Kids, Poetry…What is Happening to Me? The Holidays Apparently Make Me Sensitive.

Anyway. I am super into the Roman Empire right now. It is today to me what all things French Revolution were to me a month ago. Anyone who knows me or who has caught some little quips on my sidebar knows that I despise about 95% of all of the poetry that I have ever read; and I have read quite a lot of it. I am not going to go into which poets I like and which ones I don’t. Most of the ones that I like lived in Paris between 1900-1930. Most of the ones that I don’t like live in America between 1975-present. And slam poetry and “def” poetry are godawful. Get a fucking DJ. Ok, I strayed from the point again.

So if I despise poetry this much, then imagine how I feel about Love Poetry. Just typing the words makes me want to microwave my fingers. However, there was a Roman poet/satirist named Catullus who lived in the first century B.C. who transformed the love poetry (ugh) of the Greeks and made it more personal and as far as I know it was all written about one woman. And in poems he covers every aspect of the emotion of love: the good…. the initial excitement, the nervousness, passion, sex, lust, comfort, everyday being better than the one before. And the bad: the boredom, the deception, the vanity, the games, the jealousy, the anger, the heartbreak, everyday being worse than the one before. And the thing is, people have been writing the exact same emotions for the past 2000 years, and most of their words don’t work very well. There are very few that do work. Very, very few. So for the most part people have just been recycling Catullus in song and word. Have all of our emotions already been felt for us? Anyhow, Catullus died alone and bitter at the age of 30. I would recommend looking into him a little, and the Romans in general. If you don’t know about the life of Julius Caesar, you should really read a book about him. His life was quite interesting to say the least. Here is a Catullus poem that I like, and the last line I like quite a lot. There is some historical significance of this poem that I will not go into…

Far greater than Jove
the man who can sit
undaunted while watching and hearing you
laughing so sweetly-

while I on my part
am deprived of my senses
if only, Lesbia [his pseudonym for his muse] I catch a glimpse of you:
voiceless and tongue-tied

I feel a faint fire
steal over my limbs;
blood pounds in my ears, the light in my eyes
is shrouded in midnight

(leisure, Catullus, leisure is your disease.
It’s leisure that gives you leave to play the fool.
Rich cities have been pulled down by too much leisure,
kings have been ruined.)