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Dear Penny;

Strange years have guided me to this land
where, in the shadow of a sullen mountain,
I live as if walking on Achilles' heel, having
bled not as a god, but as a man. -Ody (1)

After a wildfire had blackened the mountains that surround a valley in Southern California, a swarm of atmospheric rivers bullied the land until it no longer recognized itself. When one day the oak tree in our backyard split, we took this as a sign it was time to return to the home we'd left more than a decade ago. It was there that one day I recalled an epic poem from Ancient Greece as told by a bard named Homer, "the master of masters, the teacher of all philosophers."(2)

After a decade of war the Achaeans finally breach the walls of Troy, and Odysseus, the King of Ithaka, a man of "unpredictable experiences, and infinite possibility,"(3) sets sail for home. But it would be ten more years, during which time this tale takes place, before he is able to complete his journey. Meanwhile, in Ithaka Odysseus' wife, Penelope, confident that he would return someday, keeps the gaggle of suitors vying to take her husband's place "at bay with the trick of the web."(4)

Why has The Odyssey been translated, critiqued, and adapted, so many times?(5) “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us."(6)

Look Homeward Ody recontextualizes some of the themes The Odyssey rehearses, including disguise, transformation, transcendence, homecoming, heroism...rasped and folded into epiphanies of the Gods, who in this century have become "symptoms."(7)

Even if we sail to the moon and beyond and colonize other planets, Odyssean poets, who ply the high tides of human culture, and the ebb tides of human artifice, will still have a journey to perform.

1. J. Weishaus. From, "A Letter to His Wife, And Her Reply." In, While I Was Waiting For You: Complete Poems 1965-2000. Camanche IA. 2023.
2. A. Lang, Homer and the Epic. London, 1893.
3. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Homeric Tradition. Cambridge MA., 1958.
4. P. N. Hernández,"Penelope's Absent Song." Phoenix, Spring/Summer 2008.
5. E. Hall, The Return of Ulysses. London, 2008.
6. A. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English. Oct.1972.
7. C.G. Jung, Collected Works Vol. 13. Alchemical Studies. London & New York, 2014.

– Besides quotations, fragments exhumed from the world's literary corpus are transplanted into the body of some of these texts.
– Notes are linked to at the bottom of the text. Each note is then linked back to the text it references.
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