The Story of Niobe, Parts 4 to 6 (end)

A royal suicide. Seven daughters killed in twilight by all-but-invisible arrows. The weeping Queen Niobe turns to stone.

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Book VI of Ovid's

4

Nothing moves swifter than the knowledge of death.

King Amphion, Niobe’s consort, had spied the cloud

and shivered as he stood beneath it, powerless.

He could not make out in the tumult below,

just who was slaying whom and why, for his eyes

with age were failing him. The shouting and screams

roared into the palace, up stairs and into his rooms

where he was wont to linger with laws and testaments.

The one who told him could not get the words.

“How many dead?” King Amphion demanded.

“All seven, sire!” — “All seven what?” — “Your sons!

All dead in the span of minutes from vengeful arrows.”

“No man can bear such grief and live!” cried Amphion,

and taking the messenger’s own sword, he slew himself.

 

Enter Niobe, to the blood-stained chamber

where she hardly noticed her perish’d consort.

At the heavens she raged, inconsolable.

The women veiled themselves in pity

as the disheveled Queen removed herself

to the corpse-ridden playing field. None envied her

now, and all who had exalted her, averted their faces.

One by one, she threw herself upon the bodies

of her seven sons engored; with blood she smeared

her raiment, and it stained her face and hair.

Each pair of dead lips she kissed with her own,

last echo of a mother’s first infant blessing.

She lifted bruised arms, all bronzed with gore

to the never-moving storm-cloud, then turned

her face toward where Latona’s temple stood,

hurling her imprecation so loud the very walls

of Thebes were shocked, and trembled.

“Feast now upon my grief, Latona, cruel

beyond the imagination of Tartarus,

feast and glut your heart with my sorrow.

It is endless — it will feed you forever!

Seven sons now I must burn and bury,

sevenfold my suffering. Exult, victorious

only in hatred. Your named shall be cursed

as the by-word for cruelty. Feast then,

and fill your empty heart with my sorrow.

 

“But, ha! your victory is not a victory.

My misery is greater still than your contentment

off in that place where no one knows your name.

Who will come to your temple now? Doors boarded

up, its walls leaning every which way, in years

to come it will be a ruin, a chicken-coop.

“After so many deaths, I triumph still!

Seven sons gone, I still have seven daughters!”

 

5

The day advanced, and dusk drew near. Cut trees

and timbers carried forth from the city took shape

into seven hastily-made biers, and the seven sisters,

robed in black, their faces smeared with weeping,

gathered around the scene of horror. All heard

the sky-shaking throb of the bowstring on high,

and one, while drawing out the arrow from inside

her brother’s raven-torn innards, toppled dead

before any saw that a missile had stricken her.

Some thought she merely fainted, but others saw

the pulsing flow of blood beneath her.

Another as she stood next her grieving mother

was cut down just as suddenly. Dim light

and enfeebl’d sight made some assume

the daughters were passing out with grief.

 

Latona’s daughter died before her, lips clenched,

without a word of reproach or a farewell cry.

One tried to flee, hoping her robes of black

would vanish into twilight. So she fell too,

and her sister, hard upon her, tumbled down

and both, in a heap, were arrowed, expiring.

One hid, but from the overarching cloud

there was no shelter; she fell,

defiant, until the angry shaft toppled her.

 

Now six had suffered wounds, and bleeding,

died. Niobe raced to her last daughter’s side.

The girl crouched, and Niobe tried to drape

her blood-stained robe to cover her.

Niobe screamed to the heavens again. “Latona!

Or you who come to slaughter in Latona’s name!

Just leave me one, the smallest, she is nothing

to you, my last vestige on earth. The littlest

one I beg you to spare me! Just one!” Yet even

as she prayed for the mercy of the implacable,

another shaft fell, sure aimed, rending her robe

and killing the hidden, crouching girl beneath it.

 

6

Now sits Niobe, childless truly, amid the gore

of fourteen slaughtered children, the sons on biers,

the daughters scattered in bloody pools

as wolf and dog, crow and raven, red-eyed

begin their death caw, the taste for flesh

that attends every battlefield. None dare to move,

except to melt away to their darkened homes,

where, hearths extinguished, the Thebans sat

sleepless and transfixed with terror.

