Vicious Romantic
Wrath James White
Published by Needfire Poetry
~An imprint of Belfire Press~
Box 295
Miami, MB
R0G 1H0
Copyright © 2010 Wrath James White
Edited by Rich Ristow
Cover & Interior Art by Bob Freeman
Interior Design by Jodi Lee
ISBN: 978-1-926912-29-5
Kindle Ebook/Digital Download
A catalogue record for this title is available from the
National Library of Canada.
This collection of poetry are works of fiction. Any resemblance to place, person or event is strictly coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.
Belfire Press – http://www.belfirepress.com
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Also By Wrath James White
Teratologist (with Edward Lee) - 2002 Medium Rare Books
Poisoning Eros (with Monica O’Rourke) - 2003
Succulent Prey - 2005 Bloodletting Books
The Book of A Thousand Sins - 2005 Two-Backed Books
His Pain - 2007 Delirium Books
Hero (with J.F. Gonzalez) - 2008 Bloodletting Books
Orgy of Souls (with Maurice Boaddus) - 2008 Apex Books
Sloppy Seconds - 2008 Skullvines Press
Succulent Prey - 2008 Leisure Books
Population Zero - 2008 by Cargo Cult Books
The Resurrectionist - 2009 Leisure Books
Yaccub’s Curse - 2009 Necro Books
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Acknowledgements
Special Thanks to Rich Ristow for having the vision to see this thing through all the obstacles and setbacks from start to finish. To Linda Addison, Tom Piccirilli and Rain Graves for keeping verse alive in the genre for all of these years and reawakening my own love of poetry. To Ted Hechtman for making me believe in the power of poetry ( I will never forget those nights sipping champagne and reading aloud the latest products of the muse.) And to Monica O'Rourke, Maurice Broaddus, and Brian Keene for things too numerous to mention. A very special thanks to my wife, Christie, for always being there to read my work and support even my craziest ideas.
Dedication
To Mom.
* * * *
About the Poet
Wrath James White is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.
Wrath’s two most recent novels are The Resurrectionist and Yaccub’s Curse. He is also the author of Succulent Prey, The Book of a Thousand Sins, His Pain, and Population Zero. He is the co-author of Teratologist with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, Orgy of Souls co-written with Maurice Broaddus, Hero co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, and Poisoning Eros co-written with Monica J. O'Rourke.
Wrath lives and works in Austin, Texas with his two daughters, Isis and Nala, his son Sultan and his wife Christie.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
A Note on Poetic White Space
A Note From the Publisher
Necropolis
House of Murderers
Sijo (1)
Not His Mother
The Wind Over The Water
Forgiveness
Sijo (2)
Trinkets
The Cycle of Victims
A Teen Mother’s Sorrow
Consumption
Wendigo
This Old House of Pain and Woe
The Rapturous Scent of Meat
Hunter’s Moon
Alpha and Omega
Just Like Whores
Vicious Romantic
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Introduction
To explain this collection, I need to explain a little about myself. To many people, even those who know me best, I am an enigma, a collection of incongruent parts that make no sense when assembled but still manage somehow to function in concert. I am a kid who grew up fighting on the streets of Philadelphia, a kickboxer and boxer who reads and writes horror fiction, philosophy, and poetry, and a hardworking family man who adores his wife and kids. I am a genuinely nice guy and a lecherous pervert who writes some of the most twisted psychosexual horror ever put into print and won’t shy away from a street fight or bar room brawl. These attributes and personality traits would seem to conflict with one another. Yet, they coexist within me in complete harmony. They give me balance. This collection, horror poetry written in Japanese and Korean formal structures, is likewise a combination that may seem incongruous at first but yet is completely harmonious. It makes sense if you know me.
I have always loved horror. I used to lie at the foot of my mother’s bed on Saturday afternoons watching Creature Double Feature o n an old black and white television, infatuated by the monsters and ghouls raging across the small flickering screen. By age twelve, I was reading every Stephen King book I could get my hands on. I knew, even then, that I wanted to be a horror author. By age fourteen, I was writing almost as much as I was reading, churning out story after story of madness and death.
