Undeath is Even Scarier In Rhyme

Poems Dead and Undead (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

Long before Lovecraft developed a secular cult by describing a world where nature’s gear-wheels fell off, or Stephen King got rich translating Jungian fears into supernatural terrors, humans looked into the darkness and knew fear. That which we cannot predict or control has always terrified us, and somehow, that terror has always been… well… fun. So versifiers, from ancient bards to modern professor-poets, have long buttered their bread telling spooky stories with the lights off.

With the highly commercialized veneer surrounding horror literature today, themes of terror and unlife seem far removed from schoolbook poetry. But death, the ultimate unpredictable force, has always lingered in poetry, often as an active force—even more so before humans discovered penicillin. Compilers Barnstone and Mitchell-Foust find examples of blood-chilling dread throughout poetic history, including Egyptian funerary texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and this bleak prize-winner from Fitzgerald’s translation of Homer’s “Odyssey”:

Thus to assuage the nations of the dead
I pledged these rites, then slashed the lamb and ewe,
letting their black blood stream into the well pit.
Now the souls gathered, stirring out of Erebus,
brides and young men, and men grown old in pain,
and tender girls whose hearts were new to grief;
many were there, too, torn by brazen lanceheads,
battle-slain, bearing still their bloody gear.
From every side they came and sought the pit
with rustling cries; and I grew sick with fear.

Hans Baldburg Grien, "Death and the Maiden"

Horror in these poems generally arises when death’s sudden implacability collides with human illusions of control. Whether that means literal death, as in Homer, or more metaphorical death, horror inevitably arises because we hoard power reserved exclusively for God, Nature, or whatever. Many poems herein have religious meaning; Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot call for God, one piously, another desperately. But other poets, like Goethe and Baudelaire, invert religious meaning, creating mindscapes where despair becomes downright transcendent.

Some classic poets included herein are renowned for utilizing horrifying themes. French Décadents like Baudelaire and Rimbaud frequently described death, monsters, and shambling unlife in their works, while Poe and Christina Rossetti are known for little else (unfair though that is). That undergraduate staple, Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” deservedly gets included here. But some poets, often sanitized and squeaky-clean for high school textbooks, demonstrate surprising horror traits when de-bowdlerized, like this, from Lord Byron’s “Manfred”:

From thy false tears I did distil
An essence which hath strength to kill;
From thy own heart I then did wring
The black blood in its blackest spring;
From thy own smile I snatch’d the snake,
For there it coil’d as in a brake;
From thy own lip I drew the charm
which gave all these their chiefest harm;
In proving every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.

Somehow, despite having studied poetry myself, I didn’t anticipate these themes extending into living times. Besides a few dedicated genre poets like Bruce Boston, I didn’t know anybody still wrote that way, not when most poets teach college courses and winsomely court the tenure committee. Therefore, most surprising of all, nearly half this collection derives from poets currently, or recently, living. One doesn’t think “horror” when teachers and other eminences name Rita Dove, Billy Collins, or Ciarán Carson. Maybe we should.

These contemporary poets, however, simply feel different from their classical precursors. Modern horror poetry, like modern poetry generally, deals less in universal truths and broad archetypes; it favors greater intimacy. That is, it would rather bare the poet’s soul than describe humanity generally. Yet despite this intimacy, these poems are surprisingly humane and inclusive. George Bernard Shaw said only the deeply personal is ever truly universal. That certainly conveys in poems like Bryan Dietrich’s “Zombies”:

                                                 Beside a tombstone
you make your final stand. Stealing the arm, shoulder
and all, from one who may have been your father, you fend
them off for a while, waving his limb before you
the way you would a dowsing rod, a hand of glory.
Living, you tire. Fighting, you fall. Past lovers
get to you first, their mouths glorious, their bums hot.
What teeth they have to rip rivulets down your shins.

With our medicine, science, and technology, we today delude ourselves that we’ve established control. We exclude chance and mortality from our decisions, screaming YOLO while simultaneously stockpiling our retirement accounts, believing we’re eternal. But poetry, itself innately anti-modern, obstinately reminds us our illusions fool only ourselves. This collection, a mere sampling of poems designed to cause fear, channels a world our spirits cannot forget.

Why Aren't You Listening To Meg Myers?

