The Stigma of Horror Poetry
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 09:09AM I recently started referring to my current writing project as "horror poetry." Ever since I started writing poetry in college, horror themes and motifs have persistently surfaced in my poetry, but I have avoided tagging my poetry as "horror poetry" because the horror genre carries such a stigma among the poetry community. Where does this stigma comes from? I suspect that it originates from the general literary disdain for the horror genre in academia, which seems to trickle down into the world of books and readers. In the publishing world, horror has only recently been segregated from the rest of the genres (within the last forty years), and it is debatable whether or not the boundaries of that genre are vanishing. Whatever the origin of the prejudice, horror is perceived by many to be a low form of art (is this improving?). Of course, lovers of horror know that the genre frequently achieves the highest levels of artistry in every medium: fiction, film, visual arts, and poetry.
I am not a complete stranger to prejudice in the literary world, being a gay writer, an aspiring horror queen, a poet, and a poet who writes horror poetry! Yes, there is a shocking amount of prejudice against poets and poetry. People detest poetry. Working as a college English teacher, I know this is profoundly true, but like all prejudice, people hate poetry because they don't understand it. And even worse, I think people are threatened by poetry, which heightens their need for avoidance.
So I have decided to embrace the labels of poet, horror poet, and gay horror poet, not because I like categories and labels. In fact, I think the persistent human obsession with categorizing and labeling everything is quite mad, but here is the big problem: marketing. As every living writer and artist knows, in today's marketplace, we have to be self-promoters and marketers in addition to being writers and artists. There is this fascinating and paradoxical principle of niche marketing: define your target audience as specifically as possible, become an expert in that super-specific niche, and that will increase your success. Logically, it seems that niche marketing limits your audience to a niche, but that's the paradox. Finding a super-specific niche actually helps reach a wider audience. For example, my niche is Queer Horror Poetry. Of course, in many ways, this is actually misleading because I like to think my work transcends the label. However, if I become known in horror, poetry, publishing, and book selling circles as the number one pre-eminent figure in Queer Horror Poetry, then I am known for something, and that might help me reach readers in a variety of markets. It seems kind of paradoxical, but it makes sense at the same time. Of course, I haven't achieved this yet, so it is all still theoretical.
So this is my rambling introduction to a bunch of topics I want to write about on this blog, including:
- What defines horror poetry?
- The stigma of horror poetry in poetry circles
- Why so much horror poetry is so bad
- Why horror poetry works better in the horror market than in the poetry market
- Theories about why so many readers think they hate poetry
- And more!
Thanks for reading, and please offer your comments and responses!
Chad Helder
I wanted to post a follow-up because the preceding blog post sounds really negative. I also want to mention that there are countless devoted readers who love poetry, and these people are often very open-minded to all kinds of subversive category bending! Similarly, I also find horror writers to be some of the most open-minded and accepting people I have ever encountered!
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Reader Comments (12)
Proudly embrace all the labels that make you uniquely fabulous! Long live horror poetry ~ and the Horror Queen!!
What defines horror poetry?
I think any definition needs to be very elastic, otherwise you'll wind-up with a multitude of sub-sub genres: slasher poetry, cemetery poetry, ghost poetry, monster poetry, etc. Besides, as soon as you have a definition somebody will come along the next day and do something amazing that the current definition never even considered.
There is historical precedent for horror poetry. The ancients and medievalists aside, at least as far back as the 18th-century there were the English "Graveyard Poets" (Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, Mark Akenside, etc.). These poets opened the way for the Romantics. You can find horror in the work of Keats ("The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"), Shelley, Byron, Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") and others. On their heels comes the master, Poe, the French Symbolists and Decadents: Baudelaire, Lautremont, the more modern Walter de la Mare, Clark Ashton Smith, and you'll even discover certain mainstream poets like Anne Sexton dabbling in the genre ("The Bat").
I think H.P. Lovecraft's definition of horror as that which causes one to feel a sense of dread or terror caused by the suspension of known natural law and human impotence in the face of it works as well for poetry as fiction. He insisted that atmosphere was everything, action and incident secondary in trying to elicit the sense of primitive fear latent in the human psyche. Lovecraft himself often wondered if what he was trying to accomplish might actually be better advanced via poetry than fiction.
Why the stigma in poetry circles where poetry is concerned?
I think a good poem in the genre rarely receives negative feedback from other fair-minded poets. What is often objected to are the hackneyed and cliched tropes that are often difficult to reanimate. A straight-out vampire story-poem is probably going to be dismissed as trite. But when a poem such as yours accents the sexual, transgressive or poignant in the vampire motif, I think good poets will take notice.
