Poetry is Dead

What if I drop one breath?

What does it mean for a medium to be dead? I mean really dead, totally stopped in place with nowhere to go, no way forward?

What does it mean to have nothing new to explore technically?

I think about this quite a bit, actually, because of my weird background with media. Although new media is very important to me, my training comes from art history and lit crit, so I'm what you would call a child of the Old School. And one of the things I've noticed is that all sorts of media have died off over the years, just sort of spun their wheels and finally stopped.

And it's not necessarily big things. Like, there's no Death of Music (despite what both Don McLean and Devin Townsend say), and I doubt there will be in my lifetime. There's just too much territory to explore. But you can kill off a single instrument. When was the last time you heard a crumhorn, for example? It's a medium of expression just as surely as the paintbrush is, but it's fallen by the wayside. And there's other little odd things that live in the space between media and genres, things like...

Well, how about Radio Dramas?

When was the last time you heard a radio drama?

I can remember the last time I heard one. It was sometime back in, oh, 1997 maybe, somewhere around there. It was a radio dramatization of Star Wars: A New Hope. And that broadcast captivated me, it went far beyond the movie ever could, for it became my personal Star Wars, the Star Wars that played out visually inside my own head.

But you don't hear too many radio dramas these days, do you? It's another dead medium. It reached the end of what it could do, new things drew the attention of the masses, and people moved on, leaving a media ghost town.

Oh, and then, of course, there's poetry.

Poetry is dead.

But wait, let me back up a bit and explain just what I mean by a medium having nothing new to explore technically. This isn't a new concept for me, actually. It's something I call the Medium Singularity. I've already talked about it in relationship to painting, but let us roll through the main points again.

A Medium Singularity is the point where we expand a medium as far as it can go, where we reach the end, essentially, of Progress. It signifies the point where our ability to predict future possibilities goes completely out the window, where there's no technique that hasn't been taken to its furthest possible point. It borrows the concept from Transhumanism, actually--the Singularity signifies the moment of push, the great thrust beyond the limits of the merely human, where all bets are off and something totally new emerges.

Another possible term for it is Art At The End Of History. What does that mean exactly? Well, I think this quote just about sums it up:

"We're the generation of 'they have already done that. They have already been there."

Youch. Heavy stuff there. That's a quote from a Belgian paper, actually, translated by a friend of mine. (He couldn't locate the original source, unfortunately--another interesting example of information lost within an information flood.) The statement encapsulates, for me, the sensation of being post-historical. It's the sensation of realizing that Progress, at least in little corner of the artistic world, is over. Our happy story of a history that moves ever forward hits a wall and we're left stranded, with all the achievements of the masters of the past gathered up behind us.

And that can be insanely frustrating for artists! I don't deny that it can be the hardest part of playing in these fields today. Hell, it's a cornerstone of modernist philosophy, where instead of making new material you just endlessly disembowel the great works of the past in search of some elusive meaning among the cast out guts of consonants and vowels. From J Alfred Prufrock all the way down to Howl, there's dross left for us after the last masters plucked out their gold, and standing on the shoulders of giants, as the song goes, leaves us cold.

Poetry is the latest victim of the End of History. Think about it, when's the last time you bought a book of poetry? When's the last time you saw someone stand and recite aloud, or heard the sound on the radio?

And you know, people have been releasing new poetry. But they're the vinyl freaks of the lit world, the people who still buy their albums pressed onto those big beautiful discs, the dying crowd with their dying tech, playing out their songs till their needle jumps and another one bites the dust.

Poetry killed itself, hung itself in the attic on a tetragrammaton string that read PoMo. Some of its acolytes killed it with sound, broke it to pure noise like speaking in tongues, like gifts from the mad god of the 20th Century. Some made it a grocery list, gathered their affairs in order like Pink arranging guitar splinters in a hotel room, then passed away into the West taking the magic of the Elves with them. And some, knowing the time was at hand, hearing the tune of the jazz band, took their books and ran, their pages fanned out in a flickering street lamp in the wasteland.

Poetry hit a wall. It beat up language for its lunch money, and the funny thing was, when it was through it found nothing more to do with the change it had effected. The beat was rejected: each meter was reduced to a kind of tired pattern of use, and the modernists refused its tired truths.

And what could they do? All the clear visions of the Chinese masters were used up faster than you could conceive, they had received all the alliterating letters from the Nordic breed, and the call and answer patterns from across the Mediterranean Sea. Even long and short vowel beats, those pounding feet, had been retreaded from the Greeks by Edgar Allen Poe.

So where was there to go
but down?

