Con-Verse: Speculative Poetry Primer

Hello, fellow travelers!

Last week, we heard from several members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association about how they define speculative poetry and how readers can discover the special pearls within such poems. Fortunately, we’ve discovered some commonalities among their answers to these questions, enough that there are some things we can definitely say about speculative poetry, but how much deeper can we dig?

The consensus seems to be simple: a speculative poem is a poem which contains some science fiction, fantasy, horror, or weird/slipstream element within it. This should be helpful! Just look for the fae or a robot in the poem, try to determine whether we’re in a spaceship or a time machine or a witch’s lair, and the question of the poem being speculative should be covered, right?

But I’d argue defining speculative poetry isn’t so simple.

Consider SFPA founder Suzette Haden Elgin’s answer in her aptly named essay ‘About Science Fiction Poetry‘ and what it says is needed for speculative poetry to “argue for its literary value”:

People look at Picasso’s abstract paintings and object that their six-year-old child could do that—but Picasso could put a pencil on a sheet of paper and draw a magnificently realistic horse (or anything else you asked him for) as a single line, without ever lifting the pencil from the paper. That’s rigor. Because he could do that if he chose, he could also break all the rules if he chose; that’s fair. I wanted sf poetry first to prove that it could do the thing rigorously; after that, if it wanted to fly off into the never-nevers, it would at least be possible to point to the body of rigorous work and say, “When sf poets choose to, they can write like this; they’ve proved that, and now they have the right to break the rules.”

I like this answer. After all, the thing that sticks in some readers’ craws about genre poetry is whether the poet is simply being indulgent with metaphor or language, as if in a speculative poem, anything goes, so very little matters. Have a unicorn! Have a starbase! We’re just playing around here! And the problem with that approach, the argument goes, is that if you just put a robot in a William Carlos Williams poem, the verse doesn’t maintain its quality.

But indulgence or a lack of honest curiosity, but overwhelming curiosity and deep interrogation, is what’s happening in those poems—when the unicorn or the starbase shows up, the poet is trying to ask something about our relationship with the genre and its signifiers through the rest of that story. What’s happening on that starbase and how does it resemble, or stray from, your real world? What does the unicorn do, or not do, that would be similarly dramatic in your ordinary day?

Using the speculative to ask what-if questions using tropes from science fiction and fantasy allows poets to obviously challenge our perception of reality and our assumptions of genre in interesting ways. Not all of those ways have to be dramatic. Take, for instance, Theodora Goss’ “The Witch Makes Her To-Do List,” telling the story of an otherwise very mundane, pedestrian day in the life of its persona—but even in so doing, it is asking the reader to think in an elevated way about the similar routines of their own life.

Perhaps we can go deeper still. Elgin’s definition, in her own words, “assumed ‘poem’ as defined,” but that obviously puts the burden of proof on the speculative work to prove its value, and that feels kinda scummy. So let’s approach this the other way around: What if the way into discovering speculative poetry is through the definition of a poem?

The root of the word verse is the Latin verb vertō, which primarily means “to turn.” Much like the same verb in English, it is very versatile (see what I did there?) in a deeper sense: It can also mean “to overthrow or subvert,” “to change or transform,” “to exchange,” “to translate” or even “to retreat.”

We like to imagine poetry as being similarly powerful, that its job as an artform is to reveal new beauty about the things we once took for granted, speak truth to power with brevity and intensity, dig into the depths of love or sorrow with sudden force, and allow readers to be consumed by imagery and language that allow them to escape into the very sound and flow of the work. This is true of any good poem, regardless of content or context.

I would argue, however, that a good speculative poem is simply doing that on two axes. The first, just like non-genre poetry, is through observing the mundane world in its complexity, but the second—the lens of the fantastical, science fictional, or the weird—is also useful for this “turning” that the poet is aiming to produce in the poem. At its best, using the same symbolism and diction to play both parts against each other can come together in a way that is even more revealing than either element alone. That “twice-turning” is happening in poems like the Rhysling Award-winning poem “In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White” by Terese Mason Pierre, where the already present theme of cultural erasure grows in intensity in a future that is paradoxically both rapidly evolving and degrading.

So, this gives us two paths to reading and writing speculative poetry, through the speculative elements and through the poetry, that are good starting points for exploring the genre further. Whether it’s trying to be more curious, adding wonder to the already beautiful ordinary world, or finding ways in which our favourite genre’s tropes and images can give us new insight into the issues of the day, speculative poetry offers a brief window into myriad futures, pasts, and presents that we can find cool and radical ways of understanding our existence from.

So here’s some homework: Go to the website for the magazine Strange Horizons and pick a poem from its poetry category at random. With these two new answers in mind, just take your time and read the poem you picked a few times, and then ask the poem some questions. What is the what-if question this poem is trying to ask about the real world? What does it try to present as interesting or complicated in our ordinary life, and what tropes does it use to do so? What is the reality this poem is trying to “turn” and subvert for the reader? You don’t have to make the perfect case right now—no one’s grading you—but really challenge yourself to be curious about what you may see or hear in the poem.

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