poetry vs sci-fi (or the segregation of the reading publics)

It was a pleasure this morning to drive into work and listen to an episode of the Diane Rhem show that was dedicated to something other than politics/economy! For the second hour today she had former US Poets Laureate Donald Hall and Billy Collins as guests. Ostensibly they were both talking about new works; Hall who is 80 has just written a memoir of his life in poetry and Collins had a new collection out. But really it was just a lovely discussion both between the poets and with the host about poetry in America today. Both read a few poems and answered callers questions; both were both self-deprecating and quite witty. Collins who teaches at city University of New York sound like he would be a terrific teacher.

But (as often happens w/ poets) there came a time when they started talking about who they ended up writing for..or, really, was there a market for poetry outside of other poet. And, as an example, one of the guests mentioned the publishing/reading divides between poetry and SF. Which, of course, caught my ear, as i've been collecting poetry books since my undergraduate days - and SF since HS. So i was wondering if i was an anomaly, or if the guests had created a dichotomy out of the air, to make a point about the insularity of literary categories?

Both Hall and (esp) Collins are very accessible, at least on an immediate level. They both felt that Garrison Keillor has done more for increasing the visibility of poetry than anyone in recent memory - praising him for not "teaching" or getting in the way of the poem, but just reading the poem "correctly." Which is not unlike the discussion here about teaching literature.

http://wamu.org/programs/dr/08/10/08.php#21614

Bob, I'll repeat my post here that I put on the Question about Dune thread. Garrison Keillor featured Frank Herbert tonight on his Writer's Almanac (I love listening to him read poetry at 7:00 PDT on KPBS radio). He said:
It's the birthday of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, (books by this author) born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1920. He was a photographer during WWII. He went to the University of Washington, but he didn't graduate because he only wanted to study what interested him, so he refused to take the required courses for a major. He worked at newspapers and magazines, and he published his first book, The Dragon in the Sea (1955), an ecological science fiction novel.
Then he got asked to write a feature article about an ecological project: a government-sponsored project to halt the spread of sand dunes on the Oregon coast. Herbert was so fascinated by this topic that he ended up with way too much material and never wrote the article. But he kept researching for six years, and then he wrote a novel that got rejected by 23 publishers. But finally it was accepted by Chilton, a minor publishing house in Philadelphia known mainly for its auto-repair manuals, and Dune was published in 1965. It's a science fiction novel about a desert planet, but also about ecology, politics, and religion. Dune has sold more than 12 million copies.

The poem featured tonight was "Adding It Up" by Philip Booth.

#1: I'm with you: I read and write both poetry and SF/fantasy, and have for many years - my library reflects that, although I've only added about half the SF and fantasy I own so far. And, of course, there is such a thing as science fiction poetry - see the Science Fiction Poetry Association website at http://www.sfpoetry.com/ - and their annual Rhysling Anthologies.

Absolutely. Even mainstream poets often speak in terms that resonate with SF fans. For example at Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow there was a panel item on Edwin Morgan. Morgan also had a new poem in Nova Scotia - an SF anthology.

One of the local fans is just finishing a multi-year stint as poet in residence at a local cemetery. He will be reading (with others) at a SF con this weekend; and also reads at local music festivals.

So I'm not at all sure the divide is as deep as presented.

"poet in residence at a local cemetery"?!

Did he get much feedback on his work?

It is usually the residence that gets picked up on.

The cemetery was pretty run down a number of years ago and used by tramps and druggies so a local group formed a 'Friends of...' organisation and have reclaimed it. Some of the poetry events are inside in a nearby church hall, but some involve a wander through the graveyard and readings at the appropriate spots. Also I think that he sometimes tries to do a poem for visiting local groups who come to give talks about local history. For example this poem (at the end of the page) about the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalions.

