Rhysling Awards (short and long poems of note)

Another Rhysling anthology in the books. Votes are being tallied. 

Here are my selection of the notable. I usually pick about ten percent, but I read more quickly, so seven percent this time. 

As usual for the past decade or so, the majority (60-odd %) of nominees were women. Of these, I selected fifty-fifty men and women, without paying attention to the author's gender until I got here. In fact, I had no idea of gender, race, name, etc. until I reached the end of the poem. Maybe not then. [ETA: Voting complete. See results at link. Presumably 83% female.]

As far as magazines go, New Myths, Polu Texni, Star*Line, and Strange Horizons are not strangers to publishing good work. Speculative North is a new magazine to place on your radar, albeit Canadian. Of course, who knows how the poems were selected, but there were some good candidates.

Short:

“Sealskin Reclaimed” • Alison Bainbridge • Glitchwords 2

• What's powerful here is the well used space--very conscious of words and packing so much into a small space. A quality often strangely lacking. Beautiful close.

“a siren whispered in my ear one night” • Ashley Bao • Arsenika 7

• Sound and repetition conscious. Particularly surprising and thought-provoking was "where to place my feet to avoid glass-infested blood."

“Chrono-Man” • F. J. Bergmann • Polu Texni, May 11

• Bonus: word play and passage to various time tropes.

“The Edge of Galaxy NGC 4013” • Warren Brown • Speculative North 3

• A traditional but moving leap.

“He Sold What He Had Left” • Diane Callahan • Speculative North 1

• Interesting wrap where a prisoner goes on a hallucinogenic journey, beginning where he ends.

“Back Story” • David Clink • Strange Horizons, 12 September 2020

• Self-referential. A closing that doesn't close but opens up.

“The Forest in the Full of the Moon” • Geoffrey A. Landis • New Myths, December

• Myth exploration that ends on a note of mystery.

“A Tempest” • Sheree Renée Thomas • Star*Line 43.4

• Thomas plumbs the Shakespearean oeuvre. A plaintive note of longing.

Long:

“The Third Sister” • Andrea Blythe • Twelve (Interstellar Flight Press)

• A love song to readers, libraries and books--how they shape us.

“Devilish Incarnations” • Bruce Boston • Star*Line 43.1

• I expected and got a good poem. I didn't expect the poem to haunt me after reading it. 

“An Offering” • Michael Janairo • Line of Advance (2020 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards)

• Evocative writing about what may be a spiritual or hallucinatory experience.

“Robo sapiens Thinks He Thinks” • Geoffrey A. Landis • Eye To The Telescope 35

• This one smacks the reader with a powerful speculative conceit, which strikes to the core of SF. You'd think more poems would aim more for this tenor.  

Long Poems of Merit from the 2020 Rhysling Award Anthology

Note: The poets appear here, alphabetically as they do in the anthology. A summation follows. To read last year’s commentary, go here. To read this year's short poemdiscussion, click here.

Alexandria Baisden’s “The Scarecrow’s Lover” [Abyss & Apex] is a moving love-story/tragedy between a scarecrow and some strange plant that crawls up its pole. It is composed of sunflowers, strawberries, ivy, etc. If the poem could have explained or kept it to one, and if it had shortened itself, this would have ranked higher, possibly my favorite. Also, I’m not sure the special typographical displays added substantially, but it’s worth checking out. (See the Inverarity poem below for the same problem, which could have made it a contender as well.)

F. J. Bergmann is represented by three dark, brooding poems—all unusually described, the best being “Maculation” [Spectral Realms]—a kind of Lovecraftian starship horror with the gradual decay of the senses toward a greater horror. It opens:

What I missed most were splotches

of color and shade: irregular clouds

above and around me

Frank Coffman missed his calling in “The Scroll of Thoth” [The Coven’s Hornbook and Other

Poems]. The set up surrounding the poem is nothing short of a Borgesian wonder. The poem itself ponders and pales in comparison. Frank, if you’re out there, please (re)read Jorge Luis Borges and see if he inspires.

While the speculation didn’t sell me on Deborah L. Davitt’s “Children of the Trees” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] the structure and close suggest she is getting close, and may be a poet to keep an eye out for.

Emma J. Gibbon renders “Consumption” [Eye to the Telescope] quite viscerally and sadly. Is this verse the best form for her words? I’m less sure. Still, it’s got quite a bite.

