You say your memoirs offer pointed re-evaluations
of countless authors’ puffed-up reputations
so you’ve arranged to have them published once you’re safely dead.
Nestor, it’s time your memoirs were read.

*****

Brooke Clark writes: “The original for this is by Martial: Epigrams IV.33; it’s a good example of the alternating 7-stress, 5-stress lines I finally settled on as the best way to capture the feeling of Martial’s elegiac couplets in English. Martial has a number of these “hurry up and die already” poems; if you read through large chunks of his epigrams at a go you’ll find a lot of themes recur over and over with slight variations. The addressee in the original is a poet, but somehow I found the idea of a writer who has left a “poison pen” memoir revealing what he really thinks of all his contemporaries more interesting. Nestor is one of the recurring “characters” in Urbanities, an idea I picked up from Martial’s treatment of Zoilus and expanded until I had a small cast whose stories developed over the course of the book.”

‘Still Waiting’ was originally published in Literary Imagination.

Brooke Clark is the author of the poetry collection Urbanities and has published work in Arion, Literary Imagination, THINK, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, and other places. He is also the editor of the online epigrams journal The Asses of Parnassus and the book reviews editor at Able Muse.
Twitter: @thatbrookeclark
Bluesky: @brookeclark.bsky.social

Photo: “1701 Martial Epigrams Dekesel M139” by Ahala is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.