THE HEAD
By:
October 22, 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.
The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts
Its click
Creates perpetual motion
Everyone knows the egg of Christopher Columbus
which was a flat egg, a fixed egg, the egg of an inventor
The sculpture of Archipenko is the first ovoid egg
Maintained in intense equilibrium
Like a motionless top
On its spinning point
Speed
It strips itself
Of its many-colored waves
Of its zones of color
And turns in depth
Naked.
New.
Total.
— From Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques, in Poésies complètes de Blaise
Cendrars.
From the 1995 anthology The Cubist Poets in Paris (ed. and trans. LeRoy C. Breunig).
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.