The realm of poetry, often perceived as an enigmatic and slippery art form, can sometimes feel akin to wrestling with a colossal, disorienting squid. Its elusive nature and tendency to evade straightforward comprehension can be a significant barrier for many readers. When this inherent complexity is further intertwined with elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, or mythology, the result is a literary beast of an entirely different, and often more daunting, nature. For years, the author of this piece, like many others, would shy away from poetry sections at book festivals, finding the pursuit of understanding too frustrating. However, a transformative shift occurred, leading to a weekly engagement with writing and reading poetry, culminating in a thorough immersion in the 2021 Rhysling Anthology, a collection dedicated to speculative poetry. This journey was propelled by two guiding principles: the understanding that one does not need to enjoy all poetry to appreciate the genre, and the crucial shift from aiming for comprehension to striving for experience.
The Gateway to Verse: Embracing the "You Don’t Have to Like All Poetry" Maxim
The initial resistance to poetry, particularly the more experimental or genre-specific forms, often stems from a limited exposure or a preconceived notion of what poetry "should" be. Just as one’s dislike for a few flavors of ice cream doesn’t preclude a general enjoyment of the dessert, a dismissal of all poetry based on a few unengaging examples is a premature conclusion. This principle is particularly relevant when considering speculative poetry. Many readers might express a disinterest in fantasy, for instance, after only encountering mainstream examples like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. Speculative poetry, however, offers a vast landscape that can serve as an unexpected gateway into the broader world of verse for those who find traditional forms inaccessible.
A pivotal moment in the author’s personal poetry journey was the discovery of Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars. This collection, a profound exploration of the universe, a tribute to David Bowie, and an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, initially presented itself as somewhat nonsensical. Yet, its "delicious nonsense," characterized by "honeyed phrases and tender images," captivated the reader. The opening lines of "Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?" exemplify this evocative power:
"After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see."
This excerpt illustrates how speculative elements, even when abstract, can forge a connection through sensory language and compelling imagery, bypassing the need for immediate, literal understanding.
Shifting the Focus: Experiencing Poetry Beyond Comprehension
The second maxim, "Don’t aim to understand poetry; strive to experience it," represents a fundamental recalibration of how one engages with poetic works. By ceasing to treat poetry as prose—as a narrative to be dissected for a clear message or coherent story—the frustration often associated with reading verse dissipates. Embracing uncertainty and finding joy in the lingering mystery of a poem’s meaning unlocks a deeper appreciation. Poetry, at its core, is a language-driven art form where sound, rhythm, and sensation intersect, often transcending the need for a singular, definitive interpretation.
Amal El-Mohtar’s Rhysling Award-winning poem "Peach-Creamed Honey," featured in her collection The Honey Month, exemplifies this experiential approach. The poem, which pairs twenty-eight flavors of honey with tasting notes and literary reflections, is a sensual exploration laced with innuendo. The stanza below, when spoken aloud, demonstrates the power of sound and suggestion:
…They say
she likes to tease her fruit, bite ripe summer flesh
just to get that drip going
down, down,
sweets her elbow with the slip of it,
wears it like perfume.
This piece, originating from a collection where each flavor of honey is explored through tasting notes and literary reflections akin to fairy tales, showcases the ability of speculative poetry to weave together the tangible and the imaginative. The language here evokes temptation and seduction, where every word contributes to a rich sensory tapestry. Speculative poetry, in its hybrid nature, blurs the lines between realism and fabulism, creating a unique artistic space that few other mediums can replicate.
The Spectrum of Speculative Poetry: From Ancient Echoes to Modern Innovations
To better grasp the unique contributions of speculative poetry, it is beneficial to distinguish it from "mainstream" poetry. While the term "speculative" is contemporary, echoes of its characteristics can be found in classical literature. Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Christina Rossetti’s "Goblin Market," and even epic poems like Beowulf and The Odyssey—with their fantastical creatures, supernatural events, and mythical journeys—can be seen as precursors to the genre. The website "Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre," curated by Theodora Goss, offers an extensive list of such older works, highlighting the enduring human fascination with the extraordinary.
Bruce Boston, a prominent speculative poet, delineates the difference in subject matter and the poet’s "stance." He argues that mainstream poetry typically focuses on "the here and now, reality as we know it, internal and external," with the poet often present as an "I" voice. Speculative poetry, conversely, delves into "imagination, the world of dreams and the world as it could be," where the poet’s stance is more akin to that of a fiction writer, often employing fictional characters rather than the author’s direct voice.
