Parmenides in Minneapolis

Parmenides in Minneapolis is a book-length sequence of poems which employ, for the most part, a 9-line stanza, featuring a rhyme scheme [a-b-a-b-c-a-b-c-a] which is very roughly modeled on the logical structure of the argument presented in the ancient poetic fragments (untitled) of the pre-Socratic poet-philosopher Parmenides of Elea. This book is the first volume of a projected longer work, which has the preliminary title of Shield of Mnemosyne.

Parmenides in Minneapolis is the outcome of a first encounter, relatively late in life, with the eponymous poet-philosopher from Elea (an ancient Greek city located in southern Italy, near present-day Naples). Upon reading these ancient fragmentary writings I was immediately struck by their fusion of poetry and philosophy : a flinty, adamantine quest for ultimate truth, couched in a poetic speech of fabulous, mythical, dramatic intensity. Parmenides’ narrated encounter with the fearsome, awe-inspiring Goddess of the Sun, driving her four horses – who leads him beyond an inherently fraudulent, illusory human condition, onto the Way of absolute Truth – quickly brought to mind Dante’s parallel encounter with the immortal Beatrice in his Divina Commedia.

Parmenides’ forthright quest, aided by divine powers, took place during an age of tumultuous change in his Mediterranean world. So in this work, I attempt to yoke together thought and poetry, metaphysics and politics, in response to a sense of terrible upheaval and crisis – presenting an ominous threat to my own seemingly ordered, civilized, American world of democracy, law and power. My poems plunge into a similar poetic idiom of judgement and imagination – yet yoked to my own ordinary, local “Minneapolis” actuality, tangled in a time of moral uncertainty and political corruption – of inescapable suffering and calamity.