Guest Blogger - Poet Cardinal Cox

Getting away with Genre Poetry
 

I’m Cardinal Cox and I fully understand if you’ve never heard of me, after all, I’m a poet. I have been published in both Britain and North America, won a couple of prizes and had a couple of residencies. The reason though why Sam kindly asked me to be a guest contributor to her blog is that I’m also a genre poet, writing a lot of verse in the Lovecraftian tradition. (I also write steampunk poetry and I’ve lectured English degree students on SF poetry at my local University centre, but those are subjects for different articles). Again, I’ll understand if you don’t immediately think of poetry when you consider Lovecraftian fiction, but I’ll argue that is essential if you want to fully appreciate the weird fantasy of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.

Indeed, let me start by quoting something to you:-

“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie…”

That is from the poem ‘The City in the Sea’ by Edgar Allan Poe and I contend that it is the major source for Lovecraft’s image of Cthulhu and R’lyeh. Poe was heavily influenced by Byron (going as far as to emulate his hero’s swimming feat) and in turn influenced the French poet Charles Baudelaire and thus the whole decadent movement of the end of the nineteenth century and thence the surrealists of the early twentieth. Just as importantly (in my opinion) is the influence of Poe upon Lovecraft and his circle.

Between Poe and Lovecraft though there were other poets in the weird fantast field, for instance both Ambrose Bierce and the Anglo-Irish author Lord Dunsany had volumes of poetry published.

H.P. Lovecraft had a large number of poems printed in Weird Tales and it is possible to find collections of his verse. For instance ‘Hallowe’en in a Suburb’ published by Stanza in 2010. Other members of his circle of fellow writers were also active poets including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard (both of whom also had volumes from Stanza) and Frank Belknap Long. Subsequent authors in the field who have penned verse include the Brit’s Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley.

Looking back at my own interest in H.P. Lovecraft I started reading him in the late 1970’s and in the early 1980’s my then band recorded on a demo-cassette somewhere a track called ‘When The Space Gods Come’. Forward to 2003 when I was the Council-appointed Poet Laureate for my home city (Peterborough) a couple of the projects I wrote included a cycle of poems for the local comic-shop (The House on the Borderland, now only trading on-line) and as Poet-in-Residence of a mad Victoriana-convention in Ireland (They Came and Shaved Us, guests included Robert Rankin and David Lloyd). Both of those included overtly Lovecraftian poems.

Since 2009 I’ve been writing Lovecraftian verse regularly and produced a handful of pamphlets that have picked-up good reviews in Britain and North America. So there is a small specialist market for these, but don’t discount the more mainstream market if you too write such poetry. Depending on what you write, you can get published in those too (though it’s not easy) if you’re willing to claim the mood pieces are either metaphors or ironically post-modernist.

As I said, I’ve had a couple of residencies, including for a local cemetery (the audience wasn’t great, but they never walked out on me, but I did get a piece in the Times Saturday Magazine out of it) for three years and I’m currently a third of the way through a year-long post at a 15^th Century Gothic church. In both of these posts, although I seldom have need to discuss in rhyme the gibbering madness that lurks in the outer darkness, I feel my poetry is all the stronger for having an unseen foot (possibly cloven) in the terrible shadows.

If you have an interest in genre verse, be it Fantasy, SF or Horror, check out the lists of previous winners and nominees for the award given by the Horror Writers Association http://www.horror.org/

and have a look at the website of the SF Poetry Association http://www.sfpoetry.com/

 
If you live in Britain, consider sending an SAE for information to either (or both) Data Dump c/o Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield West Yorkshire HD5 8PB and Handshake c/o Dunnock Press, 5 Cross Farm, Station Road North, Fearnhead, Warrington WA2 0QG.