Of course as anybody who has ever been part of a poetry circle knows, Sartre had it only partially right: Hell is not other people, rather other people who are POETS. We're a snooty bunch and very hard on each other (often for the wrong reasons).
Horror is always going to have a limited appeal, horror poetry, being even more specialized, an even smaller following since not every consciousness readily takes to either much less both. But that is true of any genre. Every English major has heard (ad nauseum) that the more "universal" a work the more general audience it will appeal to. There's no getting around that, but I daresay you're really not interested in becoming the new Mary Oliver or Donald Hall, are you? (The often terrifying late Ted Hughes, maybe...)
Why is so much horror poetry bad?
Why is so much poetry PERIOD bad? Mostly because it's written by non-poets who haven't a clue since they haven't read or studied much poetry in any depth. I'm not talking about formal education or academia here either. The above mentioned Anne Sexton never went to college, listing in her bio: "Education: none visible". Instead she started to study, read and write. Seven years later she won the Pulitzer for her collection "Live or Die".
It seems pretty clear that lots of horror poets have only read Poe and each other. A good poet, no matter his or her genre, has read lots of different kinds of poetry. They don't see it as merely an easy way of getting out of writing a plot or character-driven story and still getting their name into print. They actually like the stuff!
Why does horror poetry work better in the horror rather than the poetry market?
I don't know. I think it may have to do with its audience and where they can generally be located. Lovecraft insisted that only a specialized group went in for the "weird" and that it would always be a small and somewhat self-contained group. I think he would be surprised at how that audience has grown since his time but his point may still have some validity.
Why do so many people think they hate poetry?
Because it has been thoroughly ruined for them by their grade school/high school teachers who don't really like it themselves, don't get it and (therefore) can't convey the beauty and power of its use of language. There was a time when everybody read and recited poetry much the way people today know and sing popular songs. I think poetry can and should only be taught by poets and bona-fide readers of poetry themselves. I'm reminded of a well-known poem by Marianne Moore about the sad state of modern verse that begins with the tongue-in-cheek line: "I too dislike it...".
Of course, I've only scratched the surface with my responses. I would really like to see other poets and readers jump in here and discuss the issues that Chad has brought up. Who knows where it might lead? I'd love to see a contemporary horror-poetry renaissance similar in impact to that of the 18th-century English Graveyard school.
Thank you for that excellent and in-depth response to those questions. That really gives me a lot of substantial ideas to think about, and it's also inspiring. I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation.
I never thought about writing horror poetry, though.
I wouldn't worry about society or academics. They aren't the ones who are going to make you happy with your process or satisfied with your work at the end of the day. Definitely write queer horror poetry if it brings you joy.
It does seem that people will categorize and not always flatteringly. Under these circumstances, it's probably better to be pro-active and categorize yourself before someone else does.
--Sturgeon's Law applies to everything. Sure, a lot of horror poetry is crap, but so is a lot of poetry, a lot of horror fiction, a lot of science fiction, a lot of fantasy, and a lot fiction in general. It's for this reason all writers should be voracious readers in the medium/genre that they're writing in. You have to pick through a lot of crap to find what personally speaks to you.
--A lot of poetry written, and especially published on the internet, blogs, or a Lulu storefront, is crap because of what I stated above. The poets themselves don't voraciously read poetry, and the poetry they have read is likely centuries old and written by a centuries dead white male -- who, incidently, is writing in an outdated, antiquated form of English that roughly resembles the language we're speaking today. I am not knocking Shakespeare, Keats, Poe, Shelley, Chaucer, or any of that gang as writers though. Their skill and brilliance is evident. Plus, I am not knocking form, either. People still write in iambic pentameter these days, but they're doing so using contemporary language, idioms, and metaphors. (As an aside, if a writer is using "thy" or "thine" in a poem, they really shouldn't complain if people point and laugh at their work). So, you have people who don't know much about poetry who try to write it.
--Horror poetry is often, and rightly so, shown to be abysmal because of the above. But, in this case, it's further complicated by the market place. Of the few journals that accept and publish poetry within the genre, most of what's being published have all the red flags of what I mentioned above. Take Weird Tales, for example. They have never, ever published a poem I liked. There have been rare instances where Asimov's has published a few interesting works -- usually by Bruce Boston or Marge Simon. Much of it, however, is in sloppy rhyme, or it's written like prose that's been chopped into lines.
--Like it or not, we live a for-profit, commodity based society. People want to make money. And, for the large part, you cannot make money writing poetry. The money in writing usually comes from writing screenplays, non-fiction, romance, mystery, and so forth. Poetry is near dead last, next to scholarly monographs (where the writer is usually compensated by his University, not his publisher, in the form of merit pay or another professional notch on the belt, during the long slog towards tenure or getting out of adjunct hell). You will hardly ever find contemporary poetry on a best seller list. I'm not bemoaning that fact either; I'm just pointing out reality.