I had thought Tim and Andy's posts might not be unusual..might not be "typical" but certainly not unusual (i had cheated a little and browsed through tags for a few collections of list members), but i didn't want to ask my question in a obviously leading fashion
thanks!
for an amazing poem about, among other thing "information science" here's one by one of my favorites, AR Ammons
Swells -

The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect,
carries the deepest memory, the information of actions
summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp

slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries
and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe
deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep

time: so that the longest swell swells least; that
is, its effects in immediate events are least
perceptible, a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more

because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean
floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability
of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and

intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go
to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas
so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural

ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind
(which is, after all, where these things negotiably are)
and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its

staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the
information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty
and communicating hardly any action: go there and

rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat
shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and
sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.

this theme has certainly been used in SF!

My taste in poetry runs to most poetry prior to the sixties when poetry seemed to lose its association with sounds and became more visual, although I do like Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind collection. Many of Bob Dylan's songs are more poems set to music than songs and I like them - a lot.

I much prefer the poetry hackwork of Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling than to any current or recent poet I can think of, because of the music in the words. Poetry is much more than stringing words together in some unusual visual form. It requires being read out loud to truly catch the tempo and the movement and the music of words.

I like:
Homer (in the original)
Chaucer
Spencer
Shakespeare
Wordsworth
Longfellow
Emerson
Kipling
Robert W. Service
James Whitcomb Riley
T. S. Eliot
and any number of others whose names I've forgotten.

I guess, like so many other things, my tastes are frozen at thirteen, the golden age of both poetry and SF, at least for me.

IIRC Jerry Pournelle put a poem in in every one of his There Will Be War short story collections. He also wrote a great introduction for Kipling's 'Sons of Martha', one of my all time favorites.

I prefer the sort of poetry that tells a story through imagery and allusion, like 'The Waste Land'. I also like a lot of war poetry, especially Wilfred Owen, John Jarmain and Bernard Spencer - although I like the latters' non-war poems very much too. Lawrence Durrell's poetry I find a bit hit and miss. Likewise John Fowles'. Frank Herbert's... well I only bought The Songs of Muad'Dib because I'm a completist...

In The Martians, the spin-off volume from his Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy - what in rock band terms would be an album of B-sides and alternate takes on songs - Kim Stanley Robinson includes about a chapbook's worth of poetry about Mars. I don't think they're the best thing in the book, but I was still pleased he did it.

Here's a couple of my own Mars poems (there's a Mars sequence of them in my poetry collection All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens):

Ares Vallis, 1997-

Robots make a landscape
complete. They give a sense of scale.
Without Pathfinder
this would be no more than a rocky plain
waiting for a meteor, or eternity.

The First Artist on Mars

Well, the first professional artist
There were scientists who, you know
dabbled
but NASA sent us —
me and two photographers —
to build support for the program.

The best day?
That was in Marineris.
Those canyons are huge
each wall a planet
turned on its side.
I did a power of painting there.

You can see all my work
at the opening. Do come.
Hey, they wanted me to paint propaganda —
you know, 'our brave scientists at work' —
but I told them
you'll get nothing but the truth from me

I just paint what I see
and let others worry
what the public think.
Still, the agency can't be too displeased.
They're sponsoring my touring show.
That's coming up next spring.

Would I go back? Don't know.
It's a hell of a distance
and my muscles almost got flabby
in the low G. Took me ages
to recover — lots of gym and water time
when I should have been painting.

But Jupiter would be worth the trip!
Those are awesome landscapes
those moons, each one's so different.
Mars is OK — so old, so red,
so vertical. Quite a place
but limited, you know?

geneg...for sound, GM Hopkins?
"The world is charged w/ the grandeur of god/
it will flame out like shining from shook foil.
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
crushed."
or
"All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim"
or coleridge..
"in Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ a stately pleasure dome decree/
where Alpha the sacred river ran/ through caverns measureless to man/
down to a sunless sea" (sic)..

Or Poe..on paper his poetry looks like doggerel..read well aloud it can be mesmerizing - it was listening to the Teaching Company audio course on the literature of the fantastic and the chapter on Poe that got me appreciating Poe's sound...a bit late, at age 57.

