We seek out change to dream ourselves into the world

[sovay]

This is not the post about my weekend, because my weekend contained enough things that I should write them up properly. (Upshot: I saw a lot of sci-fi radio theater. It was good. Sunday could have stood some improvement, but it turned out all right.)

This is the post about The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, edited by Rose Lemberg, which is now available from Aqueduct Press. Contributors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Shweta Narayan, Theodora Goss, Amal El-Mohtar, J.C. Runolfson, Lawrence Schimel, Cassandra Phillips-Sears, Catherynne M. Valente, Rachel Manija Brown, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Athena Andreadis, Adrienne J. Odasso, Phyllis Gotlieb, Greer Gilman, Jo Walton, Samantha Henderson, Jeannelle Ferreira, Yoon Ha Lee, Sofia Samatar, April Grant, Nisi Shawl, and a great many other poets speaking in all their own (and sometimes multiple) voices. Two of my poems are among them, "Matlacihuatl's Gift" and "Madonna of the Cave." I won't be at Wiscon for the reading, but I am honored to have been part of this project and very pleased it is out in the world.

Go and see; read and change.

Comments

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Lots of people still do sestinas. McSweeny's used to only publish them. I included a double sestina by Joe Haldeman in a column I used to write on poetic forms (I think it's still online at Inkspot).

My best-known poem is a sestina ("Endless Sestina" in Neil Gaiman's THE SANDMAN: THE BOOK OF DREAMS anthology of other writers writing about the Sandman characters).

[sovay]

My best-known poem is a sestina ("Endless Sestina" in Neil Gaiman's THE SANDMAN: THE BOOK OF DREAMS anthology of other writers writing about the Sandman characters).

I read it before I knew who you were; somehow I never went back and made the connection. It's a good sestina!

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it. The poem is well-known, even if I'm not. :-)

[sovay]

The poem is well-known, even if I'm not.

Hah. I know very well who you are. It's really one of those cases where the author's name as originally read meant nothing to me and so didn't stick; I think I discovered you properly with Mythic Delirium and conversations about Dorothy J. Heydt. I'm glad to find out they're the same person!

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean that personally, I know you know who I am (both as me and as my LJ handle).

But I mean that it's a curious thing where many people who have both read that poem and know me don't put the two of us together.

So that's what I mean by the poem being better-known than I am.

Like, if you're at someone's house at a dinner party and they ask what you do and you say you're a writer and someone else asks what you've written, and since that antho happens to be on the shelf you pull it out and say, "Well, this sestina" and the host goes, "Oh, I read that!" and then "I didn't realize that was YOU..."

This from people who know I am a writer before inviting me over to their home... :-)

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Oh, I was being a twirp; yours is one of the examples that I use to explain the form to the non-prosody-inclined, because it is conveniently to be found in our house, but my comment was based on my mental default to the eponymous one by Elizabeth Bishop, who my very subjective brain does not call "contemporary."

Hello! I really enjoyed the poem you had in MoC, with its particular ending I will not spoil, and the translations for Sofia Rhei. Translating poetry is... I will leave it to you and sovay.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

And glad the sestina was useful as an object example. :-)

Sofía, by the way, is a big fan of Sestinas. She recently edited a 458 page anthology of them in Spanish. (I'm pleased that she included my non-genre sestina "Deleting Names", a "decaying" sestina where each stanza has one line fewer than the previous stanza, about whether or not to delete from my phone's addressbook the entry for a friend who's now passed away...)

I haven't yet tried to tackle translating any of Sofía's sestinas, though. (She has one or two fairy tale ones...)

She and I are both looking forward to the anthology wending its way across the puddle so we can dive into it...

[sovay]

(I'm pleased that she included my non-genre sestina "Deleting Names", a "decaying" sestina where each stanza has one line fewer than the previous stanza, about whether or not to delete from my phone's addressbook the entry for a friend who's now passed away...)

Where else can that be found?

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Check your email. :-)

[sovay]

Check your email.

Check yours.