Poems Dead and Undead
256Poems Dead and Undead
256Hardcover
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Overview
This selection of poems from across the ages brings to life a staggering array of zombies, ghosts, vampires, and devils. Our culture's current obsession with zombies and vampires is only the latest form of a fascination with crossing the boundary between the living and the dead that has haunted humans since we first began writing. The poetic evidence gathered here ranges from ancient Egyptian inscriptions and the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh to the Greek bard Homer, and from Shakespeare and Milton and Keats to Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Here too are terrifying apparitions from a host of more recent poets, from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Rita Dove and Billy Collins, from Allen Ginsberg and H. P. Lovecraft to Mick Jagger and Shel Silverstein. The result is a delightfully entertaining volume of spine-tingling poems for fans of horror and poetry both.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780375712517 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 09/16/2014 |
Series: | Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series |
Pages: | 256 |
Sales rank: | 1,091,903 |
Product dimensions: | 4.00(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST is the author of two poetry books and winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize, a Discovery/The Nation Award, the Columbia University Poetry Prize, a Writers @ Work Fellowship, the Missouri Arts Council Biennial Award, two University of Missouri-Columbia Creative Writing Fellowships, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, Antioch Review, and The Colorado Review, among others.
Read an Excerpt
Excerpted from the Introduction
INTRODUCTION
ONE FOOT OUT OF THE GRAVE
One moment you are alive. A car accident, a piece of pork stuck in your throat, or the slow burning away of disease, and then the change comes. The blood recedes. The heart silences. The breath dies out. Something shakes out of the body with the death rattle of that last breath. This transformation is the great mystery and the source of all religion. What is it that leaves? The spirit? The words for the soul – Latin spiritus and Greek pneuma – mean ‘‘breath,’’ and it seemed to the ancients that breath carried that mysterious pneumatic spirit that animates the body. But the moment of death isn’t the story’s end. Horribly, the dead body swells and farts and shifts, and the hair and nails grow after death. From such phenomena, the ancients must have asked, can the same breath that carries the spirit away carry something back into the corpse? Whether this something is infection or demon, this possession and dispossession is the great fear at the core of many monster tales. Can the dead become undead?
Can they indeed come back like Orpheus and Odysseus and Lazarus? Sometimes the dead are said to come back in nightmares, remnants of nature that have been suppressed, and sometimes for revenge; other times when the dead return from their descent into the earth they are (like Persephone and Inanna and Jesus) figures of the famous resurrection stories in which the planted body is actually a seed that will sprout new life.
Zombies
At times, we call the resurrected zombies. They are the children of sin, the dead bursting from their caskets in the end times; or they are children of the laboratory, mothered by infections or suffering contamination in an age ofHIV/AIDS and biological and chemical warfare. They come to us, things in the dark animated with unlife, and seem not to have souls, just an endless hunger to fill the emptiness inside with our tender flesh.
Fear often drives the creation of zombie tales, and of all monster tales, for that matter. What are monsters but the unknown made flesh? They are the bad unknown, bad because the word ‘‘monster’’ comes from the Latin word for ‘‘warn’’ (monere). We see in the poems of this collection the evolution of unknowns, dark figures in the family of archetypes that merit warnings. Therein lies their moniker Monster. And yet, the literary creation of these monsters can be a coming to terms with or a safe rehearsal of fear, as horror author Stephen King has said. Monster creators facilitate the escape from the world’s crises and from ‘‘the cult ofconsciousness’’ into mythologies and ‘‘speculations of a fantasy world,’’ according to psychologist James Hillman.
In recent depictions, zombies move faster and faster, maybe because we humans have become more and more driven in pursuit of the possible. Humans hunger more than ever – for information, for physical satisfaction, for fame. Zombies are hunger at a cellular level. Suppressed hunger. Cannibalistic hunger.
