UPDATED/REVISITED 8/29/09: Ah, the joy of working in scripts. I love wordpress, but she is an unforgiving machine. One tiny change made, and poof! The whole thing goes to pieces. Text and images everywhere. I know how to fix this, but it would be an extremely tedious and time consuming labor, and just another excuse for not doing “real work.” So apologies—the mess stays, dismaying as it is. And it looked so damn nice, once upon a time. Grrr.

THE “TITLE PAGE”

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This is not an example of typographical genius. [8/29/09: Ha! Insult to injury! Was I glimpsing the future?! Jesus.] But by the time I had finished putting this together (making that bigger, making this smaller, space here, line break there, etc), I really had decided on “Fires of Venus” for the title. Mission accomplished.

NEVER LAND

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Moody groovy pic, isn’t it? That’s not our moon, obviously. Europa? Miranda? Not sure. Just wish I knew who should get the credit. I found it on Dante-2070′s site, but he couldn’t remember where he found it. If anyone knows the artist’s name, please let me know. At any rate I thought it was a pretty good complement for the poem.

SONGS OF FUTURE EGYPT

Ugh. Piece of shit image for a piece of shit poem. Didn’t feel like putting in the photoshop minutes (ok, hours) required for what I really wanted, a way-cool SF eye-popper with legions of futuristic soldiers in front the pyramids; I could have done it quickly but it would have looked like crap, so I settled for this bullshit composite of images I stole from Getty and/or Corbis. I hadn’t even finished the fucking poem! Plus, I was having a horrible day! It was Easter, my mother and sister were visiting from New Hampshire and while I was very happy to see them they were also driving me apeshit, I was scrambling to finish the image and the poem and all the while I was obsessing over the fact that I had raised Jeff VanderMeer’s hackles by sending him an encouraging email because I thought he was having a real bad day, too, and… Jesus. It’s all okay. It’s all good now. But the image remains a piece of shit.

AFTER IMAGE

I chickened out. I could (should) have used this:

But fear and doubt won, so I went with the UNMISTAKABLE, an image attached to the poem called “After Image” that would LEAVE NO GODDAMN DOUBT in the reader’s mind that it was a poem about BLADE RUNNER, damn it. Cowardice should be a capital offense.

demophonic!

Had fun with this. Satan came from a book of public domain occult images, and the flopped mirror image is from a sketch by Michelangelo. The insertion of type struck me like a friggin’ thunderbolt. I mean, duh, why not?

CRITICAL MASS

Insertion of type continues, and I thought I was being so clever: “K = 1″ is the numeric measure of critical mass, and “K > 1″ is when the mass goes supercritical. As for the image itself, well… I wanted a damn kiss that didn’t look like an Esté Lauder ad, you know? I wanted the kiss to be “hungry,” “urgent,” “passionate,” yet “honest.” Didn’t find it. So I settled for faux French cinema. Sort of.

THE STATUES OF SAINTS HAVE BLED ALL THEY CAN

Doesn’t this picture blow your mind?!  It blew my mind, a happy accident on a cosmic scale, so suited for the idea of reaching for something so far away, so unattainable. The folks at NASA say that “the display is caused by a young and powerful pulsar, known by the rather prosaic name of PSR B1509-58. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand. B1509 — created by a collapsed star — is one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators in the Galaxy.”

BAD OMEN FOR THE NEW DIGS

Yes, that horrible portrait of Dylan Thomas really does hang on the wall of the overpriced tourist trap known as the White Horse Tavern. I say “horrible” but I should say “sad,” because Thomas’ legacy will always be bound to the joint.

DRUMS

I was very happy when I found this image. Originally I went looking for a very upfront, fantasy-styled watercolor, like the work of Thomas Canty. Couldn’t find it. At least, all the images I found screamed Hallmark Sympathy Card. So I went with this. All right, so it’s very Virginia Woolf. But it works.

FEAR NO EVIL

Holy crap! Who the hell is (was) Adolph Hiremy-Hirschl? 1860—1933. Born in Hungary, raised in Vienna. According to artnet.com: “…great passion for artistic creation is evident in the drawings, the sustained attempt to perfect the single part at the same time his means of escape from completion and synthesis… Despite his status as one of the most successful artists in fin-de-siècle Vienna, however, as the turn of the century approached his work began to be overshadowed by the more progressive and radical paintings of Gustav Klimt and the artists of the Vienna Secession movement…” Yeah, yeah, blame it on Gustav. But it’s safe to say that Hiremy-Hirschl nailed the quintessential draxian-babe: semi-naked and passed-out on an ice-floe while menaced by Death, The Wandering Jew, black crows, and an Angel. Oh yeah.

MY NEPHEW AND THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS

Oh, the worry. The tap-tap of fear in my little heart. When I listen to The Surfers’ music, two words spring to mind: terrifying and beautiful. If I couldn’t find a decent picture of a kiss, there was no way I was going to find an image that conjured both terror and beauty for an objective reader/viewer. So I took a cue from the Surfers’ own album designs, while not “shocking” but often confrontational, off-putting, idiosyncratic…

Two things I want to say quickly about the “chopped-up-hand-in-meat-grinder” pic: 1), no beauty there, baby, and 2), there’s no way the Surfers’ label, Capitol, would have let them get away with such an image, so this is my goofy way of saying Thanks, guys. Anyway, I was pretty nervous about posting the grinder picture, and SHO NUFF my stats took a nose dive the following day, boom! We’re talking NEGATIVE HITS, man! (I know: it doesn’t work that way. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean yadda yadda…)

SPLINTERS

Another instance of the “Not what I wanted, had to settle” syndrome. There was a deadline issue, too. The final image is… okay. At least I didn’t clobber the viewer with dance-of-death iconography. Oh well.

EROTOMANIA

There was a VAST IMPROVEMENT in my stats after this picture went live!!! Seriously, five seconds after posting this one, I slapped myself (as I am wont to do) and thought, “Blown opportunity to insert type!” I could have made it a billboard for NEW POEMS (ha ha) BY SIMON DRAX, BOOKSTORES EVERY-WHERE, etc, and I was vewwy vewwy tempted to go back in and futz with it, something I never do once a post is published except to correct really grievous typos… but I didn’t. Because 1) It would have really messed with the “readability” of the image (and we wouldn’t want that), and, 2) It would have been counter to what the poem was actually about, being mega crazy horny and catching fragments from the corner of one’s vision and looking twice only to realize it wasn’t THAT at all… So there it is, and there it lay. Yes, intended.

Because I am a completist and you are too, poems and art bypassed include THIS…, DEPTH CHARGE, SHOOTING STAR, NOTES FOR A POEM CIRCA 1987, and VICTORY AT SEA. Nothing to say, really.

One last thing.

I am grateful to everyone who enjoyed this batch of dusty poems, especially the beatified souls who wrote comments. I am toying with the idea of launching a Sister Site devoted exclusively to poetry, called, what else and why not, FIRES OF VENUS. Does anyone think this is a good idea? Spread the word, tell your friends, and let me know at

simondrax@comcast.net

and if there is sufficient interest, what the hell. Thanks.

And now it’s back to ICHIBAN WEAPON READY in all it’s “glory.” Seriously, beyond updating the “About” page and firing the INTERVIEWER, I’m really not sure what will come next. It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?

May 2, 2009
Categories: FIRES OF VENUS (Poetry) . . Author: Drax

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