num_pages: 137
description: All stories are consellations of tellings. Mine is no different. MeDea retells a fragment of a very old story that has been told, in many versions, perhaps since the beginning of "historical" time. Storytelling itself is a trickster tradition of witness, remembering and revision, and in the arc of time the story is forever changing. With this MeDea, I've placed a black girl from Brooklyn into the starrring role of an age-old drama. Like poets before me, I am revising a received text, improfising on a standard, tellin the sory from the vantage of my own time and attempting to reveal something both old and new through the magic of poetics. I begin with Euripides' fith century (BCE) play of the same name and his tale of betrayal anad child murder. The stories are a wheel withing a wheel and a rolling conversation about the nature of life, identity, agency, power and fate. And the tales reveal (and conceal) a vast symbolic, metaphorical, terrain trhrough genealogies as long and unwieldy as those of contemporary extended families. What a appropriate stage, it semed to me, for tracing some of the American journey through the mouth of Miss Moon.
language: English
title: Me Dea
titlecomplete: Me Dea
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Glad Day