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[Coptic Papyri]

Contents:

1. Papyri: Love-poems & fragments
   from Sappho & elsewhere (2007)
   
   
   • The Villa of the Papyri
   • Sappho to Anaktoria
   • Recipe for Making a Dadaist Poem
   • Ode to Aphrodite
   • Life among the Surrealists
   • Atthis
   • Mnasidika
   • Fragments
   • Fragments (2)
   • To a girl who doesn’t care for poetry
   • Juicy Root
   • Virgin
   • Sappho’s Epithalamion
   • Sources

•




2. Ovid in Otherworld (2006)
   
   
   • Exul Ludens
   • Tristia 3.2
   • Tristia 3.3
   • Tristia 3.8
   • Tristia 3.10
   • Tristia 3.12
   • Tristia 3.13
   • Tristia 5.7
   • Tristia 5.10
   • Tristia 5.12
   • Epistulae 1.2
   • Epistulae 4.7
   • Epistulae 4.10
   • Epistulae 4.14
   • Fasti V: 421-44
   • Sources

•




3. The Puppet Oresteia (2008)
   
   
   • Chorus 1 - Cursed with prophecy
   • Chorus 2 - I ran through the wood
   • Chorus 3 - Little girl lost
   • Chorus 4 - Joy lives with those
   • Chorus 5 - Cursed with second sight
   • Chorus 6 - See how Apollo
   • Chorus 7 - The labour pains
   • Chorus 8 - There she goes
   • Chorus 9 - Drops of holy water
   • Chorus 10 - Noise is like flame

•




4. The Britney Suite (2003)
   
   
   • COVER
   • TITLE-PAGE
   • COPYRIGHT
   • DEDICATION
   • CONTENTS
   • QUOTATION (Britney Spears)
   • [Paul Celan:] SCHNEEPART / SNOWPART
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
   • QUOTATION (Cut Above)
   • [Wendy Nu:] keith partridge y yo
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
   • [Paul Celan:] ERZFLITTER / ORESPARK
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
   • Who is Wendy Nu?
   • QUOTATION (ISBN)
   • Nouvelle vague
   • QUOTATION (Britney Spears)
   • [Paul Celan:] KALK-KROKUS / CHALK-CROCUS
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
   • Letter to the author
   • [Wendy Nu:] mr darling writes to penthouse forum
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
   • [Paul Celan:] DAS GEDUNKELTE / DARK
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
   • QUOTATION (John Felstiner)
   • QUOTATION (Nine Days)
   • It’s always too late ...
   • QUOTATION (Britney Spears)
   • [Paul Celan:] BEIDHÄNDIGE / BOTH-HANDED
   • QUOTATION (Paul Celan)

•




5. 31 Days (2009)
   
   
   • François Villon, “Ballade à s’amie”
   • Heinrich von Kleist, from Die Marquise von O
   • Jorge Luis Borges, “El puñal”
   • Victor Hugo, from Les Misérables
   • Karl Kraus, from Aphorismen
   • Garcilaso de la Vega, “Soneto XXXVII”
   • Guillaume Apollinaire, from L'Hérésiarque & Cie
   • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Gefunden”
   • Benito Pérez Galdós, from Fortunata y Jacinta
   • Pierre de Marivaux, from Le Legs
   • Arthur Schopenhauer, from Aphorismen
   • José Lezama Lima, “Retrato de Don Francisco de Quevedo”
   • François-René de Chateaubriand, from Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe
   • Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies 1
   • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, from El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha
   • Arthur Rimbaud, “Ô saisons ô châteaux”
   • Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué, from Undine
   • D. F. Sarmiento, from Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie en Las Pampas Argentinas
   • Voltaire, from Abrégé de l'Histoire Universelle depuis Charlemagne jusques à Charlequint
   • Heinrich Heine, “Orpheisch”
   • Augusto Roa Bastos, from "La Excavacion”
   • Gérard de Nerval, “El Desdichado”
   • Franz Kafka, from "Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse"
   • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, from Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz
   • Georges Perec, from La Disparition
   • Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm, from “Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich”
   • Leopoldo Lugones, “Historia de mi muerte”
   • Vincent Voiture, “Pour vos beaux yeux et vostre beau visage”
   • Theodor Fontane, from Vor dem Sturm
   • Octavio Paz, from “La verdad contra el Compromiso”
   • Jackson Wills, “Jackson's Assignment”

•




6. Case Studies (2001)
   
   
   • The Cliché
   • Truth in the Cliché?
   • The Psychic
   • Truth in the Psychic?
   • The Road of Excess
   • The Palace of Wisdom
   • Memento

•




7. Flying Blind (2009)

•




8. Theme & Variations (2010)
   
   
   • Paul Celan
   • René Char
   • Octavio Paz
   • Salvatore Quasimodo
   • Rainer Maria Rilke
   • César Vallejo

•




9. Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan (2010-12)
   
   
   • Jack Ross: Poems
   • Emma Smith: Drawings
   • Jack Ross: Textual Notes

•




10. Melbourne Notebook (2011-12)
    
    
    • Marie de France: The Nightingale
    • Choruses from the Society of Inner Light

