The State of SF Poetry: A Call to Arms

by James Dent

My initial prognosis? Not good.

I mean, what, maybe one out of three speculative magazines feature poetry? And in maybe one third of those the editors make their poetry section more than a token effort. In a marginalized genre, poetry itself becomes marginalized.

Seriously, name me one speculative poetry from the last fifty years that a non-genre reader would recognize.

Not that this is an exclusively speculative problem – increasingly, over the last couple of decades, poetry became something that only pretentious MFAs and reluctant students will admit to reading, or writing. The form, as a whole, is steadily falling by the wayside.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I find it unbearably odd that the form that holds our oldest tales, our first epics, our earliest bedtime stories, is now finding itself in a state of disuse. Poetry is no the literature of tweedy assholes obfuscating simplicity with metaphor, it’s the story for the first man who looked at the stars and asked – why?

I guess I’m  looking at you all, the speculative  fiction community,  not out of a sense of blame, or as a condemnation of quality, bit as a cry for help.

Long has science fiction been the secret trendsetter of the masses. Science fiction and fantasy short stories have had an indelible impact on how widely read the short story is in general. Now, if we could just do the same thing for poems.

Here’s what I’m trying to say:

1.  Let your poems be poems, not half-assed short stories with line breaks. Embrace the weirdness of the form, the general snapshot, in the now feeling it requires.

3. Utilize the strangeness of your language – whatever that might be. For you English speakers: the malleability of grammar, the sweet sussurations of assonance and alliteration, the way when certain words are strung together they become something wholly other.

3. Realize that poems can tell just as much story as short stories, just in different ways.

Of course, it’s not all proclamations of “poetry is dead!” – there are positive movements. Stone Telling, for one, is a beautiful magazine falling in the footsteps of places like Goblin Fruit, and is a massive step in the right direction.

Poetry is as vital a way of story telling as short stories are. Speculative fiction has such a great capacity to produce great poetry, so many promising magazines, so many inventive linguists, so much material to exploit. I just don’t want to see that all go away.