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Madison Morrison

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Madison MorrisonMadison Morrison

 

Madison Morrison is engaged in a life-long project called Sentence of the Gods, a 26-volume universal epic. The one-word titles of its individual books spell out the sentence Sleep O Light U Need A Revolution Each Second Every Magic Realization Engendering Her Exists Regarding All Possibly Happening Renewed Or Divine In This Excelling Life. The sentence also reads backwards.

The first letters of its books spell out SOL, LUNA, ARES, HERMES, HERA, APHRODITE and EL, the names of those gods who correspond to the days of the week. Thus the Sentence reflects the hexaemeral structure of works by Tasso, du Bartas and Spenser. In its larger ambitions, however, it takes its place in the cosmological-heroic tradition initiated by Hesiod and Homer, continued by Vergil and Ovid and culminating in the work of such modern universalists as Dante, Spenser, Milton and Blake. Nonetheless, James Merrill calls Morrison’s work “unprecedented.” “In this ongoing binocular museum,” he says, “what we know is distanced, what we do not know is brought near, always with skill, erudition and great good humor.” We quote from a blurb on the cover of SOLUNA: Collected Earlier Poems (New Delhi: Sterling, 1989), which includes the oeuvre’s first six books.

Its seventh book, from the ARES sequence, has appeared in two versions, as the original twelve-chapter Revolution (Taipei: Bookman Books, 1985), co-authored by Dan Boord, and as the five- chapter English-Chinese MM’s Revolution (Taipei: East & West, 1998). Every Second (Alexandria: The Working Week Press, 2004), a diptych comprising the ninth and tenth books, serves to bridge between ARES and HERMES. Altogether nineteen of the 26 titles are in print, among them, Realization (Verona: Anterem Edizioni, 1996), also from HERMES, and All, which joins the HERA and APHRODITE sequences (collected in SCENES FROM THE PLANET: In, All, Excelling, Or, Divine (New Delhi: Sterling, 2001), whose other four books are also from APHRODITE, including the middle book, which is part as well of the final sequence, EL.

Particular and Universal: Essays in Asian, European and American Literature (Taipei: Crane, 1999), translated by Alessio Rosoldi and introduced by Flavio Ermini as Particolare e universale: riflessioni sulla letteratura in Asia, Africa, Europa e America (Verona: Anterem Edizioni, 2004) collects MM’s literary criticism. Books about his work include Ron Phelps, The Sentence of Madison Morrison (Norman, OK: Sentence of the Gods Press, 1999), MADISON MORRISON: Critical Perspectives (I) (Bellows Falls, VT: Tiger Moon, 2000), Frank W. Stevenson, Chaos and Cosmos in Morrison’s Sentence of the Gods (Bangalore: St. Joseph’s Press, 2005) and MM: The Sentence Commuted (Norman, OK: Sentence of the Gods Press, 2005), an anthology of 60 pieces by 48 contributors in 20 languages.

Born 1940, MM is a graduate of Yale (B.A., 1961) and Harvard (A.M., 1962, Ph.D., 1969). During a 40-year career he taught in seven countries (the U.S.A., Germany, France, Greece, Taiwan, India and Thailand) and has offered 140 lectures in fourteen countries.

Currently employed by a gallery in Korea, he is “always available,” he says, “anywhere in the world, for readings and for lectures, on art history, religion, philosophy, geography, politics, pedagogy and of course literature and writing.” For more information see http://madisonmorrison.com.

Sulla poetica di Madison Morrison, Peter Carravetta ha scritto pagine memorabili. Proponiamo qui un suo saggio del 2009.

‹ Marco FuriasuRosa Pierno ›