But let's rein it in, I'm losing breath.

It came to the point that every technique you can imagine was played out, and, like the modernist painters, the modernist poets pushed every possibility as far as they could: repetition, the abandonment of meter and rhyme, the collapse of grammar and punctuation, the abandonment of meaning in favor of pure sound... every way you could mutilate a poem, the modernists did it. Sometimes their work was staggeringly beautiful. Sometimes it was dead. But I think that explosion of panicked experimentation can be seen as the death throes--it was the final moments of poetry's life, the rush claim the last innovatable territory.

But if you've been paying attention, you know that death isn't the end.

It's just the beginning stage of the metamorphosis.

See, just because you can't do something new technically with a medium doesn't mean you're out of things to say with that medium. In fact, I would argue that it becomes far easier to say what you want after a medium is dead, because you've got all of the tools imaginable, and you can pick and choose the tool for the message you want to convey. You're cut free from the stupid demand of the critics to be avant-garde--which isn't to say the avant-garde is bad, but the constant push in the art world for the next shock is absolutely a hard limitation that you don't have when your medium is dead. How on earth can you respond to a demand for the fury of artistic progress with anything but laughter when your medium's already been buried?

And after that laughter you can really get them worried, 'cause once the tools are all laid out before you, all the ones that are played out can start to be questioned. And this may cause some tension, but I just have to wonder:

Is poetry dead, or has it found a way to live under a new name? A name that to old poets is profane, but that has gushing through its veins the methods of Homer and the rushing presentation of a great Orator's proclamations? I speak of "SLAM," a poetry that positions its hand upon the shoulder of the oral tradition, that is bolder than the gentle bleating lamb beats that the ivory tower demands.

Tell me, when is the last time you heard a man raise a crowd's voice and hands with rhymed out lines out of his very soul? When a whole gathering of people stood at attention to hear their lives and feelings captured in a poem's mention?

But don't listen to all my nonsense, listen to Saul present this:



You can see how I might get irate when I hear someone pontificate about the youth today and how they don't appreciate art. Let me do my part as a lit crit theorist and say the nearest I've ever come to Dead Poet Society is when I'm listening to a playlist of hip hop. Hear this! The Modernists let the beat drop! And this genre caught the ball and slammed it, sample loops and all, through the hoop.

You could call it a SLAM dunk.

And you don't have to punk out
your lines, or rap to these jams,
This just shows with no doubt
that poetry died and came back
like Adonis. And I'll be honest,
I can't tell you what all this means
because once you've crossed the singularity
you're in the land of the Absolutely Free--no limits.
So give it a shot, don't let poetry
rot in a grave of its own making.

Because we're making art
at the end of history.
And poetry's only as dead
As we let it be.

Give my regards to Brooklyn.



This article really took on a life of its own--I wasn't going to write it this way, but the rhymes just started coming, and the rest, as it were, is history. No idea if it actually worked or not. You can follow me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper or on Twitter @SamFateKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

Strange Speakers, Strange Subjects: Separating the Author from the Persona

Here's a quick question for you:

In a poem or a song, who is doing the speaking?

Most people would tend to say the author--especially when it comes to songs. After all, they're up there singing it; why wouldn't it be them speaking?

The odd thing is, we don't assume this in other media. In movies, comics, books, and even games (although that's a bit weird, since we take the role of a particular character there) the speaker, even a narrator sitting in the narrative and referring to themself as "I", is assumed to be a particular character, not the actual author. And yet, songs are assumed to be autobiographical, or, at bare minimum, spoken by obvious, simplified human characters created for the purpose of making a straightforward narrative. But what happens if we stop assuming that the narrators are what we expect them to be? Or, in the reverse, what if we assume that the things they're singing to aren't quite what they appear?

Who, in other words, is the speaker, and who is the addressed audience? Who is "I" and "You"?

Consider "Child of Vision" by Supertramp:

Child of Vision - Supertramp Vidéo laurent57310 sélectionnée dans Musique

Sorry for the daft slideshow.

The most obvious interpretation here is that it's one person talking to another. In fact, considering the animosity between the two singers at the time of the song's creation, it's easy to see this as the two trading jabs back and forth. And, to some extent, that's completely accurate. But there's another meaning that comes from one of the underlying themes of the album. The album, after all, is called Breakfast in America. It includes the songs Gone Hollywood and the titular Breakfast in America, both describing America as an almost mystical, legendary place.

