Vox Mentis Discussion

You might have noticed that the "front" for Labs was the Rita Dove Institute of Psychological Research.

Lmao nope I didn't! Thank you for your response though it's everything I wanted and more. I've already mentioned how much of an "oh shit" moment it was for me when I looked up that recording of Virginia Woolf, and the metacontextual sweetness of your protagonist-poet being shaped not by the written words of her author-insert () but the only remnant of her spoken word. I still think that's cool as heck.

I naturally started seeing what Rita Dove's poetry was like when her name showed up in the "epilogue" and I thought Ars Poetica fit Vox Mentis really well:

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Ars Poetica, Rita Dove

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant

was nothing, a blink

in the long dull stare of Wyoming.

Halfway there the unknown but terribly

important essayist yelled Stop!

I wanna be in this; and walked

fifteen yards onto the land

before sky bore down and he came running,

crying Jesus--there's nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist

who told me he never learned to cook

because it robbed creative energy.

What he wanted most was

to be mute; he stacked up pages;

he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,

a ghost town

on the larger map of wills.

Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:

a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

And looking that up directed me to Horace's similarly-titled poem from the year 19 BC about "how to write good poems+drama", which was where phrases like "in media res" and "ab ovo" were coined. Vox Mentis seems to follow most or maybe all of the rules Horace laid out so I guess there's an ancient Greek poet who'd be pretty pleased with you???

Either way, I thought Dove's poem sharing a title with that of an ancient poet tied really nicely with what you said in Discord, about Dove's letter showing the Organisation hadn't learned the important lesson from this mess and was inevitably going to make the same mistakes down the line