Gerald Gene Granroth

The Legacy of Silence Gerald Gene Granroth

" A poem in search of its contemporary role is being defined as a ""cultural energy bar,"" to paraphrase David Kirby, one of my professors of creative writing at Florida State University, in an article he wrote recently for The Atlanta Journal in a review of some current poetry books. While not totally disagreeing with his assessment, I feel that poetry has a wider and deeper mission to fulfil, closer to Percy Shelley's vision of the poet as the Unacknowledged Legislator of Mankind.
My poetry may fall somewhere in between those polarizing concepts. My poems are infused with lively interactions with my cultural milieu, whether in Central America, Eastern Europe, Classical Greece or Iceland. My aim is not to transmit a poetic silhouette of my feelings and experiences, but rather to filter through my sensibility what I have discovered about Medea or Oedipus, for example. While in the Florida State University library, for example, I came across an article by George Devereux in Oedipus, A Folklore Casebook, in which he rediscover the alternate story of the Oedipus tragedy. There he found that Oedipus quarreled with Laius over a young man not over the right of his chariot to pass on a narrow road. That seemed much more dramatic to me and so I wrote the poem about ""The Laius Complex,"" followed by ""Oedipus and Chrysippus,"" the latter being Laius' original lover whom Oedipus stumbled upon as he came into Thebes. Laius would have no idea who was flirting with his lover, let alone that he was called Oedipus since he thought his son had died on the hillside a decade or so prior to that.
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