Weight of the Moment

A speculative poem weighs nothing at all. It is lighter than the paper it is printed on. Lighter than the pixels that form and reform its letters on a screen. Yet the moment a speculative poem is consumed, when it enters the mind and the body, it will start to take on weight...and the scales it tips within consciousness are different from those tipped by a mainstream poem...or even by most genre poetry.

Mainstream poetry in the broadest sense is ego-directed and self-referential. It reflects and illuminates the personal life of the individual. Friendships, familial relationships, love and love lost, the perceptions of a moment or state of mind from everyday reality, the portrait of a specific person, and so on. When you read a mainstream poem that speaks to you, odds are you will understand it with your mind or heart or both, and it will be an understanding you can relate to your life as an individual.

Genre poetry is derived more from the font of imagination than experience. Most genre poems have their origins in science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Many are no more than compressed versions of ideas and storylines from genre fiction. Others take off from those ideas and stories to create original contributions of their own. Some ultimately perform the same function as mainstream poetry by a different route, using archetypes, tropes, and images borrowed from genre fiction for a metaphorical observation on contemporary reality. Most successful genre poems turn on being imaginative, clever, and delivering their content, often narrative and usually singular in resolution, through an entertaining and effective read.

Speculative poetry can be seen as a subset of genre poetry. Its origins can also be linked to science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Beyond that, the similarities begin to fade. Poems worthy of being called speculative may be clever, but wit is not their aim. They may be narrative, but they are not about storytelling. Nor do they deliver singular resolutions and conclusions. Speculative poetry is about suggestion; it is elusive and rich in allusions; it functions at multiple levels; it may sometimes appear opaque until you give it a deserving read. Unlike most genre poems, speculative poetry does not use language to communicate in a strictly literal way, but recognizes the analogical quality of language, the play of words, the connections and contradictions inherent in sounds and meanings. It takes words beyond themselves, beyond their literal definitions, and whether its syntax is simple or complex, rhymed and metered or free verse, it understands how to make language not only speak but sing.

Nearly all poems are transitory experiences, but a truly speculative poem has the possibility of living beyond its read, not in the sense that one recalls its lines as a dead artifact, but in the sense of the multiplying horizons it unveils. At the moment you consume a speculative poem and its weight settles into your consciousness, that weight keeps dancing and shifting on the scales in your mind, it will not sit still. It is a jewel of many facets that reflects differently depending on how you hold it to the light. Most simply stated, it floods your thoughts with speculative possibilities.

Rejuvenilization

Genre poetry, along with its speculative subset, is a field that keeps losing its history and trying to come of age over and again. There is not even a consensus among those writing about genre poetry as to exactly what that history is. Some trace it back as far as Homer, making stops along the way for Blake or Milton or any writer whose poetry includes fantastical elements. Others, those of a dark bent, argue that the field was born with Edgar Allan Poe and carried forward by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Chroniclers of a science fictional persuasion will mention Lilith Lorraine, and the poetry associated with the New Wave movement that blossomed briefly in the late 1960s and early 70s. Yet even if one accepts the most inclusive definitions of this history, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, and horror through the ages, there remain significant gaps when no poetry that can be called genre was being written.

Thanks in large part to the Science Fiction Poetry Association, founded in 1978, genre poetry has now had a contiguous history for nearly three decades. SFPA has created and maintained a loose community of poets with similar interests and esthetics who are publishing in many of the same venues. They have left a body of work, a legacy, which can be referenced and upon which the field can grow. Yet oddly enough, despite the availability of this history and poetry, most beginning writers in the field of genre poetry choose to ignore it completely.

If you are a successful science fiction writer, you were no doubt attracted to your profession by reading science fiction. If you are an accomplished writer of mystery novels, you have probably read hundreds of mysteries by other writers. Yet most genre poets do not become such because they are readers of genre poetry and have a background in the work that has preceded them. Rather they come to the field by way of genre fiction and mainstream poetry, with a marked emphasis on the former. Many are frustrated fiction writers who have taken to poetry because they do not have the time and energy to write novels and stories. And though there are exceptions, the overwhelming majority of these new genre poets, even once they start publishing regularly in the field, show little interest not only in the work that has come before them but also in the contemporary genre poetry being written by their peers.

As a result, at least from the vantage of someone who has read widely in the field for more than a quarter century, what could be called a constant rejuvenilization of its content is forever in progress. The same hackneyed themes and ideas and gimmicks keep surfacing again and again. Believe me, the genre poetry field does not need more poems about robot poets or how awe-inspiring it is to look up at the night sky or how your new lover turns out to be a vampire, or a hundred other concepts that have already been written to death. Not unless you can discover a way to gather these withered and tasteless chestnuts and roast them so they have original flavor.