•




11. A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014)
    
    
    • Jack Ross: Textual Notes

•




12. Poetry Specials (2008-2026)
    
    
    • Minotaur (2008)
    • Je donne à mon espoir (2008)
    • Volcanic Glass (2009)
    • Poets at Seven Years Old (2009)
    • Silhouette (2009)
    • Pale Star (2011)
    • Lounge Room Tribalism (2011)
    • Britain's Missing Top Model (2011)
    • Except Once (2012)
    • Jay Checks His Father into a Home (2014)
    • Ice Road Trucker (2015)
    • Antigone (2015)
    • 1942 (2016)
    • Canberra Tales (2017)
    • Rather a shock (2017)
    • Time for an outing (2017)
    • Malinche Dreams (2018)
    • Scurvy Grass (2022)
    • Unpopular Mechanics (2024)
    • BECN (2024)
    • Reading Cold Mountain in interesting times (2026)

•




13. Collage Poems (1997-2005)
    
    
    • Jack’s Metamorphoses (1997-98)
    • Conversation Pieces (1997-98)
    • Wharfbury Dogs (1998)
    • Evenings in the Blackout (1998)
    • Dieting. I’m Hungry too (2000)
    • In the Cave of Henry James (2000)
    • Ancestral Voices (2001)
    • Satan’s School for Girls (2002)
    • Anamorphoses (2002)
    • Postcards (2002-3)
    • Servants of the Wankh (2002-3)
    • Suburban Apocalypse (2001-4)
    • Days Under Water (2001-4)
    • Citizens of the People’s Republic of Freaktown (2003-4)
    • Muses (for Joanna Margaret Paul) (2004-5)
    • Notes

•




14. Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2018)
    
    
    • John Clare: The Skylark (1835)
    • I ♥ NZ (1999)
    • Family Plot (2015)
    • What to do till the sentinels come (2018)
    • 1942 (2016)
    • My Uncle Tommy (2018)
    • Paul Celan: Matter of Britain (1957)

•




15. Fernando Pessoa (2000)
    
    
    • A Photograph of the Poet

•




16. Three Versions from Rilke (2019)
    
    
    • Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes (1997)
    • Herbsttag (1997)
    • Archaïscher Torso Apollos (2019)

•




17. The Oceanic Feeling (2021)
    
    
    • Jack Ross: Online Notes

•




18. The Zero Suite (2023)
    
    
    • Give blood (26/1-7/2/08)
    • Zero at the Bone (12-15/3/08)
    • April Fool’s Day (1/4-18/6/09)
    • Returning to Auckland after Dark (6/9-1/10/13)
    • A Traveller on the Road to Emmaus (2/1-29/8/16)
    • Zero is lying down today (18/1/16-22/10/17)
    • New Year 2016 (19/1/16-19/10/17)
    • Last night the heat got (28/1/16-7/5/17)
    • What to do till the sentinels come (11-23/4/18)
    • All I want (2/9/22-8/4/23)
    • Catullus 101 (12/9/22-28/5/23)

•




19. Dawn Chorus (2026)
    
    
    • Morning Song (23-25/4/26)
    • Dawn Chorus (after Quasimodo) (23-24/4/26)
    • And the hardworking bees ... (25-27/7/26)

•




20. Tesseract (2026)
    
    
    • Jack Ross: Online Notes

•

[Bruegel the Elder: The Tower of Babel (1525)]

Ovid in Otherworld (2006)

[Statue of Ovid at Constantia]

The Latin poet Ovid – famous for such bestsellers as How to Pick Up Girls, How to Get Rid of Girls Once You’ve Picked Them Up, Love-letters of Famous Celebrities, not to mention his twin epic poems Feasts and Changes – was sent into exile in the year AD 8. He spent the last decade of his life in a tiny settlement called Tomis in the barbarous wolf-haunted forests around the Black Sea. Nobody knows why. He wrote begging letters to everyone he knew, in power or out of it, but something he’d either done or said (he speaks in one of the letters of “a poem and an error”) had angered the Emperor Augustus. The next Emperor, Tiberius, did not reverse the decision.

Augustus’s decision to exile the tender, fun-loving poet to the most distant regions of his empire has been debated, speculated about, and imaginatively recreated ever since. Poems, novels, dramas and films about it abound. In the latest of these, my own novel EMO (Titus Books, 2008), I translate (or rather adapt) a number of Ovid’s own poems from the Black Sea – known collectively as the Tristia, or Sad Poems – and parallel them with more modern experiences of exile.

In the end, who was victorious in this ideological struggle between Power and Poetry? Ovid’s letters from exile have been seen by many commentators as cowardly – unworthy of his role as anointed successor to the Imperial apologist Virgil. Others read his work as more subversive, the honestly-reported experiences of a city sophisticate faced with a reality unthinkable to his blasé audience back home. For Ovid read Pablo Neruda or Osip Mandelstam, for Augustus Stalin or General Pinochet, and I imagine his case may start to come into better focus.

Contents:

• Exul Ludens


• Tristia 3.2
• Tristia 3.3
• Tristia 3.8
• Tristia 3.10
• Tristia 3.12
• Tristia 3.13
• Tristia 5.7
• Tristia 5.10
• Tristia 5.12
• Epistulae 1.2
• Epistulae 4.7
• Epistulae 4.10
• Epistulae 4.14
• Fasti V: 421-44


• Sources

[Jack Ross: "Tower at Český Krumlov" (2004)]