Niobe sees the bier she had not noticed:

the self-slain Amphion from whom no sons

or daughters more could issue, fate sealed

upon Niobe’s curse forever. Silence was all

amid the creeping night, the ominous wingbeats

of carrion seekers. What horror at dawn

when the night’s feasting would be revealed!

 

Sun rises on the unpeopled field of Mars.

The birds are at their business. A wary wolf

circles the motionless Niobe.

Her hair, a mass of blood clots, does not move.

There is no breeze to stir it. Her face grows pale

as though her own blood had gone to ground.

Her eyes are fixed on nothing, She does not stir.

Aside from her, the picture is void of human life. Eyes

frozen, tongue locked in roof of mouth, teeth

clenched on final horror, she weeps. She weeps.

She wills her neck to bend — it disobeys;

she orders her arms to move, but they will not.

Her legs and feet are frozen. Slowly her heart,

the proud heart and all her innards, petrify.

She is nothing but a rockpile in woman’s form,

but still she weeps, tears of their own accord

flow out and down the semblance of face.

 

During the night that followed, some gods

took pity and lifted the weeping Niobe on high

dropping her back to a hillside in Phrygia,

where she weeps still, and forever,

a perpetual spring in a wall of limestone,

 

Who learns not from the lessons of punished Pride

must pay the toll of sorrow and extinction!

 

 

 

The Story of Niobe, Parts 2 and 3

Seven archery murders in the unlucky city of Thebes ...

Adapted from Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphoses

2

At Cynthus, in her austere dwelling
high on the peak of a prodigious cliff,
Latona waits the waft of incense, and the bees’
murmur of far-off Theban prayers, too soon
ended and not enough to satisfy. Then up
to her ears by Echo carried comes Niobe’s speech.
Each laurel thrown to the temple floor, each
stooped retreat without the proper obeisance
is a slap in Latona’s face. How fair a face?
One need but look at Apollo and Artemis
formed in her guise in high relief. From her
the beauty that stuns to silence, from force
unknown beyond the universe, the arts divine
inspired by the sun-bright siblings.  “You two!”
her mother summons them, and fast they fly
as quick as thought and waves of energy.
They reach for her embrace; she shivers off
all contact in the ice of her anger. “You two,
my pride and joy, you know that I bow
to no one but Hera, knowing my place
that others many know and honor theirs,
hear how my divinity has been tarnished,
my temple insulted, my prayers snuffed out.
This Niobe, spawn of Tantalus, who crept
like a dog to sup on the gods’ apples, daughter
of a thief of table scraps, you she insults, too,
preferring her own grown sons and daughters
to the elder gods she should at least give nod to
and pass by in silence if she cannot praise.
No Apollo, no Artemis she honors: she calls me
childless, in bloat of pride just like a sow
who loses count of her many piglets and swells
to name and number them lords of the sty.
Just like her father, she is swollen with hubris.”

 More would Latonia have said, but Phoebus
Apollo with lifted hand stops her. “Enough!
Each moment spent in hearing more, delays
the moment of Latona’s punishment. Let’s go!”
So saying, he seizes his sister’s hand, and off
they fly. Sooner than a man could harness
two horses to a chariot, they came to Thebes,
concealed in cloud above the tower of Cadmus.

3
It was a field of Mars where they but played at war,
the exercising grounds of Latona’s athletic sons.
Crowds gathered daily to watch their chariots,
the shows of archery, the wrestling and races.
Truly, they seemed like gods at play. The earth
was flat and dry where horses’ hoofs and wheels
packed down the dust and clay. Only a few trees
and shrubs dotted the open plain, the city walls
in plain view behind it. King Amphion seldom came,
but many idled and watched as princes rode
horseback in Tryrian purple, turning and racing
with their tight gold-coated bridles. Ismenus,
first-born, his mother’s favorite son, rode wide
along the curved track, as if to race against
any or all of his brothers. Hard he pulled the bit,
the foam’d mouth of the young stallion resisted.
He squinted once at the single cloud, the only one
marring the sky’s perfection of azure, then sat
upright and cried as the first arrow struck him,
red on purple and straight through the heart.

