“Eurydice I,” “Eurydice II,” and “Eurydice III” by Margaret Diehl appeared in Issue 42 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about the Eurydice set.
Once I started thinking about Eurydice, what interested me was how the myth, like all great stories, is so potent that I never questioned that it happened the way it is told, yet thinking about it as a woman of a certain age, not so focused on passionate love, it seemed that Eurydice could have lot of reasons for staying behind and, therefore, that Orpheus could have other motives for going after her. Instead of being the romantic story of my youth, it seemed to hold all the possibilities of why women flees from men or choose not to be with them.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this set?
Eurydice II was the poem I had the most trouble with. The other two felt like they came almost whole, although I tinkered a lot. But the middle one felt like it could go in many directions.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
A Film in Which I Play Everyone, by Mary Jo Bang. There have been so many good books published in the last decade, it’s hard to choose – but this one sprang to mind first.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be?
Alice Ostriker. I love her work and I’ve heard her read and speak and spoken to her (very briefly) a couple of times. I just like her so much. She was also a poet much beloved by my mother, who died recently, so that’s influencing my mood. I’d like to meet her for coffee and cake on the Upper West Side.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m putting together my first full-length collection of poems. I already have lots for the second book, which has a theme that pulls me, but I have to focus on this first one, which is proving hard to organize.
Our thanks to Margaret for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Eurydice I,” “Eurydice II,” and “Eurydice III” here.
Margaret Diehl has published two chapbooks of poems Exit Seraphim, by Ravenna Press (2023) it all stayed open (Red Glass Books, 2011), two novels and a memoir (Men, 1989, Me and You, 1990 and The Boy on the Green Bicycle, 1999, all from Soho Press) as well as poems, short stories, and essays in literary journals, including Kestrel, The Chattahoochie Review, Kenyon Review, The American Journal of Poetry, AMP, Cloudbank, The Adirondack Review, and Gargoyle. She lives in New York City.