Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems

by Michael A. Arnzen

These poems — like all poems — were an experiment.

What distinguishes these texts is the way they were written and the way they were intended to be read: on a portable handheld computer, or "PDA," like the popular Palm Pilot. Whenever the urge struck, I composed on a 3"x3" screen with a stylus. Consequently, no poem here is longer than eleven lines and each of those lines contains eight words at best. Brevity and word economy was the rule. But if you study them, unique structures and patterns will emerge. The medium certainly shaped the message.

As did the genre. Gorelets are "horror" poems: a mode of writing which explores the "dark side" and muses over morbid themes like death, murder, disease, mutation, chaos, mutilation, the uncanny and all things outré. This is the genre I work in, mostly because I believe it is the most experimental popular genre. In it, one expects the unexpected, which requires the writer to break with convention at every turn.

Tapping into the popularity of the fiction genre, horror also brings a new audience to poetry. That was part of my goal: to get more readers in the digital age to take notice of poetry. When I began this project I realized that e-books (texts intended to be read on PDAs) were everywhere, but none of them were poetry. And poetry just seemed to "fit" the screen better than long, eternally scrolling documents written for print rather than pixels.

Here you are given the opposite: electronic text that has been transported back to the printed page. Gorelets were like applets — tiny computer applications — only darker than the usual fare. I think these pieces will stand up just as well in this slim volume as they did on a screen the size of gauze bandage.

Read and bleed. They'll be quick jabs, but I hope nothing will clot the cut.

— Michael Arnzen, Halloween 2003

Genres: Horror

64 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2003

About the author

Michael Arnzen has won multiple awards for his fiction and poetry, including four Bram Stoker Awards and the International Horror Guild Award. He teaches horror and suspense writing at Seton Hill University, as faculty in their unique MFA degree program in Writing Popular Fiction.

To catch up with Arnzen or hunt down collectable editions, visit the author's website, GORELETS.COM Or tune in his new podcast: 6:66 w/Michael Arnzen at http://6m66s.com/

Reviews

[Kane S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

From my review in the June 17, 2004 Alibi, http://alibi.com/art/8389/Gorelets.html http://www.fairwoodpress.com/index.html

alt.press
By Kane S. Latranz
Gorelets
(Unpleasant Poems · $7.99)
[http://http://fairwoodpress.com]

The company meeting is less than 10 minutes away. Your guts churn. Frankly, blowing chunks would be a huge relief. You use your Palm Pilot to log onto gorelets.com and are treated to "Worm": "naked in soil / writhing red wet and blind / puckering tip and tapering tail / i wonder if there's any of you / left in its belly / as I bring down the shovel / on your collarbone / splitting you both in two."

Bram Stoker Award winning author Michael A. Arnzen credits one Ryan Michael Williams with introducing him to handheld computing. This, in turn, led to Arnzen's gorelets.com where every week he showcases poems composed, and intended to be experienced on, a handheld computer. As exemplified by such literary inventions as flash fiction, microfiction and haiku, limitation can birth its own artistic subspecies. A gorelet is a maximum of 11 lines long, containing no more than eight words per line. Courtesy of Patrick and Honna Swenson, the husband and wife team who publish and edit the topnotch science fiction and horror magazine Talebones, some of Arnzen's contributions to minimalist literature for the really small screen can now be appreciated in print as well.

But why the horror? Why all that ickiness and morbidity, all the stuff that we don't want to think about? In his introduction, Arnzen hits one of the most redeeming aspects of horror on the head ... so to speak. "In it," he writes, "one expects the unexpected, which requires the writer to break with convention at every turn."

Breaking with convention is one way to sum up Arnzen's "Brain Chunks:" "always locked / inside a box / of bone—it's / rather unctuous / always soft / as tofu quiche / but never quite / as scrumptious."

All right. At least the meeting's over. As you clean out your desk and contemplate paying off all your student loans with a new career in the fast food industry, you're starting to feel queasy again. You'll probably have to hock the Palm Pilot soon, but for the time being here's some "Hardboiled Eyes:" "raw white eyeballs / stripped of their nerves / bump glass in a boiling beaker / like rocks jittering in a tumbler / they tussle and dilate in panic / whenever I reach for their container / as if their final memories were more / than just a matter of lost marbles."

If that doesn't do it for you, here's "Gross Eerie Shopping:" "Granny Mae fondled the foot in the / banana pile, tapped the hand in the / papaya, and pinched the eyeballs in a / bunch of grapes. She blindly bagged / them along with all the rest of her / produce, grumbling about scale- / tipping and price-gouging today. Worse: she couldn't even find help / when she needed a head of lettuce."