At age fifteen, I had my first heartbreak and instantly, typically, became a poet. Like all young tortured poets I wrote angst-ridden tales of heartache and woe. I still wrote horror stories but there was nothing like a melodramatic poem to soothe my romantic soul. After submitting and rejecting my first horror story at age seventeen, I did not submit another story for nearly thirteen years, and oh how I wish I had those years to do over again. But though I didn’t write much horror during that time period, I wrote a shit ton of poetry.
I competed in spoken word poetry contests and poetry slams. I read poetry on MTV’s The Real World . I performed live with Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets . I had a group consisting of a flutist, a conga player, and a painter. I read poetry to their music while my good friend, an immensely talented visual artist named Norm Maxwell, painted his interpretation of my words on a huge canvas in the background. I performed spoken word performance art in the nude while being oiled from head to toe. I read poetry while whipping a leather-clad woman onstage to the sound of drums. I even read poetry as part of a hip-hop group. I did everything I could think to do with poetry. Then I started writing horror again and I put poetry on a back burner… until now.
This collection combines my love of poetry with my love of horror. Some of these poems are quiet and some quite extreme. A few of these poems I would consider some of the most haunting and genuinely spooky words I have ever written—horror of the campfire ghost story variety. This collection is also richly flavored by my love of Asian culture and particularly its art and poetry.
My love of Japanese poetry began my first year in college when I was a creative writing major with an emphasis on poetry. Before eventually switching my major to philosophy, I took a class titled Writing and Interpreting Japanese Poetry. Although I was already familiar with haiku this course introduced me to new forms like choka and tanka . I fell in love with these poetic forms almost instantly. I found their rigid disciplined structure perfectly complimented the rigid discipline of my life as a martial artist. It was no longer a mystery to me why samurai wrote poetry.
For those unfamiliar with Japanese poetry, these poems may require some
explanation. Many of the poems contained within are haiku , three line poems consisting of five syllables, seven syllables, and a final line of five syllables. What I have done with most of them is to arrange them in such a way that when read one after another they form one cohesive poem yet they can still stand alone as individual pieces. Not an easy task. As a result, this collection contains as few as eighteen poems and as many as sixty or more depending on how it is read.
In The Wind Over the Water, I took some liberties with the form, creating my own hybrid consisting of five syllables followed by two lines seven syllables each. I took some other liberties as well in terms of theme and content. Traditional haiku center around nature. These poems, however, are about terror, madness, pain and sorrow, though I did try to center many of them in natural settings.
In addition to haiku this collection contains a form of Japanese poetry called a choka which consists of alternating lines of five and seven syllables ending with two final lines each with seven syllables. This type of poetry is the only classical Japanese form that is open in length, sometimes containing as many as 50 to 100 lines. Its shorter form, the tanka, is five lines of verse arranged five syllables followed by seven syllables followed by five syllables followed by two lines each with seven syllables just like a choka. Not His Mother , Consumption, and Alpha and Omega are examples of the tanka.
There is one other form you will find in this collection that is not Japanese at all but Korean in origin. It is called a sijo. Rich Ristow introduced me to this form thinking it would make a nice addition to the collection . Though the structure of a sijo is not quite as rigid as a haiku or a tanka, it does have a very definite and precise almost lyrical meter. In fact, sijo were written to be sung, though I wouldn’t recommend trying to sing This Old House of Pain and Woe or Hunter’s Moon. A sijo is three lines of verse between fifteen and seventeen syllables each. Each line can be further broken down into four lines of three to five syllables. This collection contains my first and only attempts at this form though they will not likely be my last. My thanks to Rich for bringing sijo to my attention.
So why tackle such challenging forms when free verse is by far easier and more popular? That would be like asking me why I fight instead of playing basketball, or run marathons instead of riding a couch with a video controller in one hand a beer in the other, or why I write horror when it would be easier to write romance or to get a nine to five. I do it precisely because it is not easy, because it is a challenge that not every swinging dick can meet and because I love it. Every word, every syllable, was a labor of love. I hope you will love it too.
