The Necessity of Claiming Our Poems as Horror
What is horror, in contemporary poetry and why should we embrace the genre?
Part of the Afterimages NaPoMo series
The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow,
more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting.
–Ocean Vuong, Not Even This
Horror poetry is the shiver accompanying a poem showing us our reflection. These poems refuse to comfort or inspire, seeking to freeze truth in its most raw state. As a glacier scrapes sediment from the land, becoming a time-capsule and bellwether of earth’s age, horror poetry freezes the granular building blocks of being, balancing the sublime with the grotesque. Marosa di Giorgio’s work twists innocence with nightmares. Critics have observed that the apocalyptic twists in her poems are influenced by the Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Film has capitalized on the genre in the last century. Shouldn’t we do the same with our poets, claiming what they write as horror?
Jenny George’s The Artist is a horror poem. She uses a snake shedding its skin as a metaphor for death, unceremoniously becoming one with the water running over the stones, where we molt, and “Then the future wavers up in you / and stands in your throat like a flame.” Compare George’s poem to Ashley M. Jones’ Who Will Survive in America? Or 2017: A Horror Film on Race Relations in the United States: “Do you know what it means to wake each morning, to realize your own brown hands aren’t enough to protect you?” Jones’ poem jokes, in the casual way of horror. She implies the truth of the contradiction, that we are more likely to find life on Mars than fix “that fatal likelihood” that racism is ingrained too deeply to be eradicated.
Even the acclaimed Ocean Vuong writes horror, roughly displaying his race and gayness as currency to barter for something society says we should want: “yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold.” There is no escaping our humanity once we are “lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, screaming.” In Not Even This, Vuong leads us through struggle and self-centeredness to inevitable death, blurring the end with the beginning. If the “body, doorway that you are” is to “be more than what I’ll pass through,” must we choose “joy from now on” if that joy is whitewashing, genocidal; a box to check? Blood is not gore in Vuong’s poem, it is the lifeblood, the reminder of momentary aliveness. “Time is a mother. Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.”
Merriam-Webster defines horror as “standing stiffly, bristling (of hair), shivering (from cold or fear), dread, consternation." Over time, it has meant ‘roughness’ and ‘ruggedness'. It has meant a feeling of awe or irreverent fear. Wondering if Vuong is right, it wasn’t “the crash that made me, but the debris?” The Latin origin, horrŏr, means a “shivering or dread, rigidity from cold”. And for three hundred years in the English language, it meant shaking or trembling, as might happen in cold weather or from the flu.
Today, horror has a transferred meaning: it refers to the exciting qualities of repugnance and dread, horribleness. ‘Transferred’ meaning is a sense of a word derived by a shift from its basic field of reference to another. Why have we transferred horror from meaning cold to meaning fear? Brian Gyamfi’s The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi threads the needle:
“When Eloise tells Kofi she wants a divorce,
he sits naked on the kitchen floor skinning
an ox tongue to prepare Eloise’s favorite dish”
This is a horror poem, less of the surreal di Giorgi offers, but dreadful in its irreverence “Eloise stands there, insisting on a divorce as the blood mixes into the tomato juice.” John Wall Barger uses the term ‘cold art’ to describe that which stares directly through you, piercing you. Horror is coldness. It is the visceral shivering of our autonomic nervous systems to protect our hearts. Gyamfi tells us that the man is “not thinking about the ox as he marinates its tongue” but the woman wishes he would “put down the tongue and say something.” Warm-blooded by nature, we shake and shiver when our core temperatures drop, the convulsions of the body trying to heal itself, to return to homeostasis; to stay alive.
Writers have attempted to disentangle the gore from the shock in horror poetry. There is certainly a struggle to define the limits on what constitutes ‘horror.’ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, John Donne’s The Apparition, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are obvious choices for their use of scene, similar to the diegesis of a horror film. The scene creates the space for fear to enter:
Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Feeling lonely and actually being alone are tricks of the mind. Is the subject being followed, or imagining it? In Emily Dickinson’s I felt a Funeral in my Brain, (340), the reader is invited to imagine death as a descent:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then
Dickinson’s poem evokes the many rings of hell, perhaps in homage to the rings traversed in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Was it intended to be scary? I doubt it. A narrative verse that lures the reader to the shocking trap is clear about what it intends, ominously forecasting what’s to come.