So, what if we jump straight off the deep end of interpretation and assume that this song is actually talking directly to America itself? Or, at least, a personification of America; some sort of American avatar.1

Let's look at the actual lyrics:

Well, who do you think you're foolin'?
You say you're havin' fun,
But you're busy going nowhere,
Just lying in the sun.
You tried to be a hero,
commit the perfect crime
but the dollar got you dancing
and you're running out of time.
You're messin' up the water
You're rolling in the wine
You're poisoning your body
You're poisoning your mind
You gave me coca-cola
You said it tasted good
You watch the television
It tell you that you should.

Rereading this bit with our new conception of the audience of the song, some of the odder lines begin to make a bit more sense. The "messing up the water" line, in particular, goes from seeming ambiguous and out of place to a seeming environmental message. And the last four lines here seem an injunction against not just personal excess but a whole system of blind consumerism.

The rest of the song continues on in much the same way, although there's less of interest in the next lines for this interpretation. It's just ambiguous enough to allow for these dual meanings. And by the end I feel that there is a suggestion of the speaker not just representing the singer or the band, but the rest of the world, which cannot seem to reconcile or find common ground with the American powerhouse.

This wouldn't be a StIT article, though, if I couldn't pull out an even more bizarre example. This one is actually courtesy of my sister, who has just the kind of marvelously twisted mind that we need more of in our culture. She has a rather interesting idea about the speaker of the Mr Bungle song "Pink Cigarette":

Again, the setup seems pretty straightforward: it's a man speaking to his (former) lover. It's a weird, freaky song, but the setup isn't that weird.

 Let's look at the lyrics:

Hush me, touch me
Perfume, the wind and the leaves
Hush me, touch me
The burns, the holes in the sheets

I'm hoping the smoke
Hides the shame I've got on my face
Cognac and broken glass
All these years I've been your ashtray

Not today

I found a pink cigarette
On the bed the day that you left
And how can I forget that your lips were there
Your kiss goes everywhere, touches everything But me

Hush me, touch me
Champagne, your hair in the breeze
Hush me, touch me
Lipstick, a slap on my cheek

Your eyes cried at last
Told me everything I was afraid to ask
Now I'm dressed in white
And you've burned me for the last time

This ain't the last time

I found a pink cigarette
On the bed the day that you left
And how can I forget that your lips were there
Your kiss goes everywhere, touches everything But me

You'll find a note and you'll see my silhouette...

There's just 5 hours left until you find me dead
There's just 4 hours left until you find me dead
There's just 3 hours left until you find me dead
There's just 2 hours left until you find me dead
There's 1 more hour and then you will find me dead
There's just..................... 

There's some really clever metaphorical work going on here, with the cigarette motifs carried all the way through. But that carried metaphor lets us do something really bizarre to the song.

It lets us view the metaphor as literal.

In other words, we can interpret this song as being sung from the perspective of a cigarette, abandoned by his former smoking companion. From this perspective, it's not a song of betrayed love and suicide, but a... well, wait, actually, it still is, oddly enough, only this time the protagonist is not a man but a cancer stick, horrified by the realization that his longtime smoker (no explanation for how this cigarette has stuck around for so long... a lucky item, perhaps?) is switching brands to the pink cigarette of the title. He's been literally burned for the last time, and his former smoker's lips go "everywhere" (an obvious hyperbole) but him.

And, finally, the silhouette at the end? The trail of ash that is all that remains of the poor singer after he burns himself down to the filter, destroying himself after his cruel abandonment.

Of course, none of this necessarily has to be true, or credible, or even coherent, it's just a fun exercise in pointing out that we shouldn't always assume that just because a singer is singing they are speaking for themselves, and that the intended audience is always so obvious. The wonderful result of this is that we can start to look at music and poetry as being spoken by many different characters, even if they aren't immediately obvious. It's how T. S. Eliot can, in his 20s, write about being an old man in "Gerontion" and "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock." It's how Ross Gay can write horrifying, satirical love poems (remember that one I posted?) to America, all in terms of one lover speaking to another. It means that every time we sit down to listen to music or read a poem, we take part in the construction of a whole set of personas that add depth and complexity to a work. Sometimes they can even radically change our whole interpretation.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.

1 In case you're unfamiliar with the term, personification basically means you're taking a thing and turning it into a person. Pretty intuitive.

The Last Bones of October

It's snowing here, for whatever freak reason. The night is settling down like a portcullis. It looks like the last true article of this season (an essay on silent horror films) is going to be delayed indefinitely--my partner in crime on that one is, unfortunately, without power, as are so many of my friends.

