Using the words of its author, Andrea Blythe, which she in turn found in a work by Stephen King and then repurposed, Necessary Poisons is “a locomotive eloquence” (p. 13), with “a voice like a shotgun” (p. 10), its “X’s following your dotty line” (p. 12), along “the ordinary zenith of hell” (p. 15), syllables that “decline to name their corpse a house” (p. 22), as they “twine broken hope with cabalistic designs, displaying a terrible end” (p. 46). Eerie, visceral, and enigmatic, the thirty poems in Necessary Poisons link powerful imagery with a serpentine narrative progression that haunts the reader rather than arriving at a pat or harmonious end. The effect is, in classically Burkean terms, sublime. Furthering this effect are the cover art and four full-page illustrations that Blythe collaged from works in the public domain, baroque assemblages of skulls, hearts, eyes, flowers, and insect limbs. Kudos to Interstellar Flight Press and editor Holly Lyn Walrath for supporting Blythe’s work with superb layout and production.
Besides owing its declared debt to King, Necessary Poisons carries on the legacies of Poe, the French Symbolists, Clark Ashton Smith, and Walter de la Mare; with its integrated artwork, it reminds me as well of Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté (1934). Having said that, Blythe—whose earlier work has placed in the Elgin Awards, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award—is very much her own poet, with a shiveringly good ability to depict the fevered and grotesque in clear, matter-of-fact terms. In the cognitive dissonance, the uncanny unfolds.
Blythe is also a reflective practitioner, generously guiding us through the craft that underlies Necessary Poisons (her author’s note would be useful in workshops; see too her October, 2024 interview with Leslie Archibald). The poems are all found, in this case using only words Blythe selected and then rearranged from King’s self-published novel The Plant (1982-85). As she says, found poetry “provides the blessing of constraint, the enforced limitations that allow for greater creative freedom” (p. 2). Speculative poetry, while often innovative in thematic and emotional approaches, less frequently innovates in form. (Where, for instance, is the Lyn Hejinian or Terrance Hayes of SpecPo?). Blythe stands out among speculative poets in this regard, being one of the relatively few who is mining modernist ore, and citing formal pioneers such as Isobel O’Hare and Mary Ruefle as influences. Equally, I could argue that Blythe’s work exemplifies how arbitrary our categories are, i.e., her play with form is not specific to something we call “speculative poetry” but endemic to poetry writ large. In this, I agree with Theodora Goss: “I don’t think the formal issues raised by speculative poetry are different than the formal issues raised by any other sort of poetry, although I’m certainly willing to be convinced otherwise.”
At any rate, found poetry certainly works well for Blythe’s thematic purposes. She uses King’s text as source material to explore what it means to write, to become a writer, to create one’s own authorial identity while acknowledging the inevitability of influences. “So, I write myself deadly, / expecting your grace” (p. 43), says Blythe, and also: “I could be possessed / by words, an evocation / written on skin” (p. 16). “See me narrow” (p. 11), she says. Octavia Cade puts it best in her blurb for Necessary Poisons: “She [Blythe] actively erases story in search of narrative ...” Hence the frisson for me as I seek certainty and clarity in Blythe’s images, only to be left constantly confronted by the uncanny, the gap between what I thought the story might be and what I come to realize was Blythe’s narrative intent. This calls to mind Mieke Bal’s narratological concept of “over-writing as un-writing” and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: By using found poetry, and specifically words from such a huge presence as King, Blythe allows me as reader to track her choices, her fears, her joys, in ways that other techniques may render opaque. Following her refracted narrative gives me a heightened sense of her vulnerability and her authenticity as author—which is a rare gift for an author to make to a reader.
