In which genre is a false dichotomy.
These are three poems published this month in Poetry Magazine, "the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world." They are all glosses on Game of Thrones (from the absence of the indefinite article, I assume the television series, not the novel or A Song of Ice and Fire) by Leah Umansky, whose biography includes a forthcoming chapbook of poems inspired by Mad Men:
"I Want to be Stark[like]"
"Khaleesi Says"
"Follow"
(The same issue contains Idra Novey's "On Returning to My Hometown in 2035," which is about as science-fictional a title as you can get without including robots. Adam Fitzgerald's "Time After Time" is a fascinating long-form mondegreen of the Cyndi Lauper song.)
At this point I believe the lines between speculative poetry and mainstream, not to mention between fanwork and original work, are fairly sharply collapsed, so can we stop arguing about definitions already? Perhaps I should feel heartened that I haven't been rejected all these years for sticking gods and ghosts where normal confessional postmodernism belongs, but instead I seem to experience a kind of mingled encouragement and annoyance: this is good, but more. Like the week The New Yorker published Robert Pinsky's "Last Robot Song" and Susan Stewart's "First Idyll." Congratulations, New Yorker! You are not deaf to either the mythical past or the mechanical future! Now publish some of the really excellent poets I know!
(I dunno, anybody want to slushbomb a leading poetry journal? Their response times are much better than Tor.com's.)
These are three poems published this month in Poetry Magazine, "the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world." They are all glosses on Game of Thrones (from the absence of the indefinite article, I assume the television series, not the novel or A Song of Ice and Fire) by Leah Umansky, whose biography includes a forthcoming chapbook of poems inspired by Mad Men:
"I Want to be Stark[like]"
"Khaleesi Says"
"Follow"
(The same issue contains Idra Novey's "On Returning to My Hometown in 2035," which is about as science-fictional a title as you can get without including robots. Adam Fitzgerald's "Time After Time" is a fascinating long-form mondegreen of the Cyndi Lauper song.)
At this point I believe the lines between speculative poetry and mainstream, not to mention between fanwork and original work, are fairly sharply collapsed, so can we stop arguing about definitions already? Perhaps I should feel heartened that I haven't been rejected all these years for sticking gods and ghosts where normal confessional postmodernism belongs, but instead I seem to experience a kind of mingled encouragement and annoyance: this is good, but more. Like the week The New Yorker published Robert Pinsky's "Last Robot Song" and Susan Stewart's "First Idyll." Congratulations, New Yorker! You are not deaf to either the mythical past or the mechanical future! Now publish some of the really excellent poets I know!
(I dunno, anybody want to slushbomb a leading poetry journal? Their response times are much better than Tor.com's.)
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