Chris McCreary on “RIME MAR”

The VVitch has lived in my head for a few years now, and then it was joined by The Lighthouse. There's a lot about the pacing and tone, for lack of a better word, that stick with me. The Northman now, too, inhabits that same mental space. In part, this poem began as a layering of different texts. It was originally a blackout / random text generation from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner " combined with text from a tarot guidebook, but then somehow when Orpheus entered it, I was thinking of The Lighthouse. The sinister captain character, who only appears at the very end of the poem now, used to have a more prominent role and in my head is Willem Dafoe's character from The Lighthouse. It made sense at the time of me writing it, at least.

All of which is to say, this poem is perhaps not a straightforward horror-based poem, but I was very much imagining the lighting of The VVitch illuminating characters from The Lighthouse, even if that's in no way discernible to the reader. The idea of some creeping, half-unseen fright awaiting at the end, the foreboding sense that all signs point to a certain doom... I wanted very much to conjure a bit of that mood.