Wrath James White
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A Note on Poetic White Space
You cannot vomit words onto a page and call it poetry. There’s a popular misconception that poetry is an art of “anything goes,” irrespective of cultural traditions. Even post-modernism and the current avant garde has its antecedents going back more than a century. Yet, no matter the tradition, or the form poetry takes, there’s a certain aesthetic overriding. A sense of the line, and how the line functions, is vastly important. Some more formal prosodies work off of metrical or syllabic counts—the line is fixed to a certain amount of sounds. More open prosodies, like free verse, leave systematic considerations open to the poet, but it largely comes down to how the poet structures their line, and how the line breaks. This is why, as Ezra Pound once famously noted, that you can’t take good prose and hack it into lines. Consider:
There was an eyeball floating in my beer.
Gruesome—nothing remotely “poetic” about it. However, consider:
There
Was
An
Eyeball
Floating
In
My
Beer.
It’s still not a “poem.” Broken lines do not change its nature as a sentence. Besides there being a one word per line, there’s no logic to its organization. And, there’s an unseen force at work here, one making this fail as a poem.
That force is called “poetic white space.” It’s a concept that is highly important to the book you’re holding. First, allow me to explain it, before I explain how it relates to Vicious Romantic.
Prose runs from margin to margin, filling out the page. Lineated poetry doesn’t. Depending on how it’s formatted, there’s a lot more open page. It acts like a weight. That extra white space exerts pressure on the line and language of a poem from all sides, and it draws out the effect of the language, and depending on how open page space is used, it can enhance or detract.
Here’s how that touches Wrath’s work. Wrath and I worked out an agreement where page breaks would go after many of his poem’s stanzas. So, The Wind on the Water may be string of haiku, but each individual part has been given its own page. This is a deliberate use of poetic white space. Wrath and I agreed it would be an effective tool to give more emphasis to the imagery and emotion of the individual parts of the poems. Plus, it lets each stanza stand by itself in its own right, while building off what came before. It deliberately slows the reader down, whereas if a reader was presented with two to three poems per page, the reader would rush through it quicker.
Rich Ristow
Editor - Needfire Poetry
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A Note From the Publisher
To fully enjoy this awe-inspiring collection of poetry, one really needs to see it in the format it was meant to be in, that of the printed page. In converting these words to digital medium, we have had to lose one of the very means by which the poet has chosen to show us his art - we have had to remove a great deal of the white space that was intended to heighten the impact of the poetry.
Jodi Lee, Publisher
Needfire Poetry - Belfire Press
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Necropolis
A garbage-strewn street
Littered with glass and cigarettes
Where curses resound
Promises die unfulfilled
The dreams of youth are martyred
In this corrupt place
Reeking of semen and blood
The real monsters live
Demons of all description
In a comfortable new hell
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House of Murderers
The echo of screams
In this place where children died
Live in these cracked walls
Their voices weaken
Waning with the light of day
Whispers in twilight
In costumes of skin
Demons with candy sweet smiles
Hunt the darkened halls
Phantoms cry warning
As an innocent enters
This house of murder
The foundation quakes
With the voices of the damned
As more blood is spilled
A flash of violence
Adds another victim’s cries
To the dark chorus of screams
* * * *
Sijo (1)
Festering sick and feverish,
Putrefying eternally lamenting
His lost humanity, pounds of flesh
Sloughing away
He lies amid carrion,
Witnessing civilization’s end
* * * *
Not His Mother
He knows right away
This marionette of meat
Is not his mother
It smiles with unfeeling eyes
As it lunges for his throat
He sheds a lone tear
Loads his shotgun with a shell
Full of penny nails
He hesitates a moment
Fingernails claw his windpipe
Looking in her eyes
He sees her as she once was
She who gave him birth
And in that fatal instance
Decides to join her in hell
* * * *
The Wind Over The Water
Vicious Romantic Page 1