Review of Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses: City Lights Spotlight No. 22 by Evan Kennedy
City Lights Books, 2023
Evan Kennedy’s poems mine a rich history of mythological characters, classical and modern, that he has morphed into in his travelogue of lust and love through time and space. More specifically, his poems celebrate how human love and sexual relationships are often a playing-out of mythic truths, of how seduction, the chase, the act itself, and violence often make an appearance, but just as importantly how the pagan gods take pity and/or are cruel to us and have the power to turn us into something immortal and beautiful as we pass from one state to another. Worship is a two-way street: gods and humans often fall for each other. These forbidden encounters often come at a high price, and in the end, the gods themselves understand they cannot survive without these devotees to pray, burn incense, and offer sacrifices at their temples and shrines. Only our human imagination and capacity to love can make the gods exist, ironically, and can ultimately resurrect these old gods/lovers out of the darkness of the past. Evan Kennedy hovers high above us with ease, at times a modern Romantic like the out-of-breath bicyclist from his poem who has grown wings to evade his stalker-seducer and disappears into the clouds.
As Morrissey wrote so succinctly in his Smiths’ song, “Ask,” “Nature is a language, can’t you read?” The nature being referenced is the natural world in all its complexities and by default, the beings that exist in and are a part of it, as well as the complexities of human nature, especially when it comes to what St. Augustine wrote about his own amorous youth: “distinguishing between the white light of love and the fog of lust.” As vividly as there are two ages of Ovid, the youthful out-of-control lusty one, and the older, more mature exiled one, exiled to his desk and book and self-reflection, both are literally and figuratively navel-gazing seers, starting at the navel of the earth itself and moving outward into wild and darker domains.
Ovid, 18th Century engraving.
This brilliant collection of hyper-aware (i.e., meta) poems of changes of identity takes us on a fast-paced bike journey and a cultural stroll in a park, respectively, through two iconic cities: San Francisco and Rome. The City by the Bay becomes “this infinite city, this dubious utopia” and Roma, we are reminded, is just “amor” spelled backwards, as well as a nod to Ovid’s Amores, or books on seduction. The speaker in his poems can just as easily find this eternal longing at a Giants baseball game as he can roaming the ruins of Rome and marble statues missing important parts, as well as searching for seductive “unclaimed meat.” The collection begins with a poem pared down as if with a knife, titled “A knife,” possibly inspired by Jove’s knife in Ovid’s Metamorphoses which is used to cut the cancer out of humanity itself in order to give it a fighting chance:
A knife
cut the fish
that drank
the water
that doused
the fire
that burned
the branch
that perched
the bird
that dodged
the hand
that drafted
lyric
The poem in seven degrees or so gets us from possibly a kitchen knife to a lyric by passing through stages of moisture and heat and earth and air to arrive at the ancient Greek conception of how life springs forth through the act of passing through another thing: each action or step forward takes us one step back, until we can return to the place where poetry begins. Poetry seems to exist somewhere in the ordinary but yet still just beyond our reach. The poem sits neatly on the page like a soft-shell sushi roll ready to be eaten. It answers the question, “How can a knife eventually arrive at a poem,” which makes us think in passing about the process of editing in general.
Apollo, Rome. Photo by Evan Kennedy.
“A knife” also elucidates and exemplifies the Pythagorean theory of change in all things, as expressed in book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Not even the so-called elements are constant.
Listen, and I will tell you of their changes.
There are four of them, and two, the earth and water
Are heavy, and their own weight bears them downward,
And two, the air and fire (and fire is purer
Even than air) are light, rise upward
If nothing holds them down. These elements
Are separate in space, yet all things come
From them and into them, and they can change
Into each other. (lines 191-200)
A bit further on, Ovid as Pythagoras says of the human spirit:
...As the pliant wax
Is stamped with new designs, and is no longer
What once it was, but changes form, and still
Is pliant wax, so do I teach that spirit
Is evermore the same, though passing always
To ever-changing bodies. (lines 126-131, trans. Rolphe Humphries)
In the second poem of Kennedy’s Metamorphoses, “San Francisco Chase Scene,” the speaker is being pursued by a seducer, the mythic and heroic love/rape chase played out on hills and neighborhoods. The speaker barely escapes his seducer by sprouting wings and talons and flying off. The speaker must be a favorite of the gods. It makes you think of how strange the pagan gods express their love: they force themselves on humans then turn them into something, an animal or a plant or a body of water to silence their crimes and memorialize the event. The speaker transforms the cinematically iconic San Francisco chase scene into a mythic one, reminiscent of Rumi’s famous and profound epiphanies, “Someone has given you wings...” countered by his other line, “You were born with wings...”
Mithras, Ostia. Photo by Evan Kennedy.
