‘…poetry matters because it captures the nuances of human experience, fosters connection… and has the power to effect meaningful change both on a personal and societal level.’
—Angela Yuriko Smith, HWA Poetry Showcase X
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) annually publishes a poetry showcase, the latest, Vol X, of which was edited by Angela Yuriko Smith, and opens with Sara Tantlinger’s poem ‘Sinews and Salt’, whose first stanza goes like this:
‘They left you carved open on the beach
Who they are, I can’t really say—
Some type of shadowy crushed velvet,
Unpeeling itself from the slime of your seaweed-slick skin
Before retreating into the unsettled dusk.’
The poem gets darker still with mangled bodies, gnaw marks on bones, pulverised sea glass in ‘the cavity of shredded, sinewy torso.’ Speculative poetry, like its cousin speculative fiction, offers an escape, an imagined place we can find a psychological getaway from confronting matters of the every day. Sometimes it offers us the tools with which to tackle those matters, dissolve the pollutions of our world with its murders and climate devastations and racisms and social injustices by creative alternative futures, finding action through voice in a different kind of writing that can also be cathartic and exhilarating. As you contemplate the range of speculative poetry out there in literary and speculative markets, the diversity of themes spans across whichever activism of the moment, or longer term, that the poet is immersed in, and it underlines their passions and dreads, be they family, identity, loss, relationship, wo/man, body, dying, undying, and all those things in between.
The abstraction and aesthetics of poetry increasingly allow writers to infuse poetic text in their prose, sometimes in prose poetic form or as epigraphs in stories, novels and novellas to enhance the rhythm, impact and poeticity of the text. A prose poem can be the muse or trigger of the onset of an inspired narrative. Other writers, like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi, fully resort to verse novels, another prose/poetic hybrid.
Image Courtesy of The New Press
Image courtesy The New Press
Some poems strike you like an axe, and others grow on you as you read them. They may be poems about rooms without windows, what the eye of a photographer sees behind the lens, the crows and ghouls that haunt us, how we revel in what others grieve, pilgrims and pilgrimages, omens, revenge, valleys of shadows, falling, breaking, dying, more dying—there’s much obsession with death. And the direness of our world as we know it today tells us why poetic themes are getting dark and darker in each textual response to realistic and irreal problems.
America witnessed the power of poetry in the spoken word in Amanda Gorman’s heartfelt and feist deliverance of harsh truths about the challenges and struggles that the US and its people face, with final lines urging for light to come out of the darkness, a quest for justice and compassion in a confounded world.
Brandon O’Brien’s award-winning poetry collection Can You Sign My Tentacle? secured first place in the Elgin Awards 2022, and he pulls no punches in this brazen collection of poetry leaking with blood and duality, autographs and strangers in lost timelines, motherless choirs humming out of mango roots, thresholds where hope is a phoenix, and bookstores whose owners are an infinity. With stark yet lush poetry outlandishly named ‘postcard 20xx, where there are no dirges’, ‘the lagahoo speaks for itself’, ‘Cthulhu Asks for Kendrick Lamar’s Autograph’, even ‘Lovecraft Thesis #3’, the poems offer a beautiful blackness that’s as dark at it is witty. O’Brien dares you to cross the thresholds of a poetry cycle with recurring characters and events, each just as demanding as the one before, insisting to repossess your skin—yes, that’s just about the name of a poem—with meticulous attention to order as a frayed truth screams its curses. In ‘because who she is matters more than her words’, a wolf prowls in the reed stalks outside a black woman’s Twitter profile. Like other poets of his ilk, the textual duality mirrors the collection’s audacity on the everyday and the surreal, sometimes hilarious yet all too revolutionary with its winged girls and a cosmos that never lets go, and that’s way before or after (the order is imperative) the metaphysics of wine and 32 bars of Nostradamus in hip-hop.
The collection Black Moon blends art, flash fiction and prose poetry, and carries themes of love and war, life and the afterlife, hope and despair—a philosophical assortment that questions normalcy, embraces opposition, and takes a keen interest on peculiarity. The publisher’s blurb suggests that the book ‘will appeal to curious lovers of literary dark fantasy and all places in between’, in writing pregnant with anguish and increasing themes of Blackness, dystopias, betwixt and hauntings. In Speculate—a 2020 prose poetic collaboration published by Meerkat Press, together with co-author Dominique Hecq we wrote, ‘in lieu of a preface’:
‘This book began as a dialogue between two adventurous writers curious about the shapeshifter we call a prose poem, that can be the hybrid of a poem and a flash fiction. Aware of our penchants and differentiations, we pushed ourselves to detach from each of our safe zones—for one, it was speculative fiction, for the other, poetry.
Our goal? To disrupt our writing practice by snatching in foreignness, seizing the uncanny in all its strangeness.
But why?
Though it may be true that, as writers, we think we inhabit language, there are times when we feel language is not ours. And, of course, it is not. How exhilarating, we thought, to expand our horizons! And so, like two lovers in a provocation game, teasing and pulling while thrumming antiphons in a pulse of jouissance, much playfulness in the enfold of intensity, we chased after the impossible nonrule of emancipated association in reacting to each other.’
Speculative poetry has the power to detach and disarm, to tease and pull, to play and emancipate.