But, despite missing one article, I've rolled out 11 this month--not a bad number, if I do say so myself. We've covered everything from music videos to novels to games, everything from tragedy to fear to campy transgression. There is always more to be said, but rather than write a whole new topic, I thought I would wrap things up with a selection of other interesting reading and viewing materials that didn't make its way into my other articles.

You're wet.

I think you'd better... come inside.

HORROR AND POETRY

There are several poets worth delving into a bit with horror poetry in addition to the ones described in my article. One is Anne Carson, a fairly contemporary poet who has the habit of taking a fairly mundane (in the sense of something related, at least, to normal human experience) concept and linking it to some manner of terrifying, hallucinatory vision. Take this bit from The Glass Essay:

I am my own Nude.

And Nudes have a difficult sexual destiny.   

I have watched this destiny disclose itself

in its jerky passage from girl to woman to who I am now,

from love to anger to this cold marrow,   

from fire to shelter to fire.

What is the opposite of believing in Thou—

merely not believing in Thou? No. That is too simple.   

That is to prepare a misunderstanding.   

I want to speak more clearly.

Perhaps the Nudes are the best way.   

Nude #5. Deck of cards.   

Each card is made of flesh.

The living cards are days of a woman’s life.

I see a great silver needle go flashing right through the deck once from end to   

    end.

Nude #6 I cannot remember.

Nude #7. White room whose walls,

having neither planes nor curves nor angles,

are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane

like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon.   

It is a living surface, almost wet.   

Lucency breathes in and out.

Rainbows shudder across it.

And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering,   

Be very careful. Be very careful.

This is one of those times where I would encourage the reader not to read the poetry as symbolism. It's clear from the (much, much longer) poem that Carson is, herself, in some ways baffled by the visions appearing before her. And, after all, isn't reducing these visions by stating, "Ah yes, this represents her emotional suffering after a bad breakup!" just another way of attempting to pin down and rationalize some vast, terrifying, incomprehensible thing?

Speaking of terrifying and incomprehensible... check out this little piece of work from Ross Gay:

Love, You Got Me Good

Honeybunny, for you, I've got a mouthful
of soot. Sweetpea, for you, I always smell
like blood. Everything that touches me, Lovemuffin,
turns to salt. When I think of you
I see fire. When I dream of you
I hear footsteps on bones. When I see you
I can feel the scythe's smooth handle
in my palm. Love, you got me
standing at attention.
Clutching my heart. Polishing guns.
Love, I got a piggy bank
painted like a flag. I got a flag
in the shape of a piggy bank. For you,
Sugarfoot, I've been dancing
the waterboard. You're under
my skin, Love. Don't know
what I'd do without you,
Love.

Of the various poems I was considering for this, this is clearly one of the less terrifying. Still, it has an unnerving kind of thwack to it as you jolt from line ending to line ending, from disjunction to disjunction. It's a disturbing kind of poem. And, of course, Gay can definitely do worse. If you desperately want to feel like your soul is composed of writhing maggots, I urge you to check out his poem "Nursery". I contemplated including that here, for a brief moment. Then I reread the first few lines and decided that if I couldn't stomach reading through it a second time, I wasn't going to make all of you poor saps read it at all. "Bringing The Shovel Down" is also quite an alarming little work that starts out so innocuous seeming--very Stephen King, all things considered.

And, of course, it's always worth going back and reviewing Sylvia Plath. There are certainly enough poems about horrific death in her collected works to keep a horror fan satisfied for a long time.

HORROR VIDEOS

These didn't exactly fit into the article on techno and horror, but I felt like they were worth mentioning anyway.

Came across this little gem while looking up videos for another upcoming article. I've never heard of the artist before, but I'm very impressed with the way the video is set up, and how the sludgy tone of the music mirrors the slow, gloomy video itself. At first it seems that the protagonist is only dimly aware of what's going on--note the way his head seems to have turned before the blood splatter in the car early on, for example. Then we see him openly observing events with a sort of detached resignation, a horrible sort of heartsick acceptance. This really sets the end of the video--which for once I won't spoil--up perfectly.

This fellow isn't a Stoker or a King protagonist. He's not going to march through Salem's Lot dedicated to eradicating his foes.

No, there's really only one option.

It's a wonderful blend of horror with overwhelming sadness.

That kid is going to be traumatized, guarantee it.

This video... what to say about this video? It almost works. It really almost does. There are some legitimately terrifying moments. But those moments work because they legitimately do remind me of my own childhood horrors. But the band absolutely must appear in the video, of course, for no real narrative or symbolic purpose, as far as I can see. And the video ends up with what is--let's be perfectly frank here--a really shitty animated sequence that screams "We Ran Out Of Money For This Video!" Come on, guys. I've watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. I know what happens when you get halfway through a story and suddenly no longer have cash. It's frustrating because they seem to transition from something that is deeply disturbing, and very in line with childhood horror, to something that resembles an adult's poor understanding of what a childhood horror might be. It Just. Doesn't. Work.