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part One
Meg Myers, Daughter In The Choir and Make A Shadow

The first time I heard “Adelaide,” I stopped everything. I was cooking dinner at the time, and I admit, I burned the bacon. However, when Meg Myers’ voice, bold and resonant, forcibly contrasted itself to the introductory toy piano, I knew I’d begun hearing something revolutionary. As the percussion takes Myers’ side against the deceptively gentle piano, demonstrating Myers’ conflict with someone she only calls “boy,” she proved my initial opinion correct. She’s something new.

Recent years have seen the revival of breathy female vocal stylings so annoying, back in the 1990s, that it made my teeth hurt. When Selena Gomez or Carrie Underwood comes on the radio, I cringe, wishing they’d put more larynx, less lungs, into their vocals. Not that every female top-forty singer sounds wispy and girlish, but too many do. In “Adelaide,” Meg Myers sings with such full-throated bravado, I feel her singing in my chest.

Which made it doubly surprising when I purchased Myers’ debut EP, Daughter In the Choir, where “Adelaide” is track two. Track one, “Curbstomp,” has exactly that breathy style which annoys me from pop stars, and I cringed inwardly. Then, the second time through, I bothered listening to the lyrics:

I'm a sinner, I’m a liar
Want forgiveness, but I'm tired
I'm addicted to the fire
Let go, I'm ready for it
Let go, I’m ready

The lyrics, particularly coupled with Myers’ vocal tone, suggest a powerful woman who’s had the fight kicked out of her. Particularly since those last two lines, the song’s semi-refrain, sound very different: Myers’ beefier, more self-assured tone intrudes, though clouded through layers of distortion, like some nihilistic Jiminy Cricket. In a media environment where Strong Women are so ubiquitous that critics mock them, Meg Myers sounds different. She isn’t “Strong”; she just won’t be broken.

Among her many virtues, Meg Myers’ voice is so protean, she almost sounds like different artists on different songs. She uses this to remarkable effect. “Desire,” the first track and lead single from her second EP, Make a Shadow, mimics the breathy, besotted tone much loved by demure female pop stars. However, backed with a muscular, synth-driven backbeat and Myers’ frankly disturbing lyrics, she becomes the antimatter version of the crinkum-crankum songstresses she’s clearly mocking.

This reflects her general gist across her work.. “Heart Heart Head” starts softly, almost gently, though the music sounds less like a romantic ballad, more like a horror film soundtrack. By the end, Myers has ascended from gently husky lullaby, through gruff growling, into full-throated screams acidic enough to peel paint from metal. Her changing voice makes the superficially sweet lyrics, “You’re in my heart, you’re in my head,” a statement of undisguised animal terror.

We could apply such interpretations to every track, but more example will suffice. The song “Go” lets Myers use two voices in counterpoint. As her romance collapses, one voice timidly whispers: “Running away, running away.” Suddenly, the other, full-throated and brash, barks: “Go!” It becomes clear, these two voices represent one woman, and the pull between being good-girlish and being, well, herself. The song’s abrupt ending leaves us reeling—as, indeed, her romance leaves her.

I’ve seen Meg Myers in performance. She’s as dynamic and nervy as her songs imply. Not that she’s some fearless man-eater; as she sings songs of a woman asserting herself against the prissy roles society encourages in women, she looks terrified. But you quickly realize, she isn’t terrified of being judged. She’s terrified of the mighty power she’s discovered locked inside herself. She realizes, as if for the first time, that she could destroy you.

Myers is a fascinating performer. Watching her dance across the stage, between her guitarist and an electric cello player, I assumed she was improvising her moves. But Sarah beside me, who’d know, exclaimed: “She’s using belly dance moves!” Indeed, I quickly realized her moves were choreographed. One regional DJ observed that, where many alt-rock vocalists’ warm-ups involve slamming a beer, Myers actually does scales. Her passion is tightly controlled, which, if anything, makes her scarier.

Women’s roles come and go in rock music. Confident artists, from Wanda Jackson to Suzi Quatro to Aimee Mann, periodically assert themselves against the continuous thread of shrinking violets waiting for some man to complete them. Meg Myers is no shrinking violet. She has relationships, she loves men, but she won’t let them control her. The power in her songs asserts: I exist. Before you, without you, I exist. And nobody can take that away.