 What can one say of the arrows of Apollo,
and those of his sister, no less in power?

Unleashed, they always strike their target.
Not even a zephyr would dare to deflect
the path from archer’s eye to the target.
Only another god, invisible, could nudge
the victim to safety in the eye-blink between
the harp twang of string and the heart-pierce
of flesh-rending bronze. And so, “Ah, me!”

was all Ismenus said, as he sank sideways downward
over the shoulder of his astonished horse.

 His brother, Sipylus made out the fatal sound
of the arrow-laden quiver within the cloud,
and giving rein, fled for the city walls,
just as a captain turns sail away and flees
from a sudden storm. How many hoof-beats
and how fast would take him to safety? Too slow,
too late, as the unavoidable arrow took him.
The arrow shaft sang as it sliced his neck.
Only a gurgling noise escaped him as the point
thrust out through his Adam’s apple. Forward
he pitched and his own horse trampled him.
His warm blood gushed in the dry ground’s gullies. 

Elsewhere upon the playing field, two brothers fond
who loved nothing more than trading triumphs
and sweet defeats as well-oiled wrestlers
were at a sweaty match, each goaded on by friends
and adherents. “Go Phaedmus!” some called.
“Tantalus! Be like your grandsire! Invent some trick
to tumble your brother under foot! On, Tantalus!”
The brothers strained together, breast to breast,
their breathing as heavy as lovers’, their eyes intent
for one another’s stumbling weakness. There was not
the track of an ant between them when both inhaled,
swelling their huge frames, as just one arrow,
one perfect, impossible arrow, sped from the bow
of Artemis intent to outshine her brother. One arrow
impaled them both. They groaned in unison, eyes locked
upon one another in disbelief. Naked they fell.
Their last breath was a mutual exhalation.

 Helpless Alphenor watched them die, and from the crowd
rushed forth, He beat his breast and crying, “My brothers!
My brothers!” he marked himself for ready death. He leaned
to lift the stone-dead bodies of Phaedmus and Tantalus,
and just as if he had carried them to their grave
the spot he stood on became his own death. One arrow
from Apollo plowed through his midriff at perfect center,
a bull’s eye hit that sent him groaning to slow
and painful death-agonies,. Someone ran bravely
and pulled out the Olympian arrow. Out came his lungs
and a cascade of blood. All stared in horror
at the hooded forms in the hovering cloudbank.

One brother hardly passed from boy to man, pretty
Damasichton, was almost, one would think, too fair
to kill. That may be why the god’s arrow deflected,
piercing below the knee. The boy reached down
to tend the fast-bleeding wound, and lo!
the second arrow pierced through his head so far
that from his astonished mouth the feathers showed.
So fierce the heart-blood pulsed in the prince’s neck
that the arrow went out and up on a geyser of blood.

 One son alone remained. Ilioneus he was called.
He knelt and stretched his arms in prayer.
“Unknown gods, whom we have offended, spare me!
All ye gods, but name yourselves and I will make amends!”
The god of arrows was stirred to pity, inhuman
he was not as patron to all human arts. But while he thought,
Apollo’s hand, so used to the automatic flow
of arrow from quiver, of bowstring draw and release,
alas and eheu! he had let the arrow go! The youth fell,
but the arrow, perhaps alive itself, withheld its force.
But as though the death of all had been foredoomed,
the boy’s heart broke anyway, and he perished.

The Story of Niobe, Part 1

This gruesome tale from Ovid encompasses the narcissist pride of a haughty ruler, fourteen murders, one suicide, and a petrifaction. Here is Part 1. The opening stanza about Arachne is the "hook" that Ovid used to connect a story to its successor.

by Brett Rutherford

adapted from Book VI of Ovid's

Part 1

A woman turned to a spider! Whoever heard of such a thing?

