sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2014-01-04 10:31 pm

In this story, she is fire-born

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.)

[identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com 2014-01-05 04:04 am (UTC)(link)
I feel this way about the New Yorker and sci-fi/fantasy prose. I don't have a subscription, so I don't read regularly, but I keep hearing about this or that spec-fic story that it's published.

Flash back
to seagull-beguiled eyes.
--I liked that from the "Time after Time mondegreen, but thought of you when it got to A Turing machine?
Scotch-taping through windows, stolen from deep inside
rum-beaded thyme.

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2014-01-05 03:13 pm (UTC)(link)
It was definitely printing some SF stories in the late 1980s-early '90s when I was a regular reader. Usually they were foreign SF in translation, which may have taken the curse off it for their readers. I recall a story in the form of an essay on poetry composed by tapeworms, and one (probably by the same author) in which someone had learned enough inset language to make a nonaggression treaty with mosquitoes. Also one by Lem, in which competition between washing machine manufacturers leads to a race of androids.

[identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com 2014-01-05 05:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I like the idea of a nonaggression treaty with mosquitoes!