Capitula
General Introduction
Introduction to Liber I (MMXXII); Carmina Renovata
Introduction to Liber II (MMXXIII); Carmina Instagraminea
-Introduction to the Collection
-Introduction to the Centos
Introduction to Liber I (MMXXII); Carmina Renovata
Introduction to Liber II (MMXXIII); Carmina Instagraminea
-Introduction to the Collection
-Introduction to the Centos
General Introduction
I have always loved words and wordplay, so poetry has been a playground of mine for as long as I have understood what poetry is and how it is different from prose. My Latin poetry is also a playground. Some of it may harken to specific words, phrases, verses, etc. from the past, but not all of it does. Those whose preference is neoteric may be disappointed in my lack of references. Those whose perspective is restricted to the rearview may be dismayed by the forward-focus in many of my pieces. Nevertheless, I do hope that my little poems will find their way into someone's collection of favorites. Educators are welcome to use my poetry in synchronous class settings. Please email me if you have any questions regarding content, copyright, meter, grammar, or possible errors.
Liber I (MMXXII)
Carmina Renovata
This is my first collection, but these are not the first Latin poems I've ever written. My goal with this collection was primarily to see what was possible. How many different meters could I play with, and what could I do with those meters? What happens if I do this instead of that? I was generally inspired by some general norms of Latin poetry, as you may well notice, but I did not intentionally seek out specific words or lines or phrases to reference directly in this collection, as far as I recall. It was more about using a historical language to describe a present moment and to dream about a possible future. The English translations are clunky and awkward as I was more concerned about making my Latin grammar clear than I was about composing poetic English versions of the same concepts I had already rendered into Latin verse. Hopefully this will make these poems more friendly to beginning and intermediate Latin students, even if advanced students and Latinists find the translations a bit irritating.
Amnis Felix, the image of a happy little river carrying greenery with it was the last poem I composed for this collection and was one I composed for a guest lecture on poetry composition. I liked it so much I decide to reuse it here, as the opening of the collection, setting the stage of a bunch of random things carried down on the current of my thoughts.
Carmina Mi Reperi uses and re-uses repetition. You can call me lazy if you want, but I did intend for the repetition to serve a purpose. Remember, these poems are places for experiments. This is not a kind of repetition that is often seen in Latin poetry, so why not? What happens if it is used? How does that change the experience of the poem? These were my questions. Embracing the idea that poets are bards and that bards are birds, I thought about the repetitive nature of a bird's song and how even though there are differences the major notes or overall tone is usually the same. I was also thinking about my goal to try to use as many meters as I could master, and how often I wished I could find another living Latin poet (there were fewer of us and more far apart at the time I was composing this one) so that I could ask them to show me how they had done theirs.
Nympheroti Pomario is to my husband, who had only just become my fiancé when I wrote my first mostly successful Latin poem (this is not that poem, but that first poem was also about him). This poem is placed after Carmina Mi Reperi because it also carries the idea that poets are bards and that bards are birds. I imagine my husband as a nymph, because woodworking is a hobby of his, and I use the Latin version of our family name: Pomarius (Abelseth means apple orchard). I imagine myself as a bird and maintain a theme of change and transformation. As Nympheros transforms trees into wooden objects, I, a bird, become a written note and then a song, held in the palm of a nymph's hand.
Fabula De Mure Avaro is generally inspired by the Fables of Phaedrus, which is the topic of my PhD Dissertation. I used a very strict variation of senarians because I was writing about ants, who were marching in strict formation, and I wanted to emphasize both the consistency and the inevitability of the outcome. The story itself was inspired by a conversation I'd been having with a friend about economics and personal responsibility, and some rather disturbing videos I found on the internet about ants consuming dead mice.
Astra Innumera was the first of my Latin poems to be published on the internet and it debuted at the Lupercal Blog in March of 2022. This was the confidence boost I needed to put the rest of this collection out there on my own website. You can read my longer commentary at the Lupercal Blog, but I wanted to note a few things that may make this poem easier to read and understand. First, there are a lot of elisions! I wanted to mimic the experience of being new, inexperienced, and nervous, which means mumbling and fumbling spoken words - there's even a hiatus between the end of line 12 and the beginning of line 13 to stumble through. The number words scattered throughout are meant to imitate mumbled counting, as if the narrator is counting out words, lines, and metrical feet while putting the poem together. It's meant to be as if a novice quilter is placing things in such a way that the stitches show in the final product.
