In 2014 I started spending time at my local VA hospital in conjunction with a charity called Guitars for Veterans. And I knew that for these characters deep inside the machine of war, the details were a matter of life and death because âthe detailsâ were âtruthâ: their individual truths and a larger truth about war. In his beautiful 2020 New York Times tribute to John Prine, Jason Isbell (a brilliant songwriter in his own right) wrote that âsongwriting allows you to be anybody you want to be, so long as you get the details rightâ and when it came to the Iliad, I was worried that I couldnât get the details right. Itâs a brutal story in a way that the Odyssey isnât, and because my approach to interpretation involves getting inside characters of the story, mining them for emotional resonance, and writing in the first person about their experiences, the idea of taking on warriors at war and a whole community of people impacted by war was, well, terrifying. My reason was that I wanted to keep my Odyssey as something sui generis but in reality I was afraid of the Iliad. My work around the Odyssey is collected here:Īlmost from the beginning of my time performing the Odyssey (now nearly twenty years and over 300 performances ago), audiences wondered if I might create a similar adaptation of the Iliad and for most of those years, I suggested I wouldnât. The main thrust of my take of the story is that itâs an exploration of identity and over the years performing my Odyssey for high school and college audiences as a modern bard became a big piece of my identity. To wit, I became âa man who goes around telling stories about a man who goes around telling storiesâ and this elegant merging (and maybe even blurring) of performer into subject furthered my insight into the complex relationship between bard and hero we are often invited to consider by the text of the Odyssey. Odysseus got the most songs, but I also wrote songs through the eyes of Penelope, Telemachus, Athena, Alcinous, and Demodokos. Not long after I graduated with my BA in Classics, I wrote a one-man âfolk operaâ song cycle consisting of twenty-four songs, each sung from the perspective of a character from the Odyssey. I saw in it an accessible and modern (for lack of a better word) narrative with issues and relationships I found more universal and more easily represented in the modern folk and rock song idiom. Though I read the Iliad in Greek first, I was more immediately taken with the story of the Odyssey. Ancient Greek is a time machine to me, a thread back through human history to understand and connect with people who lived 3000 years prior, people who wrestled with many of the same questions with which we wrestle today. And the more I learned of Homeric epic and how (many suppose) it was composed and performed in something like a song form, the more I became interested in seeing if I could combine one of my interests (Ancient Greek) with another (music and songwriting) and honor the epic tradition with an updated take on the same myths. By my sophomore year, I was a declared Classics major and that fourth semester in the Ancient Greek sequence brought Homeric epic into my life. We read selections from the Iliad and more than twenty years later I still have the text with my hand-marked dactylic hexameter scansion. I remember very clearly that the weight of the poetry, the meter, the language, surrounded me as if it was a living organism and made my head and heart simultaneously explode with joy. I intended to major in Psychology but my freshman year I took Ancient Greek on a whim and fell in love with it. I was in my fourth semester as an undergrad at UW-Madison. I will never forget the first time I read Homer in Ancient Greek. Singer and songwriter Joe Goodkin tells his story in his own words.
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