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Posts Tagged ‘John C. Mannone’

Published by Associate Editor on February 24, 2015. This item is listed in Introductions, Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry

Interview with Deborah P Kolodji

USC Pacific Asia MuseumIntroduction: Deborah P Kolodji served as president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She is the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group and currently serves as the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society in America. She has published over 800 poems in journals such as Star*Line, Strange Horizons, the Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Mythic Delirium, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Acorn, the Heron’s Nest, A Hundred Gourds, Rattle, Pearl, and poeticdiversity. She has published four chapbooks of poetry, including one of speculative haiku, “Red Planet Dust” in 2007. She has been anthologized in the Rhysling Anthology, the Red Moon Anthology, Dwarf Stars, Aftershocks: The Poetry of Recovery, Haiku 21, and Lighting the Global Lantern: A Teacher’s Guide to Writing Haiku and Related Forms. Her short stories have appeared in THEMA, Tales of the Talisman, and Everyday Weirdness. She has a memoir in Chicken Soup for the Dieter’s Soul. Her radio interview with Lois P. Jones on the Poet’s Café, which aired in Los Angeles in 2010, can be heard on the Timothy Green’s Blog: http://www.timothy-green.org/blog/deborah-p-kolodji/
Interview: Silver Blade is delighted to feature Deborah P Kolodji (DPK). The interview is by John C. Mannone (JCM).

 

JCM: What is or is not haiku? I think there’s a perception that a mere three-line short poem with 17 syllabables distributed over three lines ( 5-7-5) constitutes haiku.

DPK: Somehow, haiku made it into the elementary school curriculum as a way to count syllables. So, many people do have this idea that if you write something in 5-7-5, it is a haiku.

This means, of course, that
some very unpoetic
things are called haiku.

In 2013, I helped run a haiku booth at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the USC campus, and we had a whiteboard where we were conducting impromptu haiku workshops with people passing by. We’d see people stop, look at the sign, start counting on their fingers, and look puzzled. Sometimes they’d stop to talk with us and we’d explain.

In general, traditional haiku in Japanese is written in a pattern of 5-7-5 sounds. The problem is that a Japanese sound is not the same as an English language syllable—it is much shorter. For example, the word “haiku” is two syllables in English, but three sounds in Japanese.This is not how the word is said in Japanese, but it is how the sounds are counted.Michael Dylan Welch elaborates on this topic on his NaHaiWriMo (National Haiku Writing Month – February being the shortest month) website:
https://sites.google.com/site/nahaiwrimo/home/why-no-5-7-5

Notice in the above paragraph, I said “traditional haiku”. There are active groups of haiku poets in Japan who are writing non-5-7-5 haiku in Japanese, so it is obvious that when we try to define what a haiku should be in English or whatever language we are writing it in, we need to reach past this inclination to think of it as something written in a 5-7-5 syllable pattern.

Traditional haiku also has a seasonal element and a “cut” or shift, with a juxtaposition, which adds to the complexity of writing a good haiku.Some people think that because they are short, they are easy, but that is far from the case. It is said that a haiku master may spend his whole life trying to write that one “good haiku.”

In 1973, the Haiku Society of America formed a committee to come up with an official definition for haiku and haiku-related forms, and the committee was re-activated in 2004 to come up with the following definition:

A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition. (http://www.hsa-haiku.org/archives/HSA_Definitions_2004.html).

 

JCM: I like what Cora Agatucci (Professor of English, Central Oregon Community College) says much better than what Wikipedia says about haiku http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/coursepack/haiku.htm

“Haiku is distinguished by its compression and suggestiveness. It consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Traditionally and ideally, a haiku presents a pair of contrasting images, one suggestive of time and place, the other a vivid but fleeting observation. Working together, they evoke mood and emotion. The poet does not comment on the connection but leaves the synthesis of the two images for the reader to perceive.”

DPK: One of the challenges for the haiku community is that this urban legend of 5-7-5, this misunderstanding how to write haiku is deeply rooted in the Academic world. I like much of Agatucci’s definition, although I wish she wasn’t so adamant on the 5-7-5 syllable requirement. A traditional haiku in Japanese will have a “kigo,” a season word that will be “suggestive of time and place” as Agatucci notes, as well as a “kireji,” which means “cutting word.” The kireji divides the haiku into two parts, “a pair of contrasting images, one suggestive of time and place, the other a vivid but fleeting observation.” So, Agatucci’s definition mostly works for me, especially her last line, “The poet does not comment on the connection but leaves the synthesis of the two images for the reader to perceive.”

I teach a lot of haiku workshops, and one of the hardest parts of writing a haiku for the beginning poet is the ability to present images that convey an emotional mood, versus actually stating the emotion or feeling in the haiku.Many beginning poets want to use words like “sad” instead of using an image like “rainy season” to convey sadness.

 

JCM: But this doesn’t mention the inclusion of a nature or a season, which I often hear should be. Is it true they are nlonger mportant? (Even Wikipedia notes that modern haiku only honors the juxtaposition of images and tends toward everyday things.)

