Why not mash up H.P. Lovecraft with poetry and art that reflects the diversity of the 21st century?
One poem for each month of the year, as an ebook, a book, a calendar, or a day planner, accompanied by nine pieces of art and this note from the artist herself.
—Melissa Yi & Sara Leger, Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025)
The work and person of H. P. Lovecraft has been inspiring poetry for a long time (e.g. “H. P. Lovecraft” (1937) by Elizabeth Toldridge, “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman, etc.) and the form and nature of those works have been diverse, covering nearly every style and format of poem, from Cthulhu on Lesbos (2011) by David Jalajel to “Lovecraft Thesis #5” (2021) by Brandon O’Brien, from reflections on Lovecraft’s racism to new stories set in Lovecraft’s Mythos.
Melissa Yi (also published as Melissa Yuan-Innes) and artist Sara Leger bring their skills together for this small art project, which consists of 12 original poems in various styles (from Shakespearan sonnet to Japanese haiku), 10 of the poems that inspired those poems, and 9 original illustrations that capture something of the feel and aesthetic of the poems. The nature of these poems might be best illustrated by a side-by-side comparison of a poem and its source:
| What happens to those interned? Is she tucked in a Straightjacket at night? Or dunked in ice water— If he puts up a fight? Do you extract her lady parts Plus her frontal lobe— Or electroshock him and restart? Perhaps seclude them in cells ’til they do what they’re told. Or do they grow bold? | What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? |
| “Arkham” (November) by Melissa Yi | “Harlem” by Langston Hughes |
Hughes’ “Harlem” (1951) is one of the most recognized and influential poems of the 20th century, not in least because it inspired the title to Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The metaphor of the raisin in the sun speaks to the social and psychological forces that Black Americans and communities have, and continue, to face in a culture and society that holds high ideals of freedom while continuing to perpetuate prejudice and inequality at every level.
By taking “Harlem” as her model for “Arkham,” Yi is implicitly drawing on both the familiar poem’s form and its imagery by inference. Her “Arkham” is not the witch-haunted city, as Robert E. Howard wrote about in his poetic tribute, but the sanitarium, the good-bye-box where people who don’t fit in are locked away and subject to treatments and mistreatment, deprived of liberty and rights, subject to physical and psychological efforts to get them to conform to what society wants them to be.
“Arkham” doesn’t quite have the rhythm of “Harlem,” even though it is an obvious echo of Hughes’ trumpet blast. The imagery is pointed, but the target is hazy; lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy weren’t a feature of mental health treatment in Lovecraft’s time, and ice-dunking and clitorectomies suggest still older institutions. So “Arkham” isn’t referencing a single institution at a given place or time, but the idea of the mental asylum, the sanitarium, the Bedlam of all times and places, the institutional limbo where a few of Lovecraft’s characters have ended up (which has become a literary trope).
It is a fun experiment. Not every poem works well on its own, but pairing them up with the originals does help show the work. Sara Leger‘s artwork is fun, though the print-on-demand publication doesn’t show it off to its best effect. The single best piece is the cover, with the eponymous Cthulhu’s Cheerleader striding forward, bloody pomp-poms in hand, wings spread, as the Big C looks on. While some folks might argue that Cthulhu doesn’t need a cheerleader, if he is to remain relevant into the 21st century and beyond, I think Cthulhu will need every cheerleader he can get.
Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger was published by Windtree Press.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 