That said, the disjunction between the happy, poppy sound of the song and the terror of the video is quite nice, and I really have to admire the scene where the traumatized child actor/future serial killer wanders down a monster-infested street. There's some good stuff to work with here.

You may note that I haven't mentioned Thriller at all.

That is because dancing zombies simply aren't scary. Sorry, but it's true.

They are, however, awesome, and very in line with Transgressive and Monstrous Horror.

So here, have some Thriller.

OH HOLY CRAP I FORGOT ABOUT THE WEREFOLF SCENE.

[pants]

Alright, so Thriller is actually a lot scarier than I remembered. Whoops. Uh. Moving on...


ODDS AND ENDS

For those of you that tasted blood and want more... who want to stay the distance... who have an itch to scratch and need assistance... might I recommend, for your enjoyment, one last classic, and one modern marvel.

The first is The Dionaea House, a hypertext work that precedes and in many ways predicts the second of the offerings. I won't give too much away, but it involves a house that seems to be in two places--or more--at once, a house that has a habit of turning people into deadened shells of themselves... if it leaves anything left of them at all. Check it out. It's a distinctly alarming little tale, and part of the long tradition both of correspondence-based horror and modern haunting house stories. (Yes, haunting. You'll see what I mean.)

The second is the ongoing chronicle Marble Hornets, an alternate reality... well, not game, really... simulation, perhaps? Set up as a video log of protagonist Jay's attempt to sift through footage given to him (for burning) by his former friend Alex. What he finds on the tapes is a strange record of a stalking that slowly escalates into something far more sinister and uncanny. These videos make a lot of use of the Uncanny. They're worth checking out, if you can stand it. But be warned--they keep getting worse.

Oh, and if you really just need something to keep you awake for the entire night, check out the reply videos from totheark.

We will wait for you no more.

That's it for our celebration of Halloween, folks. I hope you've enjoyed the content. I've had a lot of fun writing it. This week I'll be taking a break to catch up both on articles and on school work (and on sleep--which means no Marble Hornets for me, I suppose).

Rejoin me in or around the seventh...

On the moon-drenched shores of Transylvania...

When together...

We'll do the Time Warp again!

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.


Happy Halloween! Heeee eeee eee eee eeee eee!

Creeping Between the Lines: Poetry and Horror

 The Hearse Song

     Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by
     For you may be the next to die
     They wrap you up in a big white sheet
     From your head down to your feet
     They put you in a big black box
     And cover you up with dirt and rocks
     All goes well for about a week
     Then your coffin begins to leak
     The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out
     The worms play pinochle on your snout
     A big green worm with rolling eyes
     Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes
     You stomach turns a slimy green
     And pus pours out like whipping cream
     You spread it on a piece of bread
     And that's what you eat when you are dead.

I think everyone has come across this poem at one time or another. It's from Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Read in the Dark, a book that probably anyone who grew up in the 90s (or even the 80s, if Wikipedia has its publishing dates right) is at least passingly familiar with.

You may remember the books for their absolutely terrifying artwork.

It sure gave me nightmares as a kid--which might be enough to allow us to induct it into the Horror Hall of Fame, if not for the fact that bloody everything gave me nightmares as a child. I was a rather jumpy youth. But my relative susceptibility to midnight terror aside, I don't think this is actually a very good example of a horror poem. I mean, for starters, it's not a great poem--there's a lot of slant rhymes and duplicated words, and the meter is extremely uneven in a way that actually works against the flow of the poem's meaning.1 And, let's be honest here, the horror is pretty juvenile. It's really about grossing the audience out as much as possible. Which, sure, that has its place, but it's not going to make me quake in my boots.

There's a few lines there that work pretty well, though. Take that couplet at the beginning, for example: "Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by/For you may be the next to die." It has an odd invocation quality to it, a quality that reappears in line 9 with it's repetitive structure. That's getting into the hard stuff, because it drifts out of the realm of the kitschy and into the realm of actual experience. It isn't saddled with the grossout adjectives in the rest of the poem, simply stating the bare facts as they stand. And, what's more, it has a bit of depth to it. Those lines can be read either as "Don't laugh--you could be next!" or, much more terrifyingly, as "Don't laugh--we might make sure you're next!" The implication there is that some external force may decide that you're being just a bit too cheeky, and deserve to be taken down a bit... six feet down, to be exact.2

But this just isn't scratching the horror itch. It seems like this medium maybe just isn't well suited to horror. I mean, look at Poe, the original master of horror--"The Raven" isn't particularly scary, really, it's just gloomy, gothic, and depressed. It's not all that far off from a Morrisey song. ("When you say it's gonna happen now/When exactly do you mean?/Quoth the Raven: 'Nevermore'.") Maybe poetry is just too singsongy or abstract to grasp at real terror, or spine-tingling suspense, or bonechilling horror.

