Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

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

Erasure

by JD DeHart

erasure

Errors so easily creep their way in;
the floating article, the misspelled term,
the vines of human frailty.
It is almost too sublime the way
the eraser slides in, his silver hair,
shadow and sunlight suit, gesturing
a monochromatic pantomime.
Soon the evidence will melt away,
wax withering under a powerful wick.

BIO: JD DeHart teaches English in East Tennessee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Illumen, Star*Line, Randomly Accessed Poetics, and Manic Fervor among other publications, and has been a guest editor for Z-composition.

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

Syzygy

by Joshua Gage

syzygy The moan inside your throat is a constellation
that guides my lips, my tongue. Here is the shore
of your neck, your shoulder, the small dark islands
of your nipples where the night descends in storm.

Come to me naked, hips a swollen moon
pulled in orbit around my waist. Let tides
rise. Let waves flood the sand dunes
of our skin. Let the boats of our villages capsize.

Let me lightning your heavens. Let me streak your sky
with the thousand comets of my burning kisses.
Let me burst a thousand meteorites
through your atmosphere to spray your crust.

I fall in retrograde and drag the cosmos
behind until we tremble into dust.

BIO: Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland, His first full-length collection, breaths, is available from VanZeno Press. Intrinsic Night, a collaborative project he wrote with J. E. Stanley, was published by Sam’s Dot Publishing. His most recent collection, Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse, is available on Poet’s Haven Press. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, rye whiskey and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs. He stomps around Cleveland in a purple bathrobe where he hosts the monthly Deep Cleveland Poetry hour and enjoys the beer at Brew Kettle.

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

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

Imageography

by Robert Frazier

imageography
There are the wild-hair ones
Ones with glasses, the pipe, the violin
Riding that bicycle (with cast shadow)
The posed hand to the chalkboard
And posed seated with hands clasped
The madcap tongue photo
On the beach (in trunks not hat)
The aged and worn math genius
The youthful man looking a bit like Poe
Or later in Bern like Sellers as Clouseau
With cousin/bride Elsa (in her hat)
The official 1921 Nobel portraits
Accepting a U.S. citizenship certificate
The ‘Dead at 76’ headline head shot
His brain stolen from the Smithsonian
But the telling image for me
Is Einstein standing in his study
Books askew on the shelves
The desk a mound of paperwork
His finger and thumb to his chin
Musing as if he’d misplaced a pen
In the chaos of text and symbol
Or lost a phrase of pure physics
Perhaps momentarily
Perhaps from a misconnection
In the all-fired synaptic unity
Of his complicated memory field
He seems most human then
Most at peace in a universe
He reimagined

(First published in Strange Horizons, 12/19/11)

BIO: Robert Frazier is the author of eight books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. He has won an Asimov’s Reader Award and has been on the final ballot for a Nebula Award for fiction. His books include Perception Barriers, The Daily Chernobyl, and Phantom Navigation (2012). His 2002 poem, “A Crash Course in Lemon Physics,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His long poem, “Wreck-Diving the Starship,” was a runner-up for a 2011 Rhysling Award. Recent works have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dreams & Nightmares, and Strange Horizons.

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

Interview with our Featured Poet Robert Frazier

by John C. Mannone

Robert Frazier

Robert Frazier is the author of eight previous books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. He has won an Asimov’s Reader Award and been on the final ballot for a Nebula Award for fiction. His books include PerceptionBarriers, TheDailyChernobyl, and Phantom Navigation (2012). His 2002 poem “A Crash Course in Lemon Physics” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Recent works have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, F&SF, Dreams & Nightmares, and Strange Horizons. His long poem “Wreck-Diving the Starship” was a runner-up for a 2011 Rhysling Award.

Robert Alexander Frazier (1951-), born in Ayer, Massachusetts, is an American writer of speculative poetry and fiction, as well as an impressionist painter on Nantucket Island. He freelances as a graphic designer and currently serves at the Artists Association of Nantucket as their Curator of Exhibitions.

While at the University of Iowa, Frazier attended courses in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has also attended the Clarion Workshop (Ann Arbor, Michigan) and the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop.