(comes from having poetry read to me as a kid by my dad, and, in turn, reading to our son when he was v. young)

I don't see the relation between SF and poetry. Would someone care to explain it for me?

Poetry is a form of literature, and sf is a genre. It's a bit like saying there's no relation between cinema and sf.

Admittedly, poetry, like prose, has its genres and "mainstream" poetry rarely uses sf motifs, imagery, or language. There are also poets who write chiefly sf poetry - such as Steve Sneyd.

Well I guess both can show a romantic optimism (or sometimes the complete opposite) about science.

I don't necessarily see that there is a strong relation between the two fields. Equally there is not a gulf between them - for example I would say detective fiction has less in common with poetry than SF has (and I read mysteries too).

At the very broadest, poetry and SF both attempt to present you with an aspect of the world seen from a different perspective, to make you go "oh!".

In terms of readership, there must be many other genres more distant from each other than SF and poetry.

Poetry isn't a genre. It's a mode of presentation. Its subject matter is completely unrelated to its mode of presentation.

#13 ,#16 - i initially brought the topic up BECAUSE on the show about "the state of poetry in the US" one of the guests was discussing the insularity of different reading sectors - and the small degree of crossover and picked what (i imagine) he, and evidently, certainly, publishers regard as two discrete reading groups, SF and poetry readers. Other pairings could easily have been picked and i wouldn't have asked the question. But as i've read/bought poetry & SF for most of my life - i figured while my reading habits might not be typical, neither were they unusual..And i feel that the responses - esp #16 - at least reinforce my initial reactions.

Now there's also stuff the the 4-5 poems a year that get published in SF&F,etc. but that wasn't really what i was thinking of, at least initially. I was thinking along the lines of myopicbookwork's summation.

More than that, surely. Each issue of Asimov's usually has a couple of poems in.

# 16 At the very broadest, poetry and SF both attempt to present you with an aspect of the world seen from a different perspective, to make you go "oh!".

#18 I was thinking along the lines of myopicbookwork's summation.

See, I don't get this. All fiction is supposed to do this. Doesn't matter whether it's in straight prose or iambic pentameter or free verse. The actual subject matter of the piece also has a bearing on it.

Take the following two poems:

Le Christianisme - Wilfred Owen
So the church Christ was hit and buried
Under its rubbish and its rubble.
In cellars, packed-up saints lie serried,
Well out of hearing of our trouble.

One Virgin still immaculate
Smiles on for war to flatter her.
She's halo'd with an old tin hat,
But a piece of hell will batter her.

Tel-el-Eisa - John Jarmain
Tel-el-Eisa is Jesus' hill,
Or so they say:
There the bitter guns were never still,
Throwing up yellow plumes of sand by day
And piercing the night across.
There the desert telephone's long lonely line expires,
Ends with a tangle of looping wires
And one last leaning cross.

Both take as their subject war, or rather the impact of war on something not normally associated with warfare. Both finish with an image that both exemplifies that impact and provides an ironic counterpoint. Both "present you with an aspect of the world seen from a different perspective".

oh, i totally agree w/ you on the presentation of those 2 excellent poems; i'd disagree that ALL fiction is supposed to do this...but hardly a point worth arguing about, really, as i think we'd be talking at cross purposes, while, really, agreeing about most of our points.

I selected a rather atypical poet/poem, both because Ammons is (imho) the best poet to ever come out of NCarolina..and he's very much a poet of abstract ideas made concrete as opposed to "death/birth/live/love/the moment" and hence (i hoped) some SF reader might find his stuff appealing.

Here's something that's obviously sf. It's by, er, well, me. I don't normally write poetry, and this is only part of the whole poem (which is currently awaiting an editor's decision somewhere; or I'd post the lot...). I like to think I'd recognise good poetry when I see it - or rather, good poetry of the kind I like :-). But I'm obviously too close to my own...

3: Ganymede
Hero’s welcome for the conquering son:
Fêted in regio and sulcus, from
Adad to Zaqar. Ganymede, the moon
For him to take, to own; but he wants none –
A quiet place; he has seen too much death:
Men die howling in silent vacuum. Some
Rest, some forgetting – now battle is done.
But an eagle-eye is upon him yet.

