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

[adore]

i'm so excited to find another reader i can talk about her books with! i like spoons too, but my favourites are the vet's daughter and the skin chairs. my icon is from the first edition of the vet's daughter.

i found barbara comyns thanks to another author, helen oyeyemi, mentioning her work frequently in interviews – she described the vet's daughter along the lines of 'a girl starts levitating and people think it's rude manners' haha.

[radiantfracture]

my icon is from the first edition of the vet's daughter.

Oh, of course! I see it now.

I have read The Skin Chairs but don't remember it well -- what makes it a favorite for you?

Partly I like Woolworth's because it's a little bit of a cheat: a Comyns novel with a relatively happy ending. It probably reads best against the others.

I haven't read Out of the Red, into the Blue, Birds in Tiny Cages, or A Touch of Mistletoe. Do you know any of those well?

I think the voice in Sisters By a River is very clever.

[adore]

I have read The Skin Chairs but don't remember it well -- what makes it a favorite for you?

I tend to love stories about children navigating an adult world, but don't often find books that do that. This book did it particularly well, I thought.

a Comyns novel with a relatively happy ending. It probably reads best against the others.

That makes sense. Comyns novels rarely offer comfort.

I agree with you about the voice in Sisters By A River. It's the most disjointed of all her books, but she writes some haunting imagery, like the goat buried with its horns sticking up above ground, tying her hair around her chin so the bats don't get tangled in it, and licking your hand and pressing it to the wallpaper so that the bird printed on it came off onto your hand.

I haven't read Out of the Red, into the Blue, Birds in Tiny Cages, or A Touch of Mistletoe. Do you know any of those well?

Out of those three, I haven't read Out of the Red, Into the Blue either, and it seems near impossible to get my hands on, but the hope that it will be reissued like many of her other books gives me something to look forward to in life (a biography called Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner is due to release next year so maybe that will encourage some publisher to publish Out of the Red as one of Comyns's more autobiographic works).

Birds in Tiny Cages is not very Comyns-like, but you might enjoy it if you enjoy mid-20th century writing in general. A Touch of Mistletoe was recently reissued by Daunt Books which is how I could get my hands on it, and it's got the classic Comyns heroine, with the grim fairytale view of the world, buffeted by circumstance, experiencing bleak moments in-between and surviving everything, including wartime.