Yet zombies are horrible enough moving slowly, with their failing body parts falling off around them. They move beyond death perhaps because (as in Bryan Dietrich’s ‘‘Zombies’’) ‘‘Hell / is full,’’ or as in Kim Addonizio’s poem ‘‘Night of the Living, Night of the Dead’’ because life itself is Hell they become zombies rising from their graves and stumbling up the hill toward the house. Thus, Addonizio winks at the reader and lets us know that these zombies are not so different from us: they are ‘‘like drunks headed home from the bar’’ and maybe all they want is to lie down in their drunkenness in some room while the world whirls around them, not to eat our brains after all. Maybe, in fact, the poem is really about human beings in such despair that they drink themselves into a state where they are mumbling, stumbling monsters, not unlike zombies?
In popular culture, the zombies represent different things in different generations: conformity and mind control in the Cold War era; or a disease metaphor in the era of AIDS. For Addonizio, they represent a relentless despair and self-hatred manifested in repeated self- destructive action.
Vampires
In England, it was common well into the nineteenth century to tie the feet of the dead to keep them from walking. Like zombies, vampires are the walking dead, post-humans powered by post-human desire that makes the recognizable human form sinister, as in Conrad Aiken’s seductress vampire, with her ‘‘basilisk eyes’’ and ‘‘mouth so sweet, so poisonous,’’ or that of Baudelaire, whose beauty is so great that angels would be damned for her, but who transforms after ‘‘she had sucked the marrow from [his] bones’’ into ‘‘a kind of slimy wine- skin brimming with pus!’’
We can look at ourselves as monsters and see how deeply we desire those things that quench our human, physical needs. We want to live longer; we want to eat more, kiss more, and how manipulative we can be in pursuing what we desire! Vampires are the embodiment of excess, and they, too, arise from and fall prey to infection, contamination, excess, as we see in Michael Hulse’s playfully ironic song/poem ‘‘The Death of Dracula’’: ‘‘The fiend who bled a thousand maids / has joined the dark Satanic shades.’’
Ghosts
But what if we die and our bodies decay, unreanimated, and yet we do still not go away? Then we are yet another monster, a ghost. Perhaps we are the residue of human ineffable sadness, wafting in the room like the scent of flowers long turned to dust.
Ghosts are our largest pool of poems to consider, probably because ghosts are the monsters of reflection. They do not frighten us because they are exaggerations of ourselves the way that zombies and vampires are. They frighten us in apparition because they ask us to remember our own coming deaths and commit us to live, ‘‘Because, once looked at lit / By the cold reflections of the dead / . . . Our lives have never seemed more full, more real, / Nor the full moon more quick to chill’’ (James Merrill, ‘‘Voices from the Other World’’). And they remind us that they are out there always reminding us.
Ghost settings, such as the Romantic graveyard of Wordsworth’s poem, ‘‘We Are Seven,’’ are as important in Gothic literature as the ghosts themselves. Tradi- tionally, particularly in America, houses and castles are haunted, as in Robert Frost’s chilling poem ‘‘Ghost House,’’ but when the brain is haunted, the result is more unsettling. We can find this kind of haunting in Emily Dickinson’s ‘‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted,’’ wherein the haunted body ‘‘borrows a Revolver’’ and ‘‘bolts the Door.’’ And although neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks has recently described ‘‘the feeling of someone standing behind you’’ as a neuro- logical phenomenon, Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘‘The Shadow on the Stone’’ puts a ghost to that feeling.
