Odysseus in Norfolk

When I read The Odyssey a few years ago I was struck by the fact that seven of Odysseus' ten years of journeying were spent with Calypso and yet the Calypso episode is barely described in the poem - the events there are relayed in less than two pages. The poem is 12,000 lines but only 200 are spent on this seven years.

The reason why is pretty clear: The Odyssey and the Iliad are poems of action. There is not a lot of time spent on internal states — and to ask that on it would be to unreasonably project our needs backward in time. The seven years with Calypso are all about suspension; it's a situation created out of an immovable force and an irresistible object:

• Calypso wants to marry Odysseus and make him immortal

• Odysseus wants to go home
  

The only way out of this is for the gods to get involved (and to resolve some typically petty infighting) and they are busy with other things. And seven years is not long in their world.

This vast gap in the narrative with its quality of inaction and suspension — summarised best as 'shagging and hanging around, pining', or even 'shopping and fucking' — sparked a lot of questions: How do you spend seven years looking out to Ithaca and not knowing if you will be ‘allowed’ to make it home? How do you reconcile a need for wife and home with the nightly seduction by a demi-goddess who is promising you immortality? How do you deal with the trauma of winning a war but losing all of your men? How do you spend your days when you are fenced into one small part of the world and have no real purpose? What do you do with a body that is really good at killing other people when no one wants you to do that anymore?

In this conception Odysseus is a washed up soldier, clever, yes, but friendless, traumatised, a man of action and deed with nothing to do, living for a reality that he had long left behind and may have changed significantly. He is wracked with doubt, unable to move, guilty about this nightly adultery, addicted to Calypso.

In other words he is a man, of a type, what we might call if we are being reductive, that is to a degree, 'toxically masculine'.

Now this really interests me. Having spent a lot of time running away from heteronormative and toxic masculinity I now find it interesting, least of all because it's making a comeback, and because it is a 'thing' for my son's generation. I feel pretty comfortable with having this XY body and its strengths and weaknesses but I can easily imagine a world in which I am young, 'disempowered' (and by that I mean a subjective feeling of disempowerment, not a statistical or factual one) and feeling like you might not know where to get a good idea of what masculine means (navigating this XY body, the norms, social expectations etc). I can see that an aggressive and overtly masculine persona might make some sense in that world, though I wish it was not so.

So I wanted to know Odysseus a bit more, and by getting to know him of course I get to know myself and my XY world better. I write about things that are in the 'male realm' like work and addiction and poor self-image and sex — all of which come pretty organically when thinking about Odysseus living in a contemporary regional town in the UK.

Also, in my conception he is, like myself, a 'close immigrant'. That is he shares a language and many ideals and ways of living with the host nation but he is also sees things with a slight slant on them.

There are several distinct modes in the piece that relate to this:

A man separated from himself — the epic mode

Clever Odysseus — war and trauma

Out the end of the storm — suspension and being

Odysseus learns about England — insight and ironic humour

Eros/Philia/Storge — love inside and outside marriage

Why Norfolk?

Norfolk is a kind of forgotten region, or rather a region where memory and purpose hide away. From the busted churches of the reformation to the multiple invasions from across the North Sea, from county lines to the squadie presence, from the tools of war at Lakenheath airbase to the many ghosts of WWII airstrips, from the houses falling off eroding cliffs to the secret twists and turns on the broads, Norfolk is a rich setting for a work about what is left after battle, what irrelevance can look like and the hypnosis induced by forever looking out over a relentlessly bland ocean for escape.

The work itself

The work is in tercets (three line stanzas) with occasional variations, mostly when he is remembering the traumatic events in the Trojan war and his part in deceiving the Trojans via the wooden horse.

The lines vary in length but, as this work really is meant to be read aloud, the breaks are driven by 'the score'.

Here's a couple of epic and grand tercets:

A man separated from himself is as a plank without a ship

is all that is left of the firm planted

and upward gesturing tree. A man separated from his men

is doubly lost. Odysseus remembers the growling saw

the storm cutting them from the ship one by one

until only he has the tiller and even that

and here are some that work in a different way,

He is a hero

There is a poem written about it

Have you heard it?

Or

Did nothing

Ate nothing

Drunk everything

Or even

Smoking his distraction, cycling his flavours

He gets suggestions from Katya a vape expert and dedicated content creator

with a passion for supporting the vaping community

Lychee, Cherry

Peach ice

Menthol mojito

It's a very flexible way of working that can move from a long-limbed narrative telling to punchier moments that align themselves in 'narrative threes', the kind of flexibility you need over a few thousand lines.

Glyn (my wise tutor on the MA I am doing) had this idea about the stanza length and form being the kind of prison that Odysseus is in; it is the form that contains him, both giving him shape and being the restriction that he is working against. This was the key I needed to find the tercet as a form to work in. Prior to this the poem had been written in a much freer, more open style: More interesting to look at perhaps but as this is an oral/aural piece then I think there is more to be gained than lost by being notionally traditional in stanza form.

Precedents and sourcing

There are some important precendents and inspirations at work here by some very fine writers.

The first are the translations on Emily Watson of The Odyssey and The Illiad. Now to be fair I had not finshied any other versions of these poems but I had started a good few times in other translaitons and not made it through, so Emily's, by deduction, are the best!

Memorial, a book length poem by Alice Oswald, which is pretty astonishing, is also a touch stone. She is the best metaphor maker alive I reckon and this work, informed by her own scholarship, is absolutely phenomenal. The basic conceit is so simple — she takes all the names of people who die in the Iliad and writes about each death — but the result is, truly, epic.

Omeros by Derek Walcott is also in play here. Without comparing myself to him he was also a poet and playwright and Omeros is a complete retelling of the Odyssey in tercets so is an obvious reference point. I did choose topic, setting and tercets before I started reading it (and I am still reading it!) but it is also a contemporary 'lift' of the story.