The Apostle From India

Wisdom of the Sadhu: Teachings of Sundar Singh, Kim Comer, compiler

Born into a wealthy Sikh family and drawn to religious studies from an early age, Sundar Singh angrily rejected Western Christian missions into colonial India. He insulted missionaries, burned Bibles, and made his objections known. But as Hindu and Sikh beliefs left him feeling bereft, he contemplated suicide. Then a road-to-Damascus moment altered his path forevermore. Before his death in 1929, Sundar Singh became India’s most renowned Christ follower, and remains a national icon today.

Compiler Kim Comer selects representative samples from Sundar’s writings, numerous speeches, and moments recorded by his many followers. Like Rabbi Hillel or Saint Francis, Sundar Singh attracted enthusiastic followers and initiated a school of thought that survived his mortal life. He accomplished this, not by trumpeting himself, but by righteous teachings, unclouded thought, and (too rare among Christian leaders anymore) matching his actions to his words. Before long, his reputation transcended borders, religions, and cultures.

European Christian brethren trained Sundar for their idea of Christian missions. but despite his eager Gospel studies, he couldn’t embrace Christianity’s accrued cultural baggage. I can sympathize. Intensely attuned to his people, Sundar wanted only to become a Sadhu, an itinerant Indian holy man. Leaving the European school, he undertook a lifetime of humble wandering, Socratic questioning, and mindful prayer. He never sought renown, only clarity, but perhaps that’s why spreading renown soon found him.

Comer assembles Sundar’s words along a straightforward path intended to draw new readers into the Sadhu’s thinking. In Part One, “Scenes,” Comer pairs Sundar’s parables with autobiographical sketches, allowing the parables to illuminate important spiritual principles from the factual report. Part Two, “Conversations,” pairs these parables with what Westerners might call sermons, brief discursions on important transcendent concepts. Because Sundar uses Hindu terms like “karma” and “dhyanam,” jaded Western audiences can read with unhindered minds.

Sundar Singh, the Sadhu

By parables, I mean exactly what you think. Like Christ or Buddha, Sundar uses brief, allegorical stories to convey ideas too vast to speak as mere dictionary definitions. Narratives of a bereaved bridegroom or a fledgeling hawk touch first the heart, moving afterward to the head, where simply telling us something would prematurely strangle it in analysis. Sundar’s homiletic approach encourages audiences to apprehend his truth quickly, seeking factual confirmation and theological scrutiny only afterward.

Had Sundar not embraced Christ, he could’ve inherited vast fortunes—then as now, India’s Sikhs are generally wealthier than average. But like St. Jerome or John the Baptizer, Sundar abandoned easy urban comfort, preferring the company of society’s dispossessed. If anyone donated money, he shared generously with all around. He slept in borrowed beds and ate donated food. And though his teachings eventually brought lucrative European and American tours, he owned little besides his clothing.

Despite comparisons to Francis or Jerome, Sundar has transformative potential for Western Christianity because he abjures comfortable cultural touchpoints. The liturgical language Westerners often find boring, and must consciously strive to keep vital and new, doesn’t enter Sundar’s storytelling. His references come from Indian peasant life, Hindu practice, and the poor among whom Sundar lived. He strips away Christians’ learned pretenses, permitting us no cozy hiding hole. That which we consider dull, Sundar renders alien.

Stephen Mansfield writes that many spiritual hucksters have sold Westerners a sanitized Hinduism to solve Christianity’s recent failures. Hinduism provides the spiritual counter-narrative spiritual seekers want, and Christianity hasn’t much provided. But in doing so, these purveyors have scrubbed anything Westerners might find offensive, offering a spiritual elixir that makes people feel good without challenging them to do good. This creates an environment of spiritual self-sanctification, where we can believe everything while striving after nothing.

Not so with Sundar Singh. He’s bracing, difficult, even slightly dangerous. Like Christ or the Hebrew prophets, Sundar’s message reminds us that we, as we exist, have accomplished tragically little. Salvation isn’t a matter of belief, but new life. As a resolute non-Westerner, Sundar’s messages, pierce the protective cultural barriers Christians build themselves, demanding we separate what’s truly Gospel from mere cultural baggage. That isn’t easy. But stagnating Western Christianity definitely needs an outsider’s rebuke.

Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or John Calvin, Sundar Singh doesn’t write (and Kim Comer doesn’t compile) to convert unbelievers. Sundar rather calls believers to live actively what they speak verbally, and offers wanderers a spiritual home. Therefore this book appeals primarily to current Christians and the spiritually homeless. It illuminates Christ-like thought by erasing false cultural camouflage. Seeing faith through Sundar’s eyes, it appears as dangerous today as that upstart Christ must’ve seemed two millennia ago.