Sort of like how you can't write a science fiction poem, right?

Let's take a look at Wallace Stephens and see what he has to say:

The Worms at Heaven's Gate

     Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
     Within our bellies, we her chariot.
     Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
     The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
     Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
     And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
     The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
     The bundle of the body and the feet.
     .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
      Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour.

So, what's different about this poem? For one thing, it's done away with the rhyme scheme that so many poets cling to for dear life. The result is that the poem seems less like a bit of doggerel and more like some ritualistic chant. What's more, it does away with adjectives almost completely. This isn't a poem trying to gross you out with detail--it's remaining in the realm of bare minimal facts. Which is rather odd, considering how utterly surreal the poem's actual contents are. There is something unnervingly clinical about the ritual presentation of this princess's body parts for review.

I think the greatest strength of this poem, however, comes from its use of fridge horror. Fridge horror is that sensation you get when you're up at night for a late snack, standing at the fridge, gazing upon the eggs and milk, and you suddenly become aware of the underlying implications of a work. It comes, as TV Tropes will tell you, in a number of other varieties, such as Fridge Logic and Fridge Brilliance, but what we're looking at here is the horror that comes from the title clicking with the contents of the poem. Think about it. What does it mean that these are the worms at the Gate of Heaven, conveying spirits to the pearly gates? What does that say about God?

Roll the implications of that around a little. They ain't pretty, especially if you know a bit about what Angels are actually supposed to look like. Let's just say that there's a very good reason that the first thing they tend to say when they show up in the Bible is "FEAR NOT!" The implications are not, I suppose, all that different from what the Hearse Song suggests, but whereas that poem makes its meaning overt, Stephens hides his implications in his title, letting it slowly seep into the reader's consciousness. It's the difference between a jump scare and the sensation you get when you suddenly realize that someone has been looking in the window for the whole scene and you've only just now noticed it.

Stephens does this again in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as well. Check out the fourth way of looking:

     A man and a woman
     Are one.
     A man and a woman and a blackbird
     Are one.

Again, we have a sense that something is being hidden from us, some deep, dreadful truth of the universe--the kind of truths that H.P. Lovecraft's hapless heroes tend to overhear, resulting in them going utterly mad from the horror of knowing. What's more, the structure of the poem reinforces the idea. We read the first introductory line, and then the short second line, and are aware of the cliche. Then we get to the next line: "A man and a woman and a blackbird," and we are surprised. This is an interloper in our cliche! And, what's more, a rather spooky one as that. Stephens uses this parallel structure to raise our apprehension, and then confirms our new fears with the final repetition: the three beings together are one. Something of the nature of the Blackbird seems to already have infiltrated this vision of harmony.


Do I know what exactly Stephens is driving at here?


Hell no!


But each time I read this passage I always shiver a bit. There's something barely seen here, lurking around the edges of understanding--some darkness that, perhaps, ultimately is the more horrible for how intrinsic it seems to be to our inner nature.


This is, I think, where poetry shines. Poetry is a medium of slant truths and hidden meanings. It is allusion and metaphor atop subtext and simile. It's a big juicy sandwich of fog and smoke and mirrors. This makes it perfectly suited to psychological horror, because it can describe everything as an entity seen only out of the corner of the eye. It is a horror that need not be understood or clearly spelled out--it draws upon the structure and nature of poetry as a medium to give it a visceral strength.

My favorite use of this is, of course, in the poems of T. S. Eliot. I am, it might be said, a bit of a slavering fanboi for that man's work. I already talked a bit yesterday about the horror that comes from transforming the familiar into the phantasmagoric. It's a technique you might recognize from German Expressionist film, German Expressionist artwork, some of the stuff Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman have done, and so on. Eliot is a master. Let's check out some passages from The Waste Land:

     There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!
     'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
     'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
     'Has it begun to sprout?  Will it bloom this year?
     'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
     'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
     'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

     By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept ...
     Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
     Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
     But at my back in a cold blast I hear
     The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

Or perhaps from "Rhapsody on a Windy Night":

    Half-past two,   
    The street-lamp said,   
    “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
    Slips out its tongue   
    And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”   
    So the hand of the child, automatic,   
    Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.   
    I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.