Horror poetry is exacting, forgoing the script for the score to utilize the suddenness of a deep bass note. Consider di Giorgio’s simple scene of fruit forgotten in the kitchen, doomed to rot because of the very sweetness that makes them so palatable, “in the cupboard plums lie in their sugar syrup.” The poems exist without setting a scene, intentionally, so that the reader can experience the disorientation of surrealism. Di Giorgio’s work leans into the perversion of secrets, playing out the curiosity of death. She exposes the seductive nature of the death drive.
We can’t help but be curious about pains we’ve never felt, “I wanted to find out if I could kill; I sunk my nails into the back of one of the huge mice, and the smell of blood made me blissfully dizzy.” Compared to Dickinson, di Giorgio’s musings about death are much more disturbing. They do snap the plank in Reason, for me, accomplishing what Dickinson merely alludes to.
We don’t need to set the scene like Beowulf or The Raven, to effectively scare the audience, we just need the tuba punctuating the violin’s sailing adjectives. If a poem can accomplish this nuzzling of fear within our gullets, then we are unlikely to forget it.
Take, for example, Philip Brady’s Jamb, an absolutely exotic lyric that ties Ginsberg, Homer, and Yeats with Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gutenberg’s dizzy production values/rendering three dimensions in two. Brady’s poem is a battle cry for the importance of the space on a page, the enjambment of text beating film’s automatic filtering. The visual is in hi-def as was prophesied:
executioners unwind
the result of flush margins,
incising line and sentence,
exposing the veins of each
character and theme fully
accomplished, every network
ruby variegated,
The poem is a surgery of modern culture. Medicine has the ability to alter and sever body parts, but only because we understand the pragmatism of the cuts. In every literature course I’ve taken that examines poetry, the instructor teaches a dissection of the poem. Line by line, word by word, students are encouraged to do this academic surgery–to find meaning or imbue it. Brady’s poem is pragmatic and cold, challenging us to rip off the mask revealing a bloody mismatch of sentence / and mortal life as in this / apocalyptic prose piece” and to stimulate the ancient pleasure rooted in our amygdala.
Freud tells us that all desire is unconscious: in horror poetry, the verse is the Id, the internal eye pointing the reader to disorienting pauses, rapid staccato, and music. With a twist of humor,“ Freud had predicted Fred” Frederick Seidel’s poem The State of New York mocks our obsession with the visual, “In The Future of an Illusion he said: /“Movies are, in other words, the future of God.” Seidel’s Black Sappho accomplishes what a film takes hours to do: setting tension for the cold smack of truth, measured by “Heartbeats. Sobsob, in the noon park, / the nannies were white, / Seated like napkins on the benches.”
Stimulated by ghostly and ghastly figures in poetry, fans must ask themselves the same question fans of horror films are asked by the camera: would you do this utterly depraved, monstrous thing? And without waiting for an answer, the film shows us–yes, yes you would. An indictment of their death drive, the poem points its lens directly at the reader. When you engage with a horror poem, you subject yourself to the poet's camera, showing you exactly what is. The desperate instinct, Seidel tells us is “You want to be a child– / You want to find the way / To either more or less than you are.”
Softer poems use filters and touch-ups, make-up, and props. We see fantasy, not reality. Today, our poet laureates are expected to increase community engagement and excite society with their status. They must use modern modalities. In the era of TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, the poet’s job is plain: filter reality or show it truthfully.
Some writers have identified horror poetry as a forgotten genre, eclipsed by the more modern genre of horror films. I disagree. Horror poetry has been with us, as necessary as romance and hope. It is not just macabre, spectral, or supernatural; rather it is as ancient as a glacier, showing us our reflections in mountainous proofs.
The notable names in horror films, like David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Powell, and Alfred Hitchcock, recognize that, as a genre, horror is irresistibly beautiful. Is Percy Bysshe Shelley right, that “poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”? George Franju’s film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959) flirts with the paradox of Freud’s pleasure principle and Jacques Lacan’s jouissance. Set in post-WWII Europe, the film follows a plastic surgeon, Dr.Génessier’s (Pierre Brasseur) obsession with grafting the skin from young girls onto his daughter’s face, in an effort to restore her to perfection, sullied by a catastrophic injury. An obsession with violent innocence that is perfectly evoked by di Giorgio’s I Remember Nightfall. In 2004, when di Giorgio died, torture porn, a subgenre of horror films, was just ramping up. The term became notorious after the Saw series and is the pleasure principle pushed to its extreme end. It exposes pleasure’s exact opposite: watching on screen the slicing of throats and painful physical traps that must be escaped to survive: a living person caught in a bear trap by the head.