Astronavis is more or less a love letter to the stars, the future, and science fiction / fantasy. This poem begins with a direct order given to a muse, which is immediately fulfilled. It may feel a little incomplete, and it might benefit from additional verses describing more detail about the starship or the interstellar excursion, but if it were those things, would it still be looking forward? This is not so much a conclusion as a promise that my journey has only just begun.
Liber II (MMXXIII)
Carmina Instagraminea
Content Note: violence in the context of war and school shootings is discussed but not described in detail
Introduction to the Collection
This is my second collection: six poems, all of which I composed specifically for this collection. As I mentioned in my introduction to Liber I Carmina Renovata, the last poem I included in that collection was Amnis Felix. That poem reminds me of the kinds of things posted in the kind of social media where the image or video is the focal point, though there might be some descriptive text accompanying it. Since my first collection was not so intentionally referential to ancient Latin poetry, I decided to make my second collection out of centos, which are quilted poems, cut and pasted out of someone else's work; I’m not sure how much more “referential” I can get than that. Each of the poems for this collection is short, clipped out of some ancient text, and reworked to apply to a modern context. In an effort to emphasize the modern context, each of these centos appears with an image or video providing a multimedia experience of reimagined ancient poetry. I’m also going to point out the importance of this collection existing in a digital space, whereas a printed copy could not have included a video.
Instagraminea, an obvious wordplay of a certain popular social media website, is built out of the Latin words instare (to stand upon, to impend, to menace) and the adjective form of gramen (wild grass or unkept underbrush). Social media in the modern world has a way of menacing when it seems that the flow of information, images, advertisements, video clips, and soundbites, has no end, and it also has the feeling of wildflower fields, where everything and anything will grow. Some posts become viral overnight, and some fade into oblivion. To look at it broadly is to appreciate the vast presence of humanity and, in many cases, a collective screaming “we exist”. To look at it deeply and notice every detail is to become enveloped in worlds that may not belong to us, and yet we have the feeling of being given a front row seat. I chose the original Latin poem patches based primarily on their use of gramen, as noted in the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary, as well as whether I felt I could make something new out of them that mirrored what I saw in my social media.
These centos are meant to be considered in pairs, and each pair corresponds to a type of content I often see in my own social media feeds. The first pair of centos are about some of our household cats, the second pair of centos are meant to be general commentary on the “thoughts and prayers” posts that tend to go around during traumatic events, and the third pair of centos are about me and one of my favorite videogames (Minecraft!). Taken altogether, they are haphazard and disunified, which is exactly how personal social media feeds are. We talk about what matters to us in the moment, and we might stay on one topic for a few posts, then shift to a different topic, and so on. This is a perfectly patchworked context for patchwork poems.
In my scansion, I have endeavored to remain faithful to the original rhythms of the original poems, such that they could be read aloud simultaneously and both sets of words would land on their beats at the same pace. In any communication, we always have the message that was intended and the message that was received; these are not always the same, even if the rhythm is identical. Each cento necessarily interacts with the context of its original and for this reason I have included the original texts I was working from (these are taken from those presented on The Latin Library online text database). The translations of the originals are my own. For all of the English translations of my centos in this collection, rather than prioritizing the grammar as I did for the first collection, I have aimed for a more idiomatic, smoothly readable English experience. I have not attempted to make my English especially poetic; when I do try to translate my Latin poetry into English poetry, intentionally as English poetry, I tend to recraft the poem entirely so that it no longer feels to me like a true translation but more like an adaptation, if not a new poem.
I originally intended to post each cento as it was completed, one poem every 1-2 months, but, during the time that I was writing the third and fourth centos, my social media became overwhelmed with the events happening in Israel and Palestine in late 2023. These two centos were initially inspired by the experience of being a student, a teacher, and the parent of a schoolchild during the era of lockdown drills in the United States of America, but themes around gun violence also apply to the situation in Palestine. I decided to delay these centos and post the rest of the collection all at once, and I hoped at the time that when I would post these centos the hostages would have been returned and a permanent ceasefire would have been established. However, now more than halfway through 2024, as I write this introduction, after having completed all six of the centos I want to use for this collection, not all of the hostages have been accounted for, and the genocide in Palestine continues. Genocide is wrong, as is the bombing of schools and hospitals, as is the taking and killing of hostages.
