NEW POETS OF RUM RAM RUF: Three Impressionists (part 2)

Newest post in the series! This one tackles what happens when steampunk poetry meets the medieval alliterative meter.

[Last week, I promised to discuss three impressionists who created important revivalist texts despite knowing comparatively little about medieval poetry in itself. In this week, I reveal who my final – and best – example is. And the answer is …]

A floating steampunk city

JOSHUA GAGE

My final example is also maybe the most perfect: Joshua Gage and “Demetrius Yardley, Fire Nurse.” Gage’s greater personal interest lies in short-form speculative verse, scifaiku and horrorku in particular, and he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics …. a school I know sounds fictional, but it is entirely real and fully accredited by the Higher Learning Commission; Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman founded their MFA program back in 1974.

Anyway, Gage’s text – an alliterative steampunk poem – is our primary example of how someone without even a smidgeon of contact with real medieval literature can create an exciting revivalist text nonetheless. At least for Rothfuss and Zimmer, we can safely assume they had some encounters with authentic medieval poetry in translation, even if the finer metrical details escaped their notice. This definitely isn’t the route taken by Gage, though. His guide to the meter was neither Beowulf nor Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, even in translation, but a teaching anthology for poets, The Practice of Poetry (1992). Only one “chapter” in the book – a mere two pages – discusses Old English meter. The description it provides is accurate, if unsophisticated, but notably, the chapter’s author provides only three total lines of alliterative verse as an example … and unless Richard Wilbur is fibbing on his birth certificate, “The Lilacs” – a text of about average metrical fidelity, probably a “4” or “5” on my scale – is about as far from authentic medieval poetry as they come.

With this source text and book chapter in mind, I’d probably rank Gage’s metrics in “Demetrius Yardley, Fire Nurse” as an overall nine on my scale. He has caesuras and sporadic attempts at alliteration in each line, but the greater intricacies of Old English poetics are simply missing. Gage just had no way of knowing what they are. Sure, he’s in the right ballpark, but it’s not exactly a homerun – or even a bunt single – of historical faithfulness to the meter.

If we get hung up on that, however, we’d be missing the bigger picture. In my introduction to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, I described Gage’s text as a “kind of metrical retro-futurism.” What I meant is that, if you think about it, steampunk aesthetics are a strangely appropriate vehicle to pair with an archaic medieval meter. As a SF subgenre, steampunk blends futuristic settings with a Victorian level of technology that nowadays seem decidedly antique. Nobody today thinks that steam locomotives are the cutting-edge of human achievement; they lack the “gosh-wow” factor that once made H. G. Wells’s fiction seem so impressively cutting-edge. And this old-fashioned steampunk aesthetic thoroughly inundates “Demetrius Yardley.” Its eponymous hero belongs to a toiling underclass, shoveling coal into the furnaces that maintain the magnificent floating city of Potetopolis. As Demetrius explains,

…. We dwell

in lands caliginous,

looking after

gas hoses, altimeters,

and the holocaust that holds

this city aloft

and its boulevards illuminated.

What steampunk hopes to accomplish on the genre level, Old English meter accomplishes on the metrical level. Alliterative poetics are the steam locomotives of a post-nuclear age: archaic and antique in themselves but presentable as new, exciting, and “futuristic” in a poetic world now dominated by free verse and formal rhyming poetry. If readers wish to experience the heady rush of the future and the past together, what better way than a text written in a newly rediscovered archaic meter but welded simultaneously onto a retro-futuristic steampunk setting?

Gage’s poem thus resonates for me, as a critic, in ways I’m sure he doesn’t even realize. As mentioned, his choice of meter is about as random as any such choice can be. Yet, thematically, his conjunction of genre and meter works in a surprisingly effective fashion, and it opens the way of pregnant possibility for future revivalists.