Con-Verse: Symbolic Intensity in Speculative Poetry

Hello, fellow travelers!

As we draw ever closer to opening nominations for the Hugo Awards—including the special best speculative poem award—let’s chat more about what to look for in speculative poetry in this week’s Con-Verse. Today, let’s chat about (my probably controversial thoughts on) symbolic intensity and how even the most challenging poem can clearly reveal a speculative core.

There is a wealth of figures of speech meant to relate the real world to symbols and metaphors for dramatic effect—some may argue that the frequent use of these figures of speech is what makes poetry stand out as an art form when compared to prose, even though they’re not tools exclusive to verse. Poetry’s brevity and narrative intensity benefit strongly from good use of metaphor and symbolism, but the form can often make it difficult to tell a if poem is speculative, for reasons we mentioned in previous posts: What if the robot, or the dragon, or whatever, just stands in for something instead of being actually real? If it’s just a symbol, then is the poem actually speculative?

Well, kinda.

Symbolic intensity is something I come back to often when I discuss speculative poetry with folks who are unfamiliar with the genre. In workshops, I often refer to it as “a metaphor in a heightened state of arousal.” It is, to me at least, the line at which a poem clarifies that it is not merely relying on a strong recurring image or comparison but insisting upon the reality of that image for the purposes of its narrative. It is still being compared to something—the verse’s goal as a work of art is still to draw the reader’s attention to that correlation for dramatic effect—but part of how it accomplishes that goal is to not merely be a referent to something, but to be a real object in the world of the poem, asking the reader to relate to that reality as part of that poetic exploration.

This is a hard element to parse because it is not entirely obvious. What if a very talented poet really just wrote a damn good symbol? Well, sometimes that’s exactly how you can read the speculative into the poem, in some circumstances—by asking whether the application of that symbol is asking to be read as real rather than solely a comparison to something else.

A very good mid-way-point example of this is in W.B. Yeats’ well-known poem “The Second Coming.” This poem is very obviously about a point in real history, and it uses apocalyptic imagery to drive home the awe and horror of war, but the power of those images is such that they can be purely imagined when reading. Consider the end, where he writes,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

When you read that line, answer this honestly to yourself:

You saw something, didn’t you? You imagined an actual creature, actually moving, actually traveling space and interacting with the world. Did it have a shape? Did it behave in ways you could see in your mind’s eye? While it is obviously a metaphor for the future of unimaginable sufferings much like past wartime atrocities, I would argue that the intensity of that image asks you to consider it through a lens that is not strictly comparable to a real experience.

One of my favorite speculative poems, Elizabeth R. McClellan’s “Getting Winterized: A Guide to Rural Living,” is a narrative of its persona taking measures against bears that eat books and reckoning with the ravages of those beasts on their favorite texts:

leaving scraps of easily digested
bestsellers unlucky homeowners
buy again in a year or two

In reading, it appears clear that the verse is simultaneously visiting very interesting metaphors about country survival alongside a seeming threat of the destruction of books as an inevitability:

The insurance industry decided
the bookbears are an act of God, won’t pay.
There’s a class-action lawsuit pending
in California someplace, some suburb
that got hit early on, a scrappy librarian
is named plaintiff. I hope she bleeds them dry.

Those metaphorical touchstones still reveal themselves in the reading. But they’re also just bears that eat books. Speculative verse like this is resonant in part because, in the space between the symbolic and the sensory, you are asked to also imagine the consequences of its reality on your own present life or future.

This is a convenient method to find the speculative in most poetry you read. Allow yourself first to ask the poem, “What changes by seeing this element of the poem as a fact of its world?” and then read curiously to find an answer. Not every poem–—or every image—is meant to operate so intensely, but when they do, consider seeing the poem first as a testament of fact for its speculative universe before reading further to find the meat of the imagery or metaphor itself. Keep this tool in mind to find a way into poems when what is happening in the poem feels obvious but you may be challenged by what the poem is saying.

Hopefully this simple way of reading is helpful as you’re considering nominations for the special best speculative poem award at this year’s Hugos! We’ll talk about other tools for reading speculative verse soon!

But until next time, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!

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