Ross McDiarmid
Ross moonlights a regular person, whiling the daylight hours away in 9 to 5 job. In what little time is left, he writes prose and poetry - mostly the latter. He is particularly interesting in writing about deep time and geology - Arthur's Seat looms large over his imagination.
The poem based on the epinikion of Pindar – more commonly known as a victory ode. Pindar, and other Ancient Greek writers, wrote these poems for the victors of the Panhellenic games – the primary of which was the Olympian games. This form of occasional poetry doesn’t really have an equivalent in the present. Where modern poetry can tend to linger within an elegiac mode, the epinikion deals in the importance of praise and a future-orientated sense of memory – or fame and renown. It was the power of praise and the future that drew me to Pindar. I’d been looking for ways to address my interest in geology, landscape, evolution, and Deep Time, and the more I read Pindar, the more suitable the epinikion appeared. I was interested in how the form saw the past and lineage as the key features of any victory in the games. Each victory was always connected to the victor’s heritage, either directly through his tribe with some mythical forebear or god, or through the origin myths or mythic cycles associated with the victor’s birthplace. In praising the victors, Pindar draws attention to the past as the necessitating force that defines their victories.
