Another Tumblr Post, Note for a Future Post, and Body Fail

I’ve put up another audio recording on my Tumblr, and realized I need to talk about my video folklore library at some point. So this is a note to do that in the near future, when my head is less fuzzy with migraine.

Speaking Up and Going Places

I just want to point out that there’s a new page at my website! Habitations links to other places on the web where I have an active presence, which right now is primarily Livejournal and Tumblr. Livejournal is my more quotidian version of weblogging, and Tumblr is a bit of an experiment. I am forced to admit, I’m not entirely certain I parse it, but it allows me to upload mp3 files, among other things, and that means I can share some recorded readings I’ve done which, for one reason or another, did not end up accompanying the text of works when they were published. The inaugural mp3 I’ve chosen is for “Warning Signs,” which was published in Jabberwocky in June of 2012.

I welcome suggestions for other poems people would like to hear me read for my Tumblr, though I note that the poems suggested must be mine, I won’t redo recordings I have already done, and the text of any poem I do read needs to be available online. For ideas, take a look at my Works page; if a poem is linked, but there’s no audio available when the link opens, it should be good to go.

Fear of the Beat

This is an article I wrote for the HWA newsletter back in early 2009. I don’t believe it appears anywhere else online. My question is, does it hold true for you?

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Fear begins with a heartbeat. Not a quickened heartbeat, nor a failing one. Just the steady, relentless sound of something inescapable: life being measured out, one step, one beat, closer to the grave. The pattern-making machine of the brain picks up that rhythm, and it becomes both the soundtrack of comfort, and the soundtrack of anxiety. Life is here, and death is coming.

Effective writing of any type depends on rhythm for impact, but this is particularly true of poetry. Forms of poetry are identified by their rhythm. Meter is the basic measurement, and one way to dictate meter is through repetition. Endrhymes and alliteration are repetitions of sound. You can also repeat entire words and phrases. In horror poetry, such repetition emphasizes the terror of the mundane, turns around the innocuous image to show the darkness behind. It takes the heartbeat, and makes it the worst thing you’ve ever heard.

Pick a word, a common word. You don’t need blood or gore or tentacles. Choose water or watermelon. Choose both and put them together, eating watermelon with your cousin down at the swimming hole in the summer. There’s nobody else around, and the air is hot and still. The water is still. There’s the buzz of insects, and the sound of your cousin chewing watermelon beside you. You take turns spitting out seeds into the water, little ripples before the seeds settle, floating on the surface. You get closer and closer to the center with practice. Then you spit a seed that sinks, little bubbles rising up around it, little ripples that get bigger. There’s nothing to make the water move, but it’s moving, and you think you see something else moving under the surface. Under the buzz of the insects, under your cousin’s noisy, panicked breath, you hear your heartbeat. The water ripples in time.

Maybe you’ve already stated what’s under the water. Maybe you haven’t. It’s not important. What’s important is the water, and the watermelon, the tension that builds each time you use the words. You can show your work. You just can’t let your reader escape it.

The heartbeat, you see, has to be their own. You set its pace by your words, your repetition. It does the rest. Do your part right, and the heartbeat might even do the rest until the heart stops, the fear you wrote part of the reader’s nightmare landscape. This is how nursery rhymes work, why memorizing poetry is held to be easier than memorizing prose. The rhythm gets under your skin, into your head. Use that to your advantage.

What’s in your folklore and fairy tale library?

Most my library is currently in storage across the country, but I want to start making use of the Resources area of my site, so I will be starting with a present my sister got me this past holiday season, Marina Warner’s Six Myths of Our Time. That got me thinking about what’s in my library of folklore analysis and fairy tale scholarship, and it made me wonder what might be in the libraries of those I’m hoping to converse with via this blog and my Resources page.

I can’t make an exhaustive list at this time, of course, but I will say there is a good deal more Marina Warner, as well as a chunk of Jack Zipes. In fact, I do have Zipes’ Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion and The Irresistible Fairy Tale both on my Kindle to follow up the Warner. In addition, I plan to look at retellings, original fairy tales, and collections, and I’ve got some of those on my Kindle as well. I’ve got Coyote Still Going, A Wolf at the Door, Black Swan, White Raven, Fairy Tales Reimagined, The Prose Edda, Teutonic Myth and Legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Celtic Fairy Tales, Once Upon a Curse, The Collected Fairy Tale Books of Andrew Lang, Russian Fairy Tales, Norse Mythology, The Complete Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Slavic Mythology, Norse Gods, Goddesses, Giants, Dwarves, Elves, & More, The Frog Princess, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Vassilissa the Beautiful, Folklore, and The Poetic Edda. Those are just the ones that seem fairly obviously to hold folkloric and fairy tale content from the titles, too. I’m pretty certain I’ll find more as I go a-reading.

As should be evident, I love reading this stuff, which is doubtless why it comes out in my writing so much. I love reading the analysis and criticism as well as the tales themselves, even when I disagree with it. I’ve been lucky enough to benefit from a few kind souls who’ve downsized their own libraries and given away things they had in duplicate or had converted to digital or were just done with. That’s how I managed to get the Maria Tatar Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales, and a few other gems the titles of which I cannot remember. I have Elizabeth Wanning Harries’ Twice Upon a Time, but have yet to read it. I have read, but don’t have, From the Beast to the Blonde. I have most of the volumes of the Windling/Datlow fairy tale anthologies and several of the novels in the same series. Oh, and I do have Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells on my Kindle.

What’s in your fairy tale library? What critics and scholars do you recommend or, conversely, recommend against?