Merrikkens say “purdy”.no goods only phrases,
Betta da phrase, “purdier” da experience, I tellim
“Me vocation your vacation”
Twenty t’ousand guides here but I’m #1.…
once, Helsinkian comme, I’s say “I guide I guide” but Helsinkian
say “no! Too many guide!” den I sleepim outside ‘im door,
‘im wake, I say calmly “I guide “y Helsinkian say
“Goddammunt, ja okay, guide me!”.
.a million light bulbs in Desert wit cleanest latrine
for you to crepitate since dis desert no sin.vending
machination of aborigini right here!.each hotel
De McCosm of any city.Bangkok oba here, Paree oba dere.
Hail city o rest y unrest.
I speak sum Han-guk y Finnish, good bit o’ Latin
y Spanish..sum toto Desert Creole in evachanging dipdong
‘pendable on me mood.ibid.
…Menny ‘Merikken dumplings unhinge dim
talk holes y ejaculate oooh y hot-diggity. dis
Be de shee-it. …but gut ripping done to erect dis Polis,
We expoiting menny aborigini to back tundra county.
But betta to scrape dat fact unda history rug.
so shh.
I usta move around like Innuit lookim for sea pelt.now
I’mma double migrant. Ceded from Coreo, ceded from
‘Merikka, ceded en ceded until now I seizem
dis sizable Mouthpiece role.
St. Petersburg Hotel Series:
1. Services
See radish turrets stuck wit tumor lights around de hotel
like glassblown Russki kestle wit’out Pinko plight,
only Epsolute voodka fountains. Gaggle for drink?
Twenty rooboolas, kesh only . Step up y molest
Hammer y chicklets studded in ruby y seppire almost
bling badda bling. Question? No question! Prick ear.
Coroner diagnose hotel as king of hotels ‘cos
luxury es eberyting. Hear da sound speaker sing ‘I get laid in
me Escalade/but I first sip gless of Crystal/den I whip out me pistol.’
No worry. No pistol in hotel, only best surgeon feesh y beluga
bedtime special. Deelicious. But before you tuck in king o’
water bed, befo you watch papa-view,
Be peripatetic y see snow bears merry on a ball or go
Be roused by molten sauna where Babushkas bap your tush
wit boar bristle switch. No childs allowed here. Mo mo?
De blood rust hes been Windexed to amber shine,
de insurrecta’s marauding soul wetted into papa-machetes,
de looted radio back in de propa municipal hands.
Here be city of ebening calm, da fire-rilers gone.
If you want true heestory, go watch tailor
maki magic. He more revolutionary den artist.
If you dream only for Paris, dat is right outside de
atrium, beyond de sand dunes, which form y disappear
like mekkinations of human digestion. Sand swirl
to otherworld land where blankets da weight of human
bodies tatter y pill. No tatting, no pilling here. Da sand will
be in your eye, only sometime.
Notes from the Historian: During orientation, they give new employees a 1994 Fodor’s Guide to St. Petersburg, Ins and Outs of the St. Petersburg Hotel, Rules: What not to say to Tourists, and How To Get Around Trademark Infringement Laws. Asked why she chose to be a guide at the Petersburg Hotel, she replied that it was her calling to work as a guide for the great hotel of St. Petersburg and besides her heritage and the heritage of Russians are similar: they both love the combination of dried fish and very strong liquor.
2. Preparation for Winter in the St. Petersburg Arboretum
Gardenas clip leaves, mow down calla lilies
Wit petrol-gunning motocade, sling slenda pile
O’ white trumpet lilies ova dim shoulders,
herdim de piddisnip flowas away like blighted demsels.
Now Gardena squad weavil glass y dews en trees.
Icing de trees fo winta’s memorialization.
Lika beachwood sheltas’ wind chimes,
De branch branch clinkity-clank wit ice.
Now sahib, grab un gun. BB down de riving ravens,
de vermin fatted jays, y jade headed mallards who wit
insolence nest in botany ob our #3 prize-winnim plants,
who dare nest in de hearts ob Russkies sculpt in shrubbery.
