Con-Verse: Speculative Poetry and The Body

Hello, fellow travelers!

I do believe thanks are in order! So many of you have answered the call and nominated your favorite poetry for the Best Poem category. I am so excited to see what finalists emerge from your suggestions. Now that we have enough early-stage tools to discuss what makes poetry speculative, it’s a good time to prepare you for reading the finalist works by considering something just a little bit more complex: what is the poem confronting that is valuable for us?

Just as in your favorite stories, we read poems because they help us relate to the real world or challenge our place in it. It’s not all about how the work uses figures of speech in speculative patterns, but about how the poem uses those speculative patterns to question or wrestle with the world and its parts. Looking at how speculative poems approach common themes in fiction may help you dig even deeper than before, and find parts of the poems that cling even closer to your mind.

One common shared thematic space between fiction and poetry is our relationship to our bodies, or our bodies’ relationship with other people’s bodies. If there’s anything a poem adores, it’s bringing a lens close on the body. Fiction is similarly concerned with how characters are gendered, sexualized, racialized, and classed by their bodies, but the brevity of the poetic form allows the poet to be very particular about the subjective and objectified body, observing it finely as both subject and object.

There are so many rich speculative tools that help poetry communicate this. One regular one is use of reverse personification and reverse anthropomorphism where, instead of giving human traits to objects or creatures, a poem applies inanimate or creature-specific traits to a work’s human persona.

Franny Choi’s Elgin Award-winning collection Soft Science opens with the very provocatively titled “Turing Test,” and its equally arresting first lines:

// this is a test to determine if you have consciousness
// do you understand what I am saying

This piece, alongside other similarly-named poems in the collection, uses several strongly bound elements, chief among them the “Turing Test” framing’s inherent attachment to language as a means of consciousness and to the cultural sexualisation of feminized robots, to posit questions to the about whether the poem’s persona is in fact conscious—an observation less about the epistemological and more about the sociopolitical trend of registering less thought, reason, and value to the ideas and efforts of feminine bodies.

In “quantum distributions for Sarah Baartman,” Lena Blackmon not only seeks to return dignity to one of history’s starkest examples of misgynoir, but to use Baartman’s very body to re-gift that dignity to countless other Black women whose bodies are doubly othered and exploited, by applying space metaphors that both reveal the depth of Black feminine beauty and the reckless means by which men seek to investigate their bodies:

here is what is true:
a black body radiator be a star that Rayleigh Jeans Law fails to approximate
black bodies be emitting spectral radiance but those white men act like they ain’t ever seen us i mean
who gave men permission to approximate the black body?
to contain us? how have men deluded themselves that they are close enough to touch
us? why must they demand black bodies self-sacrifice
in ultraviolet?

Now that (we hope) you’re finding it easier to read speculative poetry—and hopefully doing so more often!—by applying the tools discussed in earlier columns, try applying them alongside deeper reading for themes like these to reveal new perspective on what the poems are trying to speculate about, what questions they ask, and what answers may lie in their reading.

You should now be well-equipped to dig into more poetry and discover similar questions about the body in them. Kailee Pedersen’s “Nymph,” published this January in Uncanny Magazine, is a very strong recent example. Without saying more, I ask you all to read it and think deeply about what it has to say or ask about the bodies of its persona and other characters. Consider this homework. You have nothing to prove to me, but my hope is that as you keep flexing this muscle you will read more deeply, and poetry will become even more stimulating for you.

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