I. On Genre Poetry

I tend to shy from thinking about the reason genre poetry exists, maybe due to this sense I have that much genre poetry exists for no particularly vital reason.

A publishing environment exists in which genre poetry may appear: this, more than any social pressures that may force poets to speak, and more than any new eruption of inflamed and troubled psyches, has encouraged its rise. Chapbooks appear in signed and numbered editions of over three hundred copies, a number that seems astonishing and optimistic to me, as one sometimes involved in the poetry-publishing world; and a number that also must be indicative of at least the sense, if not the fact, that the publishing of genre poetry has a different status than it did in other decades, when poetry had status as a kind of writing but no status as a commodity. People did not buy poetry, although they sometimes supported it. Nowadays -- with the rise of reader awards in genre magazines, the spread of the small press from print to digital media, and the increased number of printing options available to writers and publishers alike -- poetry seems to have become more valuable as a type of publishable content. It has risen as a commodity -- by as much as an inch or two, I would say, even though a print run for a chapbook of over three hundred copies suggests a more significant rise.

Has greater prominence and popularity altered what it means for a piece of writing to be a "genre poem"? It probably has, to some degree. If I am right that market forces are a greater influence in the writing of these poems than any other factor, however, then the effect would be an increase in quantity rather than a deep change in nature. The tendency to produce verse to order, or "to spec," would still be present, but in greater evidence; and the tendency to simply explore the common-property genre tropes, but now in verse form, would still be present. The thing that might be diminished would be the use of verse forms to explore transformative interior experience, in the kind of poetry-of-discovery that takes writer and reader simultaneously down a hidden path, or a once-hidden one. This would be diminished because the path poets must take has become more and more clear, in the wake of publishing events that, for some, marked the end of genre integrity, or that, for others, marked the maturing of a literary field. That path has become more clear because for a poem to be explicitly a genre poem it must follow rather than lead.

A poem presenting itself as a horror poem, for instance, signals to the reader that it is what it is by its direct verbal approach to directly stated subjects. The phrases "slashed wrists/ puckering for a kiss" or "When he screams/ his eyes jiggle in sockets/ spilling what will never be tears/ from the clam pink puddles/ they swim in/ ready to pop," lines found in Michael A. Arnzen's collection Freakcidents, do more than suggest a rapport between writer and reader: they almost insist that common agreement already exists that a steady exploration of violent injury is a fitting channel for interaction between poet and page, and page and reader. In the same way, the easy occurrence of such words as "sickeningly" and "disgust" in Arnzen's poems announce their genre allegiance, being direct statements of emotions that the poems carry not as weights but as designs, or, perhaps, as exterior decorations. A genre is a literary tradition in which certain designs and decorations have become characteristic, either as essential parts or as gratuitous additions. Within the horror genre, once a poem is positioned, it does not matter that a sickening feeling, for instance, is not evoked. It matters that it is invoked.

In a similar way, the lines, "We've heard that universes evolve/ In a Darwinian way by natural selection," or, "'Our bodies, Miss Jones,' says he, 'are made/ Of elementary particles,'" from Ian Watson's collection The Lexicographer's Love Song, signal their affiliation with the science-fiction genre. A breezy, knowing tone runs through these explanations, as does also a superior tone. Both are fitting, especially insofar as the explanations turn out to be mostly spurious rationales: the contemplation of universal evolution turns into a list of imagined "giraffe universes," "tiger universes," and "rabbit universes" in the poem "Universe Zoo"; and, in "The Quantum Stalker Woos Miss Jones," Miss Jones is forced into sexual submission, apparently, by the revelation, or perhaps the explanation, of how particles interact. Such words as "metaverse" and "quantum" operate here much as do the words "sickeningly" and "disgust" in the horror-genre poems, even though they are words of emotion only in the sense that they suggest the lack of emotion born of a reason-oriented viewpoint.

Since to be a genre poem a poem must embrace either common genre tropes or the language used in approaching those tropes, then it may be that genre poems serve a purpose in helping strengthen a genre-reader's sense of being within the genre. Genre fiction, while it must likewise embrace these tropes and vocabularies, offers its content in a more diffuse manner. Within its few words, the genre poem must identify itself, so the density of genre reference is necessarily greater in verse than in prose. The genre poem in essence does offer the concentrated and intense reading experience often attributed to poems in general. By their adherence to largely unspoken rules, moreover, they re-affirm genre parameters.