There will be a little more commentary below, but I want to introduce centos 3 and 4 here, with the above context in mind. My third cento is commentary on performative social media posts, where individuals express “thoughts and prayers” without taking any tangible action in their daily lives that would contribute to ending the violence that so concerns them. My fourth cento takes the form of a prayer to Venus, begging that she protect all children as she did her own son; as a high school teacher I know what I would and would not do for the children in my care, and I can only pray that anyone else would do at least as well by my own child. Both of these centos are meant to carry a sense of hopelessness while making clear the need and potential for hopeful action, because things will change when we take action. While the themes of centos 3 and 4 were not originally written with Palestine in mind (as a white woman of the USA, I don’t think my voice needs to be centered on this topic), violence carried out against children takes many forms (and sometimes the weapons used in different locations come from the same place), and so these centos may resonate in ways far beyond my original plan for them, into many contexts, small and large. This, too, is an echo of the role and power of social media – both by means of words and by means of silence, which is often loudest.
This should already be clear, but I want to state plainly that the views expressed here and in my poetry are my own, and as this is published on my own website with my own domain name, which I own, those views are affiliated only with me.
Social media, like poetry, not only produces a reflection of the world as perceived by an individual, but also provides an expression of what we wish the world would be, and, hopefully, an inspiration to help us work toward improving the world we have around us, social media and all. May we all speak, act, write, and post in ways that move toward interconnected, mutually supportive, diverse, global community.
Instagraminea, an obvious wordplay of a certain popular social media website, is built out of the Latin words instare (to stand upon, to impend, to menace) and the adjective form of gramen (wild grass or unkept underbrush). Social media in the modern world has a way of menacing when it seems that the flow of information, images, advertisements, video clips, and soundbites, has no end, and it also has the feeling of wildflower fields, where everything and anything will grow. Some posts become viral overnight, and some fade into oblivion. To look at it broadly is to appreciate the vast presence of humanity and, in many cases, a collective screaming “we exist”. To look at it deeply and notice every detail is to become enveloped in worlds that may not belong to us, and yet we have the feeling of being given a front row seat. I chose the original Latin poem patches based primarily on their use of gramen, as noted in the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary, as well as whether I felt I could make something new out of them that mirrored what I saw in my social media.
These centos are meant to be considered in pairs, and each pair corresponds to a type of content I often see in my own social media feeds. The first pair of centos are about some of our household cats, the second pair of centos are meant to be general commentary on the “thoughts and prayers” posts that tend to go around during traumatic events, and the third pair of centos are about me and one of my favorite videogames (Minecraft!). Taken altogether, they are haphazard and disunified, which is exactly how personal social media feeds are. We talk about what matters to us in the moment, and we might stay on one topic for a few posts, then shift to a different topic, and so on. This is a perfectly patchworked context for patchwork poems.
In my scansion, I have endeavored to remain faithful to the original rhythms of the original poems, such that they could be read aloud simultaneously and both sets of words would land on their beats at the same pace. In any communication, we always have the message that was intended and the message that was received; these are not always the same, even if the rhythm is identical. Each cento necessarily interacts with the context of its original and for this reason I have included the original texts I was working from (these are taken from those presented on The Latin Library online text database). The translations of the originals are my own. For all of the English translations of my centos in this collection, rather than prioritizing the grammar as I did for the first collection, I have aimed for a more idiomatic, smoothly readable English experience. I have not attempted to make my English especially poetic; when I do try to translate my Latin poetry into English poetry, intentionally as English poetry, I tend to recraft the poem entirely so that it no longer feels to me like a true translation but more like an adaptation, if not a new poem.
I originally intended to post each cento as it was completed, one poem every 1-2 months, but, during the time that I was writing the third and fourth centos, my social media became overwhelmed with the events happening in Israel and Palestine in late 2023. These two centos were initially inspired by the experience of being a student, a teacher, and the parent of a schoolchild during the era of lockdown drills in the United States of America, but themes around gun violence also apply to the situation in Palestine. I decided to delay these centos and post the rest of the collection all at once, and I hoped at the time that when I would post these centos the hostages would have been returned and a permanent ceasefire would have been established. However, now more than halfway through 2024, as I write this introduction, after having completed all six of the centos I want to use for this collection, not all of the hostages have been accounted for, and the genocide in Palestine continues. Genocide is wrong, as is the bombing of schools and hospitals, as is the taking and killing of hostages.
