Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone
At this point, we’ve been building up our muscles in finding ways to approach poems that intrigue and challenge us. Today, let’s consider yet another one of those reading tools: considering pop culture as an element of the speculative.
This week’s poetry chat is with the inimitable former president of the SFPA and an ambassador of speculative poetry, Bryan Thao Worra!
We’ve been talking about some of the ways one can start discovering and interacting with the speculative heart of these poems. Let’s keep going by using another question-metric one can apply while reading: What is the poem speculating about?
Following up with our wonderful chat with Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master Mary Soon Lee a fortnight ago, today we’re chatting with current SFPA President Colleen Anderson!
Today, let’s chat about (my probably controversial thoughts on) symbolic intensity and how even the most challenging poem can clearly reveal a speculative core.
When we started this Con-Verse-ation, we invited several standout poets to answer the pressing question of how to define and identify speculative poetry. Today, we’re chatting with multiple-award-winning poet and SFPA Grand Master Mary Soon Lee!
We’ve discovered some commonalities among the answers to last week’s questions, enough that there are some things we can definitely say about speculative poetry, but how much deeper can we dig?
What better place to start this blog, then, by trying to ask and answer the one question that comes up often from people outside the space: what is a “speculative” poem?