Poets, etc.

August 16

I have a poem online at ChiZine, called "Broken, Entered." I didn't even realize it was online, until I got a $5 bill in the mail today, paying me for it, which prompted me to go look. I took that $5 down to the corner store (the new grab n' stab, much more palatial than the one in the old neighborhood), and I bought myself four Jones sodas, two cherries and two lemon drops. Poetry is a wonderful thing.

Continuing to speak of poetry, there's a thriving discussion going on in Alan's topic in the Ratbastards section of the Night Shade Books discussion area, about the what and why of speculative poetry (and about poetry in general). Personally, I have no attachment to speculative poetry as a separate sub-genre. Since I edit the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, that might seem like a strange assertion, but there it is. I read all sorts of poetry, and publish a fairly broad range of poems in Star*Line. I like poems that play with the tropes of myth, legend, and folklore, and I like poems about technological estrangement, and poems about giant bugs and zap guns and pulp pop culture, and I like surrealism. In Star*Line, I get to publish poems like that. I also like poems that don't have those elements, but I can't publish them in Star*Line, because it's not the focus of that journal. If Star*Line were a haiku magazine, I couldn't publish poems that weren't haiku (granted, that's comparing apples and oranges, since haiku is a form, and speculative elements are part of content, but I think the analogy holds up -- the magazine has a focus, which limits the nature of the poems included therein). That's part of why I wanted to start Flytrap -- so I could publish poems with no spec content whatsoever, work by Daphne Gottlieb, Jay Wentworth, Maria Tabor, Alan DeNiro, etc., without making the readers cranky.

I started out publishing poetry in little lit mags, and getting rejected by the big lit mags. I still occasionally get rejected by the big lit mags. These days, I publish almost exclusively in genre magazines. There's a pretty simple reason for that, though, that has nothing to do with my personal philosophy of poetry -- I just don't write much poetry anymore, and when I do, it's usually because of an editor's request. When the editors at Strange Horizons ask me for a poem, as they do every few months, I usually write something for them, and it's usually about myth or folklore, because that's currently where my interest lies, and I see lots of poetical possibilities there. I have a bunch of poems in inventory at Asimov's, and when they publish them all, I'll probably send them another batch, because they like my work, and I have things on hand I think they'd take. And that's about it. My urge to write tends to cycle, with long stretches of fiction writing followed by shorter periods of poetry writing, and next time I hit a period of poetry-writing, I'll probably produce a lot of poems, and try to sell them. The ones that happen to have fantasy or mythic elements, I'll likely send to Strange Horizons and Asimov's and The Magazine of Speculative Poetry and so forth, because I know they're likely to publish some of what I send. The poems that don't have spec elements, I'll send to the literary magazines -- along with any poems with spec elements that the genre markets don't want. I've published poems about ghosts and Fortean events and so forth in non-genre magazines, for what that's worth. And my next poem in Asimov's has nothing speculative in it at all -- it only slid in by virtue of the fact that it mentions an Aztec deity.

Some of my favorite poets working today are Daphne Gottlieb, Ellen Bass, Erin Donahoe, Sonya Taafe, Alan DeNiro, Jay Wentworth, Billy Collins, and Margaret Atwood.

Basically, when I say a poem I've written is speculative, it's no different from me saying a poem is confessional, or narrative, or any other content-based descriptor...

Anyway. As for the etc., it's Saturday afternoon, I've got three reviews to write and a novel to finish revising (I'm tired of screwing around with that, by the way, so I'm going to finish it by Monday), so I'm going to get started.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 79,900

Words written since last entry:
None.

Flytrap! Sure, we could use some extra money, if you want to help out. Maybe we could even do a color cover!