Jason and Medeia

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John Gardner wrote Jason and Medeia as a book-length poem, complete with line breaks and indents that do not usually occur in works of prose.

This poem was made possible by financial gifts from my friends Marilyn Burns, Ruby Cohn, and Duncan M. Luke and by grants from Southern Illinois University and the National Endowment for the Arts. I thank William H. Gass for permission to borrow and twist passages from his Fiction and the Figures of Life, and Gary Snyder for permission to borrow and twist two of his translations from the Cold Mountain series. Parts of this poem freely translate sections of Apollonios Rhodios’ Argonautica and Euripides’ Medeia, among other things.

I dreamed I awakened in a valley where no life stirred,

no cry

of a fox sparked up out of stillness; a night of ashes.

I was sitting

in a room that seemed a familiar defense against

darkness, but decayed,

the heavy old book I’d been reading still open on my

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