All the towns in Lydia trembled at the horror of it. It spreads

through Phrygia, the shattered pride of Arachne, daring to spin

and embroider in contest with Pallas Athena. Self-hanged

in spite, she is doomed to six-leggedness, to sit hungry always

at the heart of a dread weaving all know to be a place of poison.

 

You would think her friend and playmate Niobe, might weep

to recall how they ran the fields of Maeonia together,

and drank the bees’ nectar in the shadow of Mount Sipylus.

Yet the girl learned nothing from the sad example of how

the wise, concerning gods, should speak little and praise much.

Niobe had what some call pride of place, beside an artful spouse,

queen in her realm, high born and married to Thebes, but these

were motes of arrogance beside her pride of motherhood.

None need call out she was the most blessed of mothers,

since she so frequently uttered it herself. Fourteen times

blessed was her matronly belly, once even twinned!

 

Blameless old Manto, who could not help herself,

daughter as she was to Tiresias, got up with an impulse

divine and, taking a torch and banner, raised a throng,

saying to all in the marketplace, “Come, Theban women!

Go to the temple of Latona the Titaness. Without delay,

give up to her and to Apollo and Artemis, her offspring,

prayers and costly incense. Make laurel wreaths

and don them,  and follow me in loud procession!

Latona exults to speak through me!” The women obey,

and ripping from the laurels every reachable branch

they wound their brows with the sacred leaves and marched.

Up to the very moon and stars the incense rose, smoke, too

from everything else they heaped into the altar fires.

 

But last, and wrathful, comes Queen Niobe, her cohorts

of the palace unasked and unconsulted, no wreath

upon her brow, gold-and-white Phrygian robes aglow

as she steps into the shadowed temple. Crowds bow

and part; some kneel at the royal presence among them.

Manto freezes in her supplicatory pose, back turned

to the Queen and facing Latona’s time-blackened

visage. Niobe halts, compels with wrath’s eye-darts

that the priestess turn to face her. Neck, head, and crown

make her seem a giant among them. “What is this?”

she demands of them. “You would rather worship a stone,

a thing behind a curtain, an “Old One” you only know

by reputation? No incense for me? No laurels for me?

Must I be dead before the people worship me?

Do you know who my father was? Tantalus! Tantalus!

The only man ever to take food from the gods’ table.

Sister to the glimmering Pleiades my mother is.

The one who holds the vault of the Heavens

upon his shoulder, yes, Atlas himself, I call

my grandfather. I am descended from Titans

and as such I can call Zeus my grandfather, should

I ever have need to trouble him. In Phrygia,

where they know who is who, they revere and fear me.”

 

The women tremble. None say a word. Manto is like

a woman who has seen a Gorgon, no sound from her

defends the interrupted prayer to Latona, whose ears

hear all through the rude unpolished stone of her likeness.

 

Niobe cannot stop herself. “Queen of the Royal House

of Cadmus am I. The stones you walked to come here,

the walls of the palace and city of Thebes, rose up

at the magic sound of my husband’s lyre,

and the labor of the men of Thebes, those very rocks,

if they could speak, would acknowledge me.

 

“There is nothing here but a shack and a face of stone.

You all know how in the palace, the eye cannot see

the end of its wealth and splendor. Why this? Why here?

Do I not have the eye and brow and shoulders of Zeus,

the grace of a Hera if not an Aphrodite? All say it is so.

And add to this my proof of glory: my seven sons, our

seven sons, the glory of Thebes, and my seven daughters,

our seven daughters, and for them each a warrior king

to be my seven sons-in-law.  Dare you to call me proud

without warrant? Dare any of you?” All are silent.

The incense hangs beneath the temple roof.

 

Her fury at their silence rises. “So you prefer to me,

decked as you are with stolen laurels from my trees,

that Titaness Latona, daughter of somebody named Coeus,

whom no one has ever heard of — Latona, whose

pregnancy the Earth spat out, denied a spot of land

to give birth to her progeny, until the spirit of Delos

took pity and said, ‘Vagrant Titan, light down

on this vagrant island.’ Born they were, with Pity

as their stepfather and a bare rock as home,

a rock that floated hither and yon for centuries.