However, these categories are not rigid dichotomies but rather exist on a spectrum. Contemporary poets may incorporate fantastical elements without embracing the "speculative" label, while poems published in science fiction and fantasy venues may not always feel overtly speculative. The true impact lies not in the label, but in the poem’s effect.
All poetry, regardless of its subgenre, serves the purpose of defamiliarization—rendering the familiar in an unfamiliar light to reveal new meanings. As Stephen Moss aptly put it, "A good poem looks closely at the world; does that Martian thing of trying to see it for the first time." When the subject matter itself is deeply unfamiliar or non-existent, as is often the case in speculative poetry, the effect of defamiliarization is amplified. This genre transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary, sharpening the reader’s focus on specific ideas or images.
Fran Wilde’s poem "The Sea Never Says It Loves You," published in Uncanny Magazine, uses the familiar elements of the ocean and love, but presents them through an unfamiliar prism. The poem portrays the speaker as a lover to an uncaring sea, highlighting the absurdity of the premise while evoking melancholy. The poem concludes:
And you are bathed in salt spray, wishing.
Wishing you were water,
or that the sea would whisper from a shell the name of the first song
you danced to
Or say the name it gave you before it swallowed you up.
This subversion of reality, twisting it into new shapes, allows readers to confront their own reflections and gain a deeper understanding of themselves. Speculative poetry, therefore, possesses a unique power to imagine, delight, ignite, and converse.
The Power of Speculative Poetry: To Imagine, Delight, Ignite, and Converse
To Imagine
The capacity of speculative poetry to ignite the imagination is profound. Sonya Taaffe’s poem "Radio Banquo," featured in Strange Horizons, exemplifies this by reimagining the death of Banquo from Shakespeare’s Macbeth through the lens of a radio broadcast. The lines:
a bloodied clutch of crowns, leaf-clashed,
coin-profiles chinking a child’s singsong,
the one pure silence staring
like a hacked man’s throat into the blade.
These lines, filled with allusions to Macbeth and the juxtaposition of ancient tragedy with modern technology, create a sensory experience that would be difficult to conceive of otherwise. This warping of time and place allows for a reexamination of our relationships with each other and the world.
C.S.E. Cooney’s "Postcards from Mars," published in Stone Telling, explores a complex mother-daughter relationship through a science fiction setting. The narrator’s mother embarks on a one-way trip to Mars, sending postcards back to Earth. The narrator’s coping mechanism of pretending her mother is dead until she disappears on Mars adds layers of emotional depth. The poem ends with a poignant reflection:
I study her postcards—
Search for clues, secrets, whisperings
Footprints in the red, red dust.I finish the jam, wash out the jar.
Three pennies, a dime and a quarter so far.
Theodora Goss notes that "every story or poem we write is necessarily about us, whether it involves dragons, robots, or accountants." Speculative poetry, like its prose counterpart, allows for the exploration of new societal structures, future warnings, and reimagined identities, unburdened by present realities. It provides a means to "tell all the truth but tell it slant," as Emily Dickinson suggested.
To Delight
Not all poetry needs to be a profound philosophical treatise to be valuable. Some poems are designed purely for enjoyment, to elicit a smile or an appreciative sigh. Narrative poems that tell a complete story can feel like miniature works of fiction, artfully crafted to guide the reader’s experience. Mary Soon Lee’s The Sign of the Dragon, an epic fantasy told through over three hundred poems, showcases the innovative ways storytelling can be experienced. Poems from this collection offer perspectives from the king’s horses or capture the chaos of battle in impressionistic strokes:
(Before, an instant earlier,
Tsung’s pulse pounded loud
as the wind’s wet rush,
as the clash of metal on metal,
as the screams, the battle drums,
whilst Tsung rode beside the king,
the horses maneuvering
as if they were a thousand shadows
of a single faultless form—
The constant novelty in form and language creates a dynamic reading experience, akin to dancing at a masquerade ball. Tim Pratt’s "Soul Searching," which won the 2005 Rhysling Award, plays with form to deliver whimsical surprises. The poem opens:
On weekends I help my old neighbor look
for his soul. He says he used to be a wizard, or a giant
(the story varies from telling to telling), and, as was
the custom for his kind, he put his soul into an egg
(or perhaps a stone) for safe-keeping. He hid the egg
(or stone) inside a duck (or in the belly
of a sheep, or in a tree stump)
The enjambment of the first line creates a seemingly mundane premise, immediately subverted by the reveal of "for his soul." This unexpected turn, like the cherry cordial in a chocolate truffle, offers instant sweetness and surprise. Pratt’s use of parentheses effectively conveys the narrator’s hearing of the older man’s forgetful dialogue. Speculative elements here are crucial, untethering the poem from reality and allowing for fresh imagery, such as a soul hidden in an egg within a sheep. This literal interpretation of "soul searching" makes the abstract concrete. The poem, though whimsical, carries a deep sadness as the neighbor reveals his desire to break the egg and end his immortality. Even accessible narratives can touch upon profound truths about heroism, war, mortality, and old age.