How You Fool Yourself Daily

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 41
Duncan J. Watts, Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer): How Common Sense Fails Us

Consider the last national election, your employer’s last annual report, or your favorite sports team’s last away-game victory. What made the particular outcome happen? Looking backward, conclusions seem foregone; we construct retrospective explanations that justify how what happened had to happen, because, well, it did. But Duncan J. Watts explains that what seems inevitable once it’s already happened, is actually deeply contingent and controversial. Exactly why is both bizarre and revealing.

Trained as an engineer but functioning as a sociologist, Watts has conducted intensive research for America’s largest corporations, including Yahoo and Microsoft. In that capacity, backed with massive corporate capital and utilizing technocratic research techniques that didn’t exist fifteen years ago, he’s investigated questions about how humans make decisions. Not only has this included individual decisions, but how uncountable group decisions form a consensus. That is, he investigates how individuals make a society.

Watts’ answers prove many and various, and deserve careful reading. Their common thread, however, devolves to common sense. A system useful for negotiating everyday interactions, common sense proves more fraught when confronted with the hidden inner dynamics of large groups. Human interactions prove founded on myriad rules, mostly unspoken—as anybody who has ever traveled abroad and unknowingly transgressed serious taboos already knows. These rules are not only unquestioned, but largely unacknowledged.

In this, Watts relies heavily on research avenues first utilized by Stanley Milgram. Though mostly famous for his “Obedience to Authority” experiments, Milgram also pioneered research, like the famous Six Degrees experiment, demonstrating how intensively connected society is. We cannot explain who influences us, and by whom we’re influenced, because we cannot comprehend our cultural links. Watts actually replicates some Milgram experiments digitally, proving reality is more linked than Milgram could’ve realized.

Society proves difficult to explain. In one experiment, Watts, using double-blind research methods and sophisticated online social networks, manages to recreate the digital music marketplace. By segmenting populations into mutually unaware groups, he manages to simulate several different marketplaces, resulting in completely different bestseller lists. This proves that just because certain circumstances occurred doesn’t mean they had to occur; reality is deeply provisional. We cannot prove or understand why what happened, happened.

Duncan J. Watts

This goes double for situations which, unlike music markets, cannot be segmented and rerun analytically. We cannot, for example, have multiple trial Presidential elections or overseas wars. Explanations for outcomes therefore lack scientific rigor. When Nate Silver gives probabilities for certain electoral outcomes, his numerical assignments mean something very different from Vegas betting pools. The differences are opaque to people who can’t access Silver’s original math. Therefore we construct explanations retrospectively.

This comes across in popular self-help books which examine successful people to unlock their secrets. Authors believe we’ll replicate somebody else’s miracle if we simply find whichever magic choice or simple connection made their success possible. However, Watts asserts, we cannot see every influence that steered so-and-so to seemingly inevitable success. Essentially we assume somebody had to succeed because they did succeed; Watts calls this creeping determinism.

(Watts specifically name-checks Malcolm Gladwell for this tendency, though in fairness, Gladwell did write Outliers, which examines successful individuals’ cultural contexts, to counter this very tendency.)

Essentially, according to Watts, we don’t explain the past, we describe it. Therefore, attempts to construct actually useful predictions prove frustrating. And because most professional soothsayers’ predictions go largely unexamined, we must step over corpses of numberless stupid secular prophecies to reach contemporary reality. Certainly, many people my age lament their missing flying car. But most high-profile attempts to apply past observations to future choices remain equally fruitless, and we often don’t realize it’s happened.

Can we then even make meaningful predictions? Watts says yes, though exactly how defies brief restatement. We must eschew many common prejudices, like expecting meaningful predictions to be particularly precise. We must also limit our horizons: decades-long predictions prove as useless as long-term weather forecasts. And our reliance on either credentialed experts or gifted rookies limits our options. Processes for making actually useful predictions are surprisingly simple, yet because of learned biases, applying them is shockingly difficult.

Watts’ explanation of human reasoning, and its limits, sheds powerful light on how important decisions fail. Watts explicitly describes several implications for business, government, entertainment, and other fields, while constructive readers can imagine other fields which suffer exactly the field blindness Watts describes. If you’ve ever wondered how politicians, CEOs, and media pundits can be so spectacularly wrong, this book’s explanations will chill your blood. As science for the masses, Watts is a master.

