“I FRIED MY BRAIN…”
By:
May 20, 2024
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
I fried my brain like shashlik on the iron spit
z-z-z-zh-sh-sh!
Adding rouges and acids to the pepper
So that you dig it more, little Muse,
Than
the smeary
Tart of Igor Severyanin!
So that you dine on,
Tickling with a toenail,
The fiddlebow redolent of tur-pen-tine
My heart will go somersalty
Like nervy Kubelik’s
Fiddle.
— From Calendar, a 1926 collection by the author. This is an excerpt from a longer poem, “Spring with a Doubletreat.” Found in the 2001 Kruchenykh collection Suicide Circus: Selected Poems (trans. Jack Hirschman, Alexander Kohav, Venyamin Tseytlin).
Igor Severyanin was the founder of a rival Futurist group, the Ego-Futurists. Jan Kubelík was a Czech violinist and composer.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.