The land did not want her. The sea denied her.

The starry universe spat at the sound of her name.

 

“And what did Latona do? She bore two children. Two.

I have done seven times that, and might do more.

Happy am I, and blessed, and happy shall I be.

Why ask anything of all-but-forgotten gods

when you are safe with me, too great

and too well-descended to fear bad luck?

If drought comes, the stores are full. It passes.

If sickness comes, we heal the sick. Bright day

erases the drear fog of the night of the dead.

 

“Suppose some part of my tribe of children

might be taken from me? Take two, take four.

I still have five times as many as she! Latona,

as such things go, is practically childless!

 

“Go back to your looms, and to the market,

go back to your homes and gardens,” Niobe demands.

“Cast off the laurels as you pass the door.

I will hear no more of Latona.”

 

The women obey, and yet they mumble the name

of the slighted Titaness instead of that

of the proud and angry Queen of Thebes.

Manto, alone, falls to her knees and weeps.

The Barbara Holland Reader Now Available!

Edited by Brett Rutherford.

Created as a one-volume introduction to the poetry of Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988), the mysterious Greenwich Village poet who was a centerpiece of the 1970s neo-romantic and Gothic poetry movement, this volume presents all the reviews and essays about Holland that appeared in her lifetime, along with the poems quoted or cited in those articles. This makes it a perfect book to study and teach the remarkable work of this 20^th-century American poet.

Twenty-eight of Holland’s most memorable writings are here, including the terrifying “Medusa,” “Black Sabbath,” and “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Her work is garlanded with a group of poems about her by her contemporaries and by younger poets she influenced, including Shirley Powell, D.H. Melhem, Marjorie DeFazio, Dan Wilcox, and Vincent Spina. A memoir of Holland in her coffeehouse haunts by Matthew Paris establishes her image and milieu as a fixture of the last Bohemia of Manhattan.

Interviews, reviews and essays about Holland are presented here for their first time since their appearance almost four decades ago. Those who shed light on Holland’s unique place in American poetry include Olga Cabral, Stephen-Paul Martin, Maurice Kenny, A. D. Sullivan, Robert Kramer, Ivan Argüelles, Kirby Congdon, Claudia Dikinis, and Michael Redmond.

Since Holland’s more than 800 extant poems are scattered across numerous chapbooks and books, this volume includes a complete bibliography of the currently-known poems. This is the ninth and final volume of a series based on the Barbara A. Holland Papers, and the archives of The Poet’s Press.

Published July 2020. This is the 290^th publication of The Poet’s Press. 198 pp., 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $14.95. ISBN 9798668830121. Available NOW from Amazon.

Abecedephobia

by Brett Rutherford

     after Barbara A. Holland

 

The letters of the alphabet

frighten me terribly.

They are sly, shameless

demons, and dangerous!

 

You open the inkwell

to release them, and off

they go. How will you ever

get control of them again?

 

Coming to life, they join,

separate. They ignore commands,

arranging themselves

on the paper, serif'd black

with horns and tails.

 

You scream at them

and implore in vain.

They do as they please,

preening and pairing up

shamelessly before you.

 

They gleefully expose

what you had hoped to conceal,

yet they refuse to voice

the truth that struggles deep

in your bowels, that one thing

you want to share with

    all of Mankind.

 

Why time and again

I took up this quill,

why time and again

I abandoned the act

of writing. Things,

if they are to be said at all

must be said in letters,

the little devils whose

conjunct joinings alone

make words that are more

than exclamations. The gods

must forgive me if "O!"

cannot convey my message.

 

Demons of the alphabet,

come take my hand.

Eyes closed, I cannot do this;

eyes open, I risk

the heart attack

of seeing what I say

too late to smudge

the fatal words away.

 

(based on a 1971-72 journal entry by Barbara A. Holland)

Introduction to "A Barbara A. Holland Reader"

by Brett Rutherford

Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books). During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books available, some in print and some on-line. 

