The Getty Fiend
Ken White
- Introduction by Michael du Plessis
Published on January 29, 2024 by punctum books
- Pages
- 126 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 6⤫9 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-196-2 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-197-9 (PDF)
- LCCN
- LCCN: 2024931233
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: POE005010, POE023040
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: 1KBB-US-WPCA, DCC, DCF, FYM, VXQM
The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse is a monster mash-up of forms and languages, facades and carnal catastrophes, archaic languages and misplaced rhetorics — a campy, fantastical gender-bending transformation into the inadvertently divine.
This title is a second edition, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections(opens in new tab) project.
Biographies
Ken White is a poet and screenwriter. He co-wrote and co-produced the feature film Winter in the Blood, co-directed and co-wrote the short film Universal VIP, as well as directed and co-wrote the short film The Conservationist. He has written or co-written more than a dozen feature scripts, including Blight, The Wereman, The Sorrows, and Cullen’s Hound, as well as new scripts, The Orpheum Circuit, The Jennet Device, and a television pilot, LIT, with James Meetze, and most recently the psychological horror feature Wed the Dark, which he directed. White is the author of three books of poetry: Eidolon, The Getty Fiend, and Middlemost Constantine. His work has appeared in The Boston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Omniverse, Manor House Quarterly, Versal, Spork, Horsethief, EuropeNow, Poets.org, and BOMB Magazine, among others. White is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
Endorsements
Joan Naviyuk Kane
author of Dark Traffic, Ex Machina, and Milk Black Carbon
The Getty Fiend’s poems squall with incomparable implication: necessary and livid éclat through our embalmèd darkness, “dialed to high.” Every spiral of beauty on earth is changed under such duress. And such close observation exceeds lexical and idiosyncratic gymnastics—this is no mere concordance of hips and thighs. If there is obscurity here, it is on the part of the reader. If our phantasms are condensed, we might thank Ken White for his cinematic mitigations.
Brian Blanchfield
author of Proxies and A Several World
Like Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, the alchemy of this dark romance is equal parts fabric, flesh, fur, and art direction. Ken White is the same sort of sorcerer of menace and allure, but The Getty Fiend is situated in contemporary Los Angeles, and in trailing the city’s specters—ecstasy, vengeance, and transformation—the poet takes surface streets. In language textured as distinctly as the dress of its heroes (belted, placketed, buckled, and triple-stitched), bare bodies too are fully accounted, philtrum to perineum. How far in does the docent escort lead? What’s behind this exhibit? Through these cretonne drapes? What Opera, Doc? Somewhere to surpass oneself. Wear this. Yes. You’re the one. We’ve waited for you.
Richard Siken
author of Crush and War of the Foxes
Ken White speaks in swerve and thistle, thinks in hinges, muscles a touch of molasses into his syntax to flex the metronome. This is dazzle. These are necessary jostlings, tangled thick in coursing minutes, intercourses. Here, texture and reference are overlapped concerns, as artifice and blankness are both garmented and undressed: lovers, a beast, contemporary Los Angeles. We hunger for these racings — to be disguised, to be revealed, to jump leagues, to be in thrall.
Prageeta Sharma
author of Grief Sequence and Undergloom
Ken White’s The Getty Fiend lives in its vast world of stunning lyric objectivity. The poems peril through strong characters, their chivalry of scope, breath, might, and myth, all to touch down in The J. Paul Getty Museum, and rejoice in a dream-vision of medieval modernism (“a SkyMall classic”). I always look to White’s poetry to close the gap between the ancient and the innovative; this is a mighty and brilliant second collection of poetry that holds its discontented marvel of grandeur at “kiss of air” distance, but bewitches with its arresting caress and craft.
Reviews
Usage metrics
Funding
- punctum books(opens in new tab)
Program: Special Collections
Genres
- Fabulations
Keywords
- Bisclavret
- Getty Museum
- Los Angeles
- mash-up
- medieval literature
- post-medievalism
- werewolves