ROUNDNESS
By:
February 5, 2026
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.
…Chant
Let all our air be riddled with radiant
incantations.
On the loquacious receivers let the word of
the communion crackle like the kisses of
a chance meeting
Let the latest news strike the nocturnal
crowds on the brow
A brief maxim runs across the wavy
façades
The letters waited in the shadow of all
eternity
A fiery serpent flows through their invisible
veins and escapes
In the black chaos where the seas and the
skies become confused let the
projectors blow their white trumpets of
silence
Let the sirens utter their moan of
tracked-down goddesses
Amidst the crowds the newspapers shed
their leaves
Late News
The Earth is taken
The Earth is round in the hand of man
Ripeness has yielded all the roundness
Peeled fruit in the mouth
A presence of mind is everywhere
Geometry of nerves
The lines of the sphere are sensitive like
the fibers that go to the edge of the
body
The meridians caparison my shoulders
The equator is my belt
I perceive my brother of the antipodes
I feel the soles of his feet…
— From Fond de Cantine, collected in Écrits de jeunesse. Fond de cantine was first published in 1920 by Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française (Nrf). The excerpt from “Rondeur” above originally appeared in SIC under the title “Dernière Nouvelle,” along with “Usine” — in, I believe, 1917.
Translation from the 1995 anthology The Cubist Poets in Paris (ed. and trans. LeRoy C. Breunig).
PS: I like the visual image of a film projector “blowing a white trumpet of silence.”
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.