The Way the Future Blogs

Since there have been few outright riots to protest previous doses of verse in the blog, I’ll try one more installment, a sort of free-form Petrarchan sonnet called “Shaft.” I’ll let the poem speak for itself.

Shaft

Through a die one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter drawn
Cold when drawn, emerging smoke-hot, a metal strand.
This and a thousand others woven tight together,
Attached to an electric winch and to a car.

A hole is bored through sheets of blueprint cap.
Created then, a steel and stonework frame to fit,
Straight up and down three hundred feet, the pit,
The womb of emptiness, becomes a fact.

Then blindly humans enter, wary men.
Yet blind. Ascending viciously, they viciously go down.
To rise, to fall, on vicious errands.

Iron cord in an iron-bound vacuum.
Iron consciousness, inflexible and dull.
Iron all (vicious), iron (vicious) all.

I hope you didn’t hate it too much. I would have been maybe 17 when I wrote it.

 
Related posts:

• The Poetry Corner
• The Poetry Corner 2
• Verse Decoded
• The Quadrumvirate

Here are a couple of quatrains, the first from the smallest fanzine ever published (one 8½-by-11 sheet, folded twice to make eight 4¼-by-5½ pages), my own Mind of Man, ca. 1936:

Necroptic life, in Thursday bliss,
Exploits a winnowed worker’s brawn
While taurine canines gently kiss
With urine the aureuscid lawn.

— Frederik Pohl

While the other is the only complete verse by Cyril Kornbluth that I remember. Date unknown, but probably close to the above.

Gym Class

One, two, three. four,
Clap your hands and prance
In stinky shirt and stinky shoes
And stinky little pants.

—C.M. Kornbluth

Related posts

Some of the Futurians at my apartment in 1938. From left, front row: Joseph Harold Dockweiler aka Dirk Wylie, John B. Michel, Isaac Asimov, Donald A. Wollheim; center row: Chester Cohen, Walter Kubilius, me, Richard Wilson; top row: Cyril Kornbluth, Jack Gillespie, Jack Robins.

The “Quadrumvirate,” for most of its existence, ran the Futurians. We accreted to the club and to each other by adhesion to other clubs; the first was G.G. Clark’s Brooklyn Science Fiction League, which Donald Wollheim and Johnny Michel had left a shambles after they had kidnapped most of its members, one of them being me; then we began sending radar signals to individuals to seemed to be our kind of people, by which we mostly meant the kind of fan who desperately wanted to become a pro.

We found one of these in Connecticut in a person who was then a member of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, because the CCC not only gave him three hots and a cot for planting trees and doing other things for the environment, it also sent some money back to his family who could use it (remember, this was the time of the Great Depression). That was Robert A.W. Lowndes. Before long, he was able to change jobs, becoming a hospital orderly (thus his nickname of “Doc”) and then he made it to New York and the Futurians.

Continue reading ‘The Quadrumvirate’ »

C.M. Kornbluth

I think Cyril Kornbluth knew he wanted to be a writer at the age when most of us did, that is in his early teens. His first efforts, or at least the first I knew anything about, weren’t stories. They were poems.

He owned a book, written by one of his high-school teachers, I think, which gave the rules for composing every kind of verse I ever heard of. Cyril and I studied the book and resolved to write one of each. We made a good start, actually writing a haiku (we spelled it “hokku”), a villanelle, a sestina, two sonnets (one Petrarchan and one Shakespearean) and I think a couple of others. We bogged down when we came to the chant royal (the chant royal is HARD) and, like most of the other Futurians, we decided to try our luck with science fiction. At that time, I think Cyril was maybe 14, and I three or four years older.

If Cyril had favorites among his stories, he didn’t tell me about them. He did take his work seriously and got really testy when editors messed them up. (Particularly Horace Gold.)

Cyril had excellent work habits. When he sat down to write he wrote. I am not aware that he ever sat unproductive, staring into space, for more than a few minutes at a time before putting words on paper, and he rarely rewrote.

Although Cyril was doing reasonably well in economic terms, he suffered the usual beginner’s cash flow problems. A writer’s income does not arrive in the form of a check delivered every Friday. It comes in lumps of various sizes at irregular times and (with two kids) Cyril felt the need of a more regular income. Happily, he had been offered an assistant editor job on F&SF, which he took and liked a lot. The job included being first reader for the editor, Bob Mills, and Cyril took pleasure in finding something worth passing on to Mills. (He was, I remember, particularly delighted with Fritz Leiber’s “The Silver Eggheads.”)

