Another bohemian sonnet

Elektra on Third Avenue
for Link

At six, when April chills our hands and feet
walking downtown, we stop at Clancy's Bar
or Bickford's, where the part-time hustlers are,
scoffing between the mailroom and the street.
Old pensioners appraise them while they eat,
and so do we, debating half in jest
which piece of hasty pudding we'd like best.
I know you know I think your mouth is sweet
as anything exhibited for sale,
fresh coffee cake or boys fresh out of jail,
which tender hint of incest brings me near
to ordering more coffee or more beer.
The homebound crowd provides more youth to cruise.
We nurse our cups, nudge knees, and pick and choose.

Marilyn Hacker

Random scholarship

The cosmic-astronomic element seen here is combined with extrapolations of monsters of classical mythology and with an entire repertory of objects of evil used by Poe, Baudelaire, and the French Symbolists; the whole poem being unified by the central figure of the Hashish-Eater, i.e., "the emperor of dreams" (which figure has its analogies with "the Man-God" of Baudelaire, actually a very ancient concept). This extraordinary poem may have been composed after 1920, but its preview of things to come in later tales owes nothing to Dunsany. Something of its imagery and structure was suggested to Smith by George Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry", which poem Smith first read in 1907 when he was almost 15, two years after Smith discovered the poetry of Poe.

-- Donald Sidney-Fryer, "On the Alleged Influence of Lord Dunsany on Clark Ashton Smith"

It's amazing what you stumble upon when googling "lemurian sonnets". The title of Sidney-Fryer's article says it all, right down to the "alleged". The Eldritch Dark site also has a huge selection of Clark Ashton Smith's poetry, which seems pretty horribly over-written from what little I've read. Yet there's something almost anthropologically fascinating about it. Who the hell was George Sterling? Was Lovecraft's cosmic horror the product of some vast school of horrible cosmic sonnets? Are the French somehow to blame?

Well, I'm being too glib. I suppose this connects to the Decadents in some way, and I'm just exposing my ignorance. Although I read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé (in translation) when I was younger! "Generally overlooked is the fact that a great many of Smith's so-called 'tales of horror' are just as much tales of love." There's the Gothic for you in a nutshell. And doesn't it all go back to the Gothic? Weird!