Let’s all lend our hearts to bygone Homer, trembling soulless and unredeemed in his dusty Grecian grave.
Homer sits in a rowboat in the middle of the Mediterranean. Okay, he’s actually only a couple hundred yards off the coast, but feels like he’s miles from shore, so homeless and adrift. Homer’s back is to the sand, his empty sockets facing out to sea, picturing his heroes adrift in epic waters. He takes note of what he sees and feels. He ignores the sounds of volleyball behind him, ignores the lifeguard’s megaphone. He would wear earplugs, but they haven’t been invented. He would row farther out but worries he might not get back. He would sit in his armchair and just imagine how the oar feels in his calloused hands. But this is how he works. We will not fault him for it. Every writer has his tick, his madness, his given way of getting at the language.
When Homer applied to MFA programs, he didn’t even get a sniff of the waiting list. The person who read Homer his rejection letters left out all the mean parts, revising to imply that, while Homer’s poetry was really, really good, the university had recently suffered a reduction in fellowship support.
Homer’s legacy invites so many questions. How short can a poem be and still be considered “epic”? Can “epic” be a measure of substance instead of length? If Homer had written a really good haiku, would ancient Greek surfers have walked by saying, “Epic, Dude”? Bold essays have been written on the subject, with no consensus reached.
But what do we know about Homer? Really know about the man? He was a poet. He was from Crete or some other place around there. He lived before the invention of air conditioning. He was blind. These four facts are enough to build a life around, enough to truly understand a man.
Homer was his own bird. And if he hadn’t been, who would high school freshmen look to as the fall semester starts? Whose words would English teachers parse for higher meaning? The wonders of Homer are too great to be contained in the 50-minute lecture. Hence the invention of the two-week unit.
We’ll start with The Iliad with its wars and threats and bloodshed. We’ll end with The Odyssey—with its monsters, brawls, and sense of resolution. We think about the nature of conflict and the blessings of home, wondering how someone could know so much about both. Homer shows us what it means to be a person, revealing our selves to ourselves through good stories well told. He wanted us to read his words aloud. We don’t, of course. We scan the lines for plot and miss the music. We cling to the synopsis, denying poor Homer his due. Once, on a green hilltop overlooking white sand, people heard his poems as intended, letting the meter and the language spill out across the space between the islands.
The ladies and I are saving money for a trip to Greece. We’re going to visit the resting place of Homer, to pay our last respects. His grave is unmarked, of course, and not specifically located. He might have been buried on any Greek island, and so we will visit them all, raising blended toasts to Homer at every port of call.
Homer couldn’t see the sky, but what could he see? Those black velvet curtains must have been so beautiful. I think he saw the water lap against the blackened hulls of his heroes’ ships as they approached the bloody shores of Ilium. Homer saw the whole wide world, unveiling every bit of it. Did he understand the things it lacked, the vacuums it would someday fill? Did he know about America? The Internet? Sno Cones? Did he lament his early appearance in the endless march of man? Or was he content to lay a first foundation, a slab of crumbling macadam meant to keep us all from crashing through the hollow earth he was so desperate to describe?
It’s somewhat chilly, somewhat drab this morning on the sunporch of my parents’ home. I do not understand the world before me. If Homer were here, he’d have some lines to amplify the small, good things that I can sense, if barely. He’d turn this dismal morning into a quiet web of words that we all could enjoy on a slightly higher level.
Homer was a filter, a corrupter—turning being into language and language into pleasure. He knew that what we see is but a shadow of itself the moment it submits to words, when syllables spring up to give it form. But how else to make that dance from eye to mind to mouth to ear? Homer wept to know that he was not a perfect messenger, that all he saw was compromised by art, his endless ironwork. The tiny hammers of his mind warped the pure into the beautiful. He hopes that we can’t tell the difference.
Homer, I do you no service. Homer, I’d like to visit your dead bones and beg forgiveness.
The trees grow up around us and contain some specks of Homer. The throats of birds repeat his song. The dying light contains his dictionary. Homer should be glad he never had to listen to the rumbling of trucks. His world was filled with other kinds of violence, better brands of distraction.
A songbird crows the day’s first moment. We’ve missed it from our beds. But Homer was already by the water. He could feel the sun before it rose above the cold face of the sea. He made a note, remarked on the arrival, and found a metaphor to capture how the light looked as it struck his forehead. He shaped some adjectives to show precisely how the goatherds walked within the thinning darkness in the hills.
Homer knows the world today. It is exactly like yesterday and yet completely different. He sees the small distinctions. It’s what made him Homer. It’s why we’re sitting here, puzzling over translations of translations, hoping to get it exactly right so that we can be there too, craning in the morning air, before the sun slants up to its noonday height and the shadows grow so short and unremarkable.
Homer dead and gone. It happens as the planet shifts. We miss you and revere you. We reinvent you now and then. And also we degrade you.You seem to bear no grudge. We mock you and inflate you. But always you persist, a senseless cork in the eternal sea. Homer, we have forgotten you, have forgotten the scent of your cloak. But we care for your words, bringing them with us today. We stack them up until they touch the sky. And still we cannot reach you. Perhaps that’s what you meant.
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This Idiots’Books creation is a collaboration between Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, neither of whom has ever been to Greece, but who both enjoy feta cheese, classical allusions, and movies starring Olympia Dukakis.
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Matthew Swanson is a writer/harmonica player/English major who sprang full-formed from the head of Zeus. His most memorable experiences include flying too close to the sun, stealing fire from the gods, getting lost in a vast underground maze, having his liver eaten daily by a vulture, and spending three months each year eating pomegranates in Hades. Robbi Behr is an illustrator/commercial salmon fisherwoman/art history major who, while standing in the Melpomene Gallery at the Louvre, had a life-altering epiphany. Gazing at the Roman copies of ancient Greek statuary, she was inspired by their progression from unhewn stone to carefully rendered artifacts containing the full sweep of human culture and consciousness. This led her to an archaeology program at Princeton, which she ultimately abandoned because learning Greek was just too hard. They live together in the hayloft of a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.
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Homer Was an Epic Poet Copyright © March 2011 Idiots’Books Volume 29 www.idiotsbooks.com See also: www.robbibehr.com www.dafr.co
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