Vampire Poem
text and images by
Sylvia Gorelick
Introduction
I first became captivated by vampires because of their excessive queerness, their life outside the norms of a society bent on punishing women and all those who love differently, who experience time differently. The more I came into my sapphic self, the closer vampire life was, I could taste it.
Like vampires, poets diverge from the norms—have to, and take boundless pleasure in it.
It was my dear friend, the brilliant poet and thinker Leopoldine Core, who encouraged me to write about vampires. I have her to thank for this poem.
I was thinking about survival. Audre Lorde says in Poetry is Not a Luxury (an early version of which is called Poetry Makes Something Happen—this I love) that we have survived “as women, as poets.”
Then something happened that pushed me to the edge—a violence I had survived in the past recurred in the present, and survival took on a different quality, something closer to the horror genre. I mean, surviving became hard work in a new way. I was dodging shadows. It became difficult to go outside, to be in public, to be seen. I developed a strong aversion to (male) gazes. I started having light-induced migraines. So I retreated into the cave of my room. At night I took walks around a carousel.
Vampires are in control of how they are seen and who sees them. By most accounts, they don’t show up in mirrors or photographs. They have this concealing power. There’s an amazing moment in Daughters of Darkness where the incandescent Delphine Seyrig, in 70s Marlene Dietrich vampire drag, opens her compact mirror and the camera shows us that while her richly lacquered red nails and graceful fingers are reflected there, her face is not. The double concealment of the film camera and the small round mirror make her secret more secretive—what does she see when she looks in the mirror, this centuries-old vampire? A beautifully unanswered question.
I used to have a theory that taking a flash photo with a film camera in the mirror could make you a vampire, that is, make you disappear.
Something I love about Buffy The Vampire Slayer (without getting into it, I do want to signal the many problems of that show) is that it reveals the intimacy between slaying vampires and being a vampire. Both the hyper-sane Buffy and the mad poet-vampire Drusilla have prophetic dreams, or visions, which are aligned—they see two sides of the same future. Buffy and Angel are both haunted by the loneliness of hunting and memory, which makes them magnetic to each other. The good vs evil binary falls apart at night. The vampire and the slayer share the impossible trauma of having survived death. They keep each other’s secrets.
With my vampiric retreat from the world came a strong awareness of my genderqueerness, so being perceived as gendered was painful. Vampires guided me through. What is the gender of a vampire? Who’s to know? Only them. Vampiric subjectivity is a secret. The movies confirm this.
In the seduction scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger, they mainly communicate wordlessly—through an aria without lyrics, through shadow, lust, blood. They make their own languageless language, it is ardent and desperately sexy.
In the experimental film The Mark of Lilith, Pamela Lofton, a vampire’s lover, seizes the means of production—the film camera that frames women as victim-monsters for mainstream consumption. She saves her lover, vampire Susan Franklyn, from the narrative death of Dracula. Laura Mulvey appears as an extra, a viewer in a movie theater, among masked men. In the same theater, Lofton wears a button that reads Art Is Not a Luxury.
Again I return (as always) to the links between survival and pleasure. Or to the erotic, as Lorde might say. That is what this poem is about. At their meeting points, I have looked for another vision of justice, a lawless vision. But maybe there is no vision, just feeling—the trace of a fang along a soft edge of hope.
About the Author
Sylvia Gorelick (they/she) is a poet, translator, and PhD candidate at NYU. Their poems have appeared in Venti, What a Time to Be Alive, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other places, as well as several anthologies. Sylvia is the author of the chapbook Olympians we are breathless (2014) and the editor of an anthology of contemporary New York poetry. Their translation of Mallarmé's The Book came out from Exact Change in 2018. Forthcoming projects include a translation of Lourdes Casal's poetry and film writing in Another Gaze. Sylvia's scholarly research focuses on revolutionary feminisms in a transnational context through poetry and cinema.