Georgic Fantasy

Here is an ugly place.

If song is praise

this place refuses poetry.

No center, no common notion.

No factory, no lumberyard or even mine.


Garages and their houses,

storerooms of possessions:

commodious pollution.


The vessel is broken.


Those who before would live and make

in the structure provided

are gone—dead, and bred out

by children who sucked silver for pap.


Yet I condemn the pessimist.

I smile knowingly with the silent optimist—

joy is poison to the fearful man and to the greedy.


The vessel breaks, but hope stays in.


How does my soul revel

in what it cannot know?


"Does anywhere truly refuse poetry? Ben Jasnow tells us that there is such a place, yet his luminous poems also tell us that poetry may be found anywhere, in places made ugly by modernity, in ordinary rural events that are all too easily overlooked, and in those larger stories that landscape tells and that continue when our limited tenure of life is over." —Kevin Hart, theologian, philosopher and poet, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia


Georgic Fantasy reveals a timeless, yet ravaged landscape and the ravaged humans who toil in it, culminating in a mysterious, legendary act of violence, and falling away into a moral tale which echoes faintly the Appalachian folktale that helped inspire the poem. Ben Jasnow, a Classical scholar, has written a narrative sequence of lyrics into which is woven a visual response, a series of thirteen paintings by the artist John Woodman, whose brilliant colors and gestural marks made upon photographic imagery illuminate — even seem to express — the desperate emotions which erupt underneath the poem’s Classical restraint.


Ben Jasnow is an American poet and Classicist currently based in Saratoga Springs, N. Y. John Woodman is an English painter who lives and works in London.