Two Prose Poems ("The Jubilee" and "Not All Caged Birds Sing") by Sheree Renee Thomas

 Both first appeared in Fireside.

In "The Jubilee" slaves have just been freed:

"during the Jubilee, there was plenty of names. People shuffled them like cards and drew new ones out the deck, tried names on their tongues like new year clothes, whispered and shouted them into the bright clean air to see how they fit, licked their lips to see how they taste."

And in "Not All Caged Birds Sing" the world seems to be occupied a palimpsest of reality, dream and metaphor, amplifying the allusive title:

"Wind sang in that empty place, and I wanted to sing but my tongue sprouted roots and leaves. They wrapped around my throat until I could not breathe."

Both of these appear in the same magazine around the same time period. They seem to form part of a larger poetic sequence. They juxtapose well together, if intentional, although the location of other pieces would be greatly appreciated.

Top 5 Poems and Discussion of the SF Poems from the 2020 Rhysling Award Anthology

[To read the discussion of long poems, click here.]

A good speculative poem is a difficult thing to balance. Writing a good poem is hard. Writing speculative fiction is hard. Trying to do both is like scale Everest while spinning plates.

The term suggests it’s going to be a narrative. Most are, generally—in a basic sense (not in a traditional story sense). It also suggests it’s going to be speculative—that is, suggest a sense of wonder—which most also do, albeit to do something astounding in so short a space is unusual, so the good speculative poem tends to focus on the emotion. I’ve seen a few excel on their technical delivery. Sometimes, instead of speculation, science appears in lieu of speculation, usually the space variety.

The trick is often the poem part. What makes a thing a poem? Emily Dickinson said it takes her head off.* And so it does, usually on a word level, asking you to see a thing anew. Billy Collins does this mainly at the image level, which some criticize him for, but note that ninety to ninety-nine percent of what appears as SF Poetry is exactly that: working at the image level only. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as some spectacularly great works can be written at this level, but it does leave a whole world of poetry to explored: the words, recombinations, juxtapositions, references, line breaks and a grab bag of literary devices to make the reader to rethink, resee what’s out there.

*SF does this, too, except in a different way, usually larger, narrative and philosophic scales although poetry can be philosophical, too.

A good work of art also turns the reader to look back on himself (or whatever the pronoun). Who are we as individuals or as a species, etc. Compare, however, the fourth poem listed here to the first. The fourth occupies its human realm with forays into the speculative. The best one lives in the skin of SF and asks us to see our own world anew. That is what makes it not only the best short SF poem in this anthology, but probably in the field.

Can a poem simply make us laugh or feel (horror, love, anger, stun, awe)? Can it simply capture a moment or a mind? Sure. But ideally it can do more than one thing. These are the major aesthetics that should govern the judging of the arts—not politics or gender or race or religion (or the poem is propagandist whose agenda isn’t the arts but whatever propaganda it’s trying to propagate). And so, with this rubric in mind, I’ll look for the best of those.

The following magazines had short poems of some note nominated here:

Star*Line – 4

Liminality -- 3

Polu Texni – 3

Asimov’s – 2

Fireside Fiction – 2

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – 2

Rattle – 2

Spectral Lit – 2

Strange Horizons – 2

These aren’t necessarily the best publishers of SF poetry (although they might be), but happen to be the center of a Venn diagram of Rhysling voters, the magazines they read, and my aesthetics.

This year, like last, more women were nominated than men. About three to one. Is this a pattern? Are women more likely to submit and publish poems and represent the legitimate majority? Or is this selection sexist? The same thing has been happening with most awards. Since a male penned the best short poem this year, it will be interesting to watch how the tally goes.

Last year, I lumped the poems into of good candidates--fewer candidates, fewer notes. This year, the best poems out paced the main body of candidates.

The Top Five Countdown:

5.

Tim Jones’s “Encore” [Big Hair Was Everywhere] is remarkable mostly for its mix of emotions—an interesting, darkly humorous voice—but also the close snaps shut with some resonance. The line breaks are unimpressive, laid out for emphasis, and seem not particularly poetic. For example: suddenly cropped lines with only “the dead” or “Fingernails” in them. Still, solid work. Sample:

Four guys, four shots of whisky.

They like their liquor strong,

the dead.

Twin guitars, bass, drums.

Eight rotting hands

poised above the downbeat.

