Gypsies of the Unattainable: Paris Poems

Prelude "A selection of Rolleiflex prints of our New Purgatory..." wrote C.P. Byron of his labyrinthine modern epic Gypsies of the Unattainable. Noting a remark made more than 100 years ago in Ezra Pound's The Spirit of Romance, that all ages are contemporaneous, "Gypsies presents Purgatory not as myth but as the streets we walk each day of our lives. The poems portray irrevocable decisions made flesh, the irreducible sums of all our choices," Byron concluded. The wandering poet's records of such summing up are evident throughout his long and varied Paris cycle. While with broad, updated Homeric and Dantean references in structure and in progression, the cycle's prime influence must be attributed to Ovid's ethopoeia, rendered by Byron as personal and intimate character sketches. It is his use of character portraiture that carries weight and conveys meaning in each of these poems. Even the most prominent missing character, the artist himself, appears as in Vermeer's masterpieces of camera obscura. In Gypsies, the poet presents and explores his vast and varied cast by allowing us to see them in their most profound intimacies - sometimes shocking, occasionally banal - until we all but inhabit their circles of acquaintances. Often, we admire them; occasionally, we are embarrassed for them; sometimes, we are horrified by them until all of responses dissipates into the heady air of the human, the humane, and the inhumane. So are readers ushered into the New Purgatory of modern European life as seen through the eyes and heard in the voices of expatriates past and present a full century after Gertrude Stein's infamous Lost Generation drank, loved, and grieved their way across the continent. Through its nine sections and posthumous poems spanning Europe, America, South America, and Asia, Gypsies ferries travelers on a time-unbound odyssey in search of emotional richness, intellectual precision, and spiritual meaning - descent, transcendence, and transfiguration. In C.P. Byron's perpetual now, with countless introductions to people and persona both startling and mundane, Gypsies of the Unattainable builds to become poetic fiction truer than true life, as is every human life, including one's own.