Poetry Roundup – September 2013

I thought I’d do something a little different with this week’s post. Instead of reviewing a collection or interview a poet or some such I’d like to briefly summarize what excellent SF Poetry you can find online which has been published recently.sh_headFirst up: Strange Horizons has a long history of publishing good speculative poetry. A few poems from this weekly online magazine make it onto the Rhysling Award ballot each year. This week gifts us with a beautiful poem by Mari Ness (whose poetry has appeared on my podcast Poetry Planet): “The Loss”.
https://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130923/ness-p.shtml

logoBlue“Cosmology” by Quinn White is Ideomancer’s offering in September’s Issue 12. It is a contemplative visual poem which “builds to a crescendo of raucous desire and then peters back down to a moment of private communion with the dead.” (Quinn White)
https://www.ideomancer.com/?p=2545inkscrawlThe next issue of inkscrawl (.net) is due out soon but I still want to direct your attention to the current issue No. 6 (https://inkscrawl.net/currentissue.html) edited by Samantha Henderson (whose collection The House of Forever” I reviewed here (link) and which placed 2nd in the chapbook division of the 2013 Elgin Award). It sports the subtitle “the journey”. Since inkscrawl specializes in minimalistic speculative fiction all 21 poems are brief gems. I’d like to call special attention to a select few of them:

“The Adventurer Recalls Showing The Cartographer Her World”
“What we carry” by Beth Cato
“The Heart” by Tim McLafferty
“Diffusion” Albert W. Grohmann

logo-lyrikline-bigHere’s something different: A German poetry website,
https://www.lyrikline.org/
In celebration of the relaunch of their website they called for submissions of Space Poems for the blog. Geoffrey A. Landis’ poem “at one gee” can be read there as well as many fine poems in English and German (or both).
https://lyrikline.wordpress.com/

menuRRattle is one of the premier poetry journals in the US but they are delightfully non-elitist and let SF poets play in their sandbox occasionally. They even did an issue (No. 38) dedicated to Science Fiction Poetry not too long ago. https://www.rattle.com/poetry/print/30s/i38/ I’d like to present one of the poems appearing in that issue by John Philip Johnson. It was also nominated for the Rhysling Award. “Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town” https://www.rattle.com/poetry/2013/07/stairs-appear-in-a-hole-outside-of-town-by-john-philip-johnson/ Truth in blogging: ill be providing the audio for this poem. It should go up soon but in the meantime you can go and read it. John tells me he wrote this in the spirit of Twilight Zone.

That’ll do it. Next time I’ll be reviewing a collection again. Or maybe the interview I have in the works will be ready. I’ll surprise you! Meanwhile, enjoy the poetry!

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4 Comments

  1. Thanks for the acknowledgement, Diane, and the links to Surprising, and thanks to John Purcell also for the references. I am glad to be promoting sf poetry and want to bring it to the attention of many people, and I see this is the case with Diane also.

  2. Thanks, John P! And I appreciate both you and John Thiel pointing me toward fanzines that publish poetry. I am largely ignorant of poetry in fanzines. But I will be checking them out in the future! I apologize for the narrow scope of my poetry round-up. Space limitations and time constraints mean that I can’t include everything, but I’m happy to add things to the list here in the comment thread!

    The poems that John Thiel mentioned below can be found here on Surprising Stories (https://surprisingstories.dcwi.com/Contents.htm):

    Owen Lorion, Time Travelers Check Your Baggage – https://surprisingstories.dcwi.com/timetravellers.htm
    Joseph Verrilli, Rising Above (Beyond the Fire) – https://surprisingstories.dcwi.com/beyondfire.htm

    I think I see a new post shaping itself – Fanzine Poetry

  3. Science Fiction poetry is a difficult genre to tackle, and John Thiel’s fanzines have long published them.Of science fiction fans writing poems, I believe Steve Sneyd is still producing a fair amount of SF poetry, and some fanzines – such as John Nielsen Hall’s MOTORWAY DREAMER – regularly feature SF poetry. On the professional side, recent issues of ASIMOV’S and FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION have published poems, too. This listing by Diane is a good start for finding even more stfnal poetry online. Happy hunting, everyone!

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