His first science fiction story, “Across Those Endless Skies,” appeared in In the Field of Fire (1987). He has won the Rhysling Award three times: for Best Long Poem in 1994, and for Best Short Poem in 1980 and 1989. In 1984, Frazier edited the landmark anthology of SF poetry Burning With A Vision: Poetry of Science and the Fantastic (Owlswick Press).

He is a founding member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and a two-time past editor of Star*Line. In 2005, the Science Fiction Poetry Association named him a Grand Master.

Nominated numerous times for the Rhysling Poetry Award, he has collaborated with another Grand Master, Bruce Boston, on a long poem, “Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest,” which was voted by the magazine Locus in their Online Poetry Poll as the “Best All-Time Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror Poem” in 2006.

Some of the more recent books are:

Exiled on Main Street (The AAN Press, 2011)

The Waterfront Artists, Painters Who Changed Nantucket (The AAN Press, 2012)

Phantom Navigation (cover by Margaret Fox, Dark Regions Press, 2012)

(Excerpted from Wikipedia; more details found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frazier_(writer) )

_________________________________________________________________________

John C. Mannone (JCM): Thank you Bob for taking the time to do this interview. As anyone can see from your bio, you are a recognized force in speculative poetry. I am going to ask the unaskable, and perhaps the unanswerable question, “What is poetry?” Perhaps at least some qualities what you visualize a good poem should possess, especially in contradistinction to prose.

Robert A. Frazier (RAF): Ah, a poem is just something you call a poem. To paraphrase Damon Knight, you crank the handle and it goes “ding.” Also, I’m in the camp that believes you have to ask how does a poem mean, not what does it mean. From another angle, there are certain differences in writing. I see non-fiction as presenting as many facts as are necessary. Fiction builds as much storyline as is necessary. Poetry does neither. Poetry is about stating little and implying more, about creating ripples. I find that when I begin a fiction or non-fiction piece, I feel that slicing buzz in the gut, that impetus. But prolonged work can dull that feeling. When I end a poem (save for perhaps a bit of rewrite), I still have that buzz going. I write poetry like I paint en plein air. I get it done, no matter the length, in one blast.

JCM: Now let’s focus on speculative poetry. Do you find unique challenges relative to other types of poems?

RAF: Actually, I find working in speculative poetry to be a liberating experience. I write a good deal on straight science subjects. I write poetry with fantastic elements (fantasy, dark/horror, science fiction, etc.). I do surreal poetry, and the odd experimental form like concrete poetry. All these forms, if you like, seem to find a home in the speculative small press or pro markets. Even the occasional confessional poem, involving geologic time on a hike in Maine or body surfing through bioluminous waves or spotting Halley’s Comet with my daughter, to cite three examples, can slip in there. That’s a wide fairway to hit off the tee.

Restrictions from publications like poem length or subject matter are always a challenge to publication, yet the quantitative numbers of speculative markets continue to stay healthy, though not robust.

I should note that one unsolvable challenge concerns the label science fiction poetry. Poetry and fiction in the same handle…ouch. Who thought that could work? It begs the necessity of presenting a narrative poem. Yet there’s plenty of excellent science fiction in poetry that relies on other voices besides the narrative voice, other arcs besides a character arc.

JCM: We are delighted to share these poems with the readers: “Red Truths,” “Your Dark Angel,” and “Imageography.” Take one (or more) of these poems and give us the backstory—not only the genesis of the poem, but also some of its salient crafting features. (I can’t help it, it’s the teacher in me.)

RAF: Is their an angel watching over you? I ask that question in the context of the future, or perhaps it’s the present, in terms of privacy. We have cams in the cities, phone calls secretly archived, financial data, camera drones shrinking in size. All of this gathers information on us. But we’re not as concerned as perhaps we should be, in part because we know so much data overwhelms the ability to collate, compress, comprehend. But what if. What if something, some entity develops on its own. What if an angel, in the cloud perhaps, records everything about you. So “Your Dark Angel” is cautionary, and I found the voice that worked for me, that transferred that caution, was a fast breathless repetitive voice. In a beatnik cadence a la Howl (Ginsberg) or He (Ferlinghetti) or The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (Bly).

