Vicious Romantic
Authors: Wrath James White
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
* * * *
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
* * * *
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.
* * * *
Table of Contents
This Old House of Pain and Woe
* * * *
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
* * * *
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: