"Ariadne (Refrain)" and "Glauke Turns"

two videopoems by Dani Spinosa

"a woman...who is stuck, stranded, or sequestered in her story"

These two poem performances are readings through and extensions of poems that appear in my collection, Whispering Gallery (Assembly Press, 2026). The originals are visual poems that were first typed on a typewriter, then scanned into my computer where I manipulated them to the versions that appear in the collection. Each of the visual poems in Whispering Gallery is written to and about a woman in Greek mythology who is stuck, stranded, or sequestered in her story. In these videos, I take the first drafts of two of the poems from the collection, “Ariadne” and “Glauke,” and I burn them in my backyard fire pit. Each video is paired with a reading of the poem.

Ariadne (Refrain)

The original typewritten poem here was written in a maze-like structure, mimicking the labyrinth built by Ariadne’s father, Minos, to house her monstrous half-brother, Asterion. Ariadne’s thread allows Theseus to defeat the minotaur and escape the labyrinth. I like to think of her as a metaphor for the unappreciated emotional labour of care so often associated with the feminine. I like to imagine the thread as a metaphor for complexity and ingenuity (forget the maze and fuck you Daedalus!). I recorded and remixed the reading to echo and encourage more of that complexity. I want that labour (therapeutic, care, support, community) to wrap around everything, tie it all together. I want the old stories to burn.

Glauke Turns

The original typewritten poem here was written imagining what Glauke, Jason’s new wife, might have said, imagined, and felt while she burned after being gifted a cursed robe from Medea. In this poem I respond directly to the moment in Euripides’s Medea, where Glauke’s burning happens off-stage and is reported by a rather lengthy and detailed report by a Messenger. The poem borrows some of the play’s language, mostly from the translation by Gilbert Murray, available via Project Gutenberg. Poor Glauke is collateral damage, a testament to Jason’s cavalier crap and Medea’s wretched sorcery and scorned-woman rage. Look at how her page turns over against the fire. Please, watch her burn.

Dani Spinosa is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a computer programmer. She is sometimes an adjunct professor, a software developer, a digital and creative project manager, a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, President of Canthius, the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and a member of the editorial collective for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 5. She is the author of two books of poetry: Whispering Gallery (Assembly Press, 2026) and OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and one scholarly book: Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks of poetry and several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry and technology. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario with one beautiful man, two lovely cats, and one very silly dog.

Photographer: Jesse Pajuäär.