JCM: What an honor it must be to be a Grand Master. Can you tell us a little of the process on how you became one? Does it lead to a self-imposed pressure every time you submit work?

RAF: Every few years there is an eligibility year designated by the Science Fiction Poetry Association (there’s the term again) for voting on a Grand Master. Someone who has contributed to the speculative poetry field in a number of ways. I believe a member has to put forth a candidate, and back up their nomination with bio material, biblio material, and citations of their involvement.

In my case, I’ve guest-edited magazines, written and presented history articles on speculative poetry, illustrated poems, edited some publications, edited the anthology Burning With a Vision, and have generally been involved from a bunch of angles. Also, I’ve either edited, co-edited, or done graphic design for Star*Line for the majority of its 35+ years as the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Somewhere in there I have a family and a career in fine arts. And I sleep, though not as well as I used to. But then who does?

JCM: Cover art is such an important part of marketing strategy. What can you recommend to the readers who have a collection of poems to publish (either self-publish or publish through a small independent press)? Some printers want to choose the cover art for one’s book (I think CreateSpace). Any caveats? I noticed that you, an accomplished artist and graphical designer, don’t always do your own cover art. Perhaps you can enlighten us. (I think I understand, but I am only guessing. Having done lots of electrical baseline calculations for nuclear power plants, one would think I’d easily deal with my own house wiring. Yet I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Perhaps we’re just too close to our own environs and want a distant “eye.”)

RAF: A book line usually has a look, per se, that makes it easier for a potential reader to recognize the content, especially when genre labels are attached. So the publisher has to consider that. If you are marketing a poetry collection, you should wait until the publisher commits before you address the cover. Then you can make a case for an illustrator you favor, or a specific image that you know is available. It is much harder to sell a book when the illustration(s) are a part of the package you are submitting. Why apply limitations?

That said, I prefer added variety in a book. Cover-wise, I have been more than lucky in my suggestions. Berkeley Poets Cooperative seemed pleased to accept my suggestion for a cover drawing by David Macauley (The Way Things Work, Motel of the Mysteries) to grace Perception Barriers (1987). And it helps to have friends on Nantucket who are artists. My buddy Margaret Fox did a superb, surreal cover for my Dark Regions collection Phantom Navigation (2012). DR loved it so much that they asked her for more work.

I’ve wired a two-way switch before, but I’ll stick to brushes and keyboards, thank you.

JCM: Though I suspect it is an automatic thing for a poet who is a visual artist as well, is there anything you can share about the process of creating a poem stimulated by a visual image or vice versa. I thoroughly enjoy creating ekphrastic poems, but I’m not sure I can explain the process. The value in understanding it just a little is to optimize the result. Knowing how to look at a picture or a piece of art might help. Your thoughts?

RAF: I’ve been taken with photographs of Albert Einstein for a few years now. Written some poems that used the photos or one photo as an ekphrastic kick-start. When I find a new image in a book or online, I revisit my curiosity about a life extraordinarily lived. Still haven’t tackled a piece that starts from a photo of AE’s brain in a jar. Eventually I will. I guess I need to research more about pathologist Thomas Harvey and that part of the, ah, convoluted story. I’m big on research.

I feel that consciously picking out a stunning Dali to use as a poem starter would be a recipe for weak poetics, unless you are forced in a workshop situation, but if one of his paintings consistently haunts you, for whatever reason, then that is likely the one to stimulate a successful poem. I’ve gone back to Isle of the Dead, a series of paintings by Böcklin ca. 1880-86, several times for inspiration.

For sources I recommend some of the genre artists: Richard Powers’ spectacular surreal Ballantine covers in the 1950s and 60s. The line art of Ian Miller. Ed Emshwiller’s magazine covers. Big technology art of John Berkey or Frank Paul. Mike Whelan is impeccable at fantasy. As is Trina Schart Hyman or J.K. Potter.

JCM: You write about science in much of your poetry, yet you don’t paint realistic works. How do you reconcile the left-brain with the right-brain?

Well, my father taught cryptography for Army Security. This was after working with the earliest forerunners of the computer, including Turing’s bombe when Dad was at Bletchley Park during WWII. My mother was a librarian and an oil painter who studied with master impressionist Emile Albert Gruppé of the Rockport School as a teen. I like to say, the mystical science of deciphering gibberish into plain text somehow meshes with a penchant for fanciful imagery in my poetry.