There will be a little more commentary below, but I want to introduce centos 3 and 4 here, with the above context in mind. My third cento is commentary on performative social media posts, where individuals express “thoughts and prayers” without taking any tangible action in their daily lives that would contribute to ending the violence that so concerns them. My fourth cento takes the form of a prayer to Venus, begging that she protect all children as she did her own son; as a high school teacher I know what I would and would not do for the children in my care, and I can only pray that anyone else would do at least as well by my own child. Both of these centos are meant to carry a sense of hopelessness while making clear the need and potential for hopeful action, because things will change when we take action. While the themes of centos 3 and 4 were not originally written with Palestine in mind (as a white woman of the USA, I don’t think my voice needs to be centered on this topic), violence carried out against children takes many forms (and sometimes the weapons used in different locations come from the same place), and so these centos may resonate in ways far beyond my original plan for them, into many contexts, small and large. This, too, is an echo of the role and power of social media – both by means of words and by means of silence, which is often loudest.
This should already be clear, but I want to state plainly that the views expressed here and in my poetry are my own, and as this is published on my own website with my own domain name, which I own, those views are affiliated only with me.
Social media, like poetry, not only produces a reflection of the world as perceived by an individual, but also provides an expression of what we wish the world would be, and, hopefully, an inspiration to help us work toward improving the world we have around us, social media and all. May we all speak, act, write, and post in ways that move toward interconnected, mutually supportive, diverse, global community.
Introductions to the Centos
II.I Felem Felis*
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The original poem patch I started with for 2.1 was from Horace’s Ode 1.15, lines 29-32. In this poem, after the introductory verse, Horace writes in the voice of Nereus, prophesying the fall of Troy and some of the events of the Trojan War. I have taken the second-to-last stanza, where Nereus tells Paris that he will run away like a cowardly deer, and I have toned down the epic voice and turned it into an observation of two of our cats. In the video, you’ll see one cat stretching out playfully, and the other hiding behind a poster that needs to be hung up on the wall. Eventually the hiding cat will run away, just as Nereus prophesied of Paris, but not in nearly so terrible a context.
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*A particular note to those who are paying especially close attention: I have used two different nominative singular forms for “cat” in Latin (felis in 1.2 and feles in 2.2), and I must confess that I did so for metrical purposes (although I did remain consistent within each poem). Please rest assured that feles (with a second e) is the more common, expected form, but that felis (with an i) is listed as a variant nominative in Lewis and Short.
For more information about Horace’s meters, click here. For an English translation of Horace’s Odes, click here. For a Latin text of Horace’s Odes, click here. |
II.II Feles* et Femina
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The original poem patch I started with for 2.2 was from Phaedrus 1.22, lines 1-4. In this fable, Phaedrus shows a man catching a weasel in the act of stealing crumbs. When the weasel insists that he is doing so in order to help the human, the man replies that he doesn’t believe that weasel is being sincere and kills the animal. Here, I have taken the fable and repurposed it to be about another one of our cats (can there be too many?) who has gotten himself wrapped up in a blanket. The blanket will not kill this cat, but it is keeping the cat from returning a catnip mouse back to me after I have thrown it to the cat (according to my cento, anyway).
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II.III Votis Inanibus
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The original poem patch for 2.3 comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 7, lines 135-138. This is the scene where Jason is fighting the soldiers that have grown out of dragon’s teeth, and Medea, in love with Jason, uses her magic to give him a boost of strength. I have swapped out Medea for an absent, unnamed character, who observes violence being carried out against children (imagine children playing outside pretending to be Jason and his argonauts). Metrically, the Latin word for children, pueros, lines up with the word for gods, deos, which appears in the line below, where the absent character asks the gods to interviene, but takes no action besides prayer to ensure that there will be any such action. In the end, the absent character has promised that seeds have been planted, but has not done anything to ensure that those seeds will grow. The picture accompanying this cento is of a lit tealight candle sitting on a wooden table, with a faded brown background.
