The Complete Dark Shadows

by Tony Trigilio

Tony Trigilio’s book-length poem The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is the first book of a multi-volume experiment in autobiography. For this project, Trigilio is watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the gothic soap opera that ran on ABC from 1966-1971. He is composing one sentence for each episode and shaping the sentences into couplets. Book 1 covers 183 episodes. The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is both an autobiographical diary poem and an ode to lost television artifacts. As David Trinidad, author of Peyton A Haiku Soap Opera, writes of the book, “Trigilio manages to create a riveting two-fold narrative—personal and TV-screen ekphrastic—out of piecemeal sentences (one per episode) that honor the most unlikely of poetic a cheaply produced, blooper-ridden, gothic-horror soap opera. Barnabas Collins, kitsch vampire but source of poet Tony Trigilio’s childhood nightmares, rises from his casket in the first sentence of this intrepid fever chart of a poem. Trigilio manages to create a riveting two-fold narrative—personal and TV-screen ekphrastic—out of piecemeal sentences (one per episode) that honor the most unlikely of poetic a cheaply produced, blooper-ridden, gothic-horror soap opera. This is just the first installment of what promises to be a classic American coffin-shaped (I hope) epic poem. —David Trinidad Tony Trigilio has taken on an epic task in The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). Here, in Book 1, Trigilio uses the episodes as touchstones for his earliest memories, including nightmares, brought on by TV’s dream factory. Watching Dark Shadows episodes on DVD almost fifty years later, alone or with friends, the speaker confesses, “each time I rewind, it’s something different.” He re-casts his past in terms of gruesome camp, excavation and repression. As I read through this poem I remember my outrage at Dark Shadows being preempted by Watergate coverage, the weird day the show went from black and white to color. But if Trigilio seems to be in the zeitgeist—Dark Shadows remade by Tim Burton, Dark Shadows as referenced in Mad Men—he is also solidly planted in the universal. A boy and his mother, his brother, his father. The spirit and death. Blood—as in relation. Blood as in sex and violence. Couplets (rhyming and not), anaphora, elegies, sonnets, and a ghazal beautifully frame personal and cultural anxiety. —Denise Duhamel Long before Twilight or True Blood, there was Barnabas Collins haunting the national psyche—a vampire the poet Tony Trigilio met before he met language itself, through watching the Dark Shadows soap as a very young child with his mother. In this tour-de-force of a long poem, Trigilio reveals how our pop culture invades the very core of our imagination with irresistible magical images such as ghost girls, psychic boys, “sea tramps,” and “paranormal flowers” of all varieties. But what he also shows is that while (to paraphrase Wittgenstein) “our pictures hold us captive,” we can repossess them and ourselves through our creative acts. Anyone who wants to understand what’s behind our cultural obsession with vampires better get this book right away. —Jerome Sala

104 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 6, 2013

About the author

Tony Trigilio is the author and editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, The Punishment Book (BlazeVOX [books], 2024), the fourth installment in his multivolume poem, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood); Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023); and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (2021). A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). His books of poetry also include Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX, 2019), White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011), among others. He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014; new edition forthcoming, 2025, from BlazeVOX) and Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney (Essay Press, 2016). Trigilio is the author of the critical monographs Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (second edition released in paperback by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012) and "Strange Prophecies Anew" (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). With Erik Mortenson, he co-edited the essay collection The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (Clemson University Press / Liverpool University Press, 2023); and with Tim Prchal, he co-edited the literature anthology Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

His poems have been anthologized widely, including The Best American Poetry (ed. Elaine Equi; Scribner, 2023); Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry (After Hours Press, 2022); The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019); The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017); Poems Dead and Undead (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2014); Obsessions: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014); The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012); A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012); and Villanelles (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2012), among others. His critical essays have appeared in the collections Reconstructing the Beats (ed. Jennie Skerl; Palgrave/MacMillan, 2004) and Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Rutgers University Press, 2002). His articles and book reviews have appeared in journals such as American Literature, Another Chicago Magazine, Boston Review, The Journal of Beat Studies, Modern Language Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, The William Carlos Williams Review, and others.

Trigilio co-founded the poetry journal Court Green in 2004, and was an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly from 2017-2021. He is Poetry Editor and Nonfiction Co-Editor of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. A past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Chicago.