Last night I was feeling snacky before heading back to my home in the outlying regions of Toronto (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, I can now proudly declare myself an “outlier” [editor’s note: I think Malcolm Gladwell is a disgraceful mountebank]). Anyways, while I was at the Timmy’s by my office, I had the pleasure of hearing a young woman, surrounded by three friends, recite poetry. She had an extraordinary rich, black voice and spoke with the cadence of an experienced orator. If I were savvy enough to include audio clips on this site I would hire this wonderful woman to read poems aloud.
I didn’t have the courage to either compliment her on her amazing skills or ask her why on earth she was reciting a poem about a “hero” in a Tim Horton’s on a Saturday night. But it did strike me as kind of great that such a thing was going on.
Poems about heroes are not the usual sort we associate with Saturday nights. Such nights are usually about “drunk dialing,” or its ancient equivalent, the paraklausithyron.
Paraklausithyron is just an ancient Greek word for a poem recited beside (para) a locked (claus) door (thyron). They usually involved young male lovers, returning home from symposia, who stop at their at a girl’s house to beg to be let it. Notable examples are Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, and Ovid Amores 1.6 and 2.19. I’m not generally a fan of translations so I’m not going to include any here. You may also recall a somewhat similar situation in a Mia Michaels dance routine from last year’s So You Think You Can Dance with Katee and Twitch (love you, Mia! Photo above).
Our friends the troubadours also wrote such poems. The genre generally fell out of favour in the modern era, however. Drunken begging doesn’t seem to have fit in well with the aesthetics of either classicists or romantics. I’m of the opinion, however, that the paraklausithyron made a roaring come back in one of my favourite genres of music.
Thanks to the invention of the telephone, lovers no longer need to embarrass themselves by prostrating in front of a door. They can now do so metaphorically with a mere seven (or ten) digits.
One of my favourite paraclausithyronic country songs is Jim Reeves’ 1959 hit “He’ll Have to Go.” While there’s no door, the phone substitutes for what I think sounds like a far more intimate medium.
A song I’ve recently fallen in love with also fits the topos of a paraklausithyron. It’s Tony Rice’s 1986 song “Hard Love.” I have to thank Alison Krauss for this recommendation, via Nightline (see YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WxpPXGVCHQ). It tells the story of a broken man recalling that the only love he knew growing up was “hard love / when Christmas to my birthday was a million years away.” As the song goes on, you realize that he’s confessing this to a woman he’s alienated from a distance:
It’s a bit heavier than the froth of the drunken antique paraklausithyron. But it’s still the kind of situation many of us find ourselves in on any given Saturday night.
I didn’t have the courage to either compliment her on her amazing skills or ask her why on earth she was reciting a poem about a “hero” in a Tim Horton’s on a Saturday night. But it did strike me as kind of great that such a thing was going on.
Poems about heroes are not the usual sort we associate with Saturday nights. Such nights are usually about “drunk dialing,” or its ancient equivalent, the paraklausithyron.
Paraklausithyron is just an ancient Greek word for a poem recited beside (para) a locked (claus) door (thyron). They usually involved young male lovers, returning home from symposia, who stop at their at a girl’s house to beg to be let it. Notable examples are Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, and Ovid Amores 1.6 and 2.19. I’m not generally a fan of translations so I’m not going to include any here. You may also recall a somewhat similar situation in a Mia Michaels dance routine from last year’s So You Think You Can Dance with Katee and Twitch (love you, Mia! Photo above).
Our friends the troubadours also wrote such poems. The genre generally fell out of favour in the modern era, however. Drunken begging doesn’t seem to have fit in well with the aesthetics of either classicists or romantics. I’m of the opinion, however, that the paraklausithyron made a roaring come back in one of my favourite genres of music.
Thanks to the invention of the telephone, lovers no longer need to embarrass themselves by prostrating in front of a door. They can now do so metaphorically with a mere seven (or ten) digits.
One of my favourite paraclausithyronic country songs is Jim Reeves’ 1959 hit “He’ll Have to Go.” While there’s no door, the phone substitutes for what I think sounds like a far more intimate medium.
Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.
Let's pretend that we're together, all alone.
I'll tell the man to turn the juke box way down low,
And you can tell your friend there with you he'll have to go.
A song I’ve recently fallen in love with also fits the topos of a paraklausithyron. It’s Tony Rice’s 1986 song “Hard Love.” I have to thank Alison Krauss for this recommendation, via Nightline (see YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WxpPXGVCHQ). It tells the story of a broken man recalling that the only love he knew growing up was “hard love / when Christmas to my birthday was a million years away.” As the song goes on, you realize that he’s confessing this to a woman he’s alienated from a distance:
Now I’m standing in this phone booth with a dollar and a dime,
Wondering what to say to you to ease your troubled mind.
For the Lord’s cross might redeem us but our own just wastes our time.
And to tell the two apart is always hard love.
So I’ll tell you that I love you even though I’m far away.
I’ll tell you how you’ve changed me as I live from day to day.
How you’ve helped me to accept myself and I won’t forget to say,
Love is never wasted even if it’s hard love.
Well it’s hard love but it’s love all the same.
Not the stuff of fantasy but more than just a game.
And the only kind of miracle that’s worthy of the name
For the love that heals our lives is mostly hard love.
It’s a bit heavier than the froth of the drunken antique paraklausithyron. But it’s still the kind of situation many of us find ourselves in on any given Saturday night.
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