“The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach” by Geoff Inverarity [Geist] has some wonderful shifts in surprise. It begins with a woman who asks the dog typical questions an owner might ask, without expecting an answer. However, we are given answers, and the dog seems astute, contemplative to the point of brooding about their greater implications, which is lovely. However, there are problems. Who is relating the story? Definitely not the owner [labeled as “The Woman”] and not the dog as it starts outside the dog and goes inside the dog’s thoughts (how? god-like omniscience? the poet?) and back outside the dog (commenting on “the simple love of dogs,” which no longer seems so simple). Who is our narrator and how is he privileged to get his information? How does the dog go from simple [typical happy-go-lucky dog actions, no brooding] to deep [inside his head] to simple again [by some unnamed speaker]? This might have been a wonderful poem had the poet considered these questions and perhaps become a greater poem at having arrived at an unusual conclusion. (See the Baisden poem above for the same problem, which could have made it a contender as well.)

The best image lines from Herb Kauderer’s “Green Sky” [Influence of the Moon]:

human shellfish

invaded the moon,

skittering around

in personal metal houses

like vacuum trilobites

It treads some profound ground but would likely have been more successful at a much shorter length.

Marsheila Rockwell,’s “Stormbound” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] might have converted me to its revelations if it hadn’t felt familiar.

Cynthia So’s “If Love is Real, So Are Fairies” [Uncanny] tantalizes with a couple of nice images well phrased:

working her powdery

magic ....

a shiver

elicited by her microscopic fingers

whispering across the back of my neck.

D. A. Xiaolin Spires penned my favorite ten line last year. This year’s Rhylsing nominee, “tetrahedral edifices of a sticky rice realm” [Mithila Review]—as the title suggests—is an imaginative and evocative work, but a bit too on the nose and, paradoxically, too dream logicked:

light

shocks jangling my jade bangles

i smell the pungent odor of

temple incense and feel

a thousand eyes pressing against

my forehead...

i blink away the doubt, swallow my reservations and

proceed forth

T. D. Walker has two poems—“Eight Simulations for the Missing” and “For My Daughter, Who Will Ask for a Seismograph Implant on Her Sixteenth Birthday” [Small Waiting Objects]—and

Holly Lyn Walrath has one—“The Mining Town” [2019 SFPA Poetry Contest]—that were I an editor, I’d sit on to mull over. They are more ambitious than most, but am I or am I not sold on these? They are all told in piecemeal with strange and lovely structures. However, are any greater than the sum of their parts?

The first, “Eight Simulations for the Missing”, describes “sightings” (real or imagined—simulated or desired) of a loved one. The second is a mother addressing her daughter via earthquakes sensed on a seismograph.  “The Mining Town” seems to be an old West mining  ghost town, leading us eventually to the devil. In each narrative bit, the sections end with a question, not unlike the quiz at the end of reading to check if you were paying attention although the answers aren’t necessarily found within the texts.

Summation:

From these poems selected, there is no clear winner that stands above the rest. A number of these would have been more successful at shorter lengths. I commented on about two out of every five of the shorter poems, and one out of four of the longer. Note that I read for aesthetics first and then become curious about ratios and statistics, afterwards. Trying to put politics above art strangles both. A few poems were well written, but their speculation didn’t strike me, so I didn’t comment.

At a later date, I’ll need to reread the aforementioned three poems to determine how I felt about them. My gut instinct is to cast my primary vote for F. J. Bergmann’s “Maculation” with T. D. Walker’s “For My Daughter, Who Will Ask for a Seismograph Implant on Her Sixteenth Birthday” as runner-up, but maybe I’d reverse that later, or some other combination.

Of these long poems, my aesthetics didn’t happen to select poems from more than one magazine (two from what I suspect is T.D. Walker’s collection, which I’d be interested in reading) except Polu Texni, which I selected three of their poems before, making them seem to have been a magazine to read and appear in for speculative poetry—at least for getting noticed in the Rhysling awards.

Asimov’s, Dreams & Nightmares, F&SF, Star*Line, Strange Horizons are the usual hot beds for SF poetry, but Apparition Lit, Liminality, Polu Texni,  have all caught my eye of late in addition to a few others I will have to check out. I regularly read Rattle and Poetry, but an SF poem is a rarity. I suspect the genre’s an acquired taste, especially given the special challenges of trying to fulfill two genres at once.

The ratio of female to male in long poems is about 2:1, which is close to my selection of poems to comment on although it appears only females will get my votes for long poems this year. Before I vote though, I will reread the four poems by women (please forgive me if I messed up someone’s gender) and maybe a few other poets who are usually strong, in case I read them too quickly.

Good luck to all the poets nominated.

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?