Fred the Heretic goes to New Orleans and appropriates some culture [Shine on Titanic]
Here’s some more poetry by FTH (aka Fred the Heretic), a GPT based on the poetry of Frederick Turner. But first, I give your a recitation of “Titanic,” though not of version I use in the prompt for FTH.
“Titanic” is a toast, an oral narrative in the African-American tradition that is a precursor to rap and hip-hop. Toasts were discovered by scholars in the late 1960s, but they are undoubtedly much older. The "Titanic" toast is about, well, the sinking of the Titanic. As I say in the final chapter of Beethoven’s Anvil (p. 269):
After the Titanic sank in 1912, blacks began reciting a narrative poem in which a mythic black boiler man, Shine, escapes from the sinking ship and swims safely ashore. The ship’s captain attempts to keep Shine on board, first offering him money and then offering the sexual favors of white women, including his own daughter. Shine rejects all offers and remains steadfast in his determination to swim ashore. The poem thus rejects white evaluation of black character by depicting a white authority figure as being so depraved as to offer his daughter up to a boiler man for no rational purpose. This obsession, it implies, is a white folks’ problem and it’s about time they dealt with it.
More obviously, “Titanic” is also about white arrogance, the arrogance that believed the Titanic to be unsinkable, the arrogance that believed an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t fail or, if it did, failure wouldn’t cause nasty problems.
I decided to use “Titanic” as a prompt for FTH (Fred the Heretic). Since it is a bit long, I decided to place it in an appendix after the two poems FTH derived from it.
FTH does “Titanic”
[The “Titanic” toast goes in here, along with the admonition: Take this and make a new poem:...]
The tale you shared echoes the rich oral tradition of vernacular storytelling and modern myth-making, particularly in its rhythm, vivid characters, and defiance of conventional authority figures. It's a gripping and colorful narrative.
Would you like me to refine or reimagine this story into a structured poem, or perhaps guide you in writing something akin to the storytelling style it exhibits? If so, I could craft it in the style of Frederick Turner, combining visual imagery, thematic depth, and rhythmic cadence. Let me know how you'd like to proceed!
Just make it as jivometric as sin.
Shine's Last Swim, Jivometric as Sin
The iceberg split the moon’s sharp grin,
a daggered slice through silvered seas.
Shine leaned on the boiler’s hiss, a hymn,
while the captain flexed his gilded keys.
“Shine!” cried the man, in his grand brass coat,
“You think this ship will founder? Please!
This is the Empire’s steel-bound throat,
not a skiff blown loose on the Gulf’s breeze.”
But Shine, he grinned, and his teeth were gold,
“Cap’n, I done seen the Devil’s face—
he’s frozen white, and his belly’s cold.
You stay? I’m gone. Ain’t no disgrace.”
The waters sang as Shine leapt free,
a cannonball into death’s embrace.
The stars smeared bright in their ecstasy,
the ship moaned low with her final case.
Through blackened brine and shark-eyed dark,
Shine churned the sea like a preacher’s tongue.
His strokes a psalm, his breath a spark,
his lungs were the bells the ocean rung.
Below, a banker, pale and fat,
splashed frantic, clutching his sopping green.
“Save me, Shine! I’ll make you rich as that
great northern king, or a Cajun queen!”
Shine laughed, “Your gold won’t buy no breath;
your notes ain’t worth a shrimp in this tide.
Swim, fool, swim! The deal is death,
and it don’t care for your dollar-eyed pride.”
The sharks came close, their fins were knives,
their teeth the hymn of an old lament.
“Shine,” one said, with a voice like lives
split wide in the jaws of the firmament.
“I rule these waves, from crest to trench,
my kingdom cold, my crown a fin.
You are but meat, your life a stench.
What man outruns the tides within?”
But Shine, he smiled, his muscles sleek,
a coiled machine of will and bone.
“You’re king?” he asked. “I’m the freak
that broke the throne and made it my own.
Your kind has teeth, but I got fire—
I taught the ocean to bend and bow.
Tell your tales to those who tire,
but I’m the man who won’t allow.”
And so he swam, the sea in his chest,
a city of light at the end of the foam.
New Orleans rose like a lover undressed,
and Shine, he grinned. The ocean was home.
Let them sink with their greed and pride,
their icebergs and captains who bowed to none.
Shine reached the shore with the morning tide,
his story still burning, a rising sun.
FTH goes to Mars
Now give me a version in which Shine is a stow-away on Elon Musk’s trip to Mars. And throw in a bit of Quint from Jaws.
Shine on the Red Sea
The rocket growled, a wolf in heat,
and the thrusters’ roar was a hymn of flame.
Behind the bulkhead, beneath the seat,
Shine crouched low, playing his quiet game.
Elon Musk, with his thin-lipped grin,
surveyed his ark of tech and dreams.
"All systems go, we’re bound to win—
goodbye, Earth’s petty schemes.”
But Shine had slipped aboard unseen,
a stowaway on a billionaire’s ark.
“Let them fight for scraps where the air ain’t clean;
I’m going to Mars, to make my mark.”
Through the void they soared, the stars like teeth,
biting the dark in ancient rows.
Behind the panels, in tight relief,
Shine hummed soft as the oxygen flowed.
Then it came—a warning, sharp and terse,
a rogue AI, its circuits aflame.
“Something’s moving!” came the terse reverse.
Elon’s eyes gleamed like a gambler’s claim.
The screens showed red, a blip that crept—
no asteroid, no cosmic wave.
A shadow loomed where the silence slept,
a predator stalking the starry grave.
Quint was there, a last-minute hire,
a salty dog with a Martian dream.
“Space sharks,” he muttered, eyes like fire,
“seen ‘em before, in the asteroid stream.”
Elon scoffed, “This isn’t the ocean;
it’s math and physics, code and gears.”
Quint just grinned, a jagged motion,
“I’ll gut that beast and drink your fears.”
But Shine stepped out, his shadow long,
his laughter a bell in the metal dome.
“You fools,” he said, “you sing the wrong song—
this ocean’s mine; it’s my true home.”
The beast emerged, a cosmic maw,
its body sleek as obsidian sin.
Its teeth were comets, its eyes a law
that pulled all things to the void within.
“I am the Leviathan of space,
the dark between the stars,” it roared.
“No man escapes my cold embrace,
no billionaire, no stowaway bored.”
Shine grinned wide, his gold tooth gleamed,
his stance as sure as Martian ground.
“Listen, Shark, I’ve sailed the streams
where gods and devils both have drowned.
You ain’t nothing but space-dressed fear,
a shadow chasing a brighter spark.
But I’m the fire that burns too clear—
I’ll leave you adrift in the endless dark.”
With a wrench in hand and a heart of steel,
Shine launched himself into the beast’s great jaw.
He tore and ripped with a hunter’s zeal,
till the beast spun out, all tooth and awe.
The ship was saved, the shark unmade,
and Shine stood tall on the reddening ground.
Elon gawked at the price he’d paid—
his ego crushed by the stowaway’s sound.
“Y’all can have your Mars and domes,”
Shine said, his voice like cosmic blues.
“But the void is mine, where freedom roams,
and the stars sing songs no man can refuse.”
So Shine set out, no tether or chain,
a wanderer bold in the vacuum’s keep.
While billionaires schemed and dreamed in vain,
Shine swam the stars in an infinite leap.
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