DPK: A traditional haiku has a “kigo” or seasonal reference. I believe this is what Agatucci means by an image “suggestive of time and place”. To further cloud the issue, haiku-like poems about everyday life without a nature reference are called senryu. In Japan, there is a big distinction between haiku and senryu.In the US, not so much, mostly because most people writing haiku in English do not know how to distinguish the differences between haiku and senryu.There is also a movement in the haiku community towards gendai haiku, which is more avant garde and experimental, most of which does not include a kigo.

When we start talking about speculative haiku, it gets cloudier. Are we writing speculative haiku, scifaiku, or speculative senryu? I think the answer is all of the above. Some gendai haiku is very close to scifaiku, and the mainstream haiku journals have been publishing poems that many in the speculative community consider to be scifaiku, although the editors of those journals may not realize it.

I tend to use kigo in my scifaiku, so some of my speculative haiku is sometimes more traditional, in all but topic, than some of the gendai haiku being published in the mainstream haiku journals.

I tend to prefer the term “speculative haiku” versus “scifaiku,” but I sometimes use the terms interchangeably.

 

JCM: In commenting about about imagist poems, I think they have rhyming of images, not unlike what one finds in Hebraic poetry. Haiku is imagist poetry, and seems to be more subtle. (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11902-parallelism-in-hebrew-poetry).

DPK: Many of the Imagists in the early 20th Century studied haiku. Many people consider Ezra Pound’s, “In a Station of the Metro,” as one of the first haiku written in English. It is formatted differently. It has a title. But, at its essence, it is a haiku.

 

JCM: Uncertain on whether I should call speculative haiku a form of modern haiku, should one try to maintain the traditional elements, while adding a speculative one? I imagine there could be a need for additional words.

DPK: I prefer speculative haiku that retains the traditional elements. It is the image that puts it into the realm of speculative. About a dozen years ago or more, I had a conversation with the late William Higginson (author of Haiku World, Haiku Seasons, and The Haiku Handbook) regarding speculative haiku. He was thinking that speculative haiku might use keywords, the way traditional haiku uses kigo. For example, “time travel” or “worm hole.”

Around that same time, I was experimenting with a group of poets in writing speculative renku (Japanese linked verse). Part of the rules of renku revolve around having the correct season in a particular link, and so a group of us had a private mailing list to discuss and also write some speculative renku. One of the topics is what does season mean in a science fiction context? So, we were looking at categories of science fiction tropes and classifying them as to “genesis” (which would be spring) or “harvesting” (which would be autumn), etc. Mary Margaret Serpento did a lot of work in this area. Eventually, we published a shisan renku (12 verses) called “Gravity Spool” in an anthology about String Theory, “Riffing on Strings,” Scriblerus Press, 2008. The authors on that project were myself, Mary Margaret Serpento, ushi, oino sakai, assu, and Lucinda Borkenhagen.

But getting back to speculative haiku, I often use regular, established kigo and then juxtapose it against a speculative image, thus retaining the traditional elements of haiku.

 

JCM: Walk us through the creative process. I would guess that it is much more than assembling a collage of images. You can start with what you said in the Michelle Boston interview (July 2014) “Haiku helps you take little mental snapshots of your world.”

DPK: Haiku is part of my journaling process. I like to go on walks in botanical gardens, explore the beaches of Southern California, and hike in the local mountains, and when I do, I always have my writing notebook. Sometimes, I write haiku on the spot, other times I write “half haiku” – either the seasonal aspects of what I am seeing, a list of wildflowers or birds or butterflies, or a few lines describing something I noticed. My notebook might say:

red-whiskered bulbul – 2 in top of tree – 1 had nesting material

And, then afterwards this might become

Valentine’s Day
nesting material
in the bulbul’s beak

Later it might become something else. I might ditch “nesting material” and try to find out what exactly a bulbul builds its nest out of.

Valentine’s Day
the bark strip
in the bulbul’s beak

Or, my mind might shift to a speculative version.

nuclear winter
no bark left
for a bulbul

I never know where my notes will lead me, but my writing notebook (and my photos – I always have a camera with me) is where it all starts. And, the resulting haiku help me remember these moments I experienced even more than a photograph.

Sometimes, I work from prompts, whether a list of season words, or a group like NaHaiWriMo, a facebook group that puts out a daily prompt for haiku. Sometimes, I’ll write a haiku to the prompt, and sometimes it is speculative. A couple of days ago, the prompt was “newfangled” – and I ended up writing about a “new vampire”.

 

JCM: I see that you have a B.A. in mathematics from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. As a physicist, I like to think that we can let our analytial minds play together with our creative minds. How has your poetry benefited from your mathematical background?

DPK: I love juxtaposition and from a mathematical standpoint, some of my haiku writing consists of permutations and combinations, basically grouping images and ideas into sets and comparing them against each other.

 

JCM: I’m impressed with Jim Kacian’s analysis of the 2014 winning poems for Heron’s Nest, he said, “A great many of the poems I didn’t select were outstanding examples of normative haiku. By this I mean they contained juxtaposed images that, in company with one another, resonated; followed the usual structures of brevity, cutting, with that surprise. The poems I selected as Prize Winners and Honorable Mentions share these characteristics as well, and offer, at the same time, something just a bit more. In some instances it is difficult to say what that something more is, other than a feeling of justesse,* but I think it worth an attempt all the same.”