Increasingly, anthologies are beginning to include poetry. For example, the 2022 Years Best African Speculative fiction is speckled with poetry by Akua Lezli Hope, Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss, Bryant O’Hara, Cecila Caballero, Jamal Hodge, Linda D. Addison, Miguel Mitchell, and more, across themes of ‘childprice’, policing, technology, drones, revenge, unawakening, becoming… Another anthology, Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture and Speculative Conjunctions by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura (eds) showcases works by persons of colour identifying as ‘Black, Black-Latinx, Filipo-Spanish-Chinese, Jamaican with Chinese heritage, Japanese-American, Cherokee, EuroAmerican Cherokee, ‘a son of islands and exiles, a crossroads of multiple diasporas; my people are Cuban, Jewish, Santeros, Catholics, warriors, poets, and nerds’… and they express their lived experiences in fiction and poetry of mis/belonging in first-person complexities and multiplicities of transmorphed identities. More than the physical beauty of the poems is the tug of ardent odes to fathers, mothers, uncles, children … including Juan J. Morales’ ‘Dream of a Space Tattoo’, an excerpt of which reads:
‘Inside a dream within a dream, my dad sits next to me, telling me about
a new tattoo he got to instruct us where to go.’
And Wendy Chin-Tanner’s ‘Carville National Leprosarium, 1954’, an excerpt:
‘and this was
the shame of
the body there
amid the
pecan trees
spanish moss
myrtle and
jasmine rot
down by the
river you
were a boy
between a
column of
live oaks and
birch trees white
…’
And Soham Patel’s ‘Hello, Ghost’, whose excerpt goes:
‘As you trace your finger over
the globe your uncle gave you
the year you were born,
you remember how he used
to call it your baby earth.’
We meet more ancestral actors in Mary Lou Johnson’s ‘The Sacred Interrupted’ that massages a lifetime in the silence of memory.
There is light and shade in Sarah Sophia Yanni’s ‘How Can There Be So Much Death and Also So Much Love’:
‘across the blue blanket, I gaze at the person
I love now an object in a notebook, not a we or a you
gleaming with agency
it comes down, perhaps, to privacy to love is to keep them abstract
a strategy of non-exposure, only the edifice
of a lover like a cosmic form whose edges
strangers can collide with, but never fully comprehend’
The call of ancestry pulses across the anthology, inhabiting a prowl of animal spirits in rich language, like in dg nanouk okpik’s microlit ‘She Sang to Me Once at a Place for Hunting Owls’:
‘I wade through the nesting ground, fitted like a fingerprint. You say it’s a
place of speckled day owls with golden eyes... I dream of a snow bird with pearlescent plumes, a horntail, and a spiked crown. She brought me a lens to use in the echo chamber. When we come upon Okpikrauq River, I hear her song vibrate off the cliffs:
People have as their names, their rivers, their rivers.’
Speculative poetry continues to rise in publication access and visibility, with member organisations like the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) that’s been running since 1978 encouraging its proliferation. The SFPA offers access to markets, publications and awards—including the Rhysling Award that considers nominations for long poems (50+ lines) and short poems (11- 49 lines) published in the preceding year, and compiled in an annual Rhysling anthology for members to read and vote for the placement of winners in first, second and third positions. The year 2023 saw joint winners: Jennifer Crow’s ‘Harold and the Blood-Red Crayon’ that’s a tale with no happy ending, no return to safe harbour, and Terese Mason Pierre’s ‘In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White’ that opens with a plea: ‘I don’t want flying cars. I want my language back.’ There were ties in second and third places, with poems shouting themes of bitch moons and bone trees, first contact and gargoyles watching rain, culminating with Akua Lezli Hope’s ‘Igbo Landing II’ that’s about peasants who live in the margins:
‘We are the frightened and the failed
who nonetheless persist…’
The SFPA also annually runs the Dwarf Stars Awards that recognise excellence in petite poetry up to 10 lines, where members can self-nominate, and the Elgin Awards for the best book (40 plus pages) and best chapbook (10-39 pages) published in the preceding year, single-authored or collaborative, also member nominated. The association’s openness towards representation manifests itself in the diversity of its Grand Masters, recently including Akua Lezli Hope who describes herself as a ‘paraplegic creator and wisdom seeker’ who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, & wire to create poems’, Mary Soon Lee, an American of Malaysian, Chinese and Irish heritage, and Linda D. Addison, a multi-award winning African American. The SFPA has an inhouse publication, Star*Line edited by Jean-Paul Garnier, that’s a literary venue for speculative poets and poetry enthusiasts, and includes interviews, news, articles and letters. The association also lists on its website resources for poets, including speculative markets that do not charge for submissions.
With paying speculative fiction venues like Augur, Fiyah, House of Gamut, Strange Horizons and Fantasy and Science Fiction accepting poetry submissions, and anthologies continuing to thrive, and organisations like HWA—that also annually recognises poetry in the prestigious Bram Stoker Awards—and SFPA throwing their weight behind poetry, the state of speculative poetry is healthy and thriving. As Angela Yuriko Smith writes in her introduction to the HWA Poetry Showcase Vol X:
‘Poetry has long held an important place in human culture, acting as a mirror to society and a voice for emotions often left unexpressed. Its significance transcends mere aesthetics; poetry offers a unique blend of linguistic artistry and emotive power, making it a crucial tool for introspection, communication, and societal reflection.’
First published on Reach Your Apex, March 2024.