Clinching the Poem: Michael Salcman’s “The Cult of Beauty” in River Styx 88
by Barbara Westwood Diehl
I was catching up with the NewPages blog this morning—always a good source of literary journal news—when this November 26 blog post title caught my eye: “End of the World. End of the Book?” My heart stopped. Well, not for long. Although the post was an announcement of the River Styx issue with an “end of the world” theme, editor Richard Newman seemed confident that good literature would triumph. I was also happy to note that Baltimore Review poetry editor Michael Salcman has a poem in the issue. Of course, I wanted to read it, so I emailed him right away. His response:
“The poem is one of my recent (i.e., written since my last book) favorites, "The Cult of Beauty." The first draft was written late in 2008 based on notes I took during a trip to the Greek Islands. It was rejected many, many times (I would only send it to the very best journals) even after I reached a critical stage of revision (September 2009, after an important note from Dick Allen suggested the poem needed tightening) by re-working the final tercet about Apollo and Athena to end with the following lines, decisively clinching the poem with a specific metaphor, rhythmically delivered and accompanied by an internal rhyme: "without a trace. A single column marks her place/ like a bone her brother threw away." This new image reinforces a powerful contrast of rising and sinking in regard to his origin and her fate in the final line of the penultimate tercet and the first line of the final tercet, thusly:
where nothing lives today but the past,
its columns and houses in perfect rows,
and five stone lions who guard the sacred lake
in which Apollo rose and his sister’s temple sank
without a trace. A single column marks her place
like a bone her brother threw away.
Until your inquiry prompted me to look at the poem again, I never actually noticed the rows/rose echo but simply proceeded in my usual fashion of reading the poem out loud and checking its music by ear. I have such a backlog of poems that when a journal announces a theme, like "The End of the World" for the current issue of River Styx, I often have at least a few pieces that will fit. So the short answer to your question is that the poem was not written to the specific needs of a market but waiting for the market to develop around it. It goes without saying that this poem is in the working manuscript of my next collection.”
The entire poem, reprinted with permission from River Styx:
THE CULT OF BEAUTY
Ashore at the end of a narrow strait
we watch tourists stroll the stony paths
of an outdoor museum
where thirty thousand souls once worshipped and played,
coming together in trade or else the Delian games.
I sweat a drop or two into the sea—
it’s noon in beauty’s hell and emptiness everywhere.
No one born on Delos was less than a god,
so gravid women were taken off before making a mess.
Even the dead and dying weren’t left alone
but removed to graves off shore
before death might spoil Apollo’s perfect realm
with putrefaction. Only his acolytes dwelled continuously
in what they called the brightest spot on earth,
an island like a lens,
where nothing lives today but the past,
its columns and houses in perfect rows,
and five stone lions who guard the sacred lake
in which Apollo rose and his sister’s temple sank
without a trace. A single column marks her place
like a bone her brother threw away.
—Michael Salcman
River Styx: issue no. 88, 2012