Good tight voice and imagery. I tried quoting just one stanza, but the poem builds and so, without some context, the lines seem not as potent. Do read the full poem.

4.

Mary McMyne captures a poignant human emotion in “The Mother Searches for Her Own Story” [Strange Horizons] although the last line seems to overstate its case. The “staying alive” is merely the psychological sense, not the literal one. The line might have had a dual sense had she made that come into play within the poem, which would have added more power and resonance. Also the speculation isn’t shaped but suggested. Nonetheless, taking her speculation into our world makes it more poignant than most of these.

2 + 3.

I won’t separate these two, but will discuss their relative merits:

“The Night the Unicorn Leapt from the Tapestry” by Kate Pentecost [Liminality] is truly magical and sweet. Nice images. The most memorable line is “velvet ropes unhitched themselves as [the Unicorn] moved among the still lifes.”

To read Lily Zhou’s “From ‘Moon Sonnet’” [Poetry], one may need to be conversant in the Chinese myth of Chang’e. Still we can see a semi-unreliable persona:

“I am terrible

at playing heroine. I’ve done all I can:...

saved the tortoise from its slow drowning.”

The tortoise is presumably not drowning although he may have after a natural death, but it sounds like his death had been hastened. The language here is suggestive and taut, which is the poem’s strength. Contrast that with Pentecost’s which might have worked as well in prose. Pentecost’s, however, has a stronger sense of wonder.

1.

Bruce Boston’s “The Ruined Library” [Asimov’s] is the best poem. Why? First, he sets up an atmosphere of decay. It pays attention to the lines and the big picture. We have a “blast // building and broke” where we get the sound matching image. Plus there are fascinating phrases like “cargo of words.” The killer, though, is the double play of his ending:

Yet the deserted library

still has many patrons.

Creatures small and pale...

tunnel through one

volume after another,

devouring one letter

at a time until they

have the last word.

Damn. That’s good. Tape this sucker on your locker or above your writing desk to inspire.

                                                                                                                            

For comments on other short poems of merit that appeared in this year’s Rhysling Award anthology, click here.

Short Poems of Merit from the 2020 Rhysling Award anthology

Note: I will discuss my top five here, and semi-loose selectioncriteria, including an overview.

Mike Allen conjures some dark, wild imagery in “The Sacrifices” [Sycorax Journal].

Two light verses that work as speculative humor are David Clink’s “Steampunk Christmas” [Star*Line] and P S Cottier’s “[Aliens declutter]” [Scifaikuest]

Good lines from Deborah L. Davitt’s “The Journey” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] (reminiscent of C. L. Moore’s famous tale, “Shambleau”):

She found him on the shore, ship-wrecked, sea-wracked—

his eyes had lost their light...

her serpentine locks twined

around him, supple, sleek, and scaled.

Lamentable repetition: “Every love’s a journey into darkness”

Good lines from Robin Wyatt Dunn’s “Disassembly at auction” [Mobius: The Journal of

Social Change]

And a hallucinatory blue smear over the left retina

Chassis intact, with some bruising of the metal...

Gonads still functional

Brain missing.

Left leg is a total loss

Right, still has...

Good finale from Amelia Gorman’s “Alternate Galatea” [Liminality]:

 the base is strong and the paper

whispers and rustles in the wind

Vince Gotera’s “All-Father” [Dreams and Nightmares] is a nice tribute, clever with a morsel of wonder.

Good lines from Jessica J. Horowitz’s “Taking, Keeping” [Spectral Lit]:

When at last they took her tongue, she etched each letter

into the tips of her fingers, across her ribs,

in the hollow places behind her eyes.

She carved epics between the layers of her skin,

stitched verses into each sinew.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s “Area 51 Custodian Gets Coffee” [Star*Line] is the kind of poem you’d think would find its way into this type of anthology. Nice narrative fragment, nice little visceral shock at the end.

In “Goddamn These Minotaurs” Persephone Erin Hudson [paintbucket] displays voice and energy, but nothing yet to quote. Not quite there.

John Philip Johnson plays with bitter-sweet irony in “Mothsong” [Liquid Imagination] although no particularly striking lines. His “Fly” [Rattle] poem closed nicely.

Catherine Kyle’s “Seven Reasons to Have Hope for a Better Future. Number Five Will Really Get You!” [Quail Bell] has an ironic tone that works for it although the best thing is its fantastic title. It mixes Biblical apocalypse with common jokes about the latest generation’s penchants.

