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.