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Informationen zum Autor TONY BARNSTONE is the Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College, California. Author of numerous books of poetry, including Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki , winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry, he is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose, and editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Chinese Erotic Poems . MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST is the author of two poetry books and winner of numerous awards including a Nation "Discovery" Award, the Columbia University Poetry Prize, the Missouri Arts Council Biennial Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation , The Washington Post , Antioch Review , and The Colorado Review . She lives in Gold Beach, Oregon. Klappentext Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman brings to life a colorful menagerie of fantastical creatures from across the ages. Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness-murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses-to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf's Grendel, Homer's Circe, William Morris's Fafnir, Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock, Robert Lowell's man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy's Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn's take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare's hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.INTRODUCTION: DISTORTING MIRRORS, SPLIT SELVES, AND THE ORIGIN OF MONSTERS To be a monster is to be inhuman. Or to be a monster is to be all-too-human. Eitherway, in order to talk about monsters, one first must talk about what it means to be human. For the Chinese, the idea of the human goes back to Confucius.He used the word ren , whichmeans ‘‘man’’ or ‘‘human,’’ to name the values that make a just and moral being, such as filial piety of child to parent, loyalty of citizen to ruler, just treatment of citizens by rulers, and reciprocity – treating others as you would wish to be treated by them. Most world religions have a similar notion of reciprocity. Even when the reciprocity is bloody, as in the Babylonian and Jewish notion of ‘‘an eye for an eye,’’ it functions as an attempt to limit vendettas: take only one eye for the loss of yours, in other words. Out of such ideas comes the entire legal justice system, as well as the immensely complex set of balanced and reciprocal interactions thatmake up our daily social life. The monstrous, then, is often that which is outside such social codes. In Beowulf , the monster Grendel is much like the humans: he is a warrior for his kind, he lives in a hall like those he kills and terrorizes, he is loved by his mother just like the Danes, but he dwells outside of human boundaries and so is referred to as a ‘‘borderdweller.’’ One way in which he dwells on the border is that he kills others outside of human codes: he refuses to pay the ‘‘were-gild’’ (the ‘‘man-price’’) for those he slaughters. Killing is not monstrous; that’s what warriors do. Killing without reciprocity, killing without law, is what makes Grendel a monster in men’s eyes. Modern theories of social justice originated from the idea that just societies balance social needs with the good of the individual person, and that humans have certain inalienable rights by nature. In other words, to value humans is our hu...
