Snake Face

I'm trying to write an erotic Medusa poem.

Medusa is a figure that I find ridiculously sexy.

She was powerful, supernatural, and terribly threatening. The earliest accounts speak of her as unbearably ugly, a monster of the sea whose serpent locks where so terrifying that anyone who looked at them would be so scared they'd turn to stone (note the difference between this version and the more recent: her looks turned men to stone.) In the newer versions of her tale, Medusa is more actively evil and also "light of cheek"... and she has a lover, Poseidon, the God of the Sea.

I LOVE the idea of a tumultuous, hot tryst happening at the bottom of the ocean. This is the setting of my poem and while it is inspiring, I'm having a hard time with the sexual dynamic of the piece (particularly between M & P).

Any ideas out there?

Why I Love Edgar Allan Poe

This about sums it up:

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Edgar Allan Poe



I have a difficult time expressing the solitude I often feel as someone who is compelled by the dark matter of the universe. Poe was a man who seemed to lack human connection severely, a loneliness that drove him mad through the morgues and pits and catacombs of his mind. And yet through this disconnect with the "normal world" he was able to create some of the most astoundingly eerie and marrow-curdling lines, sharp tools of language that have come together and spearheaded those of us who, like him, so acutely feel the sinister embrace of the night and welcome it.

It seems somehow fitting that someone so true to the darkness inside himself, someone who surrendered to it above all else, can speak in such visceral words to so many to whom the outside world is but pale compared to the inner worlds of the mind.

More Great News!

My friend and fellow writer-in-darkness, Sue Williams, received an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open (Dec '09) for her novella, "The Winged Hendersons of Welton-on-Sea"!

This is wonderful, Sue. Congrats and keep painting it black. You know we love it.

Here's what I imagine her winged beings to look like (props to Taro1999 for creating this):

Coolest thing ever.

One of my fabulous students has gotten herself published!

Carrie Kei Heim Binas, a student in the Monster & Mayhem class I teach with Sue Williams, published her first ever piece, a drabble entitled: "Walking on Eggshells" in Boston Literary Magazine!

What are you waiting for? Go check it out! And while you're at it, check out Carrie's awesome blog. She gives a run-down of our class, if you're interested!

To live on the edge

Artists are a notoriously edgy bunch. We are drifters, addicts, eccentrics. We can never quite keep ourselves in the light, in the place where others set up house and have families and babies and jobs and a four-door and retirement plans.

We have a hard time with the banal because, I think, it is so outside of our experience. We feel everything not only in our bodies but deep in our brains and most often we think entirely too much. We get bogged down in the recesses of the darkest deep wells of our minds and then we block out the sun with a stone and stay down there. And then we create.

All too often we forget how to live normal lives, if we ever knew how. We can't climb back out of the well and we have to live with all the messy, dark, and truthful things that live inside us. It's enough to make one mad. It's enough to make one cope any way one can.

I'm thinking of this all because a dear friend and amazing writer Sue Williams posted a link on her blog, Wet Ink to Life Magazine's photo essay "Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts". My first thought was of exploitation and my second thought was of sadness and the lengths that artists go to to cope with this crazy lifestyle.

Check it out for yourself and see what you think.