* I had no idea what justesse meant in context of haiku—simply “accurate” falls short. I searched the Internet and found the book “The Contemporary Poetry of France: Eight Studies,” by Michael Bishop, tin which he author describes Phippe Jaccottet’s poetry using that word. I think applies to haiku as well: “it is within this tension, within its dual, reversible optic, that the crucial equilibrium, that special sense of justesse always sought.”

Anyway, what is meant by “normative” haiku?

DPK: I think Jim is talking about the way most published authors in the haiku community are writing haiku, with two images juxtaposed around a cut.He mentions resonance, which we haven’t spoken of yet, because it is difficult to define. The best haiku resonates with the reader on some level, but what resonates for me may not resonate for you. Sometimes, a poet will write a haiku that is written perfectly – it has a season word, it is brief, it doesn’t have any extra words, it has two strong images that juxtapose, and then you read it and appreciate it but it doesn’t linger and invite the reader to explore it further.

Some haiku work on totally different levels and each time you read it, you see something different about it.

Some haiku just become part of you. I love to tell the story of the time I went to Gettysburg a few years ago. It was summer and I was looking at the dry grasses and the monuments and thinking of all of the blood of the soldiers who died there, and then this haiku by Bashō just popped into my head, and I started to cry. I was looking at Gettysburg and seeing/feeling/experiencing exactly what he wrote centuries ago in a totally different part of the world.

summer grasses
all that remains
of a warrior’s dreams

Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

 

JCM: As an editor and reader, I see a lot of cut-up prose passed off as poetry. Is this a problem in poorly written haiku, too; i.e., when one thought broken into three lines.

DPK: Yes, this is a problem in poorly written haiku, too. There are a couple of issues. One is the use of enjambment, which doesn’t really work in a form as short as a haiku. This is also a problem with poets who are determined to write in 5-7-5, even when told it isn’t necessary, and then they pad the lines with unnecessary words to make the count or break the lines oddly, to make the count. English tends to be iambic, so a 4-6-4 haiku is much easier to write. It is possible to write a good 5-7-5 haiku – Patricia Machmiller does it beautifully, but a lot of beginning haiku writers come up with what are essentially statements in 5-7-5 syllables instead of a poem.

 

JCM: Please discuss the single pieces that appear in this Issue—anything about their backstory and craft you’d care to mention.

DPK: “spent lilacs” was written during one of those walks I mentioned earlier. I was at Descanso Gardens, which is in the foothills of Los Angeles County, about 20 minutes from my house.They have a lilac garden there and the week before it had been blooming profusely. However, that day, I was surprised to return and find that most of the blooms were totally spent. But, there was this one little corner of the garden that looked like the entire garden had looked the previous week. So, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s stories of how he looked at a tattoed guy at a circus and saw “the Illustrated Man” or a roller coaster being dismantled on Venice beach which became a dinosaur for his story, “The Fog Horn,” I looked at this corner of the lilac garden and saw a time warp. And then, with poetic license, I changed it from a public garden to “her garden.”

“morning launch” came out of a kigo exercise. I was writing haiku about cherry blossoms for the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival haiku contest, and I was just doing my poetic mathematical permutations and combinations thing, where I made a list of different types of cherry blossoms:cherry tree buds, blossoms just opening, new cherry blossoms, pink cherry blossoms, white cherry blossoms, scent of cherry blossoms, cherry blossom rain… and then I wrote a bunch of little two-liners to mix and match against the cherry blossoms to see if anything resonated for me. I wrote some speculative two-liners in that writing session, too, and one of them was “morning launch/of the last ship from earth” and I just loved the way it worked with “cherry blossom rain.”

 

JCM: I tend to write linked haiku, which would be titled. The title can do so much work in the poem. I know it is customary to publish haiku without titles. Would it be taboo to break that tradition and begin titling haiku?

DPK: I like untitled single haiku but feel that sequences and linked-verse should be titled.I have seen poets use titles for speculative haiku. Obviously, going back to Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” had a title. There is also a tradition in Mexico to title haiku written in Spanish. José Juan Tablada, who is attributed with introducing haiku to poets in Mexico, titled his haiku (http://www.los-poetas.com/a/tabla1.htm#HAIKUS).
That all said, I still prefer speculative haiku to be untitled so that it will be more in tune with contemporary mainstream haiku. My goal for writing speculative haiku is to write haiku that the mainstream haiku community will appreciate as much as the speculative poetry community. That means, I want to write what Jim Kacian called “normative haiku” in your earlier question, just on speculative topics. I don’t want speculative haiku to read like spam haiku or haiku for cats or any of the “cutsie haiku” books that are published in a given year. I want speculative haiku to be taken seriously by the haiku community as well as the speculative community, which means we need to reach for a high standard when writing it.

