Ange Mlinko

The inspiration​ for the Iliad was a ruin. The nine pancaked layers of an Asian city referred to as Wilusa on Hittite clay tablets – and known as Ilios or Troia to the ancient Greeks – lie under a mound called Hissarlik in north-western Turkey. The events of the Iliad supposedly take place around the time of the collapse of the Bronze Age in the 12th century BC. By the time the...

An unnamed​ man and woman come together, slowly and arduously, over the course of a novel. She is a poet who has turned mute; he is a language teacher going blind. Her first bout of muteness, which struck when she was a teenager, was cured suddenly in French class by a single word: ‘bibliothèque’. Now she is attending classes in Ancient Greek to see if something in the...

‘paradoxical contrivances for intercrossing’ – Darwin

Archilochus Colubris

From the red-light districtsof pomegranatescomes ruby-throated Archilochus

with his hocus-pocus metrics:dithyrambs to Dionysus,subsidiary of Zeus & co.,

still fragrant from an imbroglioinvolving Neobulé.Am I a sommelier

to provide minusculekraters for probosces?You whose juiciest...

Harley Mann​ wasn’t a writer. He was a talker, and shortly before his death in 1972 at the age of 82, he began talking to a Grundig TK46 tape recorder, so his life story was doled out in reels, not chapters. Russell Banks found these reels, he tells us, in the basement of the public library in St Cloud, Florida. It was 1999, and Hurricane Irene (‘I rain’) had just barrelled...

‘Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must...