A Page from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the Bodleian Library in Oxford
Mary wrote this during a time when “galvanism”
had hucksters “reanimating” headless chickens
in freak sideshows, the curious watching them
apply electrical wires to the carcasses, and then
the headless things rising, running in paroxysms
across a bloody table toward screaming children.
In ‘66, we were blowing villagers limb from limb,
and Robert McNamara was always on television
with his maps of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and film.
Before flunking out, turning 1-A, and enlisting in
the Navy, I read Frankenstein in Eng. Romanticism
before I cracked up in basic training and was given
Thorazine. I still have my Modern Library edition.
I sometimes think I should go back to read it again.
Omniscient at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture (MOPOP)
Jimi Hendrix writes on this page of his journal he’s fallen head-over-heels for a photographer named Linda Eastman (later, Linda McCartney),
then writes he knows he’s going to marry the girl though they just met, and he hasn’t asked her. The actual journal is under Plexiglas; the facsimile
lets you mechanically turn its pages forward and backward to read how Jimi predicts the future and writes about it with such absolute certainty.
Linda dies of breast cancer; in the Hotel Samarkand Jimi OD’s.
Stephen Gibson has published eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2024 Able Muse Press); Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press); The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press); Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize winner, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press). His web-site is stephen-gibson.com.