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II.IV Dictamnum
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The original poem patch for 2.4 comes from Vergil’s Aeneid Book 12, lines 411-415. In this scene, Venus is collecting the dittany plant, which has healing properties, so that she can use it to protect her son, Aeneas, from wounds received in battle. Aeneas must not only survive this war, but win it in order to marry the princess Lavinia and claim his destined home in Italy, thereby establishing the race of people who will one day become Romans. If only every child were so lucky to have a deity for their actual parent, who could spirit healing ointments to them throughout their lives. If only every child were seen by our society as a full person with a real destiny and the potential to become a leader within some level of community, large or small. If only every adult looked at every child as if they were their own and did what they could to support that child’s success and growth. If only I didn’t feel as though I needed to use masculine genders for the words for children in 2.3 and 2.4 for fear that otherwise these poems would be ignored. The picture accompanying this cento is one of a set of toppled building blocks that I and my siblings once played with, and which my own child played with as well; the floor on which those blocks have toppled is the carpet of my parents’ home.
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II.V Cata Laete
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The original poem patch for 2.5 comes from Juvenal’s 8th Satire, lines 56-63. In this passage, he is describing a racehorse who wins first place, and how it doesn’t matter which pasture that horse was raised on if they are fast enough to win. The theme of the satire overall is the idea that what should matter most is the outcome of our actions rather than the lineage of our ancestors. I have taken this portion of the poem and made it about myself. I am a first generation college graduate, and a woman whose lineage has not been especially well-known, but who has nevertheless accomplished something few others have also done (when was the last time you wrote a collection of Latin poetry?). Furthermore, I was thinking about how stallions (male horses) are seen in a positive light while the word “nag” has historically been associated with both women who ask their spouses to do things and old horses that are no longer capable of heavy labor, and I’m sure it probably bothers someone somewhere that a girl dared to write Latin poetry, but here we are all the same. Hopefully you, dear reader, are more in tune with the modern viewpoint that gender doesn’t prohibit anyone from writing any kind of poetry, or from doing it well.
The image I paired with this cento is a selfie from a few months before I had to start wearing glasses. I was putting gas in my car and happened to notice that my hair was catching the sunlight nicely, so I snapped a photo, and later on decided that this would be the perfect image to go with this cento. |
I have also combined into this cento words from Horace’s Epistle 1.17 (acumina at line 55; about a girl pretending to have lost something valuable until others no longer believe her when she has actually lost something of value), and from Ovid’s Amores 2.19 (versuta at line 9; where he calls his girlfriend clever for creating barriers to keep Ovid away so that he has to work harder to get to her). I have also included some words more loosely (loosely in that the Latin forms are different or because it’s really just a similar sound without being the same words, and what I’m really pointing out is that I, the poet, really was thinking of these references when I chose these words) from Horace’s Satire 2.3 (varum at line 56, and ruentis at line 57; where he is talking about different types of recklessness), from Horace’s Epistle 1.17 again (catellam at line 55; see above), from Ovid’s Amores 2.19 again (laedat at line 8; where he claims that whatever he loves always hurts him), and from Horace’s Odes 3.12 (catus at line 10; describing the lover of Neobule while he hunts a wild boar). Notice that these references are stronger at the beginning of the cento, and weaker toward the end of the cento, when I have pulled ahead in my race and am continuing to rush happily forward, leaving the past behind me. Again, I used entries in Lewis and Short to find these words in various places – this kind of thing must be appropriate for a collection inspired by social media, which can only exist in the context of the internet and its many search engines.
For more information about dactylic hexameter, click here. For an English translation of Juvenal’s Satires click here. For a Latin text of Juvenal’s Satires click here. |
II.VI Mechanicae Pecudes
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The original poem patch for 2.6 comes from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Book 2, lines 660-663. In this passage, Lucretius is explaining that pasturing animals do the same things even if they are not the same animals. This is part of his larger discusion of science and philosophy, describing and defining the various phenomena of the natural world.
Minecraft is a surprisingly philosophical game that encourages creative thinking and problem solving in a low-risk environment – unless you turn the monsters on, but even then, you have to actively choose whether or not your world will contain monsters, and whether or not you will become the villain (and what a privilege it is to have the opportunity to make these choices!). The entire game is a giant sandbox, made of many different kinds of squares, and it seemed fitting to cap this collection of patchwork poems with a world made of patches, quilted into a piece of a poem whose primary question is something along the lines of “What even is reality anyway?”. The answer Minecraft has given me is this: Whatever we make of it. The image I paired with this cento is one that I staged in Minecraft. Having begun my collection with a video recording of real animals, I have ended my collection with a still image of imaginary animals. Two cows and a sheep stare at the viewer from inside a pen with a poppy flower in the center. In the background there are two tall tufts of grass. |
