Please welcome guest blogger Kelli Stanley!

Kelli is the Macavity Award-winning creator of the Miranda Corbie series (CITY OF DRAGONS, CITY OF SECRETS, CITY OF GHOSTS, CITY OF SHARKS), literary noir novels set in 1940 San Francisco and featuring "one of crime's most arresting heroines" (Library Journal). She is also a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Classics, a background she put to good use with her creation of “Roman Noir”: her first book, NOX DORMIENDA, won the Bruce Alexander Award for best historical mystery. The City and County of San Francisco awarded her a Certificate of Merit for her contributions to literature.

Kelli’s next novel is THE RECKONING. She founded Nasty Woman Press, a unique genre-based non-profit publisher, on November 9th, 2016.

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When Marlyn asked me to write something about a favorite poem, I was both delighted and overwhelmed by making such a difficult choice!

Poetry has always been a passion of mine. As a teenager who loved alliteration and rhythm and the musicality of words (I partially credit an early exposure to Poe for this), when I rode a bus to my rural school for thirty miles and back again every day, I devoured everything from Blake to Browning to Coleridge to Kipling. I spent a good portion of my younger life and previous academic career both translating and authoring poetry, particularly sonnets, my favorite form.

Since naming a favorite poem is simply impossible, I’ll just mention a few …

Shakespeare’s sonnets—particularly those devoted to the subject of love—are unmatched. Among those I enjoy the most are #116, #130 and #29.

Beyond the Bard, though, the pursuit, enrapture and bitter dissolution of love has long been a theme in poetry (keep in mind that in the classical world, song was poetry and poetry was song), and you won’t find a more brilliant, trenchant and emotional roller coaster of the full experience than in the works of the Roman poet Catullus. Sappho, too, justly earned copious praise through millennia for the unfortunately few fragments of her verse that survived, but Catullus remains my personal favorite.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!


soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Here’s my translation of the Latin:

Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love—

And not give a damn for the gossip
Of sanctimonious old fools.

Suns may fall—and rise again;
When once the brief light dims for us,
There’s but one long night for sleeping.

Give me a thousand, then a hundred kisses
Then a thousand and a hundred more
Again a hundred, again a thousand.

And after we’ve kissed so many, many kisses,
Let’s mix them all up, so we won’t know the number—
Or so some jealous sort can’t jinx us, trying
To discover just how many kisses there were.

I took the title for Nox Dormienda (A Long Night for Sleeping), my first novel, from this particular poem.

Love and death are forever linked in the human psyche and therefore literature, not only in the work of classical poets like Catullus and Horace, but by stalwarts like metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell (no relation to Captain). “To His Coy Mistress” is a brilliant exhortation to carpe diem akin to the earlier “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick, but far more subtle in its pitch. Their descendant is “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel …

To be continued tomorrow...