Con-Verse: Two Reasons To Trust Your Own Poetic Sense

Hello, fellow travelers!

As you are reading this post, you are currently a mere five days away from the deadline for nominations for the Hugo Awards! As you are slowly plugging in your final selections for categories—including the 2025 Special Hugo Award for Best Poem—I just wanted to check in one last time about the importance of this category, not only for the awards itself but also the importance of you being able to be a part of this historical moment for the fandom of this genre that we love so much. Consider this a breakdown of not just the avenues to read your way into speculative poetry but also as an encouragement as to why you should.

One of the things I and many other poets have been championing for the last few months, and surely even for years beyond this, is that the base assumptions that limit our engagement with poetry are not the fault of poetry being inherently difficult, but rather because we have been taught that it is. In reading spaces, this is a double-edged sword—there is this idea that poetry is supposed to be esoteric or challengingly wrought (both being assumptions about the words your favourite writers use) in order to be truly worth reading, but that means that once a poem starts feeling like it’s going over your head, it’s easy to give up, to even argue that the work is verbose for its own sake, too absorbed in its own sound to be worth reading.

I imagine that even among many readers who are excited as many poets are for this Worldcon’s focus on poetry as a part of our great genre, this blade has been swinging over their reading heads like the Sword of Damocles. I am here to tell you that—well, not that the sword is not there, but that you can read without thinking about it. I am here to tell you that even in the places where those assumptions are true, which are too rare to think about anyway, there is still a wealth of places for you to journey into poetry in a way that moves and strikes you.

“Con-Verse” has been a place to discuss tools to learn how to read complex speculative elements into verse because I truly believe that you have all the other tools necessary to engage with poetry deeply. The majority of fans didn’t need to go to a university literature or science course to see the value of rewarding your favourite novel or related work—and in the same vein, the ability to read yourself into poetry is also a skill you know innately and practice often, arguably one you’ve been rehearsing more often since you were a child, every time you think about the seemingly silly or dark stakes of your favourite childhood nursery rhyme or keep time to your current pop-song earworm. This segment of the blog does not exist to say, “You poor soul, you don’t know how to read a poem—but I will take you as an apprentice!” It exists to say, “How dare the world rob you of a magic you’ve been performing from the depths of your bones! You must prove them wrong.”

This is also important because, beyond the rocket statues themselves, the awards ballot is in its own way a reminder that we are still invested deeply in these forms of creativity in this genre. It matters that poetry has a chance in this year’s awards because, in a landscape where short fiction outlets are often struggling to remain afloat and, among them, very few publish poetry while the ones that do are making a healthy and responsible effort to keep that section as equitably competitive as their prose, fans are saying, “Poetry is worth reading—and worth celebrating—and we can do it ourselves.” The double-edged sword is very good at telling fans that only “smart” people, people who “get” poetry, are fit to comment on what poetry is good.

Good news: That’s you! I promise! In a lot of ways, it’s more you than those who say poetry is too smart to be common art. And I can think of very few awards that value the perspective of fans in the assessment of poetry, for all the reasons I’ve cited above, which is one of those many small things I love about this genre of ours.

So today is not about giving you a reading tool. Today is just giving you fire. Read anything. Go hunting. In these last few days, let no poem slip past your gaze.

If you’ve been still looking for places to catch up and explore poems you haven’t already gotten to, here are some recommendations to go foraging if they aren’t already a regular part of your reading diet:

• the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association has two magazines, Star*Line and Eye To The Telescope, the latter of which is available online and both of which are available for subscription. Plus, this is technically cheating, but if you want to know what association members are already considering as worthy of rewarding, the longlist for this year’s Rhysling Awards have just been released, which gives a good sense of what poetry is catching the eye of poets themselves. (Although, again, I promise you can trust your own instincts just as well!);
• magazines like Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Apparition, Radon Journal, Abyss & Apex, and Small Wonders have their content available online for your perusal, so if you’re looking for outlets you haven’t read yet or still trying to work your way all the way back to January of last year, there is a lot of poetry free for you to find; and
• other outlets like FIYAH, Solarpunk Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Augur are mostly available offline via purchase or subscription—and are well worth your investment to explore their 2024 catalogs, not only because many of those poems are just as intriguing as those of their counterparts but also because buying copies is how they pay their poetry rates.

If you are already deep into completing your ballot, I thank you for adding your voice to this genre award’s shouting about the value of poetry. If you are still reading, I still wish you a wonderful time plumbing the depths of the form and finding the thing that will truly stick with you this year. I hope that not only now but also throughout the year and especially when we meet in Seattle, that poetry keeps widening your eyes and your heart. I can’t wait to see what our community’s combined tastes reveal.

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