We have other great poets, poems, and poetic creatures being referenced, which is understandable considering Ovid inspired Shakespeare, Milton and Blake, and many others, up to the present day. The speaker of these poems apologizes to Ovid for stealing the title of his book but reminds him that the best artists steal and don’t borrow. The themes of reincarnation, metamorphoses, and changes are writ large in identical titles (“Tree of Life,” “To Apollo”) that give the reader the uncanny experience of how these poems pass through each other, like remembering a previous life. The speaker of these poems one-ups John Donne by presenting us with a “second flea” and some lice and skin fungus to boot. What are some contagious critters or infection between lovers? Near the end of the collection, both Franz Kafka and Ovid emerge out of the fog, and we are presented with a live-action form of “intertextuality” as the author of “The Metamorphosis” and the author of Metamorphoses interact with the poet writing at his desk.
These poems remind us how the literary past is always waiting for us in the literary future if we open our hearts to becoming something new and different. We have two Ovids at least: the young lustful one and the older exiled one. We have at least two sides of the same speaker of the poems: a young lusty one cruising the streets of San Francisco and Rome and an older, more mature one, who would rather spend time at his desk with his books and writing. How these two identities pass through each other in these poems means the speaker, and hopefully the reader too, can forever re-invent ourselves in order to save ourselves. While the formerly out-of-control lusty speaker of these poems, reminiscent of the rites of pagan times, spends a lot of his free time intuiting his way through city life, having a deep sense of how literature and mythology can intersect and come alive in the present, he still navigates his hunger for both “experiences and observations.” He confesses to Attis, “Like you I propagate nothing but lyric” and “Each Magna Mater circles me / Their poems texts lyrics fill the flaw I was born into.”
Like the Oracle at Delphi sucking up the fumes emanating from the navel of the earth then answering our questions, the speaker of these poems knows all of our questions in advance and has a direct line to the gods. The speaker becomes a re-incarnated Ovid educating us on creation itself and those beautiful old gods and heroes: Apollo, Attis, Shiva, Orpheus, sirens, and goddesses, and how we live those myths over and over in our own lives—how those myths pass through us, both changed and unchanged. The poems as a whole force us to think of the act of seduction and how the mythic mind reminds us there is “nothing new under the sun” when it comes to sexual attraction and how it can transform us into mythical, strange, and beautiful creatures in our own private mythologies. Echoing a savvy St. Augustine while addressing Attis, the speaker of these poems beseeches, “Attis, make me good in my bodily vehicle / but not yet.”
Attis, Ostia. Photo by Evan Kennedy.
While it is not necessary to have read Ovid’s Metamorphoses to enjoy this collection, if you have, it will make these poems even more meaningful. The goal of these poems is to encourage us to read more literature in general, to explore the stacks at your local public library, so that you can live a richer and fuller life and be able to make more connections with the past, to alleviate suffering and loneliness by finding friendship and empathy with bygone literary gods, and to discover a new way of expressing joy and fear by finding one’s face among past and present gods and monsters. The speaker of these poems also does not want us to give up on Earth but sees himself as the “Last Utopian,” with that comma suggesting there may still be hope: “the comma indicates the addressee you were becoming…”, the self-awareness of becoming something different and attempting to become better, “infinite cities” also being “dubious utopia[s]” possibly because they reflect the state of constant flux of its residents re-inventing themselves, while the wild world threatens to eat us alive and turn us into a viral meme “...comically for clicks in the merciless algorithm.”
The collection concludes by reducing us to our most basic motivations that drive our atoms themselves. The speaker suggests, “Ask any atom why it does what it does then / ask a unicorn, selkie, chupacabra, nymph, minotaur / Sense all identity reduced to fragments / —a character from Ovid whose frayed bleeding roots land abroad.” It is only through the power of the imagination that the speaker can see himself as a character right out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses among so many other wondrous creatures. Our motivations must be deeply rooted in those dark and distant times. The poet sums up the joy and grief of accumulated bodily knowledge at the end of his mythic pagan journey and his return to human form: “I liked these lessons / bred in rot / sunk in contagion / behind the sun and its deity / shedding petals and pelt.” These pagan poems will renew your faith in the power of reading and the power of human imagination.
Kennedy’s Metamorphoses presents us with another bestiary, another litany of incarnations and further contemplation on “lesser paradise[s]” and “dubious utopia[s]” as the parameters of his real and imagined worlds, worlds that start at the animal level and exist somewhere just below a pagan paradise. He is grounded by our animal natures and is able to rise to Icarian heights, but we all know how that myth ends. He is living dangerously between the muck and majesty of existence, his bouncy bike tires keeping him afloat and inches from the hard pavement and gravel of knee scrapes and hard falls. It is in this “earthly paradise” that he would like “to be of service / to the century” (“Envoi,” Terra Firmament (Krupskaya, 2013)). Wherever his alter-ego goes, it is never far from his hyperaware experience of the passage through these ever-changing bodies of beasts and gods, all with their animal desires taking shape and playing out in the beauty, barbarity, and unsolvable mystery of existence. It is a testament to an almost inexhaustible font of imagination and possibilities when it comes to identity itself.
San Francisco Public Library. Photo by Anthony Zedan.