II. Conversations in Miniature

The challenge of writing a poem is to engage in deep conversation in miniature, using images, allusions, and asides. The conversation arises from the poet's need to reveal something inner and unseen. It continues when the reader "responds" to the poem; and becomes deep when the poet's revelation becomes the reader's. This may be true, you might argue, but only of a particular kind of poetry, that of a William Stafford or a Seamus Heaney. Even so, it is more helpful to look at a body of poems with the prejudice that they are serious expressions, or started from serious intent, than to take them off-handedly as intentionally literary gamesmanship, for instance, or as purely intellectual exercise.

Evidence enough appears in Ian Watson's lines of a serious intent, even if it is quickly waylaid by a demon of verbal playfulness and subverted by a second demon of emotional superficiality. His collection's title poem, "The Lexicographer's Love Song," for instance, begins with two stanzas that suggest a direction for the poem that readers of Watson's prose would welcome. The poem's narrator, the Lexicographer, finds the word "fiction" in "this old dictionary of mine/ Halfway between feverfew and field," beginning a series of associations. "Feverfew" suggests to the Lexicographer the "confinement" of pregnancy, which leads then to the thought, "Fiction/ Is a sort of confinement too --/ Being closeted with a brain-child/ Giving birth to characters, situations/ In feverish labor." The narrator links the urge to write fiction with the universal "way everyone tells a story" through living their lives. That this all appears in the first two stanzas of a long, five-page poem seems to promise great things. The publisher of the collection, after all, presents the collected poems as the works of an accomplished short-story, novel, and screenplay writer. Reflections on the life of the writer would be actively welcomed by most readers. As a surprise, then, comes the realization that the poem nearly abandons its serious exploration of associations in favor of a kind of literary rock-skipping that appears self-indulgent and flip, after those first stanzas.

Echoing the first lines, the third stanza begins, "In the midst of the feverfew field/ -- where other? fiction appears." Then the poem plunges into seemingly willful irrelevancy: "What else do I find hereabouts?/ There's fiasco and fibster and fickle,/ Fiddlesticks, fidget, and fie!" The trail of consonance leads him to "fey" and "fairy," and then to a fairy the Lexicographer names Florizelle, whom he immediately grants existence for purpose of love-making. The tatters of serious intent still wave in these verbal breezes: Florizelle is a created figure, a thing of imagination, and the narrator reflects upon the possibility of a verbal creation gaining independent existence, even while in the midst of his making love to her among a flurry of F-starting words -- without including, oddly enough, the directly descriptive four-lettered one. The poem then continues in pursuit of words beginning with the letter G, then H. It is a pursuit less of words and associated thoughts than of consonance-created female spirits whose existences are defined by their sexual receptivity. It is a descending rather than ascending progression. In the stanza after the line, "So I fall into L, into hell," he invokes "a mermaid./ She's naked and golden-haired,/ Breasts budding ripely -- but damn it,/ Her legs can never part."

The prosaic flatness of the language, and the bald statement of thwarted libido: the typical lexicographer's concern with word meanings may come here to the fore, since the poem steadily moves toward this point where the words comprising it are reduced to dictionary dryness.

The last words of the poem reflect on the original imaginary lover, Florizelle: "Why did I ever conjure you?/ Or did you conjure me?" It would be possible to read these as a canny observation on the state of the creative artist, who creates works of art and is created in turn, as an artist, by the success of those works. Yet this reading would be a difficult one to argue, given the poem's general descent from thoughtful exploration of ideas to sexual fantasy, and from interesting matters to fairly humdrum ones.

Better in its cohesion is "True Love," a verse that satirically portrays narcissistic love for what it is. The lovers involved exchange affection by physical means: "So off they went to the body shop/ Where he exchanged his left arm for hers/ -- A popular token of bonding." The ending, in which the lovers have fully exchanged their bodies, is a vision of onanistic pleasure, suggesting the sickness of this "true love." As a satiric verse, it does have mild bite.

The surface of these poems rarely breaks to reveal either Watson's own character or to give a vision of the character of others, instead playing about the outward appearances of things, both real and imagined. Even when the topic promises insight, as in "Surgeons of the Soul," in which the first, dryly stated line is, "You have a new blot on your soul," the lines move forward without revelation. While a few humorous lines point suggestively, as in the lines, "Through my psychoscope I see your soul/ Is now within your left testicle," the poem leaves the reader with only a few images and ideas -- surgery can be done on the soul, and it is about to be done -- and these are not tied together by an underlying, revealed meaning.