That said, sometimes if the idea is “too alien” and the science fiction/fantasy/horror aspect of it is too complicated, it may not be possible to write what you need to say in 3 lines. If you are writing a haiku about a planet you invented and no one understands anything about that planet, three lines may not give any space for the reader to enter into the poem. Haiku is more about a conversation between the reader and the writer than other types of poetry.

I think the answer for these situations, where it might not be possible to reduce the poem to three lines without a title or note of explanation, is to write a sequence or a haibun and then title the resulting longer poem.

 

JCM: Please discuss these linked haiku that appear in this Issue—anything about their backstory and craft you’d care to mention.

DPK: I enjoy writing sequences of haiku and have found them to be more appealing in markets that don’t usually publish haiku. I have written a series of haiku sequences with four haiku, one for each season. There are several, written from the point of view of “If Bashō was walking around “insert fantastical place,” what would he see and write about.

I have done a couple of haiku workshops where I took participants on a imaginary ginko. (A ginko, not to be confused with the gingko tree, is a “haiku walk,” where a group of haiku poets go somewhere together, write haiku, then share them together afterwards). For these workshops, I had partipants close their eyes and pretend they were on Mount Olympus or Mars (I selected a place for the workshop) and then write what they see. If I am walking around Mount Olympus or Mars and look carefully at the details, what do I see? What does it smell like? Feel like

The three haiku sequences in this issue, “Bashō After Cinderella,” “Bashō on the Back Road to Camelot,” and “Seasons of a Time Traveler” were written from this perspective. What does spring in Camelot, in the Cinderella story, if I time-traveled someplace, look like? Then, how about summer? Fall? Winter?

“Equations of a Sonata” was obviously inspired by string theory. Even though it is a poem with no association with haiku, I believe its style was influenced by my work in haiku because I’m using juxtaposition, the lines are short, etc.

 

JCM: When you write other forms of poetry, does haiku inform them? For example, I imagine they would be very helpful in writing minimalist poems.

DPK: Yes, I started writing haiku because I thought my biggest flaw at the time as a writer was that I was too wordy. So, I started to economize on words, selecting words with powerful associations, getting rid of words that were unnecessary. Working with haiku and other minimalist poetry is helpful, even when writing longer poetry because you start to realize which words are unnecessary. If I am writing about apples, I don’t need to say “red apples” because most people would assume they are red. However, if I wanted to emphasize that the apples are green, then I would add the adjective. Further more if I am using apples, which are red, I can imply something else is red by simply having it near the apple and the mind makes the association.

As I wrote haiku more and more, I fell in love with this type of poetry and almost write it exclusively these days.

 

JCM: What about the popular Japanese forms, like senryu and others?

DPK: I write senryu as well as haiku, and also dabble in tanka and haibun.

 

JCM: Tell us about your haiku workshop and your moderatoring the Southern California Haiku Study Group.

DPK: In the late 1990’s, I started attending workshops of the Southern California Haiku Study Group, based upon the recommendation of gK, who I knew from the Scifaiku mailing list. Jerry Ball had founded the group and was the moderator at that time. In 2006, he moved to Northern California and I took over as moderator so the group would continue and because I felt that the group had given me so much as far as my growth as a haiku poet and I wanted to help others in the same way.

We meet monthly at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, the 3rd Saturday of every month, starting at 2 pm. Anyone who happens to be in the area is welcome to drop in. We have had surprise visits from haiku poets from places as far away as Wisconsin and New York.

We usually start with a read-around of haiku. I bring several books with me each month (I have a collection of several hundred haiku books and journals – not sure exactly how many – at least 500) and participants can either read one of their haiku or a haiku from one of the books. Then, it can vary. We might have a special presentation, such as the “Haiku of Shiki”, a workshop on some topic such as “sound haiku”, or a writing exercise. We usually conclude with an anonymous haiku workshop, where we workshop participant’s haiku.

I also am doing workshops at Joshua Tree National Park and the Fullerton Arboretum this spring.In January, I became the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America, which means I help facilitate information sharing between the various haiku groups in the state, help publicize their events, and basically am an ambassador for haiku in California.

 

JCM: Tell us about your projects and where we can learn more about your work.

DPK: Most of my projects lately have been more organizational in nature, but I am currently working on a haiku manuscript. It has been almost seven years since I published a chapbook. I can be reached via Facebook and Twitter (@dkolodji). I have a new website at www.deborahpkolodji.com, which I will be adding to as the year progresses. I also have a blog at dkolodji.livejournal.com.

I am planning to attend several haiku conferences this year – the Haiku Canada weekend in Victoria, B.C. in May 2015, as well as Haiku North America in Schenectady, New York in October 2015.

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Published by Associate Editor on November 6, 2014. This item is listed in Introductions, Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Introduction to Poetry in Issue 24

by John C. Mannone

John C. Mannone

John C. Mannone

The line-up for the Fall issue is stunning; it is an eclectic mixture of poets. Some are scientists (or related), while others are literary professionals—they bring you a diverse collection of literary-speculative poetry. And as a chemist and physicist, I feel very much at home with these fine poets: Roald Hoffmann (Theoretical Chemist), Simon Perchik (Attorney), Michelle Butler (English Professor), Bruce Boston (Computer Scientist), Kate Gillespie (Microbiologist), David Kopaska-Merkel (Geologist), John Reinhart (High School English Teacher).