Me look at me wrist clock, almost Deciembre,
Sap be a bloodgout ooze in fall but in winta,
trees mus’ be spare like balsam pim peck.
Origini yaar? So we vacuum sap wit a cleva-
Oi, oi! Mifela Gardena! You half bark up a tree
in de wrong location, it be det tree you chop!—
Now sahib, les be avid again. Ah! Seasons chenji,
green turns mint, now, g’wan wit de gun.
3. The Fountain Outside the Arboretum
Ahoy! whitening wadder fountain. Drink. Afta cuppa-ful
of H20, yo pissin fang transfomate to puh’ly whites
lika Bollywood actress swole in saffron,
Flashim her tarta molar to her coquetry man.
Me drink gallon-a-day.( bares her teeth ) ssshhhee?
Issshh beautiful, eh? . frum purim H20 wit flouride y
sulfate y tu typical humectant lika xylitol
which supa-boosta Flouride’s cavity fightim powa.
So go’on miff, you mus’ drink. Me good-fo-nut’ing
fadder once salem to me, “Ttalim, you mus’ habba de whitest
I-ppal so you catchim holistic hotshot man.” Me fadder hed
rat-hole teef, y you have it too wid dim nicotine mold
on packiderm tusk .
Eberyone habba de bes’ teeth! Shinier den
‘Merikken Colgates..’Cos me molar, me attract lusty lubbas,
But I no likeum if dim have moss sweaters on dim teef
Even if dim wining dining me. As me fadder salem,
“You triumph only wit da whitest.”
Atop the St. Petersburg Dome
De ebening es mein, starry as himbo’s
bubble, de ebening wit stars in grid, starry ya?
Stars ideation in dome, me vocal twills in dome, listen—
HULLO.hullo.hullo..
Vaulted up y up, we reach agley,
We reach agley.no conflict non, no embargo nimbly
Only conflict o duration, yaar, but
no rat-a-tat.but,
Once unrest shatta’d desert horizon to ellipses,
Haunted slay de flames feasted de hotels y sommelier,
Feasted de lawn foliage y swim-pool,
y charrum de head chumps to Malaga raisins.
When me comeupon for tippame-turban job,
Greyhound dogs, spectas in de dawn fog,
Traipse de trash-boil mountains for scrap cook pork,
Nut’ing left but skrep metal y bitterness.
I de frosh guide maki pennies ‘cos no one to ooh-aaah.
I guided da misbegodder fool who vacation
In woebegone ruins. Tu, I mean, you tryim.
To flower-arrange words so sand-piss
ash sound like Melodious plot of
beechen green, try, nary!.
No money cash flow fo me ‘cos no foliage, no
Va-va-va-boom sites to show..Me like white fes mime,
gestulatim atta air.a gameshow lass wit
no appliance to show.
So I makeum up gammon, no goodfela am me,
I makeum up.Am I yesman like me fadder y me grandfadder?
Am I hucksta? O Sigh. Me sebum dome skin red-alert from wig rash. Excuse me? Mus’ exeunt.
* * * *
Copyright © 2006 by Cathy Park Hong.
SCIENCE FICTION AND LYRIC POET
RY, by Seo-Young Jennie Chu
If lyric is so prevalent in science fiction, then why do so many discussions of SF exclude poetry?
There are three ways of answering this question.
The first answer: those who read, write, study, and teach poetry tend not to overlap with those who read, write, study, and teach science fiction. As I have already mentioned, discussions of poetry are nearly absent from monographs, surveys, anthologies, and collections of essays on SF. The converse is also true: discussions of SF are nearly absent from monographs, anthologies, surveys, and collections of essays on lyric poetry. One aim of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? is to promote dialogue between those who study poetry and those who study science fiction.