Or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

    Let us go then, you and I,   
    When the evening is spread out against the sky   
    Like a patient etherized upon a table;

These are weird images, ladies and gentlemen. And maybe I'm overstating my case to call them horror, but should we term them anything else? There is a sense of the macabre in each vision Eliot presents us, whether it be the unknown presence chuckling in the background in The Waste Land, or Prufrock's sky, drugged and splayed out, or the blank, sociopathic child lurking at the docks at two in the morning in "Rhapsody". Eliot's world is a haunted world, and it seems like something monsterous is lurking just beneath the surface, ready to emerge--fitting for a poet caught between the horror of the two World Wars.

Of course, these aren't the only poets with an understanding of different forms of horror. Stevie Smith manages to create some pretty unnerving images in her otherwise rather nursery-rhyme-esque poems, demonstrating that horror can come even in a singsong form. And Langston Hughes creates a very adult horror through his exploration of powerlessness and the violent suffering of his people in the American South. Emily Dickinson is always lurking in the upstairs window, as well, spinning out strange visions. And even the modern hip-hop artist and poet Saul Williams occasionally drifts into these dark waters:

It seems strange to me, then, that there aren't more poets that work specifically in the genre of horror. There is, after all, such a strong effect to be found in the lines, the steady march from line to line of each and every metric footfall, every rhythmic tap, that signals the inevitable march of something you would rather not know... it comes on, unstoppable, trudging or skittering through the fog. You don't know what it is, or what it wants, its significance or form, but you can be certain of one thing.

It's coming.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days. Oh, and I'm looking for guest entries this month, so if you have something interesting to say about things that generally fit the theme, send them my way.

1This is another Topic For Another Day. Basically, the main idea here is that the irregularity of the meter draws attention to itself without actually reinforcing any of the themes of the poem. It's a distraction rather than a boon, unlike, say, a Hughes poem where the irregular meter creates a sense of musical influence.

2. Eee hee hee hee! </Crypt KeeperofManyNames> 

Approach

A white burst of lightning strobes downward and God rears His head in the sky.
He is colossal,
Implacable, steel and
Thunder.
Within him ride Angels, quick for the hunt.

Do you recall a time when they were as we are?

--Humans?

--Mortals?

As we trade our guns, so they traded numbers, on vast howling engines in our once great cities. And they traded their numbers to the ancient Gene Witches. They trialed and they errored and a whole generation of beautiful beings was born--

Beautiful boys--

Beautiful girls--

Their faces were unmarked as ours, their minds were so quick like the vast howling engines in our once great cities, their bodies so strong and so slender.

Ah, and here are their eyes, open to us now, as their colossal god eclipses the sky. Their eyes shine down rays of God's love to his children.

Their eyes shine like the sun.

Do you recall the sun? Once all the sky was alight with a warmth that let our crops grow.
Now deep beneath our old city
Moloch
Breaths his fire and the plants of the Gene Witches feed from his warmth.

Look, how the Gene Witch's hut sinks into its mire. God does not suffer a Gene Witch to live. Not anymore. Only the Witchminds,
Bred from the vats of
Angels, live in the core of
God, closest to His light and heat.
And see, the Capital sinks as well, protected from the Angels.

Do you recall music from before the Gods rose into the sky and we were left here to our once great city, and the Old Gods beneath the earth, and the old howling engines and Gene Witches?
Music before the Blessed Mixers found their beats of calamity and the Bravers fought angels? They music they played says nothing to us about our lives,
And so they mixed a new beat for our scattered tribes.

See, all the eyes are sinking to earth, and the  ships of the Angels approach, bringing the
Witchminds, and the
Huntsmen, and the
Threshing dogs, and the
Whip guns. And the
Blessed Mixer will mix his beats, and the
Bravers will Brave against the Angels, and if
We are lucky and the
Howling engines bless us, we may
Capture a whip gun
For ourselves.
But now me must go in and hide, or be harvested for our Stems.

Lead me inside, girl,
Out of this storm.

And tomorrow, if the Bravers do not win, we will hang the Blessed Mixer.


So tell me again why there isn't more Science Fiction Poetry? As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.

Modern Music, Modernist Poetry

I love mashups. I love them for the same reason that I love odd covers, remixes, and fanfiction: mashups take something that I'm familiar with (or two things that I'm familiar with) and turn them into something unfamiliar. They allow me to get a whole new perspective on a work. It might not even be a profound new understanding of the meaning of the work, but it can still give me a new sense of how something works musically, how the lyrics interact with the other instruments, and so on.

