Hello, fellow travelers!
As of this morning, Seattle Worldcon members will have had two weeks with the finalists of this year’s Hugo Awards—including the amazing poems in the 2025 Special Hugo Award for Best Poem category—and I’m so excited that you all get to share in this moment of discovery for the genre and, for some of you, for yourselves as readers. I hope that you have already begun the process of engaging with some of your surface feelings about these poems so that they can be the diving board from which you venture into deeper readings.
So I thought it was only fair to step all the way back—to rewind time and our focus way past our initial reading questions and come back to the way we first dig into poetry: by sound and by emotion.
Perhaps one of the earliest stumbling blocks when it comes to getting into poetry, especially if you consider yourself already daunted by such a task, is that poetry is very essentially about emotion and sensation. There can be this initial frustration, then, when a poem either doesn’t seem to immediately provoke your senses, or when the emotion feels like something distant or unrelatable. I can imagine at that point that the poem feels like work, too cerebral, too effortful. This feeling can even contribute to that feeling of foreboding when reading poetry–the sense that you may be “reading it wrong,” that it is engaging with things that are either beyond your grasp or too simple to be noteworthy.
I want to open first with two obvious rebuttals. The second of them is this: These poems have made it to the finalist stage of this category precisely because dozens of readers have found something worth digging for, and I would like to compel you not only to dig but also to see if you find something they did not.
But the first rebuttal is this: These poems also made it because dozens of readers have found something to sit with sensually and emotionally that is worth lauding and worth sharing, and it is also worthwhile to just try to sit with the poem and initially take that part in.
The best place to start with this kind of work is one of the ways one should read a poem: aloud. That’s the only homework you have this week as we wait for finalist voting to open: to just acquaint yourselves with the finalist poems aloud, in your own time.
We have quite a bit of time to ask all kinds of questions about the poems themselves—and I plan to find interesting ways to pose some of those questions to you by relating the finalists to other examples of standout speculative verse—but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. For one solid read, before you ask those questions yourself, simply get accustomed to how the poem reads and sounds. You are particularly fortunate to be engaging with a notoriously short medium—even when dealing with epic poetry (like Oliver K. Langmead’s Calypso, which is among our finalists!), it doesn’t take very long to get from cover to cover compared to prose of the same page length. Even if it did, you are invited to take it in chunks; I’d argue that for our purposes, the form itself lends itself pretty well to dividing the task into smaller portions. Take an entire poem, line by line and stanza by stanza, and simply get used to hearing it in your own voice.
It also helps to hear yourself after the fact: Record yourself reading it, and then let the poem sit for a bit after you have. Then, come back to your recording and simply listen to it. What does it sound like being read by you? Are you discovering or rediscovering something about its flow or its language now that you’re hearing it again—either something inspiring or curious that you are now noticing in your voice, or something you’re realising you missed that would have stood out better with a change of inflection?
What will also help is reading it to others. If you have a friend or family member who is even less aware of the finalists, ask them to listen to you read it earnestly as if you were its author reading it in front of a crowd for the first time. Ask them what they feel about it after. Feel free to also ask what they think it means, or what it does narratively for them, but let all your first questions be sensual: How does it sound? What other senses does it stir up for you? and so on.
All of this sounds like a lot of work, of course—why can’t we just let the poem do what it’s doing on the page? The answer is because a lot of what makes poetry such a powerful art form is the act of hearing it read aloud. Tone, rhythm, and word choice impact the poem as a sense object just as much as what it means or how it employs poetic devices to convey that meaning. Getting used first to how you like the sound and cadence of each poem also goes a long way in determining what the rest of the poem does for you.
So again, that’s your only exercise this week! Soon we’ll talk more about what ideas and patterns these poems may be in conversation with, and some other discoveries we can make about speculative verse besides, but—
Until then, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and tabletop game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions and the 2020 Ignyte Award for best in speculative poetry, and has been published in many genre magazines and collections. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, available from Interstellar Flight Press, is the winner of the 2022 Elgin Award. He is the poet laureate for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and the first poet laureate of any Worldcon.