Are there poems that make you afraid? (Poem post: fear and poetry)

[radiantfracture]

The New Yorker: Poetry: Dorothea Lasky Reads Louise Bogan

This was going to be a podcast-Friday post, but then it was more poem- than podcast-centric, and then it wasn't Friday any more. I liked the podcast episode, but mostly I liked Dorothea Lasky's discussion of Louise Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia's Song."

Imaginary Photograph: Dorothea Lasky laughing apologetically as she changes my brain about poetry and fear.

Lasky has a new collection coming out, The Shining, about her obsession with that film, and so she's been thinking about the poetry of fear.

You know, I hadn't really thought of poems as a source of fear -- even that which evokes fear, or terror, or horror, is transmuted into awe by the aesthetic context. Every angel is terrifying, but also sort of hot.

Emily Dickinson can freak me out -- "I felt a funeral in my brain." There's "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. That has horror. Maybe "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" freaks me out a little?

Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?

Anyway, Lasky convinced me about Louise Bogan. The deepest knowledge I had of Bogan's work until now was from the nine-minute Essential American Poets episode about her. So I was sleeping on Louise Bogan, and now I'll never sleep again.

Lasky chose the triptych "Three Songs," published in The New Yorker in 1967 and in her collection The Blue Estuaries in 1968.

Here's the first of the three, a weird little singsong right out of a horror film:

Little Lobelia's Song

I was once a part
of your blood and bone.
Now no longer --
I'm alone, I'm alone.

Each day, at dawn
I come out of your sleep;
I can't get back.
I weep, I weep.

Not lost but abandoned,
left behind,
this is my hand
upon your mind.

I know nothing.
I can barely speak.
But this is my hand
upon your cheek.

You look at your face
in the looking glass.
This is the face
My likeness has.

Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.

* * * * * *

Creepy.

I don't know whether it was just my mood, but as Lasky read out the poems she'd chosen, I exclaimed aloud in my kitchen (mixing the chocolate and butterscotch and peanut butter chips into the batter) -- "what the fuck." The fear felt so present in the lines as she spoke them -- that uncanny fear of the child and of the unconscious, that which comes from you but is alien to you.

Lasky provides some autobiographical context for the poem; it's just as unsettling. Bogan used to wake up crying uncontrollably, and "Little Lobelia" is the name Bogan's daughter gave "the thing that made her cry." Lasky says that "Bogan thought of it as this child ghost inhabiting her ... and making her cry."

"I've always seen rhyme as having a haunting quality, and not necessarily being innocuous," Lasky said, which is a wonderful thought to turn over and try out.

What's the most frightening couplet one could write, I wonder. Maybe post your chilling rhymes below?

{rf}

P.S.I've remembered a poem -- song really -- that terrified me. "The Worms Crawl In" -- it was in a children's book of creepy things and it ruined me.

Comments

[sovay]

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.

[sovay]

P.S. For an example of a poem that doesn't scare me, but an adaptation of it into a song that does, see Laura Veirs' "Sleeper in the Valley" vs. the original Rimbaud.

[radiantfracture]

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?

I was just now reading back through poetry posts to find something to share in class today, and I came across this poem we talked about, which feels almost like an answer or antidote to the horror of decay, because it looks with love: https://radiantfracture.dreamwidth.org/196734.html

[sovay]

was just now reading back through poetry posts to find something to share in class today, and I came across this poem we talked about, which feels almost like an answer or antidote to the horror of decay, because it looks with love

Yes! What a great re-find. What did your students think of it?

(I don't know when the terror of bodies with no one in them began to change, except that it must have happened by the time my grandmother died when I was fifteen, because the last time I saw her was in the hospital, and even though it is not part of Jewish mourning for the bereaved to be part of the chevra kadisha who wash and wrap the body for burial, I hated the fact that it felt like she had just disappeared into the hospital, never to return. With my grandfather, twelve years ago, I sat with my mother for the two and a half days in a different hospital that turned out to be his deathwatch and it felt like the right thing to do, because it was real. I could see when he stopped being under his skin. And I still hate modern practices of embalming, because they feel like lying about death.)