Horror films often use violating, violent images but are rooted in the psychological. Beauty is almost intolerable because it reminds the mind that the aesthetic is brilliant, but falsely captured. The mind understands that a rose, in its red velvet beauty, is dying. This intersection between death and beauty, associates the pleasurable viewing of something beautiful as a recognition of its fleeting nature, making us sad to recognize it in the world and each other. Poetry that is specific about this transcience is horror.
Writer of Saw, Leigh Whannell, says that he was extremely interested in the idea that once a human being is faced with the threat of their life, it becomes the only thing that’s important to them. Whannell says “There’s a certain coldness required of the Doctor character, [...] if you’re job is to sit down every day with people and say ‘I’m sorry to tell you, you’re going to die [...], you have to inform them with a sort of neutral attitude, the way a cop would deliver the news of a murder to the victim’s parents.”
Act I, by Simon Shieh uses white space on the page to force the eye shakily across the page. There is a tension in each enjambment, like precise scalpel cuts:
and when their faith wavers
in his absence
he lays his naked back perfectly flat
Shieh’s metaphor is painful and sharp, similar to the tension written into Saw’s death puzzles. There is neutrality in the lines that Whannel attempts in his script. The poem accomplishes this itching discomfort with precision:
on a bed of nails before them and tries
not to move—
his favorite
lie
Whannell acts in the first Saw movie; a photographer, who says at one point to the doctor: “we’re both bullshitters, but my camera isn’t, it doesn’t know how to lie, it only shows you exactly what is put right in front of it.” The camera has the advantage of recording, but it is only a mirror of what it looks at, necessitating sounds, movement, and color to rough up the viewer. A horror poem doesn’t grant us this same separation. Georgie O’Keeffe, “From the Faraway, nearby,” 1937 written by Camille Carter uses painting as a cue for her horror poem:
Where in the prism of the painting antlers bloom,
as ascendant and gnarled as branches,
sits the alien skull of the once-majestic stag,
his eye-sockets hollow but for your projections.
The literal skull, originally painted by Georgia O’Keefe, haunts us more deeply than the canvas ever could. But for your projections, the painting and the film are shadows on the wall. The poem is the spotlight illuminating the forms.
A classic mash-up of poetry and film, before the camera’s invention, is William Shakespeare. Written in verse, for the stage, The Merchant of Venice, displays Shylock, a moneylender, demanding that the merchant must abide by their agreement, and Shylock shall have “the pound of flesh, which I demand of him.” Shakespeare teases us, here, with his horror: is it hate that evokes a killing, or merely a lack of love? “Do all men kill the things they do not love? / Hates any man the thing he would not kill?” Similarly, Oedipus Rex builds suspense for the audience who know that the protagonist has killed his father and married his mother, but that the character does not know. This kind of dramatic irony requires an audience, just as the poem requires both the poet and the reader. Carter’s evocation of “place was a metaphysics; the word “skeleton” meant “home” and rips us from the safety of reality; the stage, the film, and the theater are created by the poet who uses form to carve chunks from us, pointing out the horrific inflictions we shiver to rebuke.
Indran Amirthanayagam’s Eyes Beyond the Border captures the horror of death that we encounter through our memories: “Leafing within the mattress / I found a hair / after many months looking. It lay still in my hand / like a hand grenade.” The poem is about volcanoes erupting, civil war raging, and yet–the speaker is captivated by the most mundane, almost grotesque, vision of a singular hair left by the dead. Defensive in the face of loss we“used language like shrapnel,” horrified to find whispers of the living in “a second hair / under the floorboards.” The poem doesn’t care about your sympathy. The horror poem is sympathy. That shiver that Barger writes of, and that the word horror is rooted in, is the discomfort of being reminded we are transient. The most horrifying moments are those that remind us of our mortality.
Sara Cahill Marron, native Virginian and Long Island resident, is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018), Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here (Kelsay Books 2021), and Call Me Spes (MadHat Press 2022). She is the Associate Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and publisher at Beltway Editions. Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and journals; a full list is available here. Sara also hosts virtual readings for Beltway Poetry Quarterly with Indran Amirthanayagam and teaches poetry in modern discourse programs for teens at the public library in Patchogue, NY.