Some Pickups from Recent Travels: A.C. Benson, R. H. Benson, and M.P. Shiel

 

Some pickups from recent travels. Some people know that I read a lot of horror literature, with a specific interest in gothic literature and the classic British ghost story.

E.F. Benson is one of the most famous and highly regarded of British ghost story writers. What I didn’t know (and most people don’t) is that his two brothers also wrote ghost stories, although they didn’t have their middle brothers significant commercial success. But their stories too are quite well told, if not quite as crisp and high energy.

M.P. Shiel is little known now, but for a time he had a reputation for writing some early great novels in what became known as science fiction. He wrote horror stories too, and his story “The House of Sounds” was mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s book Supernatural Horror in Literature as one of the great tales in the genre. Shiel’s personal history as a criminal (you can read about this elsewhere) pushed him and his work out of the public eye nearly for good. But what’s equally fascinating, from the vantage point of now, is he was born and raised in the West Indies and his paternal grandmother was likely an enslaved person. Many photos of him show clearly that he is a person of color. And why this matters is that unlike Lovecraft and most of the 20th century British and American cosmic horror writers, Shiel in his fiction is not a racist, and his horror stories do not seem to dwell in a land of inferior and superior races. The style of his writing can be overwrought and unbearable to contemporary readers, but not all of it is.

Broken Lens #11 and "The Palace of Light"

 

I’m pleased to have some work featured in Broken Lens Journal Issue #11, which has returned after a hiatus with its first issue in 18 months under slightly new editorial management, with Adam Stutz as Editor-in-Chief and Isabel Yi Jimenez as Poetry Editor.

I’ve been enjoying reading the writing by the other contributors, especially because this is a rare situation for me: my work is appearing in a magazine in which the names of every other writer in the issue are not names I've heard before (or if I have, I’ve forgotten).

Context in the social world of poetry always changes, of course. Processes of contextualization and decontextualization always go on together, although my sense is that social media has changed things, maybe making new contexts come together and go away more rapidly than they used to. My own decontextualization might be more rapid too living in a place like San Diego, which has some local communities of poets but mostly not ones with much connection to contexts outside themselves.

Of course, one has to work to make connection, while being decontextualized doesn’t always require taking any action at all.

Is it fun or disconcerting to be “out of context" (which is always, of course, being in a new context again)? A bit of both, I think.

My work in the magazine is the opening pages of my prose poem “The Palace of Light,” which is from Book 21 of The End of America poems. Book 21’s title is Palace of Light, Pit of Virus. “The Palace of Light” was originally composed between September 2019 and March 2020. It was in the process of winding itself down in February and March 2020 when, for the obvious reason, it was over. The multi-part conglomeration "Pit of Virus" began to be written some months later.

And here’s a link directly to my work, which also contains a brief audio recording of me reading some of the material in the poem.