SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT


Will Hart has an amazing website, CthulhuWho1, where a number of wonderful offerings may be sampled.  Some wee time ago he downloaded his reading of the entire Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle over at YouTube, one video for each sonnet, with each poem reproduced in text using the H. P. Lovecraft font available  from the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society -- so it looks as if each sonnet had been penned in HPL's handwriting.  Will's reading voice is magnificent, and this is, for me, the definitive recording of ye Fungi.  This sonnet cycle has long been one of my keen Lovecraftian obsessions, and when S. T. Joshi led a wee pack of us on a walking tour in Providence, I had my pb edition of Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems (a reprinting of the Arkham House Collected Poems that reproduced Utpatel's fabulous illustrations) in hand, and as I stood before 10 Barnes Street, where Lovecraft wrote ye Fungi, I recorded the incident in ye book.  I have long wanted to write some work that was absolutely inspir'd by Lovecraft's sonnets; & at first I thought this wou'd be a sonnet cycle of mine own.  I wrote my sonnets for Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, but I've come to dislike moft of yem, I was too experimental with ye sonnet form, wrote the cycle too quickly, &c &c.  

My new love as an author is to compose my prose-poem/vignette sequences, the most ambitious of which is "Uncommon Places," which in its final form reached 25,000 words.  I have now started work on a new sequence that will be entirely based on Fungi from Yuggoth.  I've just completed the first one and it seems okay.  My initial plan was to try and make each of the thirty-six segments around 1,000 words, which wou'd bring ye total work to around 40,000 words, whut I cou'd then submit to someone as a potential small press chapbook.  But the first one came to only 800; & if any of the future segments need 2,000 words to tell their tale, cool.  Most of the segments will be wee prose poems, but I fancy that some of them will blossom into short-shorts of 2,000 or 3,000 words.  We shall  see.  My hope is to have moft of this thing written by the time we attend MythosCon in January -- and perhaps that is a lunatic hope, but I am sure gonna try.

By clicking on ye title on this blog ye will be taken to Will's fabulous site!

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