Table of Contents
Introduction: One Foot Out of the GraveTHE CORPOREAL UNDEAD
Henry Israeli
Depraved Cogitation
Kim Addonizio
Night Of The Living, Night Of The Dead
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Der Totentanz (The Dance of the Dead)
Bryan Dietrich
Zombies
Robert E. Howard
Dead Man’s Hate
William Shakespeare
Puck’s Nighttime Speech
Eugene Lee Hamilton
On Two Of Signorelli’s Frescoes
1. The Rising of the Dead
2. The Binding of the Lost
Marvin Bell
The Book of the Dead Man (Medusa)
1. About the Dead Man and Medusa
2. More About the Dead Man and Medusa
Edgar Allan Poe
The Sleeper
Charles Baudelaire
Metamorphoses of the Vampire
Tony Barnstone
The Revenant
George Gordon, Lord Byron
from The Giaour
William Baer
All Hallows Eve
Michael Hulse
The Death of Dracula
Alexandra Teague
Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, Watches House of Dracula
Tim Siebles
Blade, The Daywalker
Tim Siebles
Blade, Historical
Conrad Aiken
The Vampire
Jim Stewart
Count Orlok
Tony Trigilio
My Childhood Nightmares Unfolded in Serial Narrative
Sarah Maclay
The View From Harold Way
THE INCORPOREAL UNDEAD
Jorge Luis Borges
Dead Hoodlums
Sholeh Wolpe
Ghost Tango
Alan Michael Parker
Words for Spring
Matthew Sweeney
In the Dust
Hayden Carruth
The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill
Li-young Lee
Nocturne
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
Gary Young
I last saw my mother
Emily Dickinson
One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted
Charles Harper Webb
Haunted
Robert Frost
Ghost House
David Orr
Daniel
T. S. Eliot
from Little Gidding
David Daniel
Paint
Thomas Hardy
The Shadow on the Stone
Mark Jarman
Goodbye to a Poltergeist
Howard Nemerov
I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee
William Shakespeare
The Ghost of King Hamlet
Ciaran Carson
Labuntur et Imputantur
James Merrill
Voices from the Other World
Charles Simic
from The Invisible
Anne Sexton
Ghosts
Harold Pinter
Ghost
Richard Garcia
The White Ghosts
Edward Hirsch
Hotel Window
John Donne
The Apparition
Richard Hunt
Gas-lamp Ghost
Walt Whitman
As If a Phantom Caress’d Me
D.H. Lawrence
The Inheritance
Anonymous
The Unquiet Grave
John Milton
Sonnet 23: Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint
Derek Dew
(Weathervane) Pirate Ship of the Dead
Yusef Komunyakaa
Blue Dementia
Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
The Ghosts (from The Song of Hiawatha)
Molly Peacock
Great-Grandmother’s Young Ghost
Jorge Teillier
In Order to Talk with the Dead
William Stobb
The Panther
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Incantation of the Spirits of Earth and Air
Vachel Lindsay
from The Ghosts of the Buffaloes
Egyptian Pyramid Text
The Dead King Eats the Gods
DEVILS, GODS, ANGELS, DEATH
Amin Esmaielpour
From Zahhak’s Burning Tehran
Michelle Mitchell-Foust
From Hell, Mister Lusk
Dante Alighieri
Canto XIII: The Wood of Suicides (from The Inferno)
Arthur Rimbaud
Night of Hell
John Milton
Satan’s Speech to the Fallen Angels (from Paradise Lost)
Stephen Dobyns
The Gardener
Boris Pasternak
Mephistopheles
H. P. Lovecraft
Nemesis
Allen Ginsberg
Howl, Part II
Anonymous
The Whale
Bishop Theobaldus
The Whale
Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
from The Devil’s Walk
George Meredith
Lucifer in Starlight
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
from Faust
Rita Dove
Hades’ Pitch
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill
Devil’s Tattoo
David St. John
In the Pines
Alexander Pushkin
Demons
Jennifer Clement
Deus Ex Machina
Anonymous
From The Oldest Legends of Ancestors
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Sonnet 100
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
Anonymous
Beast from The Sea (from The Book of Revelation)
Christina Rossetti
The World
Charles Baudelaire
Incubus
Anonymous
Enkidu’s Dream of the Underworld (from The Epic of Gilgamesh)
version by Tony Barnstone and Emma Varesio
Homer
The Land of the Dead (from The Odyssey)
Lynda Hull
Address (from Suite for Emily)
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death
William Shakespeare
Flute Playing the Death of Thisbe
Robert Louis Stevenson
Death to the Dead For Evermore
Suzanne Roberts
Skeleton
Grace Schulman
Instructions for a Journey
Dana Curtis
The Angel Opened
Billy Collins
Questions About Angels
Edward Hirsch
Isis Unveiled
Helene Cardona
To Kitty, Who Loved The Sea And Somerset Maugham
C. K. Williams
Halo
Anonymous
from Psalm 18
Willis Barnstone
God of the Gas Chambers, Where Are You Hiding?
Robert Pinsky
The Refinery
Shel Silverstein
Monsters I’ve Met