I’m delighted to share that Faith+Lead has recently published my poem “Dithyramb* for My Club Feet:”
*A dithyramb is a wild, enthusiastic, and irregular poem. The Hebrew word is shiggaion, and it’s found in Psalm 7 and Habbakuk 3:1.
Shiggaion comes from a Hebrew word that means “to wander,” or “to reel about from drink.” This definition matches the Greek sense of dithyramb, which started as a hymn to Dionysis, the god of wine.
As David Kirby explains in his article “Give Me Life Coarse and Rank,” “neither lyric nor narrative, the dithyramb embraces both the emotional heat of the former and the sprawl of the latter.” Kirby additionally explores how Walt Whitman is a prime example of a poet who often wrote dithyrambs,
Have you ever encountered dithyrambic poetry? What situations, and/or subject matter, do you think can best be captured in a dithyramb? I’d love to hear what you think!