Hello, fellow travelers!
I hope you’ve been inspired and intrigued by our Con-Verse posts so far—as we slowly grow your list of poets to read and share ways to dig into their work, our goal is that you start to gradually work your way into the wider world of genre poetry and discover something truly engaging for you. This week’s poetry chat is with the inimitable former president of the SFPA and an ambassador of speculative poetry, Bryan Thao Worra!
Bryan Thao Worra was the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (2016–2022) and has since served in the capacity of a speculative poetry ambassador. A Lao American writer, he holds over 20 awards for his writing and community leadership. He is the author of nine books. His writing appears internationally in Australia, Canada, Scotland, Germany, France, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, Pakistan, and the U.S. in over 100 publications. He represented the nation of Laos at the 2012 London Summer Games Poetry Parnassus, the 2019 Smithsonian Asian American Literature Festival, the Library of Congress, the 25th Singapore Writers Festival, and the inaugural SEA LIT Writers Festival. He was the 2022 Poet Laureate of the NecronomiCon Providence convention. His writing is cited in over nine international textbooks, including the 2012 edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and Wenying Xu’s Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, and numerous academic papers. His retrospective collection American Laodyssey will be released by Sahtu Press in April 2025.
How did you get into writing speculative poetry?
Speculative poetry was always finding me first. From “The Raven” to “Jabberwocky,” “The Wendigo” [by Ogden Nash], or “Ozymandias,” or bits about a ring or things that were not dead which could lie eternal. Over the last year or so ahead of my new collection, I looked at my juvenalia and was surprised and yet not surprised at how much of [my] early poetry drew upon myths and the science fictional rather than the “realistic” and documentary or confessional forms that were in vogue at the time. There weren’t many models for Asian American verse, especially for Lao refugees in diaspora at the time, so it was easier for me to compose a poem relating to an alien or the post-apocalypse than a Grecian urn or the joys of white picket fences and middle-class aspirations in the Midwest.
What about speculative poetry do you enjoy?
I appreciate the ambition of speculative poetry and its ability to show up in surprising spaces. A good poem is a bit of time traveler, appearing and reappearing at different moments in your life, in part and in whole. Sometimes in the pages of a book or the beginning of a Ghostbusters movie. Maybe a bathroom stall or the ceilings of a national library. Speculative poetry gets us back to poetry’s deepest roots and dreams, recalibrating language to tap into the soul, the imagination, the mysteries in life that can’t be so readily expressed or predicted by an AI algorithm. It is constantly inventive, and it is not satisfied with merely what is [or] what has been, but probes what if, what might be. How can we not find that compelling?
You are the recent former President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and served during the establishment of November as Speculative Poetry Month. What do you see as the value of initiatives like this?
It’s much like the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 2001, where the very act of presenting something intentionally created, even as simple as a rectangle can encourage agency and imagination. That we could in fact make our own holidays, recognize our own milestones and temporal base camps for those who come after us to consider what they would like to see in such organizations and events. To take risks and build community and many ways for poets of all paths to add something to the grand table and push the boundaries of our outermost sense of what is possible.
You are also a consistent ambassador for speculative poetry, regularly attending cons and other literary events to promote the art form. What does the future of poetry look like in these spaces?
Presently most organizers are consigning us to the fringes of the schedule, and I’ve found them to be gracious without high expectations. But that’s where speculative poets tend to bring their A-game, like a particular space amoeba or tardigrade. Give us an unused room, an impossible hour, [and] a few cocktail napkins, and you’ll be surprised who shows up, what games and ideas emerge and spark and ignite. To make room for a poem and the poets amid every other thing going on is to buy yourself a bit of a break from FOMO and to introduce a bit of a wild card into your convention experience that few others will have. There’s value in that.
What is your favourite poem you’ve read recently?
Jack Mitchell’s “Odyssey of Star Wars” has been the epic poem that I’ve found compelling over the last few years or so because I found it wonderful at a technical level, but [also] important for us as speculative poets in an age of so many intellectual properties trying to be monetized modern myths. We have long been having a conversation on how America is such a movie culture, waiting for books to become films or a streaming series. But of course the good writers wonder: How many movies have you watched [while] thinking, that could be a great book? Few ask if a movie could become a great poem. Mitchell’s “Odyssey of Star Wars” had me wondering what could happen if we had a poetic response and retelling of Star Wars in such a way that years from now, we turn to the verse version as the preeminent iteration of the story, however unlikely. At one point, Shakespeare went around and retold several well-known stories in theater form that we’ve all but forgotten the root tales, and so my curiosity has been piqued.
What are you looking forward to at Seattle Worldcon? (Other than poetry, of course!)
‘m old-fashioned about such things. I look for the emerging artists and creators to see if I can spot who might become the next big thing, and I look for the elders who might not be with us much longer, to hear their stories, their sense of the field, and once in a while if you’re really attentive, their secrets to making it as a creator, a human in this strange cosmos. I’m also looking forward to sneaking off site to Open Books, the country’s only poetry-only bookstore, the Wing Luke Asian American museum, the grave of Bruce Lee, and the Fremont Troll, who will be very disappointed if you don’t say hello. Oh, and a really good cup of coffee, of course.
Read Bryan’s poem “Ecce Monstro” at Poetry Foundation.
That’s all for this week! Hopefully, during the last few weeks you’ve already started exploring the world of speculative poetry as a reader for yourself. If you’ve been reading 2024 poetry for the Best Speculative Poem award at the Hugos, hopefully you’re slowly building a big list of poems that definitely deserve a rocket! But here’s a question for those now reading their way into the field: What speculative poem published within these first few weeks of 2025 has caught your eye so far? Share them in the comments or in a post sharing this week’s Con-Verse on social media so other people can find out and read it!
Until next time, 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.