Last year, Red Ogre Review, which had previously published my poem The Radiolaria Salute You, published my poetry collection Grab. Grab, in which I played with the English and German meanings of the word for poems that bookend the collection, included poems about burials, the costs of warring with the fae, a new take on two poems by Goethe, a telling of the Christmas ghost story “The Mistletoe Bough,” and other works, was supported by a grant from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. Editor Matt Bullen asked whether I’d be interested in writing a second book of fantasy and horror poetry for the press, and voila! A Registry of Omens. This new collection is dedicated to folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, as their work makes mine possible. I thought it would be fun to write (and fun for readers to read about) how all of that work influenced or inspired the poems in the collection.
I love doing research, which has served me well in my career as an academic. I put those skills to use in my creative work as well, writing libretti, lyrics, poetry, and plays. My process includes keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and links for future works; the ideas can range from a single name to a few lines of verse ready to expand on at some future time. This series of blog posts, published once every day as we lead up to A Registry of Omens‘s pub date on 15 September 2024, offers background information on several of the poems. There are of course zillions of writers who do research for their creative work, but in this aspect I think I’ve been especially influenced by Emma Donoghue, who has written several collections of short stories (and numerous novels) in innovative forms that draw on actual, fully-cited sources.
The first set of poems in the book are titled “American Sonnets for American Cryptids.” The term “American sonnet” can be applied to any poem of 14 lines; it doesn’t have to rhyme in any way, or contain the turn or volta of more traditional sonnet forms. I liked the idea of telling stories about American myths and legends in this form. I had a number of cryptids I planned to write about, but my knowledge of them is far from exhaustive, so I asked people on Bluesky to suggest lesser-known creatures in need to recognition. Lisa M. Bradley, Nissa Ren Cannon, John George, Annie Smith, and Julia Sullivan all suggested various beings.
The poems themselves draw on Mike Kilen’s “Van Meter remembers 1903 visit from winged monster,” Des Moines Register, May 3, 2013 (“Van Meter, Iowa, 1903”); Wikipedia and April White’s Atlas Obscura article “The Blood-Sucking Capelobo Haunts Brazil’s Dense Forests” inform “Sixteen Lines for a Capelobo.” I learned about the Ahuizotl ( “The Ahuizotl Kills a Conquistador”)from the Florentine Codex, book 11, from this excellent site, and from a reddit poster called slothprincess, and about the Schneller Geist or Snallygaster at the American Snallygaster Museum (“Stars to Stop the Snallygaster”). Information about the Gloucester sea serpent (“The Schooner Caravan”) came from a GBH radio interview with Arun Rath, Diego Lopez, and Jeff Belanger.
You can find excellent images of the Snallygaster here at the Museum, and below is an image of the Ahuizotl from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis folio 39r.
