Dispatch from the Archives is a regular column about work previously published in Southwest Review. The magazine is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States, and its archives date back to 1915. This edition looks at a poem by Vincent Barrett Price from volume 52, number 4.
The opening scene of the 1953 film House of Wax ends with fire. Professor Henry Jarrod, played by Vincent Price, risks his own body in his attempt to save his beloved sculptures. He is helpless, on fire himself, as he watches the visages of famous characters melt—Cleopatra and Joan of Arc morphing into monsters. Their figures are mutilated echoes of his once-beautiful creations. Marie Antoinette’s hair is engulfed in flame. Her skin bubbles off. Her cheeks drip to the floor. Her glass eyes bulge out of their sockets and stare back at her creator.
The wax sculptor is forever changed by the loss: his own body terribly burnt, his mind’s obsession with beauty twisting into the macabre. He rebuilds his museum by stealing bodies from the morgue and encasing them in wax (talk about the uncanny valley!). What we perceive as alive or dead, as beautiful or grotesque, is brought to question. The film’s mystery is grounded in human perception—the disparity between sight and belief. Vincent Price is infectiously chilling as Professor Jarrod, and this was the role that propelled him into a long career as king of horror.
If I’m being honest, I probably first encountered Vincent Price as the narrator in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video. But it was a high school English class that fully exposed me to Price. We wrapped up a unit on Edgar Allen Poe with a screening of The Raven (1963). And I never forgot that mustache.
Price starred in multiple adaptations of works by Poe throughout the 1960s, and he was famously a fan of the writer and poet. So, would it be surprising that Vincent Price’s son might dip his toe into the poetic? Might take a dark approach in his writing? I guess not. But still, I was surprised to find Vincent Barrett Price’s poetry in the SwR archives.
The magazine published Vincent Barrett Price four times between 1966 and 1974. His poems are short, meditative lyrics. When I look at the four of them together, I’m struck by their loneliness—by a speaker who is trapped in a “hollow sky,” who sees the persistence of memories that “stained his shadow” as inescapable. There’s a nearly hyperbolic solitude to his writing, as both the speaker and the landscape detach from connection. In one poem, the moon is “skinned / from the doddering sea”; even a reflection of the self can be severed.
These metaphors of detachment and the speaker’s despair feel most gruesome in Price’s 1967 poem “The Cyclops’ Garden,” which was published in the autumn issue of Southwest Review. Here’s the whole piece:
The Cyclops’ Garden
To whom it may concern,
as proof of my good faith,
contrition, my devout
submission to romance
I’ll simply split this eye
right down the middle,
slit it deep as my nail will go,
part the edges smartly back,
lay to rest a cherry pit inside
then wait till spring,
till you pass by,
for it to blossom;
love is blind.
The speaker of this poem is so driven by a desire for love and connection, so detached from a healthy expression of emotion, that he splits the eye in half and plants a cherry blossom inside it. Sink into this poem’s imagery: visualize the nail slicing deep into the eye, the slit parting into two edges peeled “smartly back,” the cherry pit bulging out of the socket, the tree sprouting up from the speaker’s face, the bloom erupting at the sight of a potential lover. The poem itself is ultimately sliced and severed—the stanza break isolating the final line.
Yes, this imagery is a fresh metaphor for the old adage “Love is blind.” But the total mutilation of the self, the grotesque surrender of the eye to another (nearly parasitic) entity? That’s body horror.
Before the final reveal in House of Wax, Vincent Price’s character cries out, “Everything I’ve ever loved has been taken away from me.” It was the pursuit of beauty and love that drove him to gruesome ends. Uncanny: the proximity of love and horror in Vincent Price’s film, in Vincent Barrett Price’s poem.
Wax melts. The glass eye falls to the floor. New life sprouts from fire’s ash; new growth buds from a cherry pit planted in an eye. The blossom is beautiful, isn’t it?
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