To Ignite
Amal El-Mohtar, in her article "How to Read Poetry 101," shares her grandfather’s experience as a political prisoner in Lebanon, shaping her view of poetry as a language of resistance. She states, "I grew up being taught that poetry is the language of resistance—that when oppression and injustice exceed our capacity to frame them into words, we still have poetry." Adding speculative elements to resistance poetry can amplify its intensity. Franny Choi’s poem "Introduction to Quantum Theory," from her collection Soft Science, uses a science fiction framework to achieve this. The poem begins:
There are only so many parallel universes
that concern us.
From this premise, Choi imagines universes where mothers do not grieve so deeply or where no child washes ashore. By highlighting the absence of certain conditions in other universes, she implicitly draws attention to the failings in our own.
Brandon O’Brien’s "Birth, Place" in Uncanny Magazine embodies the idea of a "shock to the nervous system" from its very title. The separation of "birth" and "place" immediately signals a poem about identity and the loss of homeland. The opening stanza is stark:
I made this land myself.
I put dirt in my own
mouth and hoped it
would mature; you made
manure of the bodies
of our mothers, asked
us to chew the remains,
The poem invokes orishas and the creation of land, depicting displacement in the wake of colonization. The narrator reclaims ancestral land as an extension of the body, with home caked around them. Amidst spirits and planetary rebuilding, a hope for future generations shines through in the poem’s powerful conclusion:
I will plant a time I cannot see
for children I will not know
among those bones,and what grows, laughing,
will not be as easy to pluck
as I once was.
Speculative poems challenge readers to look inward and reexamine their perception of the world.
To Converse
Artists often engage in dialogues with each other across time and genre through their work. Verse serves as a conduit for these conversations, whether with contemporaries, historical figures, or future generations. Feminist retellings of fairy tales, for instance, imbue traditional figures with greater agency, subverting stories embedded in our collective consciousness. Theodora Goss’s titular poem from her collection Snow White Learns Witchcraft imagines Snow White in old age, after marrying the prince and having a daughter. Now in the position of the "Evil Queen," a beautiful woman whose hair has turned "as white as snow," she contemplates her future:
I’ll walk along the shore collecting shells,
read all the books I’ve never had the time for,
and study witchcraft. What should women do
when they grow old and useless? Become witches.
It’s the only role you get to write yourself.
These retellings, a form of defamiliarization, extract the familiar from well-known stories. Speculative poems also converse with works outside their genre. Dominik Parisien’s "A Portrait of the Monster as an Artist" in Mythic Delirium is a clear nod to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Brandon O’Brien’s "Cento for Lagahoos" in Strange Horizons draws from twenty other poets, composing new meaning from existing pieces—a form of "highlight poetry" rather than erasure poetry.
Sherese Francis’s "Celestial Mary (Galilean Daughter)" in Apex Magazine engages with the Bible from a metaphysical perspective, focusing on Mary’s viewpoint. The poem’s parallel stanzas create a sense of conversation, with a centered stanza offering a different dimension. The use of forward slashes to break words into units of sound or meaning creates a disorienting effect, enhancing the poem’s experimental nature:
a here/tic: one with free will to choose
ooooooodis/urn/er of dogma
ooooooodivine wil/l/d power
Through formal and thematic innovations, speculative poetry continually pushes the boundaries of what is possible within the genre.
The Future of Speculative Poetry
The true value of poetry is unlocked when we cease to fight its perceived complexity and instead marvel at its dance in the depths, allowing it to draw us into new realms. While always in love with language, poetry has profoundly reshaped the author’s understanding of how the world can be experienced through words, a purpose that lies at the heart of speculative poetry.
For those eager to explore this genre, the Rhysling Anthology serves as an excellent starting point, offering a diverse array of voices. Additionally, the numerous magazines mentioned throughout this article, such as FIYAH Literary Magazine, Polu Texni, Speculative North, Augur, Asimov’s, and The Future Fire, along with the archives of Goblin Fruit and Liminality, provide a rich tapestry of speculative poetry. The future of this vibrant genre rests in the hands of its readers; it is through engaging with these words that they are given life and continue to evolve.
This article was originally published in July 2021.
