FROM “I”
By:
October 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.
On pavement stones
Of my trampled soul
Steps of madmen
Plait soles of harsh words.
Where the cities
Are hung
And in a cloud noose
Stilled
Crooked turrets
Of towers
I walk
alone sobbing
that on the crossroads
are crucified the tsar’s cops.
— 1913
In 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, ed. Boris Dralyuk, we read:
In 1911, after enrolling at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Mayakovsky met David Burlyuk (1882-1967), who drew him into his circle of innovative young poets, including Khlebnikov, the poet-aviator Vasily Kamensky (1884-1961) and Alexey Kruchenykh (1886-1968), who pioneered a “transrational” poetics called zaum. That same year the “Hylaeans”, as they dubbed themselves, would issue a resounding ‘Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ — a manifesto urging its readers to “Toss Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on, and so on, from the steamship of modernity”. Over the next six years, this volatile group — the most artistically diverse and accomplished of myriad factious Futurist outfits-would splinter, then reform as the Cubo-Futurists, then splinter again. Yet despite their internal squabbles, they never lost sight of their true foe: the petty philistine consumer, the repulsive bourgeois. Their aesthetic enemy was, conveniently enough, the class enemy of the Bolsheviks, who were just as single-minded in their hatred. And yet, although the core Hylaeans met the February Revolution with unbridled fervour, the Bolshevik coup induced a more ambiguous reaction.
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.