No refuge, no haven. He is taken,
Put on display for lust’s degradation.
One enemy no hero has beaten,
In whose baleful jade eye all good’s undone
No favour found, no entreaty to sweeten.
And the war fought once more and lost to it.

v. nice..I am NOT a poet...i accidentally came up w/ this a while ago and kind of like it...and it is kindof about science..though not a nice sonnet or anything that takes skill..
---
Gravity Waves (after a phrase attr. to Einstein)

Gravitation
Gravitation can not
Gravitation can not be held
Gravitation can not be held responsible
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people
Gravitation can not be held responsible
Gravitation can not be held
Gravitation can not
Gravitation
Gravity
Grave
Gave
Ave
Al
in
L
o
v
e

apologies in advance..i don't write, just read, as a rule.
This was modeled, roughly, after a statistical function.

There is a line of thought that says human language started as poetry based. Tempo, rhythm, meter, etc. are all considered to be useful in mnemonics used for efficiently and accurately transmitting information. It seems that if someone was of a mind to write an "early man on a prehistoric planet" sort of story, they might consider writing the dialogue in poetic forms.

well, certainly that early literature was poetic as all the linguistic cues made poetry much easier to memorize and transmit.

I don't get this. All fiction is supposed to do this

Unfortunately not. Much fiction is intended to present you with an aspect of the world from the same boring old perspective, so that you can read it without moving out of your imaginative comfort zone. My mother, for example, seems to read mainly realistic fiction set in 20th century Britain. Much SF and quite a lot of poetry (well, the interesting stuff) is essentially about playing around with imaginative ideas and putting them together in new ways, which can't honestly be said about much mainstream or historical fiction.

I suspect you're approaching fiction wrong. Even if a book is set in a Manchester suburb in the 1990s, it's still a different view on the world. It doesn't have the eyeball kicks and sensawunda of a sf novel, perhaps, but it's still an insight into a different mind, a different perception of a set of circumstances that might or might not be familiar to you.

For example, "realistic fiction set in 20th century Britain" seem familiar to me in many ways, but if it were set in, say, Brighton, then much of it would be almost foreign to me. (I live in Yorkshire.)

And this is even more true for historical fiction. The past, as they say, is another country; they do things differently there.

On reflection, that came out stronger than I meant it to.

My point was that while some fiction may pander to the prejudices of its readers, there is no way any reader can see the world in exactly the same way as the author. Because they're not the author. In that respect, any novel is going to be a window on someone else's worldview. A different perspective. Even if it is only a couple of inches to the left or right.

The real question, ian, is can the author see the world the same way the text presents it?

the real distinction is between those that read and those who do not...

#29 - surely it would take an act of imagination for them not to? And since lack of imagination seems to be what prevents them from not presenting a different perspective to their own, then by definition they've presented one different to their readers.

Er, if that makes sense...

What I have always said about science fiction in terms of its meaning to me, is that it shakes the assumptions loose in my head. By taking what is implicit in the culture or zeitgeist, and throwing it into alien settings, or turning it on its head in those settings, or showing a different path in those settings, it keeps me from simply accepting those assumptions as the way things are. Whether it's at a societal or a personal level, that's what the best science fiction does for me. And I guess the poetry that touches me the most does the same thing. The thrill and insight I got when I first read Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill at age 16, or e e cummings' i thank you God at some later point, taps that same sensawonda. I've not kept up with poetry over the years, except to listen to Garrison Keillor reading it sporadically (my listening, not his reading) and I think part of that it is more difficult for me to read it than to listen to it--I have to hear it in my mind's ear to appreciate it fully.

What a thought-provoking thread! Does anyone (past adolescence) read obsessively only within one genre?
What makes someone open to poetry? (I can remember my teachers at school failing miserably to provoke any reaction to poetry, but I've never been sure whether this was due to them choosing the wrong poets, or whether I was incapable of reaction at that age. I suspect the latter).

