Poet of metamorphoses5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() In her new book Black Metamorphoses, Vermont poet Shanta Lee has opened what she calls "a 2,000+ year-old phone line to Ovid." In "Blessed Black," she describes herself as "Applying Ovid's / Pythagorean theory: / Black bodies shapeshift." Gods and people mingle, and a human might suddenly change into a plant or animal. ![]() In Ovid's volatile cosmos, things - magically, erotically, sometimes violently - transform into other things. Beloved to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Bob Dylan alike, this is a multilayered verse epic melding the natural and supernatural. ![]() In exile, Ovid wrote his most famous work, Metamorphoses. Many historians think Augustus condemned Ovid for the purported obscenity of his Ars Amatoria ( The Art of Love), a poetic guide to seduction. In his early fifties, Ovid offended the emperor and was banished from Rome to a remote town on the Black Sea. His works, along with those of his contemporaries Virgil and Horace, are among the most enduring and influential of classical Latin poetry. The Roman poet Ovid lived from 43 BC to 17 or 18 AD, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.
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