Our Featured Poet, Roald Hoffmann (Ithaca, NY), is a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1981), who is also impassioned with the arts. His poems (“A Different Kind of Motion,” “Volition,” and “Crossing the Mekong”) bring a chemistry of their own. He speaks of their genesis in the interview.

Simon Perchik (East Hampton, NY) continues to dazzle us with magical illusions and other realities with his poetry (“This spoon all night on tiptoe”). Michelle Butler (College Park, MD), who teaches Medieval Literature, shares a ghostly poem (“The Near Shore”). The multiple-winning Bram Stoker poet, Bruce Boston (Ocala, FL) crafts a poem with luxurious language (“Septuagenarian Flashback”). Another poet from where I grew up, Kate Gillespie (Baltimore, MD), skillfully incorporates metaphors from her studies as a microbiologist in marine biotechnology (“Harboring”*). Our scientific professions often provide fresh metaphors. In David Kopaska-Merkel’s (Tuscaloosa, AL) poetry (“Hard Row”), the geological influence is very clear. Finally, John Reinhart (Wheat Ridge, CO) leaves us with a short, surreal poem (“dream”) that is fanciful and pensive—a good final note.

* I am reminded of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, which now serves as a model for developers across the country, but I remember before it was cleaned-up, when it was a place for refuse, and too many times, a setting for crime. Now, it’s a tourist stop.

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Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23 Poetry

Introduction to Issue 23 Poetry by John C. Mannone

John C. Mannone

John C. Mannone

Silver Blade is proud to present a slate of highly accomplished poets for this issue. We hope you savor every poem in this rich meal of words. Many of the poets here demonstrate what is meant by lifting prose into poetry, sometimes by filling our ears with a rich complex of sounds and rhythms. Virtually all of them take risks with conversational language, but turn the line with well-placed images, surreal elements, and daring structures and innovative styles (and I’m not talking about spreading words all over the page, though when done skillfully, can be very effective).

Our featured poet, Sue Brannon Walker, a former Alabama Poet Laureate (2003-2012), starts us with an edgy batch of work: “What is Found There,” a found poem (a cento) whose title is taken from the famous Adrienne Rich poem; “Bathsheba Bathing on the Roof,” an ekphrastic poem inspired by both music and a painting; “Committee by Fiat,” a poetic rant with linguistic delights; and an unusual prose sestina, “Nature like Mother is an Improper Name (Shillyshallying Sin).”

Marge Simon’s haunting piece, “Awaiting Another War in D Minor,” changes the direction of the thrust but sustains the energy from Dr. Walker’s poems. The deceptive simplicity of Mel Goldberg’s poem, “Weakling,” is also haunting, but in a very different sense. Adele Gardner’s “Everything and I,” might look like prose, but do not be deceived by this surreal piece. “Greek Fire” by Darrell Lindsey has many textures (perhaps even a spiritual one, at least for me it did). “All worlds meet at Happy Nails” by Emily K. Bright is playful, yet wrought with precision, light as a feather and heavy as lead. The series is concluded with Vanessa Kittle’s “The Nap Between the Worlds.” This is another deceptively innocent poem leaving me longing for more—the poem lives beyond the last line.

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Published by Karl Rademacher on July 9, 2014. This item is listed in Interview, Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Main Features

Interview with Bruce Boston

by John C. Mannone

Bruce-Boston-1980_350

Bruce Boston

Bruce Boston is the author of fifty books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener’s Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His writing has appeared in countless publications, most visibly in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, The Pedestal Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase. One of the leading genre poets for more than a quarter century, Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award for Poetry Collection, the Asimov’s Readers Award for Poetry, the Rhysling Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and the Grandmaster Award of the SFPA. His fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, twice been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (novel, short story), and a finalist for the Micro Award (flash fiction).

John: To say you are a prolific writer, as well as being highly accomplished, is an understatement.  Click here for a bibliographic summary..

Having read other fine interviews with you, such as John Amen’s in The Pedestal (issue 11, 2002) and Van der Hooft’s in Strange Horizons (June 2007), where you address what speculative poetry is, would you please summarize your thoughts about what it is for our readers who might ask if a speculative poem is just a science fiction or fantasy poem, especially since you helped define the genre?

Bruce: If you are talking absolute categories, the defining characteristic that sets speculative poetry apart from mainstream poetry is that it speculates. Mainstream poetry concerns itself with the everyday world that we inhabit and perceive: personal relationships, observations of people and the city and of nature, social and sometimes political situations, etc.  When you encounter an “I” voice in mainstream poetry, it is most often the author of the poem speaking directly to the reader about something in the real world. In contrast, speculative poetry deals more with the imagination: the world as it might be, the nature of reality, why we are here, what the future may hold, the existence of the supernatural, etc. It fashions scenarios of the possible rather than the actual. When you encounter an “I” voice in speculative poetry, it is most often a fictional character speaking, not the poet. Since the real world exists not in terms of absolute categories but of gradations from one category to another, it is not always completely clear whether a poem is speculative or not.