After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family in Philadelphia, the poet’s notebooks and papers were transferred to The Poet’s Press in 2019. The objective was to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the ninth and final product of this project.

The intent of this volume is to present the critical articles about Holland published in her lifetime, in the same volume with all the poems which are cited or quoted in those articles. This yields an ideal single-volume resource about the poet and her work for students, scholars, and poetry lovers.

The new material in this volume is a collection of memoirs and poems about Barbara A. Holland, gathered over the years since her death. Most of these have been housed on The Poet’s Press website.

The trove of Holland’s typed manuscripts included five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” were largely made up of poems no one had seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. These separate manuscripts were edited and published in 2019-2020 as:

Medusa: The Lost First Chapbook
Out of Avernus: The Exiled Sorceress & The Fallen Priestess
The Secret Agent
The Shipping on The Styx
The Songs of Light and Darkness (in Shipping on the Styx)

For another volume, The Beckoning Eye (2019), I turned to approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s. While a few of these poems are familiar from the poet’s later collections, most had never seen print since their magazine appearance. Since no manuscripts survive for most of those poems, they were presented as printed by their respective magazines, with silent corrections of obvious typographical errors. Holland published, by her own account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one of the nation’s most prolific published poets, so this modest collection of “unknowns” was only a sampler of her magazine publications.

Finally, the large compendium After Hours in Bohemia included newly-found magazine poems, the remaining unique poems from typed manuscripts, completions of poems from hand-written notebooks, and poems from a posthumous chapbook. The editing and completion of the notebook poems brought the number of extant Holland poems to over 800.

Two additional books in this series did not come from the Barbara A. Holland papers, but from The Poet’s Press’s own archives. Returning to books I published in the 1970s and 1980s, I prepared two new volumes that represent Holland’s own selection of her works from 1980, 1983, and 1986. Selected Poems. Volume 1 reprints a 1980 book that was ambitiously titled Collected Poems, Volume 1, adding to it poems she selected in 1983 for another collection (Running Backwards) issued by Warthog Press.

For the record, that volume also incorporated all the poems from her chapbooks, A Game of Scraps; Penny Arcana; Melusine Discovered; On This High Hill; Lens, Light and Sound, and You Could Die Laughing; plus an unpublished chapbook, East From Here.

The inclusions from the 1983 Running Backwards also folded into Selected Poems, Volume 1,  items which had earlier appeared in Poet’s Press chapbooks, Burrs, In the Shadows, and Autumn Numbers.

Selected Poems, Volume 2 consists of all of Holland’s poems that revolve around the imagery and concepts of the paintings of Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte. This had been published as Crises of Rejuvenation in two volumes in 1974-1975, and then reissued in 1986 as a single volume. This new version, with annotations and illustrations, is the definitive version of the large Magritte cycle. (To further clarify the bibliography, a twice-printed chapbook titled Autumn Wizard consisted of excerpts from the Magritte cycle, a teaser for the two-volume edition.)

Thus it will be seen that Selected Poems is Holland’s own choice of her important poems, a necessary starting point for her readers. The Holland papers — from magazine publications, type manuscripts, and hand-written notebooks — did not include all or even most of these poems, and she had no “master set” of her works. They are literally “everything else.” The overlaps with the “warhorses,” her most-read and most-known poems, is that she used those repeatedly, in her book manuscripts and proposals. 

I have been asked why I have devoted a year of my time to this project, issuing books that few will ever read, the more so since so many of Holland’s contemporaries are gone. I know only a handful of people who remember Barbara Holland.

It comes to this: in 1975, I took Barbara out to lunch at a Thai restaurant at the edge of Chinatown. We were celebrating her 50th birthday; I was 28 years old. I told Barbara that afternoon, “I will keep your work alive.”

It was a promise, and I have kept it.

Grateful acknowledgment is made here to the still-living critics whose essays are included with their permission: Claudia Dikinis, Ivan Argüelles, Stephen-Paul Martin, Robert Kramer, and Michael Redmond, and to Matthew Paris for his memoir.

— Brett Rutherford
Pittsburgh, PA.
July 21, 2020