Dr. Emily Lord-Kambitsch, Pacifica Faculty & Co-Chair of the Mythological Studies Program was recently awarded first prize in the Classical Association Poetry Competition, 2024 for the poem, “Pluto’s Wife in Transit.” I’m delighted to speak with her about her poetry and also hear what is new in our Mythological Studies Program.
Angela Borda: I would venture to say that few people undertake poetry with the expectations of accolades and awards being bestowed on their work! It’s a rarity to be recognized in this way, and in this case, it’s very well deserved. So let me say congratulations on behalf of your Pacifica community. Please tell us about “Pluto’s Wife in Transit,” which won this award. Was it from a book of yours and what inspired it?
Dr. Emily Lord-Kambitsch: Thank you so much for the kind words of congratulations. I feel very proud to have this poem receive such an acknowledgement, especially from the Classical Association Poetry Competition judge, Dr. Selina Tusitala Marsh, the former Poet Laureate of New Zealand. She’s a luminary of a poet and storyteller. I once heard her caution in a TED Talk, “If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will.” Even though this poem is Persephone’s story, it’s also the Demeter/Persephone myth, one that relates intimately to my story of coming to work at Pacifica. Six years ago, I stumbled across a lecture on the Demeter and Persephone myth from Dr. Christine Downing, who aided the development of the first curriculum for Pacifica’s Myth Program. I was struck by the ways in which she used this myth to explore the depths of her own experiences of being a mother and a daughter. Like many of my poems, this one came through with its own voice, in 2018, as a way to connect with part of my own childhood as the daughter of a victim advocate in Santa Barbara, who did a lot of work in processing trauma with crime victims and guiding them through the often labyrinthine and sometimes callous proceedings of the criminal justice system. There was a lot of conversation in my early childhood about what can happen to young people, how vulnerable it is to be a young woman. That led to the modern turns in the poem, situations where women feel like they have to be polite and give consent in situations where they’re endangered.
Angela: The present moment seems no less fraught than these myths with feelings of endangerment, with many worries in the political theater and with the many sociological and environmental issues that concern the world and especially scholars at Pacifica. What roles do art and stories and music-making play in response to human suffering and injustice? The poem that you won this award for very much addresses the idea of hell and descent/rebirth, which would seem relevant to me in times of chaos and shadow.
Emily: Persephone’s journey has been told many times, her abduction, her descent, her mother’s grief, and her emergence for the first time, told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which dates to roughly the 6th century BCE. I tried to emphasize the iterative nature of her descent and reemergence; it becomes a Sisyphean cycle; she doesn’t get the royal treatment any longer, her uncle/abductor doesn’t come to escort her, now she has to take the ferry with the human souls. I’m interested in what happens over the years, the centuries that she has to travel, her perspective on the cyclical nature of crises.
Considering the proliferation of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives across time, the threat of end times is always near, and the environmental, social, political, and spiritual crises come and go. It’s important to be present for them and understand how each of us can affect change. We have different forms of activism that we’re conditioned for, and art is a very important form of activism. Artists are often the first to be exiled and suppressed. Some of my favorite poets, Dante, Ovid, were exiled and their work has that sensibility. The story of descent is the story of exile, and sometimes it’s as a result of speaking out, of speaking through art that tells the truth. That’s what art does at its best, it reveals truths that might be at odds with the political or social system. Art is very important for the restoration of collective consciousness.
Angela: As do we all, I have my favorites when it comes to poetry, such as Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, and Sandra Cisneros. But I’m no poet! And I wonder if you would share with us your poetic inspirations, authors whose poems still impact you?