 

John: I understand that your first passion was fiction. How did you become interested in speculative poetry? And as you write fiction today, what has poetry brought to the table besides the effective use of metaphor and other poetic devices in your fiction.

Bruce: In 1971 I joined a group in Berkeley, California: The Berkeley Poets Cooperative.  I already had an interest in poetry from reading poets such as Pound, Eliot, Ginsberg, Poe, and a score of others. And I’d already written some poetry that had been published in Occident, the University of California, Berkeley, literary magazine.  Each week the group held an open workshop, so I began writing poems more regularly to contribute to it. My poems were often distinctively different from other in the group. I was writing speculative poetry, though I didn’t yet have at name for it. It was not until the late seventies that I connected with Robert Frazier and his magazine The Anthology of Speculative Poetry, and through Bob the Science Fiction Poetry Association, that I discovered fellow writers who were mining the same imaginative vein that I was in poetry.

Poetry and fiction both employ the medium of language. Anything that enhances one’s language skills is going to enhance both, and seriously practicing the craft of poetry certainly enhances one’s language skills: brevity, the perfect word for the line (or sentence), symbolism, assonance and dissonance, rhythm, flow, etc.  I generally read poems aloud at some point while composing them, and for certain passages in fiction, I do the same thing.

 

John: If there is such a thing as a typical writing day, please share your process with us. If the process is unique each time you write, then could you share the triggers of inspiration?

Bruce: There is no typical writing day unless I am working on something long: a novel, a long story, or a very long poem.  Then I write first thing in the morning and try to put in four or five hours at it, sometimes returning to it for another hour or two later in the day.  If I am writing shorter poems or flash fictions there is no schedule. I write when the spirit moves me, sometimes not writing for weeks at a time. A thirty-line poem may percolate for days or even months, changing a little and becoming more polished each time I return to it, until I feel it is complete and ready to submit for publication.

 

John: In a recent and fascinating article posted in The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/05/daily-rituals-creative-minds-mason-currey), Oliver Burkeman reviews the book “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work” by Mason Currey. We learn six lessons from history’s most creative minds; one of them is the practice of “strategic substance abuse.” I think many of us are familiar with Edgar Allen Poe and his indulgence to alcohol, or Calvin Coleridge, and his to cocaine, when they created some of the finest speculative fiction or poetry in history. And though hardly abusive, I do enjoy a glass or two of dry red wine when I create poetry (or write interviews. LOL). So tell us if your experiences support Currey’s thesis.

Bruce: Very much so, though I think I’d refer to it as “use” rather than “abuse.”  I’ve consumed a large quantity and variety of mind-altering substances in my life. When the mind is in an altered state one’s imagination can be stimulated and you are more likely to travel mental byways that lead to ideas and perceptions you would have never experienced otherwise. Thus the ingestion of certain substances can contribute to one’s creativity and imagination, just as your glass or two of wine does for you. However, I believe abuse of such substances is detrimental to both creativity and one’s health. And I don’t write final drafts of either poems or stories in a mind-altered state. That’s where the craft of writing comes in.

 

John: You close your recent collection, Dark Roads, with “Thirteen Ways of Looking at and through Hashish.”  Its clever final lines might elucidate what we’ve talked about in the previous question.

“Tendrils of illumination
Cling to my thoughts,
Trailing in my wake,
Puzzling to those
Whose paths I cross,
Those ever immersed
In the dull endurance
Of their daily tasks,
Without illusions,
Without perception
Of what lies beyond
The stolid borders
Of the everyday,
Insensate and
Unable to travel
In the domains
Of space and time
And consciousness.”

Bruce: Actually, I think the whole twenty-page poem does. But please note that the poem as a whole portrays not only the positive but the negative aspects of mind-altering chemicals.

 

John: This, of course, is a good segue into your latest collection. I’ve had the pleasure of reading Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems/1971-2012 (Dark Renaissance Press 2013). Thirty one poems span over the 156 pages. Share with us what you’d like your potential readers to know about this fine collection. (And of course, tell us how we can purchase it.)

Bruce: Dark Regions Press published a retrospective collection of my work in 1995 – Sensuous Debris: Selected Poems 1970-1995.  Since nearly twenty years had transpired since that book, and more than forty since I began writing speculative poetry, I thought it was time for another retrospective collection covering my entire career as a speculative poet. However, when I began to assemble it I realized that if I included all my own favorites poems along with those readers had single out, I would be looking at a three-hundred-page collection, which seems to me excessive for a book of poetry.  Therefore, I first decided to limit the book to long poems, all those fifty lines or over.  And next, since I’ve been working more in the horror field than science fiction for the last dozen or so years, I decided to limit it to dark poems.

You can purchase the regular trade paper edition of Dark Roads at Amazon, the signed limited trade paper at Dark Renaissance Books and Dark Regions Press, and the signed, limited hardcover edition at Bad Moon Books, Camelot Books, and Ziesing Books.

 

John: The illustrations by M. Wayne Miller in Dark Roads are remarkable. Your wife, Marge Simon, is also a notable poet and artist, whose artwork is fascinating, too, and she is quite skilled at ekphrasis—one art form complementing another (a fair way of defining it).