JCM: We are well into the new year, but I’ve found myself reflecting on my 2014 writing goals. What can you share about setting goals and how have you faired this year in that respect?

RAF: Not well. I’ve spent much of this year curating a museum exhibition for the Nantucket Historical Association, a big organization on the island. It’s been eating up my time. As well, I have a solo exhibition in July. I’ve gone back to using the palette knife for landscapes, employing techniques I learned from my mother, a true professional. But I’ll get on with it by fall. It was a decade between poetry collections for me when Phantom Navigation came out. I almost have enough good stuff for another collection.

JCM: Tell us about your successful writing projects; entice our readers so that we’d want to rush out and purchase them.

RAF: Good luck finding them. The art history books are local and sold out. The poetry books are all out of print, save for Phantom Navigation. If you can find the book of novellas I did with my dear friend Lucius Shepard, Nantucket Slayrides with a Potter cover, I have one in that. High Fantastic, Colorado stories edited by Steve Tem, collects one of my favorites, “How I Met My First Wife, Juanita”. Anything in The Mutant Rain Forest, the shared world I invented and habitated often with Bruce Boston and, for one novelette, Lucius.

JCM: Tell us about your new writing projects.

RAF: I’m working on a story set on a badly terraformed Mars that I find engaging, but I haven’t seriously worked in fiction for a long time. It’s been pretty much poetry for years. I was blocked on writing poems in 2007-08, but I’ve refound my muse. We’ll see if my prose comes back.

Published by Associate Editor on February 9, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

Catana

by Marge Simon

Fall comes.
I step outside for a smoke
hopeful for a glimpse of her, and yes!
she’s basking in the afternoon sun
all tawny gold, her hair the color of leaves.
She stretches a shapely leg,
lifts it up to lick her silky fur.

My breath catches
at the sight of such raw beauty,
but she hears the match strike,
turns toward me with a snarl.

She moves away quickly,
crawls into her lair under the house.
At least I can tell it won’t be long now,
she’ll have our kit before the cold.
Afterwards, I’ll bring it in.

She won’t like it,
doesn’t like me, doesn’t like
to be touched, but she’ll allow it
for the sake of her kit—our kit.

If only she were human,
she’d love me as I do her.
But she’s a hominid,
more feline than woman,
product of modern science
and sold like the rest for pets,
sex toys or concubines.

She doesn’t understand
what true love is.

AUTHOR BIO: Marge Simon’s works appear in publications such as Strange Horizons, Niteblade, DailySF Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, Dreams & Nightmares. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She has won the Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, the Bram Stoker Awardâ„¢, the Rhysling Award and the Dwarf Stars Award. Collections: Like Birds in the Rain, Unearthly Delights, The Mad Hattery, Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls, and Dangerous Dreams. Member HWA, SFWA, SFPA. www.margesimon.com

Published by Associate Editor on February 9, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

Interview with Geoffrey A. Landis and Mary A Turzillo

Featured Poets for Silver Blade Issue 21

Geoffrey A. Landis and Mary A Turzillo

Silver Blade is proud to present these poets who just happen to be husband and wife. Both are notable and highly regarded speculative poet/writer and each deserves an individual interview. But I wanted to do something different. I wanted to interview both of them together to explore the dynamics of husband and wife “teams” engaged in the same or similar genres, even if there may not be any obvious collaborative work between them. (I got the idea not too long ago when Silver Blade interviewed Bruce Boston for Issue 20 and posed a question about his collaboration with Marge Simon, whom, like him is a notable voice in speculative poetry.)

Here is a brief summary of our esteemed Featured Poets:

Geoffrey A. Landis is a scientist and a science-fiction writer. He is the author of eighty published short stories and novelettes, and just under fifty poems. His novel Mars Crossing appeared from Tor Books, and a short story collection Impact Parameter (and other quantum realities) from Golden Gryphon. In 1990 his story “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” won the Nebula award for best short story; in 1992 his short story “A Walk in the Sun” won the Hugo award; and in 2003 his short story “Falling Onto Mars” won the Hugo. His novel Mars Crossing won the Locus Award for best first novel of 2000. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages.

