Dear Friends, Students, Alumni, and Colleagues,
Henry
Mahan taught Latin and Greek at the University of Arkansas as a graduate
student before he began his work on the MFA degree in creative writing.
His poem, "Penelope" (right) won the Felix Christopher
McKean
Award during the University Honors Day. He writes in several forms ranging
from the sestina to the sonnet to the haiku. I think you might
enjoy these poems of his, which I found today on a cardboard poster
in the Dickson Street Bookshop. I like "Penelope", "Catullus
on his 29th birthday" (note the hendecasyllables), "Xanthippe's
Apology" and "An Egyptian Painting".
I met Henry in 1980 when I first came to the U of A. He was the dear friend of Robert Cross, the Classics and Egyptian professor whom I replaced at retirement. They rented a house on Highland Avenue. I last spoke with Henry in January of 1996, when I got word of Bob Cross' death via a letter from Henry.
I do not know when in 1996 Henry died. If any of you know, or saw an obituary, please let me know. Thanks.
I have a few more of Henry's poems. If you want to see them, just let me know.
- Dr. Daniel Levine
An Egyptian Painting
Ochre Egyptians
picking figs now and then goose
a red-assed monkey.
Penelope
"To work and create 'for nothing,' to sculpture
in clay, to know that
one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day
while being aware that fundamentally this has no more mportance
than building
for centuries -- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought
sanctions."
-Albert Camus
It little profits that an idle queen
In Ithaca abandoned, I should be
Unhappy in my fate though unforeseen
Or let my widowhood unsettle me.
There still is much to hold me in this land,
A challenge yet to occupy my day,
Although Telemachus has grown up and
Ulysses like a child has gone to play.
He never understood how I could
stand
To wash and iron, the endless iteration
Of the same task. It seemed to give him pain
That I could work with an untiring hand
And revel in ephemeral creation
To weave, to ravel out, and weave again.
Catullus on his 29th Birthday
When I was young and passionate and silly,
I was usually in love and always out of breath;
But now I'm twenty-nine and level-headed,
And frequently I bore myself to death.
Xanthippe's Apology
(to be read in a very Bette Davis fashion)
All right, I dumped a piss pot
on his head.
It served him right, the lecherous old turd,
Always lusting for another boy's bed
And acting like he's giving them the Word.
He buttonholes an ephebe on the street,
While I'm supposed to spend the day alone,
A little wife so virtuous and sweet,
And let him search for trumpets yet unblown.
Oh no, by God, I'll have
no more of that.
His eager students tell me he's so wise,
But I know better; were it not that he
Adored the lovely youths, this bald and fat
And sub-nosed man were mine; but in his eyes,
"
Philosophy" is more divine than me.
HENRY MAHAN
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