And sometimes it uncovers interesting parallels between different songs, resulting in a completely new composite message.

Consider the "State of Pop" mix by DJ Earworm for 2009:

What's particularly interesting about this mix is the fact that the original lyrics are compiled into a whole new set of lyrics. And these new lyrics make coherent sense, in a pop music sort of way, despite being from so many different sources. What the venerable Earworm has done here is he's pulled together a bunch of parts of other works to create something new.

This isn't a crazy 21st century trick, though. No, they were doing it way back at the turn of the last century as well. In fact, in literature there's a whole term for this sort of thing.

We call it shameless theft.

We call it... "allusion."

Well, not exactly. Usually what "allusion" means is that an author takes a previous work and deliberately makes reference to, or quotes bits of, that work in order to make their own creating a little bit deeper, or more rewarding for the dedicated reader. So, when you've got a serpent in something, that tends to hint at a biblical allusion--it's alluding to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Or, a character in a vampire story proclaiming whether or not they drink wine would be an allusion to the classic line from Dracula. It's a bit different than something like a full-out borrowed character, or a retelling of another story, because it tends to rely on smaller references, structural similarities, and symbolic parallels. And, of course, as with anything dealing with symbolism, there is always plenty of room for interpretation.

DJ Earworm's mix, then, is basically Allusion On Steroids. It's all allusion--all snippets of other works composed into a new work. There's no original work--it's all other source material. This is a weird concept, and it sounds like a very modern kind of thing, but it's older than you might think. T.S. Eliot was doing this sort of thing back in the 1920s. Check out this passage from his sprawling, chaotic epic The Waste Land:

             And I will show you something different from either
             Your shadow at morning striding behind you
             Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
             I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
                          Frisch weht der Wind
                          Der Heimat zu
                          Mein Irisch Kind
                          Wo weilest du?

The beginning bit there is one of the most famous chunks of The Waste Land. It's an incredibly evocative passage, alluded to (are you starting to see how this works?) rather famously by Stephen King in his Dark Tower series.

But then the poem sort of clatters off the rails into four lines of German, of all things.

What's going on here?

Well, Eliot is sampling. First of all, all of that babbling about handfuls of dust? That shows up in a John Donne poem. The German bits? That's a sample from the famous Tristan und Isolde (or, The Romeo and Juliet Alpha Test). And the bits about the shadow? All of that's a sample too, of Eliot's own work! A big swath of the first part of The Waste Land actually comes from an earlier poem--"The Death of Saint Narcissus". Everything has been tweaked a bit to fit the structure of Eliot's new poem--maybe it's been autotuned or manipulated so that the key matches up--but ultimately this evocative, powerful passage is a mashup, just like Earworm's "State of Pop".

Eliot even plays games with the audience by including a bunch of notes (as in footnotes, not musical notes) that supposedly clear up all of his allusions. Spoiler alert: they do not. In fact, even he described his notes as a masterpiece of "bogus scholarship". He'll do things like reference a particular passage to a narrative about an arctic expedition when, as other scholars have pointed out, it's just as likely that he was thinking of passages from the New Testament. Sometimes he ends up sampling other people's samples. It's a mess.

It's a complex game Eliot is playing, and the end result is that the major theme of the poem is reinforced. That theme, of course, is fragmentation and collapse, reinforced by this confusing jumble of references. DJ Earworm has created a song that emphasizes the unity of its component parts, and while it can be argued that this is possible because pop music has basically three or four subjects (Sex, Dancing, More Sex, Lack Of Sex and How Lame That Is) that it never swerves from, ultimately the result is that the structure reinforces the theme of people coming together. In fact, the end message of the song is that pop music does have the power to bring us joy and comfort, even when life knocks us down. It's an incredibly optimistic message that is full of a belief in the ultimate power of art. In The Waste Land, the sense is only that people are dividing ever further and further apart, and this optimism is constantly denied. The places where the sampling is heaviest create not a sense of unity but a sense of disorder and the uselessness of our artistic traditions.

Two different works.

Two very different ways of using sampling as a tool for the generation of meaning.

The DJs of today are, in short, the Modernist Poets of our generation, spinning meaning out of the fractured images of the past. And call it sampling or call it allusion, the technique isn't going away any time soon. Because I agree with DJ Earworm: art has power, and we can find meaning amongst the fractured images shored against our ruins.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days. ALSO, I'm calling in favors. I'm living in The Week From Hell at the moment, and I'm going to need a guest article for Friday. Anyone have something they want to share? Let me know.