Emily: That’s a great question. I love reading poetry, I wish I could read more than I do. But the people who inspire me and have stuck with me are those with powerful, imagistic poetry. Louise Glück is a favorite. She has these very vivid poems with an alchemy to them. There’s a lot of interest in death and rebirth cycles, including those of a relationship. As someone who’s been divorced, I’ve found in popular literature there’s not as much attention to that process of relationship, it’s sad and sometime beautiful erosion. The way she observes that is fascinating and it adds a helpful compassion. Honestly, I’m most inspired by ancient poets, Catullus is one of my favorites. In the late Roman Republic, his poetry is inflammatory invective, there’s a lot of obscenity in it, but others that glorify his love for his mistress and how there’s only a limited time to be with the person we love, and this woman he loves, whom his poems call “Lesbia”, named after the island of Lesbos, home to the famed poet Sappho. Sappho is another huge influence for me, she was writing in the 6th century BCE, and she writes about the embodied experience of desire, jealousy, beauty, perennial themes.
Angela: Your poem is about Hades, and myth is your forte. Could you speak a little about the intersection of poetry and myth for you?
Emily: I think myth is really carried forward through its poetics, by which I mean the way it’s made, poetics coming from the Greek work poieo, meaning “make.” The myth survives on the basis of how it’s told, through a human voice, performed on stage, rendered in a film. The poetics evolve the story and make sure it survives. Poetry has always been an important vehicle for myth; it involves rhythm, music, community. As far as we know, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, written in dactylic hexameter, was a devotional song, so I anticipate it was for a public ceremony, likely associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries celebrated by the Athenians.
Angela: If only we could go back in time and take part in such ceremonies and devotionals. But, as you say, the survival of the myth is based on how it’s told. And how we tell our own stories is no less important. You teach memoir during the summer, in the “Myths of Self, Memoir and Autobiography” course. What is the importance of combining personal writing with writing on mythic figures?
Emily: It relates to my earlier response. In teaching the memoir course, it’s the last one the third-year students take before they move to dissertation. They can reflect on the archetypes and the stories that have most inspired them and that characterize their own life experience. It gives them a course to write re-tellings of any myths from any tradition that have inspired them. Every year I see deep, thoughtful engagement with these stories that reveal new angles of meanings. They come from the authors of these retellings. It’s very healing to write a quasi-personal, quasi-mythic treatment, to encase the personal in the mythic. Myths are containers by which we understand the events and relationships in our lives.
Angela: I love the idea of myth as a container, just as we think of the therapeutic process as a container. You’re the Co-Chair of the Mythological Studies Program, along with Dr. David Odorisio. What is new and upcoming for Myth?
Emily: I’m the advisor to the Mythological Studies Journal, and our student editors, led by Kira Kull and Jasmyne Gilbert, are doing a wonderful job at compiling the scholarship from our program and editing what will be the new issue of the journal with the theme “interstitial intermediaries,” focusing on borderlands, margins, between-spaces, and aspects of myth functioning there. That’s coming out in the fall. And we also have our first incoming cohort of our new track called the MU track, the first not to have a summer residential session. We took that session out to give everyone a break from the rigorous year-long schedule, based on student feedback. The Program remains the same number of units, but students won’t have to travel during the summer. So there is free time for recreation and research and family. So that’s exciting! We’re also incorporating some course title changes and new course descriptions that are now available online on our website.
Angela: That’s wonderful the program is evolving to meet student needs. What are you most looking forward to in the Fall as a new cohort gets underway? Are there any of the new courses you’d like to highlight for us?
Emily: Over the past year we have had a lively infusion of new energy in our course offerings through the arrival of Core Faculty member Monica Mody and Associate Core Faculty member Devon Deimler, both of whom have been making considerable updates to a few of our existing courses, such as “Psyche and Nature,” “Ritual and the Embodied Mythic Imagination,” and “Archetypal Psychology.” David Odorisio has a new course called “Christian Mysticism and the Medieval Imagination,” inspired by his specialty in Christian mystical traditions. Looking further ahead, I have a new course called “Greek Tragedy in Language Theory and Practice” that I am in the midst of building, which will launch in 2025-2026. The principle is to understand issues of language and translation, and the ways that these tragedies have been staged in ancient and modern contexts. And we’ll be doing a deep dive into one or two plays; we’ll have students work in groups on a scene and have each student develop a monologue based on the play. We’ll be doing group and individual performance studies as a way of exploring the text in an embodied way.