Unfortunately Cyril’s health was deteriorating. Partly this was due to the quantities of coffee, cigarettes, hot pastrami sandwiches and alcohol he had been ingesting since his teens, but mostly it was due to the war. Cyril’s draft number had come up early, but he caught a break. He had worked for a time in a machine shop and thus had experience of operating metal-working machinery. This was just what the artillery people wanted, so they recruited him to work in cannon-repair shops, always located far enough from the front lines that the enemy couldn’t sweep down in a lightning raid and steal the precious machines. It was the kind of a safe and cushy job that several million GIs would have traded their right testicle to get, but in 1944 what looked like a better deal came along.

Higher-ups in the Army’s command circles were calculating that the war was likely to last for years yet, and if so there might be a serious shortage of college-educated candidates to serve as commissioned officers. They didn’t want to get caught short of these valuable resources, so they quickly set up what they called the Army Specialized Training Program, under which the GIs lucky enough to be accepted would be relieved of all duties except going to college. This sounded like a dream of heaven to most GIs, not least because the service’s unrelenting drafts of manpower had left most college student bodies heavily weighted with an excess of young single women.

Cyril applied, was accepted and went happily back to school, though in uniform … until some person higher still than the higher-ups noticed that both the Germans and the Japanese were losing most of the recent battles, and the war might end sooner than they had feared. So ASTP was peremptorily abolished and all its personnel transferred willy-nilly to the infantry. For which branch of service the Army had a great and unanticipated immediate need, since Hitler had managed to launch an immense surprise Christmas attack on the unsuspecting Allied troops in the Ardennes Forest.

So Cyril, who was always a slightly pudgy and definitely unathletic young man, found himself lugging a 50-caliber machine gun around the freezing temperatures and unremitting combat of the Battle of the Bulge. He survived, having acquired for his efforts, 1) a Bronze Star, and 2) a serious case of what the medics called severe essential hypertension.

The hypertension won. Cyril’s editorial career was cut short — a pity, because he would have been an outstanding one. Early in spring of 1958 he had a meeting scheduled with Bob Mills in New York. It had snowed heavily in Levittown, where Cyril lived. He had to shovel out his driveway, which made him just barely able to catch his train, so he ran to the train station and died of a heart attack on the platform.

 
C.M. Kornbluth works online

• “The Only Thing We Learn” (From Startling Stories, July 1949)
• “The Mindworm” (From Worlds Beyond, December, 1950)
• “The Cosmic Expense Account” (From F&SF, January 1956)

C.M. Kornbluth on Amazon

A while ago, I gave some early examples of my poetic period (which, roughly, lasted from age 14 to age 19, with a few later relapses). One was a sort of puzzle, entitled “!” which went like this:

                      !

                 ,   ,   &
                ! my frand
                ;  $
                - - . . . . . . . 

Some of you managed to interpret this pretty well, but for those who didn’t, I will read it to you:

                “!”

Or “Continue reading” for a translation.

Continue reading ‘Verse Decoded’ »

One of the nice things about running a blog is that you can conveniently republish things that people have asked for. Another is that you can sometimes republish things that hardly anyone has ever requested … like this.

Among my childhood vices was the writing of poetry — sometimes quite quirky, like the first exemplar, sometimes pretty banal, like the second. (The best thing about the banal ones is that I quite often got some editor to buy them.)

I wrote “!” for the very first magazine I ever edited (and published, and ran off on the mimeograph machine, and bound), a tiny semi-fanzine called Mind of Man. It is also the very first thing I ever wrote that got favorable comments from people as astute as Cyril Kornbluth and James Blish, who memorized it and was known to recite it at parties.

              !

         ,   ,   &
        ! my frand
        ;  $
        - - . . . . . . . 

The second poem is significant even to me only because it is the first thing I wrote that some editor bought and published and paid cash to me for.

Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna

Darkness descends and the cluttering towers
Of cities and hamlets blink into light.
The harsh, brilliant glitter of day’s bustling hours
Gives place to the glowing effulgence of night.
The Moon, that pale creature, the queen of the sky,
Peeps wistfully down at the life forms below,
Thinking, perhaps, of the eons rolled by
Since life on her bosom lapsed under the snow.
A dead world and cold, this satellite bleak,
Whose craters and valleys are airless and dry.
No flicker of motion from deep pit to peak,
No living thing’s ego to shout, “I am I!”
But once, ages past, this grim tomb in space
Owned living things on its surface now bare
Till grim Time in his flight, speeding apace,
Swept life, motion, thought away, who can know where?

All right, all right, the Moon isn’t a planet and it never had any living things, or snow, either. Sue me. When I wrote it I was a fairly ignorant fifteen.

Then, when I was sixteen, the editor of Amazing Stories, T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph. D., accepted it, and when I was seventeen he published it in his October 1937 issue, and when I was 18 he paid for it. Two dollars.

 
Related post:
Verse Decoded