Amazing how working on a poem or two helps. I swear it’s my version of religion; this is how I talk my way back to God.
Struck by how, um, CHRISTIAN this stuff is of late –“Frontier”, “Suicide Notes” both have strong Biblical motifs.
And I can’t think of too many poets less Xian than me…just working the myths that I know best, I think.
Dark Matter 
December 23rd, 2003 at 9:08 pm
Too true.
He was a bastard, after all.
December 23rd, 2003 at 8:53 pm
>And I can’t think of too many poets less Xian than me…just working the myths that I know best, I think.
Bah. Screw the dogma. You and JC would get on famously. He was a pacifistic anti-Imperial revolutionary, after all. With a penchant for wine.
December 23rd, 2003 at 5:26 pm
Glad you’re feeling better & hey, god has an awful lot to answer for. Right now, so does Santa, since the rat bastard brought me a cold for xmas.
I haven’t been religious since I gave up Catholicism at around 10, but I’ve played Mary Magdalene in two different musicals & have an chapbook that’s about half bible-themed poems. Just call me a mythology junkie. Maybe there’s a support group somewhere for us, with the ghost of Joseph Campbell running the meetings.
I reference other mythologies, but for me using very familiar Bible imagery makes it a lot easier to set up an entire premise that is assumed as part of the poem & then reinforced/taken apart/subverted/whatever in the poem. You get a whole bunch of ideas & story points to play with absolutely free, without needing to put them directly in the text.
Talking about Anansi or White Buffalo Woman outside their cultural context takes a lot more explaining if you’re trying to reach a mainstream audience, so I find them more effective when I’m trying to present an idea as fresh (even if the idea’s been around forever), instead of changing or supporting an existing cultural view.