So, in general, how do you collaborate with Marge, and what advice can you give other writers collaborating with their counterparts?

Bruce: Joe Morey at Dark Renaissance Books selected Wayne Miller to illustrate Dark Roads, and I couldn’t have been more pleased, particularly once I saw the work he produced for the book.

Marge and I have collaborated in several different ways and forms.  Marge has illustrated several of my collections, which is a kind of collaboration since her art was in response to specific poems. We have also collaborated on cartoons, Marge’s art along with ideas that I came up with or we did together.  However, most of our collaborations have been with poetry and flash fiction. This generally happens when Marge is stalled on a piece and I contribute some ideas and lines that get it moving again. Then we pass it back and forth until it feels finished and we are both satisfied with it.

As far as advice for couples or any writers collaborating: 1) If your styles of writing are too disparate, don’t try it; 2) Have a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish with a particular poem or story, and make sure you agree on it. 3) Never collaborate unless you are both enthusiastic about it.

 

John: We are delighted to reprint or publish for the first time some of your poems in this issue: “Living in a World Of Giants,” “For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets” (Asimov’s SF Magazine, April 1984 and 1985 Rhysling Award winner), “Visions of the Blue Clone” (Shades Fantastic, 2006), and “The City and the Stars” (The Pedestal Magazine, 2002). Would you care to give the genesis of each of these poems and/or any interesting anecdote concerning them?

Bruce: Not sure about the genesis of each poem, but I can say something about each:

 

“Living in a World of Giants” –  Modern science, despite it’s many wonderful practical achievements that have given us a living standard superior to kings of a hundred years ago, remains totally impotent regarding one important aspect of our daily lives.

“For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets” – This one was written thirty years ago, and I don’t remember what prompted it.  It’s a mix of science fiction imagery and surreal imagery.  The “spacers” of the title can be interpreted literally as far future space travelers, or metaphorically as anyone who has lost their way and is struggling with life’s complications.

Visions-of-the-Blue-Clone_50“Visions of the Blue Clone” – This is an ekphrastic poem based on my own art. In some early version of Windows there was a free graphics program included called Picture It.  I started playing around with it as a recreation, taking photographs and other images and manipulating and changing them.  By taking an old photo of Marge, I created the image below.  This consequently inspired the poem, which portrays the aspects of a developing relationship using a biblical metaphor.

“The City and the Stars” –  The title of the poem is taken from an early Arthur C. Clarke novel where the last surviving humans live in a huge enclosed arcology on a barren Earth.  They have forgotten about the stars completely and lost their aspirations to reach them. I took the same idea and compared it to humans living in a contemporary city. This is one of the poems that stands on the borderline between speculative and mainstream, and it first appeared in a literary magazine, not a speculative publication.

 

John: What projects do you have on the near and far horizons?

Bruce:  For the first time in many years, I’m project-less at the moment.  I could put together a retrospective collection of my shorter poems, or an entirely new collection of previously uncollected poems.  But the book market is so glutted these days by indie and small press books, and ebooks, often offered for free, that it seems like a fruitless endeavor.  Though I will be continuing to submit new poetry and fiction to magazines and anthologies.

 

John: Thank you

Bruce: Thanks for having me.  I hope your readers enjoy the poems.

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Published by Karl Rademacher on July 9, 2014. This item is listed in Introductions, Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry

Introduction to Silver Blade Poetry Issue 20

by John C. Mannonejcm

Silver Blade is proud to present five excellent poets for your continued enjoyment of cutting edge speculative poetry: F.J. Bergmann, Bruce Boston (Featured Poet), William Doreski, James Hutchings, and Clyde Kessler.

Bruce Boston, a notable force in the genre, is our Featured Poet. Please read our interview with him here. The Boston series is a small cross-section of his prolific career. It begins with a new piece, “LIVING IN A WORLD OF GIANTS,” which contrasts the immensity of nature and the apparent minuscule-ness of man. “FOR SPACERS SNARLED IN THE HAIR OF COMETS” (Asimov’s SF Magazine, April 1984) is the 1985 Rhysling Poetry Award winner for short poems, which considers another giant—the vastness of space. “THE CITY AND THE STARS” (The Pedestal Magazine #11, 2002), a ballad-like poem, demonstrates how rhyming poetry can be deftly done with well-crafted slant end rhymes. “VISIONS OF THE BLUE CLONE” (Shades Fantastic, 2006) is a clever creation myth metaphor.

James Hutchings gives us yet another well-crafted rhyming poem, “TIME AND THE TRADESMAN” that addresses another giant of sorts, Time. It’s rhyme scheme is novel (aaad bbbd cccd) and has a ubiquitous, but not stifling, anapestic beat.

F.J. Bergmann’s “Primordial” show the power of love. This is followed by a gripping poem with religious flavor, “Appian Tombs” by William Doreski. Clyde Kessler brings “Blackbird Forest,” a sensitive and disturbing piece with surreal elements. Perhaps it is about posttraumatic stress from an encounter in Vietnam or Cambodia, perhaps not. You decide. And we close with another Doreski poem, “So Shipwrecked” that left me wanting to read more of his poems. Please enjoy this fine collection of poems.

