The convergence of classical form and digital immediacy creates a strange, resonant atmosphere. It is not the marble halls of antiquity where Horace might have recited to Augustus, but a grid of illuminated pixels, connecting New York afternoons to British evenings. In May 2021, the Society of Classical Poets orchestrated such a gathering, a defiance of distance through the shared discipline of meter and rhyme.
The Orchestrator and the Storm
James Sale stood at the helm of this virtual assembly. There is a specific energy required to bridge the silence of a muted microphone and the expectation of an audience scattered across time zones.
Horace Delivering the Odes to Augustus by Vincenzo Morani
The selection of voices for the Spring reading moved beyond simple recitation; it was a curation of temperament. Brian Yapko opened the thematic heavy lifting with “A Meditation on The Tempest.” To invoke Shakespeare’s final play is to invite the storm, the magic of the island, and the reconciliation of art with nature. It sets a high ceiling. The air in the room-or rather, the bandwidth-tightens when Prospero’s shadow is summoned.
A Dance of Forms
The program did not linger solely in the serious air of the storm. James A. Tweedie brought the rhythm of the “Tango” to the fore. Verse, like dance, relies on the unseen wire between tension and release. A tango on the page must snap; it must turn sharply where a lesser poem might merely drift.
Andrew Benson Brown followed, shifting the gaze to the cult of personality with “How To Be Like Byron.” The Romantics offer endless fodder for both emulation and satire. Brown’s work often walks that razor’s edge, examining the posture of the poet as much as the poetry itself. It is a necessary mirror. We look at Byron to see the excess we secretly crave or publicly admonish.
Kindness and Complexity
Midway through the hour, the tone settled into something more intimate. Mark F. Stone’s “Speak with Gentle Kindness” acted as a balm. In a year defined by noise and separation, the plea for gentleness carries a weight that iron-clad heroic couplets sometimes miss. It was a moment of quietude.
James Sale returned to the microphone, not for his own work, but to lend voice to Sasha A. Palmer’s “Connected.” The act of reading another’s poem is an exercise in empathy-finding the breath the author intended, the pause they heard in the silence of their own study.
The event closed with a structural high-wire act. Susan Jarvis Bryant presented “A Half-Baked Rondeau Redouble.” The Rondeau Redoublé is a beast of a form, unforgiving in its repetition, demanding that the poet weave four refrains back into a coherent whole without sounding mechanical. Bryant’s title suggests a self-effacing humor, but the execution of such a form requires nothing less than architectural precision. It is the pastry chef dismissing a towering croquembouche as a “little snack.”
The Lingering Echo
These readings, preserved now in digital archives, serve as markers. They remind us that the pursuit of classical poetry is not a solitary confinement in the past. It is a living, breathing dialogue that happens at 2 p.m. on a Sunday, where the ghost of Byron and the rhythm of a Tango can coexist in the glow of a laptop screen.
Horace Delivering the Odes to Augustus by Vincenzo Morani