Dr. Landis is a scientist with the N.A.S.A. John Glenn Research Center and has published 400 scientific papers in the fields of photovoltaics and astronautics, holds seven patents on photovoltaic device designs, has written dozens of articles about model rocket technology, and has worked on a number of space missions, including his current assignment on the Mars Exploration Rovers.

He is the recipient of the prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Award (the ceremony will be at the Balticon, May 2014).

Find more about Geoff here: http://www.geoffreylandis.com/

Mary A. Turzillo: After a career as a professor of English at Kent State University, Dr. Mary A. Turzillo is now a full-time writer. In 2000, her story “Mars Is No Place for Children” won SFWA’s Nebula award for best novelette. Her novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog in July-Nov 2004. These two works have been selected as recreational reading on the International Space Station.

Mary’s Pushcart-nominated collection of poetry, “Your Cat & Other Space Aliens,” appeared from VanZeno Press in 2007. Her collaborative book of poetry/art, Dragon Soup, written with Marge Simon, appears from VanZeno in 2008.

Mary’s collection Lovers & Killers, in addition to winning the Elgin Award, was also on the Stoker ballot and contains “The Hidden,” second place winner in the Dwarf Stars award for 2012, plus two Rhysling nominees: “Tohuko Tsunami” and “Galatea.”

See http://www.duelingmodems.com/~turzillo/ and http://maryturzillo.livejournal.com/ for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________

In the interview: GL (Geoffrey Landis), MT (Mary Turzillo), JCM (John C. Mannone)

While you both were working on this interview, a pleasant surprise manifested itself: On January 14, 2014, it was announced that you, Geoff, will receive the prestigious 2014 Robert A. Heinlein Award, which is for “outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space.” We at Silver Blade extend a huge congratulation to you. Here is part of the announcement:

“Geoffrey A. Landis, science fiction author and scientist working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is the 2014 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award. The award is bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space. This award is in recognition of Mr. Landis’ body of work including five books, 83 short stories and 76 poems in the SF field as well as over 353 science fact publications.”

To date, the winners of the Robert A. Heinlein Award are as follow:

2014 Geoffrey A. Landis
2013 Allen Steele and Yoji Kondo
2012 Stanley Schmidt
2011 Connie Willis
2009 Joe Haldeman and John Varley
2008 Ben Bova and Spider Robinson
2007 Elizabeth Moon and Anne McCaffrey
2006 Greg Bear and Jack Williamson
2005 Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven
2004 Arthur C. Clarke
2003 Michael Flynn and Virginia Heinlein

Adapted from the Science Fiction & Fantasy writers of America (http://www.sfwa.org/2014/01/geoffrey-landis-receive-2014-robert-heinlein-award/) and the Baltimore Science Fiction Society (http://www.bsfs.org/bsfsheinlein.htm). See these links for fuller discussion.

1) JCM: Geoff, Did you have any idea you were a serious contender for the award? How were you notified—phone, email, postal delivery? Take us back to the moment of discovery and tell us about it. (Add anything you like about receiving this award.)

GL: I had no idea that I was being considered for the award until I was notified that I won it—I guess it’s like the Nobel prize, they don’t release the list of people that they’re considering, just the winners. The notification came by e-mail, and to be honest, when I first saw it, I assumed that it had to be a prank. Of course, like pretty much all the SF readers of my generation, I grew up reading Heinlein, among others, and so I’m tremendously excited at getting the Heinlein award. I think that the award is as much for my non-science-fictional work as for my fiction, but it’s great to think that some of what I’ve written has actually had an influence on people. And, wow, it is quite a high-powered set of people to join the ranks of.

2) JCM: Provide a little background on how your speculative work, in general, evolved, and poetry in particular.