John C. Mannone
Poetry Editor

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Published by Associate Editor on May 12, 2014. This item is listed in Introductions, Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

Introduction to Silver Blade Poetry May 2014

by John C. Mannone

As this issue evolved, a theme emerged, which touched many aspects of love and life—there’s the love for one’s friend, a mate, nature, and life itself. Our Featured Poet, Robert Frazier, opens with a poem (Imageography) that speculates on the mind of Albert Einstein; it’s not a love poem (unless you count my love of physics), but it reminds me of something this great physicist once said: “Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Robert Frazier (Nantucket, MA) sets a dark stage (Your Dark Angel) with what he says has “a beatnik cadence a la Howl or Ferlinghetti,” which segues into the plaintive poem on Mars (Red Truths). Jane Ellen Glasser (Lighthouse Point, FL) follows with the first of her two poems (For the Love of Certain Spaces). It is a wonderful list poem speaking of a love of “certain places” that nature has given us. JD DeHart (Cleveland, TN) presents a poem (Erasure) that uses an interesting metaphor. It is a short poem, but powerful. Love has no bounds. Anne Carly Abad (Manilla, Phillipines) proves this with her compelling poem (Vessels). The word syzygy means a conjunction of three astronomical objects, among other things, like Joshua Gage (Brecksville, OH) shows in his love sonnet (Syzygy), which approaches the Spensurian form. There is more than skilled slant rhymes in this poem. The selection closes with a second poem from Glasser, another modern sonnet—love poem (How We Happened). I think it makes for a happy ending to a great selection of poems from some very talented poets. Enjoy.

 

John C. Mannone

Poetry Editor

 

Poetry in this issue:

Interview with Featured Poet Robert Frazier

Imageography by Robert Frazier

Your Dark Angel by Robert Frazier

Red Truths by Robert Frazier

For the Love of Certain Spaces by Jane Ellen Glasser

Erasure by JD DeHart

Vessels by Anne Carly Abad

Syzygy by Joshua Gage

How We Happened by Jane Ellen Glasser

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Published by Associate Editor on June 13, 2013. This item is listed in Introductions, Issue 18, Main Features, Poetry

Introduction to Silver Blade Poetry Issue 18

 

Welcome to Issue 18. Though there is no Featured Poet in this issue, we still bring a full complement of speculative poems written by six excellent poets, as well as by your poetry editor. We are proud to publish so many established voices in this issue (and we often publish new and emergent ones alongside them). As usual, the poems are ordered according to content and mood, rather than by contributor names.

The opening poem, “The Music of the Stars” by Bruce Boston, is the winner in the 2013 Maryland Regional Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention (see Balticon 47, http://www.balticon.org/) poetry contest. It is a pensive psalm-like homage to the stars. The wonderful chant of that poem sets us up for another invocation, of sorts. “A Prayer on Ganymede” by John Grey, is layered with textures of irony and satire.

There are many ways in which mankind can examine himself. In “Eye for an Eye,” Laura Madeline Wiseman does it through the eyes of Martians. Her pieces are often humorous, but in this case, it is sobering and poignant. (Recently accepted for publication, both of Wiseman’s Martian poems will be available in her chapbook, Stranger Still, and in her full-length book American Galactic.)

Astronomy-related poetry is much more than poetic descriptions of heavenly objects, or the simple wonderment of “Who’s out there?” and of imagined encounters; nor are the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars, also, mere backdrops or clichéd mood settings, though all of these things are worth exploring. Rather, more often in a successful literary poem, astronomy might provide metaphors for the human condition, as we might see in Wiseman’s poem and others, including Dawnell Harrison’s poem, “A Wintry Fever.” It is short, but piercing.

Though we had a wonderful transitioning piece, the contributor could not be contacted, so I will act as the bridge. “Alien Ants Invade the Waffle House” by John C. Mannone, has a little humor as the title might suggest, but there is a serious subtext in this narrative flash poem.

The final two poems are imbued with fantastical elements accented with spiritual tones. “The Elixir” by Sandy Hiortdahl, is a narrative poem in a fine storytelling tradition. (Incidentally, her doctoral dissertation was on Gardner’s Grendel as a reinvention of Beowulf; she even learned Anglo Saxon so she could do it right). And “Milk Witch” by John Zaharick, another narrative poem, which is infused with unusual images, surprises, and literary depth, closes the selection.

Please enjoy this collection of poems (that straddle many aspects of literary speculative poetry), the complementing images, and mp3 voice recordings (when available).

Sincerely,
John C. Mannone
Poetry Editor

 

The Line-up

 

1 Bruce Boston The Music of the Stars (reprint)
2 John Grey A Prayer on Ganymede
3 Laura Madeline Wiseman Eye for an Eye
4 Dawnell Harrison A Wintry Fever
5 John C. Mannone Alien Ants Invade the Waffle House
6 Sandy Hiortdahl The Elixir
7 John Zaharick Milk Witch

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