So I think I should come out of the closet, I like urban fantasy involving supernatural powers, vampires, werewolves, the odd Zombie, maybe a demon or angel or two thrown into the mix. Don’t get me wrong if it is poor writing driven by clichéd situations and the odd splash of gore and sex thrown into the mix just to titillate or tick the box then I can easily dismiss it as tosh …such a nice word tosh feels more rounded than rubbish. Yet written well and acted well it can be a real joy to watch or read (although I must admit I tend to watch it rather than read it).
I have always been intrigued with why the concept of the vampire can have such a hold on the human psyche. There are Jungian and Freudian interpretations abounding…young girls and blood is always a good bet for something deeply meaningful going on in involving the unconscious. Some deep seated concerns with menstruation and becoming a woman and growing older and then along comes a vampire than not only drains you of blood (that nasty monthly reminder that you can now be a mother) but here is this creature that does not grow old has all sorts of powers but yet put them in the clear light of day or near any religious paraphernalia and they can be vanquished. They can only enter a house if invited which could be a metaphor for the fact the events that they bring about are somehow colluded with. We invite our own destruction at times.
Vampires and werewolves are big business, the media abounds with such programmes which can easily be overlooked as the equivalent of moving wall paper but thousands tune in to see someone transform into something beyond our normal understanding with fangs or hair and uncontrollable feral urges. Over the years the genre has built up a whole universe of vampiric rules and regulations which many fans guard jealousy. They can do this but they can’t do that, they can die in only very specific ways, stakes, silver bullets, daylight. Sometimes the rules are broken to serve the plot, to make the genre just that bit more flexible but you do so at the risk of some hard core readers shaking their heads in disbelief at such liberties. What interests me is that there are some things that remain central to what is essentially only an imagined world no matter who the writer is. Vampires crave human blood, werewolves transform during the full moon( again another menstrual cycle allusion). Vampires can beget other vampires and werewolves other werewolves. Everything stems from these things, plots, character everything has certain fixed points in a shared understanding of how this world works. That is almost what I love about this genre writing it generates a huge investment by the reader in the details of imagination. You are asked not just to suspend disbelief and believe in vampires etc but you are asked to invest in the establishment of boundaries and rules and an intricate yet shared interwoven set of beliefs about how they can act. All fiction demands of the reader a certain leap of faith into the writer’s world but in this genre there are a myriad of leaps of faith that are almost choreographed into an intricate dance that aficionados are willing to join in. I don’t look down my nose at such lovers of the genre I just love that they are so engaged in serial acts of imagination. There are probably as many badly written urban fantasy novels, televisions programmes and films as there are badly written literary, romance, crime or thriller novels or films. Somehow it is a genre that is often ridiculed as Goth, geek and plain weird territory despite the fact that in the publishing industry such books are out selling almost every other genre world wide and is also attracting an increasing number of women of all ages where is has a strong fast growing market. This is a genre that is probably not going to go away and it is the genre that statistics are saying is attracting people who would not normally consider reading a book. So I think something that gets non readers reading it great, it builds a reading habit that might start to extend to other books. There has also been the Harry Potter phenomenon whereby readers of that series have naturally morphed into readers of urban fantasy. If you have consumed wizardry and dark forces at work at Hogwarts its only a short stretch to a werewolf in your garden shed and a charismatic vampire turning up at your book reading group. I feel I should be out and proud about my predilection, I watch Being Human and enjoy it , there I’ve said it, do I need a sponsor to ensure I don’t go on a Twilight Trilogy DVD bender one day?
One of the earliest vampire stories is Vampyr by Doctor Polidori written in that rain sodden holiday in 1816 at Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Out of this came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or a Modern Prometheus and Vampyre. Polidori based it on unfinished extract of a story by Byron and did little to dispel the belief that the very famous and huge celebrity Byron wrote the story…it helped his sales no end. The vampire in the story Lord Ruthven is almost modelled on Byron who himself worked hard at his mad, bad and dangerous to know image and who flouted conventions especially sexual ones with great panache. His connection with Hell Fire Clubs did little to dispel his demonic persona that he worked hard at promoting. There had always been folklore tales bout vampire like creatures and Poliadori simply packaged it up for the dark gothic tastes of the era.
There are countless vampire websites containing poetry that quite frankly rivals Vogon poetry for craft and tone but let’s not get too snotty, Goethe wrote a vampire poem and whilst it may not have been his finest work he is hardly a poetic dullard. I think poetry draws heavily on myth and legends for subject matter or metaphor yet somehow the world of vampires and other supernatural beings is consigned to some fanzine ghetto. Such tales are almost regarded as too chavish, too ‘poor popular taste’, to write serious or even ironic poems about, other than perhaps the odd tasteful homage to a classic Dracula film. If any one knows of a modern poet who has written a good vampire or werewolf poem I’d like to know about it.
How strange that a topic that can be an enormous part of the cultural zeitgeist at the moment and sparks endless poems on fan sites can be virtually unrepresented in modern poetry. I typed that and suddenly stopped , what a snob I’m turning into, there I am saying there is a huge amount of vampire poetry on innumerable vampire, werewolf or Goth fanzine type sites and then saying it is not to be found in modern poetry as if real poetry was something only defined by a very narrow criteria. There is the argument about what is just taste and what is ‘good poetry’ ( whatever that is) but to discount it all in such a cavalier way is a bit harsh. I must go up to my room and write in blood one hundred times, I must not be a poetry snob, I must not be a poetry snob.
No comments:
Post a Comment