Ascend

With no explanation beyond a simple “Go, do what you must,” Hell releases Judas Iscariot.  Thus begins ASCEND, my 17,00 word epic poem about Judas’ quest through the surrealist landscape of the afterlife to find an answer to why he was freed.  The journey will not be easy–his guide is lost and blind, his other companion haunted by a devil on his back, and every step is mocked by the whispers of Pandemonium cursing him for his betrayal.  But if Judas finds a way to escape the industrial city of Dis, climb the lurid post-apocalyptic Tower of Babel, and survive the haunting loneliness of an empty Heaven, he just might find his answer–and maybe even his atonement.

HISTORY

I don’t know if this is the exact story behind the creation of this behemoth, but it’s a good one so I’m going to stick by it.  It was just before my Junior year of college and I was helping one of my friends move in her apartment before I had to leave for my semester abroad in England.  There was some down time, so I picked up a copy of the Norton Anthology  of Poetry and started reading The Waste Land.  And at some point through that, not understanding a lick of  it, I thought to myself, “Hey, you could write an epic poem.”

Montage: In England.  I write up the first few pages and hand it in for the end of my Creative Writing Workshop.  They love it.  I go home and keep working on it, getting about 50 pages done but not feeling it.  The end of junior year looms and one of my friends suggests taking Departmental Honors in English instead of some boring Honors Seminar.  I check the requirements: creative works of “substantial length” accepted.  My proposal takes one night to write and consists of me blabbering about how I want to write something long and exciting and I was going to do it anyways so I might as well get credit for it.  Hand it in with a shrug of the shoulders.  It’s accepted.

I spent all summer reading every book of epic poetry we had in the library and started writing first thing fall semester.  Even now, I don’t know how I did it–I must have not slept.  Because I didn’t like my first 50 pages so I threw them out and rewrote the whole damn thing and still finished before Christmas.  Spring semester was all polish and reworking, I presented it, everyone clapped, I graduated, and here we are.