Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

 
9780375712401: Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375712402 ISBN 13: 9780375712401
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman brings to life a colorful menagerie of fantastical creatures from across the ages.

Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TONY BARNSTONE is the Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College, California. Author of numerous books of poetry, includingTongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry, he is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose, and editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Chinese Erotic Poems.

MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST is the author of two poetry books and winner of numerous awards including a Nation "Discovery" Award, the Columbia University Poetry Prize, the Missouri Arts Council Biennial Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, Antioch Review, and The Colorado Review. She lives in Gold Beach, Oregon.

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INTRODUCTION: DISTORTING MIRRORS, SPLIT SELVES, AND THE ORIGIN OF MONSTERS

To be a monster is to be inhuman. Or to be a monster is to be all-too-human. Eitherway, in order to talk about monsters, one first must talk about what it means to be human.

For the Chinese, the idea of the human goes back to Confucius.He used the word ren, whichmeans ‘‘man’’ or ‘‘human,’’ to name the values that make a just and moral being, such as filial piety of child to parent, loyalty of citizen to ruler, just treatment of citizens by rulers, and reciprocity – treating others as you would wish to be treated by them. Most world religions have a similar notion of reciprocity. Even when the reciprocity is bloody, as in the Babylonian and Jewish notion of ‘‘an eye for an eye,’’ it functions as an attempt to limit vendettas: take only one eye for the loss of yours, in other words. Out of such ideas comes the entire legal justice system, as well as the immensely complex set of balanced and reciprocal interactions thatmake up our daily social life. The monstrous, then, is often that which is outside such social codes. In Beowulf, the monster Grendel is much like the humans: he is a warrior for his kind, he lives in a hall like those he kills and terrorizes, he is loved by his mother just like the Danes, but he dwells outside of human boundaries and so is referred to as a ‘‘borderdweller.’’ One way in which he dwells on the border is that he kills others outside of human codes: he refuses to pay the ‘‘were-gild’’ (the ‘‘man-price’’) for those he slaughters. Killing is not monstrous; that’s what warriors do. Killing without reciprocity, killing without law, is what makes Grendel a monster in men’s eyes.

Modern theories of social justice originated from the idea that just societies balance social needs with the good of the individual person, and that humans have certain inalienable rights by nature. In other words, to value humans is our human nature, and the devaluation of humanity – by horrendous individual crime or tyrannical government – is unnatural and inhuman. To be human, in other words, is to be humane, and to be inhumane is to be monstrous.

On the other hand, our deepest human drives can be misconceived as inhuman, simply because they are wild, lawless, unrepressed, Dionysian instead of Apollonian. Our battle with these drives is often projected out of the self as a battle with a monster, as in the case of Spenser’s Redcross Knight who crosses the landscape battling manifestations of psychological excess, which is to say ‘‘sin.’’ In William Morris’ retelling of the Norse Saga of the Volsung, Fafnir kills his own father and takes possession of mountains of elf-gold, but his greed and lust for power are so monstrously exaggerated that he suffers a physical transformation and becomes a dragon. The pages of this anthology are filled with such Grinchy nasty-wastiness and burbling Jabberwocky rage, with cannibalistic werewolf hunger and tygerish pride and Promethean aspiration, all manifesting the monstrousness of human nature.

These internal battles with human drives may be why the image of the mirror figures in so many monstrous tales. In Jorge Luis Borges’ poem ‘‘To the Mirror’’ it is a kind of vampire that sucks our life and luck away by duplicating us, by showing us to ourselves. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most monstrous one of all? In William Baer’s poem ‘‘Monster,’’ when a slinking, creeping creature sneaks into the narrator’s car and looks into the rearview mirror, the face reflected back is his own. He is monstrous because he hates himself, because he feels like an outsider. The mirror is a literalizing of the idea of the split self. Perhaps we are most monstrous when we are so alienated from ourselves that we feel certain we are unlovable.

Monsters truly are hard to love, since it is a risky thing to sleep with them. Flippered and dripping, will he take you to the Black Lagoon to drown, or be your handsome man in the day and then sneak off to be a bloated giant caterpillar at night? Will you freeze under her baleful gaze until you turn to stone? What kind of relationship can you have, when your gaze distorts her: ‘‘Why do you keep creating us half-human,/with bat wings, dragon scales, luminous green skin,/as if you can’t appreciate ordinary women anymore,/as if you fear what lies beneath?’’ ( Jeannine Hall Gailey’s ‘‘Here There Be Monsters’’). You try to accept her, but can’t. After all, you’re only human. Or she tries to accept herself, but can’t, as in Allyson Shaw’s sestina ‘‘Mermaid Surgery,’’ where it doesn’t matter that she is ‘‘a waking sailor’s dream/ . . . the prettiest in the sea,’’ because what she really wants is feet. How can you love what doesn’t love itself ? It is dangerous to take a border-dweller to bed.

The case of multiple murderer Jeffrey Dahmer is a stunning example of love distorted into the monstrous, as he was unable to love the men whom he wanted to love while they were conscious, while they were most human. It’s an odd fact, according to psychiatrist Helen Morrison, that serial killers find it difficult to tell if a human being is alive or dead. This ‘‘misunderstanding’’ might be the most profound example of the shift from humanity to inhumanity on the part of these murderous border-dwellers. Or perhaps Dahmer’s strong religious upbringing was so much at odds with his sexual preferences that hewas unable to have healthy sexual relationships. He opted instead to ‘‘keep’’ the men he brought home and ate. He took his others into himself through ingestion, trading one cultural taboo for another.‘‘Hitch-Hiker,’’ a poem from Thom Gunn’s Troubadour sequence that gives voice to Dahmer, expresses this grotesque romantic quandary: ‘‘I know that I must keep you, and know how,/For I must hold the ribbed arch of your chest/And taste your boyish glow.’’

What was monstrous about Dahmer the human being was not visible to the naked eye. But had he been a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, rather than a quiet man working in a chocolate factory and walking the streets of America’s midwest, he might have exhibited the impossible possibilities of the body, as do some of the monsters in this anthology. He might have sported a horn, or an extra leg, or a growth he shared with his conjoined twin. Or he might have been hybridized, like William Shakespeare’s Caliban of The Tempest, the child splice of a witch and a devil: ‘‘What have we here? a man or a fish?’’ Shakespeare’s Caliban recalls the humanesque forms of old, representing fears of what humans are capable of. These monsters are grotesques: exaggerations of ourselves descended from the creatures in the paintings in blood-thirsty Emperor Nero’s dark grotto in ancient Rome. They are figures suffering incongruity, hybridity, doubleness, and metamorphosis, into which border-crossers Casanova and the Marquis de Sade couldn’t resist carving the graffiti of their own names. Caliban’s form would have been at home among these distorted forms in the dark underground.

Grotesques are often reversed images of the exaggerated forms of heroic and beautiful archetypes. The impossibly buff and sexy bodies of supermen and comic book beauties are distorted reflections of the grotesque forms...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375712402
ISBN 13 
9780375712401
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Herausgeber
Barnstone Tony, Mitchell-Foust Michelle
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