It may well be these are verses intended mainly to amuse, possibly even to divert the writer himself from the fiction for which he is best known. That some are intended as trifles is clear, since they bear such titles as "Death by Dyslexia" and "Ode to My Screen Saver." Those that are less trifling in their intent tend to fall victim to a blunt-toothed cleverness that constantly imposes itself, and that asserts quickness and thin humor over the thoughtfulness that struggles to emerge.

Freakcidents lives up to its subtitle of "A Surrealist Sideshow" in parading before the reader a series of misfits: "Umbilicile," "Genetic Defect Jennie," "Test Tube Tommy," "Mutant Marcus," and "Spiderboy." Sideshows must be professionally run to win dimes from their marks, and the reader who feels at home in the rhetoric of body fluids and gruesome effects will find some able use of materials in these vivid sketches. The verse "Polka Clots," for instance, tells of "Inky the Hemophiliac Clown," who bleeds from a picked scab on his face, and lets "gravity smear the oily/ blood down into a greasy grimace/ of hobo determination/ before spilling off his chin/ to stain the big bow tie/ as red as a failed tourniquet." Two lines arise here that surprise the reader into taking this otherwise excessive image seriously: "of hobo determination," and the final one, which gives as strong a statement as any to be found in this collection of the unchecked injury that stands in for character among these misfits and monsters.

These poems are, as a whole, poems of violence and excess. "Needle Baby" might serve as a characteristic attraction in the sideshow, depicting an infant turned into a misfit, or monster, through the injury of being thoroughly skewered. The impossible creature the infant has become is both the object of cruelty -- visitors to the sideshow can "make her body dance" -- and also a potential source of further violence, due to "the spikes she carries everywhere/ like a porcupine bristling for a mate."

In my various readings of this collection I have found myself returning to "Mad Head." In places it is banal in its imagery, as in its opening lines of "When he screams/ his eyes jiggle in sockets." In others, it is effective. The second stanza deals with what Mad Head cannot utter: "whatever is hiding/ behind his curses,/ his words a feeble limb/ reaching out of his mouth." Do these lines, or perhaps even these paired stanzas of the banal and effective, convey something of the common heart beating behind these sometimes excessive and sometimes pointed verses? The idea that violence is forcing meaning down into hidden regions, that meaning is enfeebled by violence, is an attractive one within the context of a suite of poems that seem to encourage the direct, face-on encounter with the obviousness of violence. The final line of "Mad Head" could then either be trite or a statement of fact: "We call him Mad Head/ and toss him raw meat." The lines might be offered as invocation of the primitive state of being, of the primal, that is forever elusive to poets.

Raw meat, and raw experience: however overblown certain images might seem, others seem to reflect honest searching. For now, the vivid overpowers the more substantial elements, as overstatement tends to do. Yet the seed of an effective poetry does appear here.

In reading these otherwise greatly different chapbooks by Arnzen and Watson, I was surprised to find a linking emphasis on the sexual act as a foreground concern, and as an uncomplicated foreground concern, at that. Sex is simply sex, in other words. Or any sex is good sex. When a girl has sex with snakes, or when a man engages in sex acts with every female name he imagines finding in his dictionary, the absence of emotional content in the poems comes even more to the fore than the constantly invoked sex itself. Oddly enough, this might point to the sex being simply a trope, too -- a trope of pulp literature, in which action, strife, attraction, and even sex can be depicted without recourse to an understanding of human emotion.

I find it interesting that even before this notion struck me, I would have picked out Arnzen's "Stripper" as the most skillfully written piece to be found in these two chapbooks. To treat the poem in prose, "Stripper" tells of a watcher horrified to see that after the star takes off her clothes, she keeps removing more layers. When the stripper reappears fully restored, the horrified watcher finds he still lusts for her.

The irony, as is appropriate both for what the poem is and for where this short essay has arrived, is that despite horror and disgust, prurience remains.

"How true," I am tempted to say.

Mark Rich has written critical work on authors including Cyril Kornbluth, Poe, and John Hersey, and writes extensively on American toy history. He was a founding editor of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. To contact him, email mark.rich@sff.net.

Reviewed Works

Ian Watson, The Lexicographer's Love Song 2001, DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, Va. 24143 $6.50 postpaid, dnapublications.com

Michael A. Arnzen, Freakcidents: A Surrealist Sideshow Winter 2002, Dark Vesper Publishing $13