The second answer: protocols/preconceptions surrounding poetry and protocols/preconceptions surrounding SF have evolved along disparate tracks. Several generalizations are in order here. The lyric is considered high art, and lyric poems are treated (rightly so) as worthy of formal appreciation and analysis. SF, by contrast, is mostly considered sub-aesthetic pop-cultural entertainment. Rarely are SF novels, stories, and films treated as sophisticated works of compelling art. More often they are treated as pulp commodities to be consumed rather than appreciated seriously. These differing attitudes toward poetry and SF can be explained in part by historical circumstances. The lyric is an immemorially ancient institution and practice. Accordingly, it inspires reverence, even in those unfamiliar with poetry. Science fiction, meanwhile, is an institution and a practice whose very name originated (in the 1920s) in the context of lurid magazine publications literally made of pulp. Accordingly, science fiction tends to inspire less reverence than derision or apathy in those unfamiliar with SF. The differing attitudes toward poetry and SF can be explained not just by their respective histories but also by formal attributes intrinsic to each discourse. In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov articulates a perspective representative of an outlook shared by many when he claims that poetic images are to be read solely “on the level of the verbal chain they constitute, not even on that of their reference. The poetic image is a combination of words, not of things, and it is pointless, even harmful, to translate this combination into sensory terms” (60). In Todorov’s view, the necessity of reading poetic images solely as incantatory chains of signifiers (rather than as referential descriptions) renders the protocols for reading poetry incompatible with the protocols for reading fantastic narratives. Todorov goes so far as to claim that the two sets of protocols are mutually hostile: “poetic reading constitutes a danger for the fantastic,” Todorov warns. “If as we read a text we reject all representation” and consider “each sentence as a pure semantic combination”—which is how Todorov idealizes the process of reading poetry—then “the fantastic could not appear: for the fantastic requires, it will be recalled, a reaction to events as they occur in the world evoked. For this reason, the fantastic can subsist only within fiction; poetry cannot be fantastic” (60). By contrast, I prefer to see no reason why readers should be forbidden to read poems as more than incantatory combinations of words. To be prohibited from reading poems as referential descriptions is to be deprived of revelatory aesthetic experiences. For example, many of Dickinson’s poems, when approached as more than “pure semantic combinations,” reveal an astonishing science-fiction cosmos where clocks are afflicted with timelessness, mathematical diagrams glow across night skies, and the specter of post-apocalypse haunts every other mindscape. However, I agree with Todorov’s assertion that the lyric entails certain kinds of reading while precluding other kinds. Due to its compressed size, the lyric is much more spatial than temporal in its proportions. In general, spatial forms such as two-dimensional photographs are limited in their representational capacity. A photograph may suffice as a mimetic account of a simple concrete object, but photography is unfit for the task of representing cognitively estranging phenomena such as cyberspace. The process through which a cognitively estranging referent becomes available for representation is a massively complicated one that requires ample time and ample space. Unlike the lyric, the novel is capable of prolongating along axes both temporal and spatial. This may be one reason why SF writers tend to write novels rather than poems.
The third and least obvious answer: lyric qualities are so prevalent in science fiction, so thoroughly characteristic of SF, that their collective presence need not take the physical form of verse in order to make itself felt to the reader of SF narratives. By “lyric qualities,” I have in mind not just musicality, soliloquylikeness, lyric time, etc., but also—more broadly—the lyric “turn” that subsumes as its subcategories lyric time, soliloquylikeness, descriptive intensity, musicality, and eccentric/heightened perception. As Northrop Frye has remarked, “the lyric turns away, not merely from ordinary space and time, but from the kind of language we use in coping with ordinary experience” (“Approaching the Lyric” 34, emphasis added), and it is equally true that science fiction turns away from ordinary space and time and from the kind of language we use in coping with ordinary experience. The existing canon of SF may consist mostly of prose, but the straightforwardness of prose (“prose” derives etymologically from “prosum,” Latin for straightforward) is absent from science fiction. Just as verse constitutes a turn away from prose (“verse,” as noted earlier, comes from the Latin verb “vertere,” to turn), and just as poetic tropes constitute a turn from literal to figurative meaning (“trope” comes from “tropos,” Greek for “turn”), science fiction constitutes a turn away from familiar reality. The organism turned by mutation into something else; the wormhole twisting and turning through universes; the mind-turning realization that “reality” is actually a computer-generated simulation; the moment when an inanimate robot turns into a living person: each of these science fictions is literally a trope, a verse, a deviation in narrative space-time and consciousness. The “turn” that defines verse is so deeply implanted in SF that science-fiction verse nearly amounts to a redundancy. Paradoxically, then, the omnipresence of lyric poetry in SF narrative is an absent presence. This paradox explains why SF authors tend to write novels and stories as opposed to poems, and it explains why the study of SF in lyric terms remains largely unexplored territory—one that I hope to open up to investigation.