These days I've come to love poetry. The best poems for me capture something fleeting, intangible that might otherwise be unexpressable/never expressed.

"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought, in a green shade".
Thoughts in a garden, Andrew Marvell.

in re Ian..a sci fi sort of poem..

the Future

Robots will write love poems for us.
We will write odes on interstellar flight
that neglect to mention the importance
of robotic navigation, but the robots
will forgive us. We will be sad
to finally confirm our universal aloneness.

We will throw parties at the least
provocation. Drinks will not induce
vomiting, headache, or loss of motor
control unless we want them to. It's good
to have options. Other planets will turn
out to be boring. We will remain

Earthbound, transcribing each others' lives
alone, or maybe the robots will do that too

ACMcC

Birmingham (UK) sf fan and sometime academic, Chris Morgan has just been declared Official Poet Laureate for the city. Local newspaper coverage made quite a big thing out of this, but other than the headline referring to him as a "rhyme Lord" made no reference to his sf connections.

I suspect that the participatory nature of the sf community makes it likely that those who are active in the one field may well seek out - and find - opportunities to be active in another. And poetry is quite possibly easier to produce work in (at a practical level) than prose. (And after a talk to the Birmingham SF Group last night by Jo Fletcher, Gollancz's SF editor, probably easier to progress to some degree of creditable workmanship with than prose - especially at novel length.)

(Agree with #33 above that this a great thread.)

SF readers pretty much self-select from the people who are likely to be interested in lots of stuff, so it's quite probable that the SF audience is more likely than average to also be poetry readers. (Why not? SF readers are more likely than average to be mystery readers, more likely to be history readers, etc. etc.)

I don't follow much contemporary poetry simply because there's too much out there, but I hope I'm familiar with anything down to say, Larkin or Ammons.

(My wife is the real poetry buff in our household, but I do try to hold up my end of the conversation.)

I personally enjoyed the poetry included in The Lord of the Rings very much, although I know many who said, just get on with the story. I thought it layered the story creating real depth, as well as being very true to the tradition on which it was based. This is also something I really liked about Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home, which was like an anthropological analysis of a post-apocalyptic society and included poems and stories from the culture.

#35 What exactly did she say to the Brum Group? The usual "how difficult it is to get published"?

#37 I prefer my prose not to be diluted with poetry. Or perhaps it's the other way round. I like poems to be poems, and not embedded in prose - because usually they're not very good.

They say Frank Herbert used to write poetry and then use the poems as his descriptive prose.

#27 I know other fiction works similarly, but I was tendentiously trying to find ways of linking SF and poetry by setting them contrastively against mainstream prose. Ordinary fiction for the most part takes more or less ordinary situations and descibed them in more or less ordinary language. SF and poetry, in different ways, take a step away from that ordinariness. So (for example) does fiction in the "magic realism" stream, which is why some mainstream novel readers hate it.

Ah. The quotidian versus the non-quotidian. I agree in part, although I think good sf should make the exotic seem quotidian, and a lot of poetry actually takes the quotidian as its subject. In fact, the two examples I gave above load a prosaic image with a reference which makes it ironic. Which, I must admit, is the type of poetry I prefer.

.38: not quite, Ian. She was mainly going on about how difficult her job is, attending endless meetings, making pitches to the publisher's main book selection committees, arranging marketing and production and all the 1001 other things that lie between the MS being finished and the first copy hitting the shelves. She enlivened this by recounting tales from the slushpile, reading out some examples of the contents thereof.

This started out as fun, but got tedious - it was a surprisingly hot evening in a small room where the aircon wasn't working, for some reason; there's only so much jollity you can extract from the silliness of others, and it began to go down the slope towards 'let's laugh at the loonies', which is just the sort of thing we sf fans complain about when it's directed at us, but it seems to be OK if we direct it at those worse off than ourselves.

And sad to say, Jo may be a pretty hot editor, but she's not a great speaker. No fault of hers, she didn't expect to have to do voice coaching when she became an editor, but after an hour-and-a-half some of us were getting twitchy.

