“The baby hit the button again and again on his electronic cigarette: no nicotine. Nothing. It was freaking unbelievable that they would let this happen. What was he supposed to do? Crawl downstairs and trade his only remaining sock for a drag on a Marlboro? Keep a grip, he thought. You’re a bigger boy than this. Just six hours until his parents came home. He pressed the button again. Nothing.”
Ok, ok — it’s not actually a noir scene of infant smoking, it’s a set of images from the 1931 book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern, German for “Electrical Safety in 132 Images,” which now resides at a technical museum in Vienna. The idea, I guess, was to show people unused to electricity how they might be injured in a variety of ways — the above image was supposed to let people know not to let babies play with the cords to their bottle warmers. I originally ran across them at Bre Pettis’ blog when I was thinking about cover art for my chapbook Movie Plots. I ended up picking this one:
Which I guess says something about me (someone who grew up in the tradition of the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, or less charitably, a pre-adolescent with a lot of grey hair) and something about the book. Movie Plots is a set of prose poems that tell the stories of movies, often unfilmable movies. Prose poetry is a great way to contain lyric narrative — to give and take away the promise of narrative, to attempt to make a narrative of the unseeable, the momentary, the fleeting — or to give a slice of a narrative that indicates the whole. Most of the time, when we encounter prose, we expect a story (even if it’s academic prose, or a how-to manual), and that expectation can provoke readers to travel far past what actually appears in the text of a poem. We encounter details, forge them into a story, realize that the story doesn’t cohere, and then experience that frightening, expansive feeling that reminds us that the stories we tell are a web of reasoning woven around a mysterious — and exciting, and meaningful — conflict or threat. The best example of this I’ve ever read is Marie Howe’s “Part of Eve’s Discussion.” The scariest part of that poem, the charge of it, is this: things are like this all the time.
To put it all in terms of German safety illustrations: the electricity enters the bodies of the people. We watch its path. Where the electricity is coming from is sometimes clear and sometimes unclear. Why in the world the victims are licking bottle warmers and peeing on high-voltage lines — no clue. The electricity is eternally coming in and going out, we are in fact frozen in the moment of its infinite, simultaneous entry and exit. The more we attempt to explain this eternally repeating moment of shock as a cause-and-effect procession of events, the more dramatic our encounter with the inexplicable.
For me, the cover to Movie Plots didn’t pan out — the publisher found a way to create these extremely beautiful, 3-D, luxe covers that would’ve been spoiled by a big cartoon, and in any event they’re upstanding ladies and gentlemen who urinate only in traditionally acceptable ways. For me, these images will probably always be the ‘draft cover for the chapbook’. For you, though, they can be a way to make (and unmake) stories. I’ll paste my four other favorites here, and you can explain what’s happening in the pictures. Feel free to comment, email me, or go for broke and put it on your own blog. Click these to enlarge them:
Next week: Outdated Psychology for Poets (party game version)