Angela: Sounds wonderful! Are there any publishing projects ahead for you that we might like to know about? Any conferences or research projects from the summer or in the coming year? What’s on the horizon for you?
Emily: I’m in the early stages of co-editing a collection with Devon Deimler on Classics after C.G. Jung, a collection that aims to combine perspectives of classicists and Jungian/post-Jungian scholars interested in Carl Gustav Jung’s reception of classical antiquity and its influence on literary criticism, depth psychological theory, and the popular imagination. We’ve just sent out calls for submissions, so we’re in the early stages of development. I’m also going to be based in Rome for much of the coming year, as I have a visiting scholarship at the American Academy in Rome to work on the Jung book as well as write on the Roman poet Ovid’s characterization of the city of Rome as a space for transgressive lovers. I’ll still be teaching most of my courses and serving as Associate Chair of the program. I’ll still be available to my dissertation students. I’ll also be coming back in winter and spring for in-person teaching sessions, so I’ll have some long commuting adventures!
Angela: That sounds so fun! I always love speaking with you, Emily, so thank you for your time and thoughtfulness in your answers. We’ll include below an excerpt from your poem. For those who would like to read the work in its entirety, you can visit here.
An Excerpt of “Pluto’s Wife in Transit”
By Emily Emily Lord-Kambitsch
Hades had me by the hair.
Should have cut it.
Mother told me to cut it.
His breath wilted my bouquet of wildflowers.
His horses’ eyes rolled like wheels of flame.
The earth bled lava as he
pulled me down into the
incision he had made.
Where was my head then?
The others told me not to pick too many.
Don’t go picking those, they said.
Daffodils don’t do for garlands.
Daffodils don’t grow where I am now.
To learn more about the Mythological Studies program, visit us here.
Emily Lord-Kambitsch, Ph.D, is Co-Chair and an Associate Core Faculty member of the Mythological Studies Program. A scholar, poet-storyteller, and native of Santa Barbara, her lifelong exploration of classical mythology is rooted in the study of Greek and Latin language and literature. After completing a BA in Classics at UCSB, Emily received a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where her thesis focused on the healing of grief in Roman stoicism, and where she worked as a research assistant for the Oxford Emotions Project, a cross-disciplinary study of definitions of emotions in ancient Greece.
In 2016 Emily received her PhD in Classics at University College London (UCL). Her thesis examined emotions as an important mode for audience engagement with representations of antiquity in modern popular fiction, theatre, and cinema. The thesis has yielded articles in publications including the journal, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, and the collections, Rewriting the Ancient World: Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in Modern Popular Fiction (Brill, 2017) and Star Attractions: Twentieth-century Movie Magazines and Global Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2019). Her current research traces the relationship between memory, longing, and selfhood in the voices of women from Greek tragedy.
A prize-winning poet and author of a poetic memoir, Western Yoga: A Field Report on Desertion and Deliverance (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Emily has ceaseless curiosity about nature, religious experience, Greco-Roman myth, memory, and the transmission of story and artifacts, personal and ancestral. Her commissioned writing was featured in the showcase, “Weaving Women’s Stories”, at London’s Being Human Festival in 2018, and has performed with Backbone Storytelling and at the Narrative Loft in Santa Barbara. She regularly co-facilitates a series of Mythic Movement workshops in Santa Barbara, combining elements of intuitive movement and guided visualization to invite participants’ embodied engagement with mythical themes and characters, and co-hosts a monthly community discussion on mythic/philosophical themes (Love, Friendship, Ritual, Renewal, Myth) at Wylde Works in downtown Santa Barbara.
Emily arrived at Pacifica after 8 years in the UK and a series of lectureships at UCL and UCSB, and at Pacifica she teaches courses in Greco-Roman myth, ritual studies, memoir and self-writing, research approaches, and dissertation formulation. She is passionate about supporting students’ connection with the perennial stories that call to them through academic, artistic, and personal lenses.
See her personal website for more information: https://www.emilylordkambitsch.com/
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
