Troy, Unincorporated (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Abbate, Francesca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226001202 ISBN 13: 9780226001203

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in Troy, Unincorporated offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer’s tragedy Troilus and Criseyde. The tale’s unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted “historic” downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the good courtly lover, suffers from the weeps, or, in more modern terms, depression. Pandarus, the hard-working catalyst who brings the lovers together in Chaucer’s poem, is here a car mechanic.

Chaucer’s narrator tells a story he didn’t author, claiming no power to change the course of events, and the narrator and characters in Troy, Unincorporated struggle against a similar predicament. Aware of themselves as literary constructs, they are paradoxically driven by the desire to be autonomous creatures—tale tellers rather than tales told. Thus, though Troy, Unincorporated follows Chaucer’s plot—Criseyde falls in love with Diomedes after leaving Troy to live with her father, who has broken his hip, and Troilus dies of a drug overdose—it moves beyond Troilus’s death to posit a possible fate for Criseyde on this “litel spot of erthe.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Francesca Abbate is associate professor of English at Beloit College. Her poetry has appeared in Field, Iowa Review, NEO, and Poetry, among others.

 

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Troy, Unincorporated

By FRANCESCA ABBATE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-00120-3

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................xi[Chorus:] Everything is half here.................................................................xiii[Psyche's Song:] Praise me, I told the water lilies, for I am half-invincible.....................3[Narrator:] Of eighth grade.......................................................................4[Criseyde:] How sadly my friends and I............................................................6[Pandarus:] Troilus I said we're just dumb boys you know..........................................8[Troilus:] Sniffly weather, the sky all prologue..................................................10[Criseyde:] In those days arrows were very magic..................................................12[Psyche:] On the walls, the usual Americana.......................................................14[Pandarus:] We made a sand woman on Harrington Beach..............................................16[Cassandra:] The halo—no mere incandescence.................................................21[Narrator:] The afternoon grew taller when a boy on Halsted.......................................23[Criseyde:] Like the friend following you.........................................................25[Troilus:] I was a boy. I listened to frog song...................................................27[Criseyde:] Already I miss Troy...................................................................29[Pandarus:] Slatternday Crumbday..................................................................31[Criseyde:] I didn't know who I was, we say.......................................................33[Troilus:] I watched him paint all he could draw..................................................35[Chorus:] We tried to remember....................................................................41[Narrator:] Our usual consolation of daisies......................................................43[Criseyde:] Dear (you know I never / rode horses well)............................................45[Troilus:] What lean pickings.....................................................................47[Criseyde:] I knew my would-be lover..............................................................50[Troilus:] Nightfall when I crossed...............................................................53[Criseyde:] By night my father's house shines.....................................................55[Cassandra:] Now the accrual of was. At Booth Lake, the body......................................57[Chorus:] Then came the sand trucks...............................................................61[Narrator:] We take the Hoan Bridge home..........................................................62[Criseyde:] If in any harbor......................................................................64[Criseyde:] It was like the old world sent me a letter............................................66[Criseyde:] The canister of Ajax glinting on the counter..........................................68[Criseyde:] Daily it storms: dams give out, a lake in the next county.............................70[Chorus:] The way fences open.....................................................................72Notes.............................................................................................75

Chapter One

    And so bifel, whan comen was the tyme
    Of Aperil, whan clothed is the mede
    With newe grene, of lusty Veer the pryme,
    And swote smellen floures white and rede,
    In sondry wises shewed, as I rede,
    The folk of Troie hire observaunces olde,
    Palladiones feste for to holde.

    Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (I.155–61)


    [PSYCHE'S SONG:]

    Praise me, I told the water lilies, for I am half-invincible,
    half-destructible, half-mad: am, in fact, a divine half

    and a half not, and it's lonely out here and hot,
    and half a lifetime has elapsed on this floating path

    with its canopy of poison sumac, its pale, half-dead
    orchids, the dreams of bog people hidden

    under the planks—so finely pored, so stubble-bladed,
    so adept at heat and loneliness, so not half—for who

    will praise me now, I who was too clever by half,
    who had an idea but no map: narrowing road, clearing,

    the sun like the secret shining in the dark halves of all things,
    like the improbable spirit—house in a wood,

    wet seed under the weight of thought?


    [NARRATOR:]

    Of eighth grade—
      tried reading the Comedies,
    as if to live in the forest naming the flowers
    and flighty things when really

    I was a fat girl
    hurtling the length of a shotgun apartment
    and crying bullet! when she leapt.

    The photo recalls me thus: of vellum, a gulping sheen,

    a blot under the crucifix
    in her red velvet blazer.
      Homeroom: paper plates, lemonade,
    someone's pink-candled birthday cake—

    I stayed at my desk. Penned, making real
      progress:

      Once she watched a house burn and thought
      a commotion of flamingos.
      Once the spring trees cast such delirious nets
      she left someone
      for someone with his hand on the next big thing
      and that was sexy.

      Dear So-and-So,
        I wanted to be a real scholar.

    Then March. Then April
    signed its proclamation of cloud—


    [CRISEYDE:]

    How sadly my friends and I
    go after the fallen straps
    of our tank tops
    as if worn by some

    dawning nostalgia
    for the way the wind
    gets to the picnic table
    where we've set

    the Campari and soda
    the bowl of potato chips
    the bowl of green olives

    Afternoon's in the offing

    we're a small herd
...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226001202
• ISBN 13: 9780226001203
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 90
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar