To piggy back on Amy’s interview with Carl Springer, I wanted to elaborate on what our Classicists, Carl and his wife, Avery will be doing on Saturday from 4:45-5:15 pm. Since our marathon is conducted in English and not the original Latin, I jumped at the opportunity to have some of our readers read Ovid in its true form. Avery will start reading at 4:45 pm in Latin for about seven minutes before switching to read the same passage in English. Carl will do the same thing for his reading slot at 5:00 pm. Read the rest of this entry »

Carl Springer, Professor of Classics at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, describes Ovid, the Metamorphoses, and why he thinks it’s a good idea to revisit the 2,000-year-old poem. He and his wife, Avery Springer, Chair of the Classics Department at John Burroughs School, will both be reading this Saturday–in Latin.

Chris King is creative director of Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media, and editorial director of The St. Louis American newspaper. He reads at 3:45 p.m. on Sunday.

I suppose I am still not quite over the exceedingly pleasant surprise that The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is hosting a marathon reading of the Metamorphoses by Ovid. You see, I had thought Ovid was, if not my secret, then the secret of people like me, and I didn’t think there were all that many of us, at least not in St. Louis, and certainly not running august art institutions in St. Louis. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, August 20, 7-8pm, Pulitzer Senior Curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra and Kress Interpretive Fellow Hannah Fullgraf as well as St. Louis Poetry Center Consultant Lorin Cuoco were guests on KDHX 88.1FM’s Literature for the Halibut. They, along with hosts Ann Haubrich and Jane Ellen Ibur, read sections of the Metamorphoses and discussed A Marathon Metamorphoses. Stream in the show’s podcast here.

August 30 marathon reader Elizabeth Ketcher is Executive Director and founder of StudioSTL, a non-profit, in the Grand Center Arts District of St. Louis, which empowers youth through writing programs. You can find StudioSTL  young authors’ published works in bookstores or online.

I confess I haven’t read all fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Okay, I haven’t read even one. When I tell my friends that I am participating in the Pulitzer’s marathon reading, they casually say, “Oh, yeah. I read that in college.” Huh? All fifteen books? I learned that my friends (and husband) are confused. Not Kafka, The Metamorphosis!  This is OVID, Metamorphoses! Duh. Read the rest of this entry »

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.  Read the rest of this entry »

It is interesting to note when a translator comes to his text. For his next book Mandelbaum retreated, back to the Greeks, to Homer, but does not, as most translators do, begin with the Iliad. It appears through dates of publication, for some time at least, that the Odyssey and Ovid were companions, with the fanciful lies of Odyseuss book to book with the stories Ovid tells. After all, Ovid is, above all, a storyteller, as is Odyseuss or Ulysses, as we have him from the Latin poet. (I’m not saying there isn’t a little blood in the Odyssey but the Cyclops produces a few more laughs than Cassandra does.) Read the rest of this entry »

Hannah Fullgraf, a Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Pulitzer and the event manager for A Marathon Metamorphoses, gives event details and describes what it was like to organize an 18-hour reading.

After weeks of calling, asking, emailing, confirming, and confirming again, the nitty-gritty of the super-read has been (practically) finalized. You can peruse the current schedule for A Marathon Metamorphoses on the Pulitzer’s events and programs page. The list might be tweaked as the event draws near, but overall, the line-up shows a group of people with noteworthy roles in St. Louis, who I predict will be excellent public readers.

And if you would like to RSVP to this event on Facebook, you can do so through our Facebook page.

If you pull out the Latin text of the Metamorphoses, as I have through the excellence of the Loeb Classical Library, what you will see are not English lines of verse but drab prose. Ovid is not alone, of course. It happens with Homer, Virgil and Dante, all the Greek and Latin writers in the Loeb Library. That’s fine for Plato’s Republic but not for poetry. (And we don’t have time here for the debate about Plato being a poet.) Read the rest of this entry »

Judy Mann, a curator at Saint Louis Art Museum, describes Joachim Wtewael’s idealized rendition of Ovid’s Cephalus and Procris, a dramatic couple who can be read about in Book 7 of the Metamorphoses. The painting is in the Pulitzer’s Main Gallery for Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer, and is on loan from the St. Louis Art Museum.