OdeIS/HeIs, a play on the name Odysseus, is an epic interspersed with traditional (e.g., Greek) and contemporary (e.g., urban) myths. The lyric narrative follows a genderless “hero” through surreal desserts and forests, battlegrounds, and the underground realm of death. The text is fragmented and includes poetic and critical essays on epic and poetic personal essays—forms which intermingle epic tropes of home, travel, and battle with issues of class, globalization, and gender.
In “Homeward, Postmodern Epic Conventions in Eleni Sikelianos’ The California Poem,” I read The California Poem as postmodern epic and against The Odyssey to illustrate how traditional epic tropes of invocation, heroic journey, and homecoming are used in The California Poem to comment on postmodern concerns of globalism, feminism, and subject positionality.