The wild, computer-manipulated photo art, some of which you see on the cover, is the product of Arnzen's fevered and inventive brain as well. Feel better now?

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some poets, composing haiku or tanka as a text message could be a plausible, creative activity. Many traditional Japanese forms are small and subtle, as more is required of them then just a syllable count. Writing them takes an act of controlled deliberation, not the sort of stream of consciousness that comes with fast typing on a keyboard -- one has to choose their words carefully. Texting on a cell phone only facilitates slowing the writer down, not only because you can only use one finger to enter the words, but if one does it the hard way, and doesn't insert ready made and saved words or type in LOL-LMAO text-speak, one has to hit the same button multiple times just to get the right letter. In a sense, the frustrating constraints makes the writer actively rethink his word choice, and not to mention the direction of the poem they're writing. Also, one's not going to write a sestina on a cell phone either, because the process would become too maddening, and the resulting poem would be too long for a text message. This is just one example of how the methods of writing can sometimes dictate the output.

Basically, every writer eventually creates their own system, and sometimes, they actively seek new ways to constrain themselves. The late A.R. Ammons, for example, tended to compose longer works on a continous strip of paper. Joe Wenderoth, decided, one day, to sit in a Wendy's and compose prose poems on their comment cards, some of which were ponderous, pornographic, absurd, and outright hilarious. The result of that experiment became his book Letters to Wendy's.

Then, there's Michael A. Arnzen's chapbook Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems. He chose to constrain himself by writing, initially, on his handheld. He writes, in his introduction that:

What distinguishes these texts is the way they were written and the way they were intended to be read: on a portable handheld computer ... Whenever the urge struck, I composed on a 3" x 3" screen with a stylus. Consequently, no poem here is longer than eleven lines and each of those lines contains eight words at best ... The medium certainly shaped the message.

So, the result was a bunch of short, lean poems, some more experimental than others. Of course, Arnzen goes on to note one other limiting factor: they had to be "horror" poems. Much of Gorelets stretches between what is grim and what is goofy, showcasing, at times, a sly sense of humor. But as for the chapbook itself, the poems are a variety of different techniques. Sure, the PDA and stylus helped make these poems relatively short, but that doesn't mean that they're all necessarily the same. For example, there's this tongue twister:

Sunk

squalid skull
spurts silt snot --
sunken sailor
once sneezed
seeking safer
sand

To point out the obvious, the poem runs together the letter "S." The dash is working like a cutting moment, one that is often found in haiku and tanka. Now that's not the same as:

Compost

eggshells and applesauce
blood pudding pies
peanut butter apricots
chicken bone thighs
pine needles pumpkin seeds
potato skin peels
orange rinds coffee grinds
your last meal

There's no punctuation here, except for the line breaks, and that has the effect of running everything together, so the poem creates a larger image. Stephen Dobyns once suggested that point of free verse is to create a system and then undermine it. It's good to think of that as a sucker punch, which is exactly what Arnzen does here. Everything in the poem is a list, except for the last line, which takes on different meanings. For one, "your last meal" can be in or part of the the compost heap, or the compost heap literally is "your last meal." If one actually eats the decomposing bacteria ridden parts of a compost heap, it likely will be "your last meal."

Of course, there are other currents running through Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems, like what some might call "poetry of the moment." These, in many respects, are more grounded, albeit in a twisted reality. The point, really, is to paint a scene caught in time, without any prolonged narrative impulse:

The Oral Surgeon
Removes His Mask

and there is no chin
just half a mouth, over biting air
as if possessing an upper palate
is all it takes to smile
before he cups my jaw in his hands
and presses it wetly into place
a new mask hanging on his false face
and as numb fades into nothing
all I can scream are vowels

The title is part of the humor here, as it effectively uses the convention where the title is part of the poem itself. The rest of the poem follows the notion of a single idea / image per line, as the poem stretches down the page, locking all together in the last line.

This is a usual aspect of Arnzen's poetry. The test of a poet, often, is how far he or she can move beyond the limitations that they set for themselves. In that sense, Gorelets doesn't read like a bunch of tiny poems that were quickly trotted off on a PDA. They are tiny experiments as to what a poet can do with a minuscule amount of space, and even with only a tiny amount of space, Arnzen's possibilities are limitless.

[Michael]

A massive, ten year anniversary edition with updates is in the works for 2011! Watch http://www.gorelets.com for details.