So, some newbies approach writing poetry, find out how tough the market place is with very little financial reward, and then they move on and try writing a screenplay or novel. Even worse, after receiving umpteen rejection notices from The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, lesser journals, and presses like Graywolf, Ecco, Sarabande, or others, they run all butthurt to iUniverse, Authorhouse, or create a Lulu marketplace.
Basically, if we live in a for-profit society, poetry offers no financial incentive to keep talented writers around. To write poetry is to largely languish in obscurity, even if you made it with a high profile book from Ecco or Scribners. It's more than likely that you still have a day job to pay your bills. To write fiction is to at least have a glimmer of hope of becoming a full time writer.
--"Academic Poetry" is never the problem or the solution, either. If you take the above couple of paragraphs into mind, most high profile published poets these days end up in academia. Teaching poetry becomes their day job. However, there's this weird false conception that "academic" equals "pointy head" or "Language Poetry" or "Post Modernist." This is wrong, too. That's just one little corner of the great, vast poetry world. Not everybody writes like Jorie Graham. Not every writes like Mary Oliver or Sharon Olds, either. Poetry coming out of academia is very, very diverse.
Which leads me to final point....
-- "Horror" is only a content description. This is why Sylvia Plath can be termed a horror poet, but if you're talking about contemporaries, many fit the mold. For instance, how is the following Frank Bidart poem NOT horror?
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180503
Which makes me come back to my central point. Poets of any content type should be voracious readers. Nothing is ever truly new, when it comes to subject matter.
Granted, none of this wall-of-text is aimed at anybody on this blog. It's just my standard position on the subject of "horror poetry."
As to why there is so much bad poetry out there, horror or otherwise: I blame the Internet. In the age of blogs (and we both have them) everyone can be a published author, writer, poet, journalist or *fill in the blank.* While this isn't a bad thing, it definitely fills the air with more poems than I will ever have the patience to sort through.
Of course that's true of all media these days. The only sensible tack to take is to not try and read everything. When something comes your way and hits you as the real deal, check it out more fully and follow the links. That's how literary worlds open up now. Sure, the majority of poetry out there is shit. I second everything Rich says. And any would-be poet who doesn't read poetry needs to do a big rethink.
There's no big money in poetry and never has been. Poetry is read by other poets and a VERY limited number of poetry-lovers. As with other kinds of writing, poets do it because they have to. If it's remuneration you're after become a decent genre writer and dive-in where there's a viable market. But as Rich points out, whatever you choose, don't quit your day job too prematurely. When asked what a poet should do for a living, Dylan Thomas once responded he thought they should deliver the mail.
I absolutely believe the best poetry out there these days is on the Web and blog-driven. Paper and online journals are really little more than reflections of their particular editors tastes and "schools"- a motley, uneven crowd at best despite their myriad "credentials".
I follow and read lots of poetry online and in print and am convinced the future is online. The cream will always rise. Self-publishing is the democritization of literature. Yeah, you're going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but you've always had to do that. Besides, it's all going to be free and accessible whether anybody likes it or not. Whether it's Houghton Mifflin or LuLu doesn't matter anymore. Nobody buys much poetry but they certainly read and write it and there's some brilliant stuff out there. What's more, studies have shown that being able to access media for free FIRST more often has a POSITIVE effect on eventual sales than the reverse. Counter-intuitive perhaps, but these are confusing, exciting and transitional times for writers and artists. I say blog away, promote yourselves, and If you're good (or good and lucky) somebody may read you. That's the most any writer can or should hope for.
Oh yeah, and Rich is absolutely right - Plath is terrifying: "Dying is an art like everything else/ I do it exceptionally well/I do it so it feels like hell/ I do it so it feels real". Scary lady.
The twisted, horrid, dark stuff just comes out of me sometimes.
I've been writing poems for 25+ years now &
I can count on two hands how many happy poems I've written.
My crazy fiction poetry out weighs all the others,
though lately my patriotic stuff rants like a creature possessed.
I realize that poets hardly ever become famous / or infamous
until after death. LOL
I'm not interested in getting rich, not that wouldn't be nice,
I just want to get my stuff published & out there for the world to see.
"NAMELESS"
Dim shapes,
steel across the moonlit landscape.
Clawed feet tread the lawns,
below which buried souls rest.
Silence stills the blackened world,
cold chills wandering souls,
where is the light and warmth?
Darkness has it's wings unfurled,
the Devil now feels whole.
Will of mankind lies broken
dreams are dying unspoken,
final death knell has tolled...