Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?
When I was twelve or thirteen, I heard the opening of Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" performed as part of a one-woman show called The Bog Man's Daughter at the Boston Museum of Science and it terrified me: and seems to weep / the black river of himself . . . I remembered the line for years with such child-haunted dread that it physically shocked me to re-encounter it on the page in its proper context as part of the bog cycle of North (1975) by a poet I had just discovered in college and loved. I was not afraid of ghosts as a child; I was afraid of bodies, the uncanny valley of uninhabited flesh. As an adult I can recognize that the round "Have you seen the ghost of Tom" is meant to be creepy-funny, but hearing it sung at night in a tent at a Girl Scout sleepover in the middle of some state park woods I found the question "Wouldn't you be chilly with no skin on?" unspeakably horrible, literally so bad I couldn't put words around why it upset me so much. You're not supposed to be there if your skin isn't on. You aren't supposed to feel heat or cold or anything by the time you're just bones. Is the skin the only thing that keeps us from being a bunch of leftover, shivering bones knocking around in the night? Can you lose it? Can someone just take it off you? (Can you find . . . someone else's . . . to stay warm in? I knew some folktales like that. But wouldn't you still be those cold bones underneath?) So now I write stories and poems some of which are head-on about the sort of things I couldn't think about and couldn't stop thinking about as a child and some of which are not, which strikes me as normal, but the other factor here is that I have a very hard time telling what will upset other people vs. what actually upsets me and therefore I know I've had people tell me that my work freaked them out, but I can't remember examples off the top of my head.
[edit] Much of Gemma Files' Invocabulary (2018) is excellent fear poetry.
Give me back your sleep, until you die, Else I weep, weep. Else I cry, cry.
That sounds exactly like something Pamela Franklin should have been singing at the start of The Innocents (1961), Jesus.
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Date: 2023-09-24 08:12 pm (UTC)When I was twelve or thirteen, I heard the opening of Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" performed as part of a one-woman show called The Bog Man's Daughter at the Boston Museum of Science and it terrified me: and seems to weep / the black river of himself . . . I remembered the line for years with such child-haunted dread that it physically shocked me to re-encounter it on the page in its proper context as part of the bog cycle of North (1975) by a poet I had just discovered in college and loved. I was not afraid of ghosts as a child; I was afraid of bodies, the uncanny valley of uninhabited flesh. As an adult I can recognize that the round "Have you seen the ghost of Tom" is meant to be creepy-funny, but hearing it sung at night in a tent at a Girl Scout sleepover in the middle of some state park woods I found the question "Wouldn't you be chilly with no skin on?" unspeakably horrible, literally so bad I couldn't put words around why it upset me so much. You're not supposed to be there if your skin isn't on. You aren't supposed to feel heat or cold or anything by the time you're just bones. Is the skin the only thing that keeps us from being a bunch of leftover, shivering bones knocking around in the night? Can you lose it? Can someone just take it off you? (Can you find . . . someone else's . . . to stay warm in? I knew some folktales like that. But wouldn't you still be those cold bones underneath?) So now I write stories and poems some of which are head-on about the sort of things I couldn't think about and couldn't stop thinking about as a child and some of which are not, which strikes me as normal, but the other factor here is that I have a very hard time telling what will upset other people vs. what actually upsets me and therefore I know I've had people tell me that my work freaked them out, but I can't remember examples off the top of my head.
[edit] Much of Gemma Files' Invocabulary (2018) is excellent fear poetry.
Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.
That sounds exactly like something Pamela Franklin should have been singing at the start of The Innocents (1961), Jesus.