MT: I started writing poetry when I was six, and began fiction a bit later, age twelve. I was influenced by historian William Prescott, Robert Sheckley, Theodore Sturgeon, John D. MacDonald, Mary Webb, Pierre Louÿs, Alfred Bester, and all the science fiction I could lay hands on. Two profound poetical influences on me were e.e. cummings and Don Marquis. Others included Clayton Eschelman, Wanda Coleman and, of course, Charles Bukowski. And Poe, of course. You can probably tell. A real estate agent named Raphineli, trying to sell my parents a house, gave me a black kitten and all his old Galaxy magazines. You can imagine where that led. I wish I could find him now and thank him!

Shakespeare, too. Always Shakespeare. I’ve done roles as Goneril, as the woman attending Lady Macbeth in her sleepwalking scene, Richard III’s mother, etc. The language on one’s tongue instructs one’s brain.

GL: I’ve been reading science fiction ever since I was a kid, so it’s no surprise I started writing it. Poetry was actually more of a later thing—although I did write the occasional poem that I never would have dared to show anybody, I didn’t really write much poetry until I went to Clarion, where Joe Haldeman had everybody write a poem. Clarion was also where I originally met Mary, so it did have a bit of an influence on my life.

3) JCM: How do you both interact with each other, as poets & writers, as you write, edit, and revise your speculative genre pieces?

MT: We used to take our work to a genre-friendly poetry workshop led by this old opinionated galoot, Cy Dostal, who is now dead. We started a speculative poetry group, Speculators, a few years ago.

GL: Yes, Cy was a poet who put the word “cur” in “curmudgeon.” He ran the workshop of the Poet’s League of Greater Cleveland, which I joined when I moved into the area. It was fun. That’s another thing that drew me more into poetry, I guess, joining the community of poets here.

4) JCM: It is clearly possible to emerge with distinct voices, as you both have demonstrated, but how is that? What is it that you do to retain individual voices when, on the surface it would seem to result in a homogenization that might echo the other if, as one might suspect, couples engaged in the same activity?

MT: We really don’t collaborate very much, although we both enjoy and admire each other’s work. We came to our delightful marriage at a relatively late age, so each had developed an idiosyncratic voice.

GL: Well, that’s only partially true—we talk about writing all the time, bounce ideas off each other, discuss plot points. But we do have very different ways of going about a story, or a poem. I like to know where I’m going with a story—less so with a poem, I guess. Mary is more about taking an idea and then just ramping on it, keeping on bending it until it breaks. And them we go back into our little holes when we’re actually writing. (Although these days, likely as not, I’m sitting in the living room on my laptop with a cat on my arm.)

We do collaborate some—often just my suggesting a line, or even a word. And we’ve written about a dozen poems together. But our native styles are a bit disparate.

MT: I think both of us are more and more into the dramatic monolog. We’re both fiction writers, so it’s natural for us to write as personae.

5) JCM: Perhaps the difference lies in the process. Take us through the process of creating a poem (or story) or project on its way from inception to publication. Be sure to include the use of each other as critiquers/editors, if applicable.

MT: Hm. I just finished a book with Marge Simon, Sweet Poison, to be published by Dark Renaissance. I really felt that our process, which was for one of us to send a poem, and then the other to respond with an answer poem on a similar or contrasting topic or theme, helped me explore and nourish my poetic scope.

GL: Yes, usually Mary shares her poems with me when they’re done, and then we usually talk about them, but this new book she was very secretive about—I still haven’t seen the whole book yet! She’s been pretty cozy with Marge—maybe I should be jealous!

MT: My poems tend to start with an image, an idea, or even a short narrative. Then I lay out the poem using the best language I can find in myself. After I’ve laid down a decent draft, I look at such issues as meter and sound patterns, along with poetic tropes and tricks and tomfoolery and sometimes I decide the poem needs to be a form poem, often a sonnet. Other times, I decide that rhymed forms are too formal, too artificial. I want a poem to sound like natural language, although of course the language is highly sculpted by the time I finish a few drafts. If I still want the effect of a form poem but without the remoteness of traditional form, I’ll use slant rhyme or other sound effects. Bruce Boston uses these effects extensively; I admire the sound texture of his work.

GL: Yes, I love the sound of words sometimes; just put words together because I like the way they sound. I write a lot of doggerel, actually. Fortunately, most of it I don’t publish. More often I start with an idea, and then keep elaborating on it. Sometimes I have a short story in my head, and don’t have time to write it, so I write a poem.