An intriguing epiphenomenon of the paradoxically absent omnipresence of lyric in narrative science fiction is the prevalence of lyric intertexts and paratexts in SF novels and short stories. Paratexts and intertexts are themselves paradoxical spaces: a book’s title, for instance, is at once central to the book and overtly peripheral; an intertextual allusion is neither fully here nor exclusively there yet definitely present in both texts simultaneously. Such paradoxical textual spaces are frequently the same places where the absent presence of lyric manifests itself most explicitly in narrative SF. Titles of SF narratives, for example, often allude intertextually to specific poems. To cite a few cases: the title of Philip José Farmer’s 1971 novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go echoes a line from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets; the title of Iain M. Banks’s 1987 novel Consider Phlebas echoes a line from The Waste Land; the title of Simmons’s Hyperion tetralogy echoes the title of Keats’s unfinished epic; the title of Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” echoes Sara Teasdale’s poem of the same name. Moments of verse also erupt intertextually within many SF narratives. In David Brin’s novel Startide Rising, sentient dolphins, biologically uplifted by humans, communicate in haiku-shaped thoughts. In Cunningham’s Specimen Days, soulful androids compulsively recite lines by Whitman and Dickinson. This latter poet, it is worth noting, appears intertextually as a science-fiction protagonist in a growing sub-sub-set of narrative SF. In Yolen’s 1996 story “Sister Emily’s Lightship,” set in nineteenth-century Amherst, a fictional Dickinson has a mystifying nocturnal encounter with an extraterrestrial lifeform that leaves Dickinson forever mind-altered and launches decades of otherworldly creativity. In Joyce Carol Oates’s 2006 story “EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” a childless subur
ban couple purchases a robot designed to simulate Dickinson’s personality—with heartbreaking results. In a 1997 short-story-disguised-as-a-scholarly-article by Connie Willis entitled “‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective,” the narrator fancifully speculates that Martians invading Earth around the turn of the century inadvertently disturbed Dickinson (d. 1886) from her slumber in the grave, thereby angering the dead poet and provoking her to relay admonitions in verse to the Martian invaders. Severely injured by Dickinson’s weapons of slant-rhyme, the Martians (Willis conjectures) hastily retreated from Earth before suffering further casualties. What exactly makes Dickinson an attractive figure to writers of SF? My guess is that there is something enticingly science-fictional about Dickinson’s idiosyncratic sensibilities. Dickinson’s poems are so hyperbolically lyrical, so acute in their lyricism, that they virtually self-literalize into recognizable science fiction.
The absent omnipresence of lyric in SF narrative is precisely what accounts for the representational work that SF is capable of performing. Only a narrative discourse powered through and through by lyricism possesses enough torque—enough twisting force, enough verse—to convert referents ordinarily averse to representation into referents accessible to representation. Just as the “turn” that defines poetry is so deeply implanted in SF that “science-fiction verse” approaches redundancy, lyric figures and devices (apostrophe, synesthesia, the simple present, etc.) are so thoroughly and systematically literalized as features of SF narrative worlds that SF cannot be understood as narrative without concurrently being understood as lyric. Hence the moment when a humanoid robot comes alive is not only a narrative event but also a spatio-temporal trope—a twist, a turn, in space-time—charged with the lyric energies of personification. Within the narrative universe of SF, the literal and the metaphoric share ontological status. As a figurative discourse whose grammatical mood is indicative, SF can provide a representational home for referents that are themselves neither purely literal nor purely figurative in nature.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 530