Also, there was quite a bit of what she was saying that wasn't new to me. Quite apart from the horrors of the slushpile, which after all various people have done in fanzines over the years, she was talking a lot about the book trade; and as a defrocked librarian who still gets the office copy of 'The Bookseller' on circulation, I soon began to think "I knew that. I knew THAT, as well.". It came home to me when Rog Peyton asked a question about the end of the Net Book Agreement - good or bad? - and whilst I understood it, someone else came up with "What is - or was - the Net Book Agreement?" and I began to think I was in the wrong place.

On the other hand, she confirmed to me the reason why a Banks or a Rowling can be rejected by umpteen publishers before hitting the big time - it's completely down to the pile of MS in the slushpile that, even after weeding out the absolute no-hopers, is so big that a gem can easily go undiscovered. The moral is: if you think you're good, and you can take constructive criticism, and you can meet the submission criteria, and the only reason for failure is "Not what I'm looking for" (and the editor means it), then the answer is just Keep On Submitting. But if you think your 457-stanza epic poem about the holocaust survivors Adam and Eve, written, illustrated and crayon'd by your own fair hand, is so perfect that anyone who rejects it is either some sort of moron or part of a secret cabal of publishers and authors intent on creating a New World Literary Order - well, how about trying self-publication (and saving the rest of the world a lot of brain hurt)?

I've been there. My novel - the first in a big fat space opera trilogy - has been bounced by three publishers, and the remaining ones have been dragging their feet over reading it for a couple of years. And yet Hannu Rajaniemi, who has the same agent as me, John Jarrold, gets a 3-book deal from Simon Spanton at Gollancz, on the strength of one 24-page chapter.

Spanton asked for an exclusive look at my novel before I delivered the revised ms to John, but he then passed on it (not enough like Peter F Hamilton, apparently). Which leads me to suspect that if an editor can show that a debut novel is sufficiently like something else which has been successful, then they're more likely to buy it. And neither Rowling nor Donaldson nor Dune were much like anything else at the time they were doing the rounds. So they would be more of a gamble. And publishers don't gamble any more.

John tells me my time will come. Sooner or later, the market will want what I write. Meanwhile, I just have to churn out more books in the hope that one catches an editor's fancy...

Ian - you were there in the room with us, then? JJ's name was bandied about (especially in the context of referring real undeterred nutters on to him as an act of revenge for a similar move on his part a while back); and your story sounds absolutely typical. Editors have to show sales potential to their main book committees, and they can only do that by saying "This is like X, which sold very well." This is then the line that the salesforce take in trying to get bookshops to take the finished product, as the usual pitch is about 30 seconds per book out in the real world.

There are exceptions to all this, of course, but they are rare. In the meantime, just keep on keeping on.

(Speaking as someone who likes big fat space operas, I'd buy it. Get a few more like me signed up and you can at least say "There's a market out there for This Sort Of Thing...")

This is what Voyager said about my novel: "I’m afraid I just didn’t find the characters quite engaging enough to really pull me into the story with the necessary gusto."

Gusto?!

I'm just going to jump in here and place my vote for "pulled out of thin air". I know I was in love with poetry by the age of 8 when I got a cool poetry anthology from an uncle (and still in my library). I know I was reading SF by the age of 11 and had been an avid reader of fiction long berfore then.

I just can't figure out a basis for division. If anything both poetry and SF, at their best, look at the world with unique and imaginative perspectives. It would seem not surprising that individuals that like one, might just as easily like the other, or at least not out of hand not like it.

#44

Translation: Your characters need to have more sex or try and kill eachother. Whichever is appropriate.

Possibly. Although there are at least half a dozen sword fights in the book.

#47

You've answer is right there - your characters need to have more sex. And if you want to be classified as the new Peter F. Hamilton, it needs to involve at least three people at the same time.

And some teenage girls (if I want to be like Peter Hamilton, that is).