Over the last two decades some of the finest speculative poets have abandoned genre poetry because they could no longer stand its ongoing pubescence. Others have adapted their talents, writing more straight genre poems and fewer truly speculative ones to accommodate their work to the limitations of the field. Genre poetry lacks neither established writers nor new ones who are capable of carrying the form to another level, but unless there are publications that can serve as outlets for more sophisticated, ambitious, and original work, it will not be written. And even if it is, it will not be read. At least not in the field of genre poetry.

Going to Market

In his twenty-year stint as editor of Asimov’s SF Magazine, Gardner Dozois exposed genre poetry to far more readers than any other editor. Even given Asimov’s current circulation of thirty-odd thousand -– once much higher -- one would have to publish a poem in over one hundred small/alternative genre publications to reach as many potential readers as a poem in its pages. Further, despite the magazine’s title, the poems included have not been limited to science fiction but have provided generous helpings of fantasy and horror.

When once asked how he selected the poetry for Asimov’s, Gardner laughed out loud and said: “I don’t know anything about poetry. I just buy what I like.” Yet whether or nor he could tell the difference between a dactyl and a sestina, his expertise as a fiction editor, and consequently his understanding of how language functions and what accomplished writing is, was enough to carry the day. At least for my tastes, most of the poetry he published in Asimov’s was good to excellent, with not that many losers along the way. At the same time, although this wide exposure was a plus for genre poetry, bringing it greater respect and recognition within the SF/F/H community, truly speculative poems in the pages of Asimov’s have been few and far between. For more than publishing the poetry he personally liked, I suspect that Gardner, like any professional editor, was also selecting poetry he thought the readers of Asimov’s would like, namely, poetry that would appeal to fiction readers who did not normally read poetry and may have even had a distaste for it.

In contrast, speculative poetry is for those who read and enjoy poetry...and its natural venue is not in popular fiction magazines, but small and specialty presses that are devoted to poetry or consider it a significant part of their contents.

Yet when one looks at the genre poetry field today, the presses that have specialized in publishing speculative poetry rather than genre poetry as a whole -- Velocities, Ocean View, Miniature Sun, to name a few – have vanished from the field. Collections of speculative poetry by individual poets continue to appear from a number of publishers, and there are periodicals – mostly the venerable ones: Dreams & Nightmares, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Star*Line -- that include truly speculative poems as a part of their content. Yet among newer publications that are prominent in genre poetry, there seems to be a trend away from speculative work in favor of the quick read, the clear delivery, the laugh, the name author, the nifty idea, the shocker, the mainstream poem decked out in genre trappings. Leave your readers swiftly satisfied so they can take their abridged attention spans and move on to the next temporary gratification. It’s not that these poems are necessarily mediocre. Some of them are wildly successful in terms of their own  esthetic, just as many of the poems in Asimov’s are. Yet they are in no way speculative.

And if one takes the trouble to examine not only the prominent publishers but all the presses in the genre field that include poetry as part of their fare, the situation seems still more hopeless for speculative work. Fueled by the relatively inexpensive and thus indiscriminate publishing mania of the Internet, ebooks, and print-on-demand, most of what is being published is selected by “editors” who have no experience or qualifications to be editors except that they have expressed the interest and are willing to work for nothing. In many cases, this includes the self-appointed, those who have decided, without prior experience, to fund their own publications in order to don the prestige of an editorial cap. Some of these happenstance editors turn out to have the serendipitous savvy to bring quality work to readers. Yet such work is far too often lost in the deluge.

Exposing the Faceted Jewel

Before genre poetry can come of age as a literature, it not only needs to recognize its own history, it has to catch up with the literature and art of the twentieth century. It needs to deconstruct itself and reconstruct along different lines. Without diminishing the influences of genre fiction and pure imagination on its content, it needs to assimilate the influences of modern non-genre poetry. Not the content of such poetry, but what such work has to reveal about language, form, and craft.

All of this, quite simply, involves reading.

If you are serious about writing genre poetry, abandon your egocentrism long enough to acquire some knowledge about the context in which you are writing. If you are an editor who publishes genre poetry, don’t presume that you understand what a genre poem should be because you have read plenty of genre fiction.

Bio

Bruce Boston’s poetry has received a record seven Rhysling Awards, a record five Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His latest collection, the humorous Etiquette with your Robot Wife, is available from Project Pulp, Shocklines, and other genre distributors. For more information, you can visit his website (http://hometown.aol.com/bruboston).

Commentary © 2005 Bruce Boston.  All other content © 2005 Jeremiah Tolbert