Is Hank Junior an Actual Menace?

Hank Williams, Jr. (Bocephus)

Blake Shelton’s massively disingenuous crossover hit Boys 'Round Here, a paean to putative down-home authenticity and refusal to embrace urban influence (larded with hip-hop studio effects), opens with this naked invocation to Hank Williams, Jr.:

Well the boys ’round here
Don’t listen to the Beatles
Run Old Bocephus
Through the jukebox needle
At the honky-tonk
Where they boot stomp
All night
(That’s right)

My dislike for where this half-assed rhyme situates contemporary country music is already well documented. Less obvious, this hymn to yesteryear elevates Bocephus (a nickname Hank Senior bequeathed his son) into a stratosphere occupied mostly by deceased artists like Elvis, Sinatra, and… well… Hank Williams. That is, hearing Hank Junior, or anyway talking about hearing Hank Junior, lets individuals appropriate his legitimacy unto themselves.

Several recent country songs have used Hank Junior, especially his song “A Country Boy Can Survive,” to bespeak down-home genuineness. You’ll know somebody is fer real, according to today’s hit country if somebody knows Bocephus’ lyrics by heart. Admittedly, Young Hank hasn’t had a significant chart hit in over twenty years. But this revival of interest has pushed several singles back into prominence, and raised his interest on sites like Pandora and Spotify.

Some of what’s returned to prominence isn’t pretty.

At work recently, a coworker attached his iPhone to the company stereo and began playing his Hank Junior channel from some web service. Only three songs in, it played “If the South Woulda Won,” a top-ten hit from 1988 praising the Great Lost Cause from the American Civil War. It arguably starts off innocently enough:

If the South woulda won, we woulda had it made
I'd probably run for President of the Southern States
The day Elvis passed away would be our national holiday
If the South woulda won, we woulda had it made

Okay, Bocephus as major world leader might curl some listeners’ toes, and not without good reason. But that’s ordinary folksy boastfulness, nothing to lose sleep over. I got much more worried by the very next line:

I'd make my Supreme Court down in Texas
And we wouldn't have no killers getting off free
If they were proven guilty, then they would swing quickly
Instead of writin' books and smilin' on TV

Hank Junior actually sold this at his concert merch tables for several years

Hank Junior has repeatedly, in his lyrics, complained that killers get off easy. “A Country Boy Can Survive” spotlights a Country Mouse/City Mouse friendship that ended when “a man with a switchblade knife” murdered his friend: “I’d love to spit some beech-nut in that dude’s eye, and shoot him with my old .45.” Similarly, his 1984 non-single “Mr. Lincoln” says of a murderer: “When they caught the man he did 23 months of time; he pled insanity like they do now all the time.”

I’m forced to ask two questions: Who hurt Hank Junior? And: Where did he learn such bullshit about American justice? Despite TV crime drama narratives, insanity pleas are very difficult to sell, and usually result in lifelong involuntary committal. And frontier justice, despite its romantic appeal, always puts “right” in the hands of the most violent. Since that works well in Somalia and the areas controlled by Mexican drug cartels.

That says nothing about one fact regarding the south: slavery. Pro-South historians perform backflips to make the Civil War about anything, anything, other than slavery. But Georgia attorney Loren Collins, a self-proclaimed conservative libertarian, notes that slavery was the only unifying link in Southern secession. Multiple states, particularly South Carolina, cited slavery specifically in their declarations of secession. Jefferson Davis proposed a constitutional amendment making slavery legally unchallengeable.

Young Hank doesn’t mention slavery in his song. He does, however, sing this undying gem:

We'd put Florida on the right track, 'cause we'd take Miami back
And throw all them pushers in the slammer

Hank Junior ain't half the artist his father was

Clearly Bocephus watched Scarface while writing this unlistenable travesty. Take Miami back? From whom? He says “pushers,” but considering the late-Reaganite cultural context, he clearly means Cubans. Remember, this is a guy who said Barack Obama golfing with John Boehner “would be like Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu.” Hank Junior’s history of race-baiting is both long, and unsubtle.

My problem isn’t that such bigotry exists. It’s that Bocephus, and others like him, actively market their bigotry to others. Currently, mainstream country avoids racial language, and country acts cut duets with hip-hop stars. They even let the blandly numbing Darius Rucker join the Opry. But stars like Blake Shelton giving Young Hank facetime keep his odious opinions shamefully alive.