Kathleen A. Lawrence retells “Hansel and Gretel” [Star*Line] from the witch’s perspective in “The Nonpareils: As Told by the Woman in the Gingerbread House” to some advantage.

Mary Soon Lee tells some entertaining verse: “To Skeptics” [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] being the most effective.

Francine P. Lewis ["drag strip drag" in Eye to the Telescope] and Jeff Crandall [“Halsted IV” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] had some impressively structured poems. Crandall’s being the more emotive due to the nature of Lewis’s tight structure, where the poem is reverses itself in two directions. Crandall is more loose with his redeploying “The House that Jack Built”—not forcing himself to repeat events each time, but uses that to create a sense of an inevitable outcome.

Sandra J. Lindow’s “Creation: Dark Matter Dating App” [Asimov’s] is a charming misinterpretation of a scientific sentence.

Nisa Malli’s “Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, Pilots the Interstellar Ark” [Spectral Lit] has what could become a fascinating speculative examination, but it doesn’t feel quite there yet. I gather it’s a problematic A.I., but we need sharper details (same number of words, just sharper—not so much sharper images but the effect she wants).

Caroline Mao‘s “when my father reprograms my mother {” [Strange Horizons] is effective, even moving, but it never quite arrives.

“The Certainty of Seeing” by Michelle Muenzler [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] captures a moment of revisiting an ailing patient (through a psychological time travel) although we aren’t given much context.

Jason O’Toole’s “Samsara” [The Scrib Arts Journal] suggests that reincarnation means you should give your kids cupcakes, which will benefit you somehow. I wanted this to work, but we need more dots to connect.

Uche Ogbuji’s “Kolanut or kola tree  Íjè [Kola Journey]” [FIYAH Literary Magazine] has interesting translations and cultural aspects. As a poem, it is at its strongest when it comes up with lovely strange descriptions; “no sick greengray” “a shovel breath” “toes spadeing the soil.” Some are simply strange ones: dialogue croaked and “She grimaces while replying:” The kolanut is kind of a totem that carries freight although it doesn’t quite get to that and could probably use more development. There’s a lot of bandying back and forth since a third (?) of the poem is in a different language. I decided to search and replace to see if that helped and notice that could have conveyed a different culture just by substituting “Until the dawn!” for goodnight. That way we’re not floundering for the primary sense of what’s happening (unless confusion is called for), but we are within this culture and should hear the phrases as the other native characters hear it. I know there are other hypotheses, but poetry has barriers enough. Let people enter the poem smoothly. Use cognates if you have them unless you mean to exclude (but then why a poem?) and I don’t think Uche Ogbuji means to do that, especially given the translations provided.

Christina Olson [from her prize-winning Rattle chapbook, The Last Mastadon] has some science poems that offer bright, little moments and occasionally nice structure, but the whole doesn’t quite click for me.

Terrie Leigh Relf hints in “Revisiting the origins of language” [Space & Time Magazine] (if one compares the title to the ending) that language was created as a poem to lost love, which is sweet.

“The Ghosts of Those” by Ron Riekki [Star*Line] is a non-speculative poem about PTSD in the aging with some word- rhythm (“emptied, struggling for words, for worlds, / for wars other than the faded wars, the fading wars,”) and fun word pairings (“in my farmhouse mind, strange-keeled, fog-queened,”), but again it’s not speculative.

WC Roberts captures an intriguing scenario and atmosphere in “Phobos and Deimos” [Chrome Bairn] but it needs more time percolating.

Marge Simon’s “The Snow Globe” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] captures a tender moment between lovers who only come alive when it's shaken. Through a confusion of pronouns, it sets up the boy to be the man inside—neat trick.

Christina Sng in “Styx” [Spectral Realms] admirably takes something should stir horror and turns it into something tender. Quite a feat.

“Three of Swords, King of Cups” by Ali Trotta [Fireside Fiction] presents an extended metaphor that mostly works although it might have be shortened to greater effect.

Jacqueline West discusses “Lady Macbeth’s Green Gown” [Liminality] in the 1888 play which “was sewn / all over with real green beetle wings.” What a beautiful found image.

Fran Wilde’s “The Unseen” [Fireside Fiction] talks about fog in a pleasant manner—better fare than most novelists. The best lines: “it takes the distance first, / that mountain we always said we’d climb” although it isn’t really speculative. Scientific? Maybe?