Stefene Russell, writer and poet, is currently Culture Editor for St. Louis Magazine and Executive Editor for At Home Magazine. You can read blog posts from her regularly on St. Louis Magazine’s arts blog, Look/Listen, and listen to her read Ovid at the Pulitzer, Saturday, August 29.

So you know you’re a great poet when your images are so sticky they become the adhesive by which an entire literary tradition is pasted together. As Lorin Cuoco pointed out in an earlier post, western literature waterfalled out of the Metamorphoses, including the works of Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. The text’s also the primary source for a good number of our universally understood metaphors—Icarus shows up in James Joyce as well as Nine Inch Nails. 

Ovid has street cred. So we do him no disservice to bring up one of his less influential, and more eccentric works: the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, literally “Cosmetics for a Woman’s Face,” though more gracefully translated as “The Art of Beauty.” It’s written in elegiac couplets, like love poetry, and extols the virtues of makeup. The poem (or at least the 100 lines that survive) includes recipes for beauty potions, including an acne remedy made from “pale lupins and windy beans,” to which has been added “white lead and the scum of ruddy nitre and Illyrian iris.” According to scholar Patricia Watson, it is a parody of Virgil’s Georgics, a didactic poem about agriculture that dispensed advice on growing legumes, as well as keeping truffle pigs and beehives. Copying lines from the poem is a punishment at Eton—it’s that compelling—but the spirit of Medicamina Faciei Femineae reminds me of contemporary poet Robin Schiff’s really wonderful little book, Worth (Kuhl House Poets, 2002). Schiff, like these very very very old poets, nimbly combines the plain facts of the material world with a sparkly breath of pneuma, writing about high fashion in order to “inquire about making, buying, selling, and stealing in the material world, the natural landscape, and the human soul.” The title is a double play, referring both to the concept of value as well as to Charles Frederick Worth, the Brit who dominated the French fashion world during the Victorian era. In her poem “Chanel No. 5,” she writes: 

Waterfall gown with water-
fowl sleekness embroidered so as to rise
with the speed of light while
not in motion; slit placed
to stride from standstill to escape
as a leopard, monkey, or fox might hear an en-
emy in a dark brush

One part Coco, one part chthonic menagerie—I also sense a truffle pig, or maybe some windy beans, waiting to cause trouble just out of frame. Schiff is one of the few modern poets that comes to my mind who can, like Ovid and his literary descendant Dante, talk about cheek rouge or demons and at the same time talk about politics, or God, without mentioning either one. That girl knows her classics—and you can hear it, and feel it, when you read her poetry.–Stefene Russell