#39 - i'm pretty much in agreement w/ myopic..it's fine and dandy to say that all fiction is speculative or imaginative..at some level, since it's a fiction. But i'd think that a lot of fiction is an attempt to get the reader to see him/herself reflected in a setting perhaps a little out of the ordinary, or, perhaps, to get the reader to see the author as some sort of hero figure (well that's a cheap shot at writers like heinlein/rand).

A good poem is like a quiet atomic bomb..i'm not Christian, let alone Catholic..but "The world is charged with the grandeur of god/ It will flame out like shining from shook foil/ it gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil/crushed." (sic) It sticks in my mind and ear and it's awfully hard for me, at least, to shake it, even if i wanted to. I haven't read God's Grandeur in 15+ yrs, but i can come pretty close to putting the complete poem down. And i have a pretty sucky memory.

#2 thanks for that info, never knew that about Frank Herbert.

On poetry & SF I think post #17, Ian's, nailed it.

My own experience with SF & poetry {with a wonderful lurid interlude} happened in the 6th grade when the librarians {what to elementary school librarians do?} told me I had read all the SF in the library and to quit looking in that section. A lady handed me The Odyssey and the Iliad & told me those were Sf also. I read them & others {over a period of a few weeks maybe} and noticed it took some time to make the story flow but you can read them as a tale & enjoy it.

After sifting through the epic poetry section I came upon Percy B. Shelly & read Prometheus Unbound and a bunch of myths. Somehow I still have a memory of a female {thank Odin!} librarian leaning over from behind me {while engrossed in Shelly} and asking me to read, what she said was her favorite part, the graphically anatomical description of Prometheus when he was chained to the rock - as she traced the section with her finger and her arm wrapped around me. I was unaware of the significance of what was massaging my back at that time but I have retained the memory for some reason and will figure it out one day I am sure.

Any poetry read since then was under duress or happenstance.

#51

Perhaps the Librarian liked you.

>1 bobmcconnaughey: sorry, late to the party. Bob, both dukedom and I read poetry and I occasionally write it; however, neither of us are interested in the poetry published in SF magazines or so-called 'genre' poetry. That said, we do have volumes of poetry written by Le Guin, Bradbury, Disch and Guy Gavriel Kay in our collections (he still has a lot of SF to catalog, but all of my genre books have been done - er, we have separate but overlapping libraries). We both enjoy Billy Collins, btw.

the "poetry" that ends up in F&SF is mostly abysmal. Why bother when there's so much great poetry lurking about?

42

Rajaniemi does have some short stories, too. On the strength of those I'd have no problem checking out his book.

Garden variety big fat trilogy by unseen no-name? Meh.

It isn't just the wannabes like yourself, of course. Walter Jon Williams was talking about problems getting published etc. on his blog - just going on probability it is likely he is better than you.

Lou Anders of course said to get published, just produce something brilliant. ;-)

That been said, space opera with sword fights (if not too much poetry ;-) ), I'd be likely to utilise the library to check something like that out, given the UK publishers not too flash with the ebookage as yet.

Most of Hannu's stuff was published in Finnish. The recent Interzone story was, I believe, his translation of one such. His story in Nova Scotia is the one that was picked for both Year's Best anthologies.

Bah. It sounds like sour grapes, but I am genuinely happy he's made it. And yes, I'll probably buy his book when it's published.

As for the "Garden variety big fat trilogy by unseen no-name?"... Well, I have sold short fiction, although it won't appear until next year. And I hope to sell more. And I'd like to think my book isn't "garden variety"...

"That been said, space opera with sword fights (if not too much poetry ;-) )". Oh dear. Every chapter opens with a haiku. Ha. I'm joking - my feelings on poetry are best described by the poetry guidelines to New Dawn Fades, a new genre magazine: "Poetry should be no longer than 50 lines, but no less than 10. No motherfucking haiku."

Sure. Possibly he's better in Finnish, too. I'm not too likely to learn that language. He has a few others online - not as good as the YB story, but decent.

If you have space samurai a few haiku wouldn't be out of place.

a space opera
with much swordswinging and stuff
is entertaining