Blythe is at her best when she adopts another Modernist technique: compression. Consider “Little Ghost”: Its twenty-two lines contain just seventy-five words, and a great deal of white space on the page—a parsimony from which blooms an entire history and world-view. As free verse, traditional meter is not the concern here, and yet—intentionally or not—the poem’s first lines read as anapestic, putting me in the mind of Dr. Seuss and limericks. Maybe the titular spook is a cousin of Casper the Ghost? But no, I am pulled out of humor and into High and Serious topics with the next two aphoristic stanzas: “Scales balance. / People die. // The Universe / doesn’t invite returns.” The tone turns again shortly thereafter, in the sixth stanza with its “Smoking and bloody / you rattle in creaky houses,” every substantive word Germanic, reeking of the Gothic and Dickensian, and hoary stage or film directions. Before I can find my footing, the tone swerves yet again in the next three stanzas, where nearly all the words are Latinate besides one stemming from Greek. Some of them (“concurrence,” “misapprehension”) are not often found in idiomatic English speech. In nuce, I must contemplate elevated but condensed language that my memory registers as elegiac—phrases that Catullus or Cicero, Dryden or Pope, might have used. And then comes the final stanza, approximating the anapestic again, with its deflating observation that “[o]ne can only go so far to remember you, after all”—a LOL moment for me which brings to mind the theme of vanitas in seventeenth-century art and eighteenth-century Graveyard Poets.
Consider also “Smile, No Humor” with its seventy-five words, all of them common, none of them alarming—except for “terrible” and “blood”:
He did nothing, just grinned,
teeth as white as piano keys.One is tempted to forget the rain,
the cold, steady downpour.Him, flashing that smile, tongue
tickling the keys of his terrible teeth.One is tempted to believe in blood—
every day soaking wet with it.His happy mouth hung in his head,
empty and obscene.
The poem’s genius lies precisely in the disconnect between its conversational tone and the mounting awareness of something awry. Blythe also uses alliteration to great effect, pulling me quickly through the stanzas: “tongue / tickling … terrible teeth” (with echoes in “tempted” within the counterpoint), and “His happy mouth hung in his head ...” The first, third, and fifth stanzas could be someone chatting with a friend, relating an episode from the bus stop or outside the grocery store (note the enjambment in the third stanza, furthering accelerating the flow.) But the second and fourth stanzas are in a different tonal register—perhaps these are the narrator’s inner voice musing on the event, or a chorus observing in the background, providing counterpoint to the narrative. I read the second and fourth as dactylic, the meter Annie Finch calls the Rhythm of Water—arousing emotion from the everyday.
All this achieves a liquid and lively tempo to match Blythe’s images, the last of which is shocking and yet delivered in mundane diambs. This jolt sends me back to the start, to re-evaluate previously innocuous words in light of what I now know. First, I realize that the poem has generated flow around an image that is, in fact, static: “He did nothing.” “He” (whoever or whatever he is) only smiles and licks his teeth, otherwise standing mutely in the downpour. I recall that the etymology of “grin” is “to show one’s teeth in pain or anger,” possibly related to the Old English root-word for “groan” (its cognate in modern German and Norwegian means “to whine,” “to grimace”). Not all grins or smiles are pleasant, hence the poem’s title. That “gr-” now evokes for me Grendel, and Solomon Grundy, and The Groke. Now the downpour and the blood feel more like Carrie, or the blood rains in the Book of Revelation. The final stanza’s image is a Jack-o’-lantern, a revenant from a thousand tales and movies, a Ruysch skull (which Blythe uses in her collages), perhaps the face of Pennywise the Dancing Clown or that of Chucky.
To make kinetic in my mind what is described as motionless—that is sorcery. Throughout her poems, Blythe deploys these and similar sonic arts to enchant me. I imagine Billie Eilish or Tori Amos singing them, or Björk turning them into an operetta. Blythe only rarely stumbles. “I invited chatty cockroaches / and hectoring wasps” (p. 42) sounds too much like a game of Mad Libs; “Covens, covens, covens—curdling cool connection, on the cusp of control” (p. 47) offers too much of an alliterative good thing. Such infelicities are few, however, and only serve to highlight the overall strength of Blythe’s poetry. As Eugen Bacon recently wrote: “the state of speculative poetry is healthy and thriving.” Blythe’s Necessary Poisons is a prime example of that health, and deserves a wide audience.