MT: Then my poem will be workshopped, usually by the Speculators, although I will run it by anybody willing to read it. Geoff of course. Geoff isn’t as married to the idea of compression as I am, and I’m not as compressed as many poets.

I don’t fall in love with forms and write sestina after sestina. I fall in love with what the poem wants to say. Then the form follows.

I do multiple drafts, ad nauseam, but I do them by sculpting the poem in one shape-shifting document. I seldom fall in love with an older version. I just discard lines, words, syntax as I go. I do have a couple poems where I’ve a slant rhyme version and then a formal sonnet version and I don’t think either of them is finished

I also do readings. Lots of readings. I learn so much about a poem and how it works by watching audience reaction as I’m performing. Major learning process.

GL: I’ve grown to like readings. That’s surprising, since I don’t really like the sound of my own voice. But poems really are meant to be voiced aloud, and sometimes I hear things in a poem when I read that I hadn’t even realized I’d put in them.

MT: I also feel every poem should have something mysterious in it, something the reader thinks might even be a mistake. Like the mistakes in oriental rugs.

GL: I’m ambivalent about obscurity in poetry. I guess I’m mostly on the side of clarity, illumination rather than chiaroscuro, but sometimes, unless you put in footnotes, you can’t explain everything that’s in a poem, it’s just impossible.

6) JCM: Geoffrey, as a fellow scientist, I appreciate the valuable resource of fresh metaphors derived from our scientific fields of study. I appreciate the challenge to quell the left-brain from intruding into our creativity. How do you go about going beyond the poetic description of science and rendering it with literary depth, which is something I consider necessary for it to transcend into a true poem?

GL: I wish I knew! Actually, science is rich in metaphor and connections; everything is related to everything else. But it’s hard, sometimes, to take it beyond the “wow, man, it’s all so cosmic! “ level. Although that is a valid thought! And a lot of physics, in particular, are deep thoughts that are hard to express without mathematics.

7) JCM: Geoffrey, sometimes I hear (from other poets) that scientific language is sterile (probably because many words are Latinate). How would you defend a science poem from such an accusation?

GL: Well, I love Latinate words. Especially dactyls—oh, wait, those are Greek, aren’t they. Using the science words is half the fun. But, in fact, real science has a sense of whimsy to it. I mean, charmed quarks? Come on!

8) JCM: Mary, as an English professor, I wonder how you would feel about scientific expressions in poems. Is there something you can advise the non-scientist reader to appreciate such poems (of course, if they are good to start with)?

MT: Oh, I love scientific expressions in poems. I think they lend surprise and authenticity. I love surprises, love new words. I think I have probably written dozens of poems just around a new word I found. Two caveats: unusual words, scientific words, have to be used accurately, and they have to provide euphony. A clunky-sounding word might work in the right context, though.

Poetry and science are two maps to the real world. Both aspire to precision and accuracy. Both need all the words they can get their hands on.

Oh, think of the naming of new planets. How much poetry there is in that!

9) JCM: Mary, having seen many of your excellent traditional or form poems, is there some insight you can share that makes them successful for you, especially in an era where such poems are a hard sell?

MT: Are they a hard sell? I’ve had good success with them. I think they are a hard sell if the poet forces the material into a form unsuited for it. Since my work is often dramatic monolog, about people (or entities) in weird situations, I try to make my poems read as natural language. That can be done with form (Shakespeare did it all the time), but it’s quite challenging, and I see a lot of poetry out there where the form has just been forced on the material. Maybe another twenty drafts and it would work—or maybe not.

As to writing traditional form poems, I like to enter contests that demand a form unfamiliar to me. I also admire a poet like Mari Ness who becomes obsessed with a difficult form, and this challenges me, though I seldom achieve the proficiency of somebody who has such an obsession.

10) JCM: Neil Gaiman had answered such questions as “What is your source of inspiration” that it’s whatever he makes up. I agree to his insightful answer, but I wonder if there is something more. How would you answer such a question?

MT: Pain. Pleasure. The wind in my face. Creatures. Geoff. My son. Stuff in the news. Scientific discoveries. Outrage. Despair. Anger. Grief. Wonder.

I am still not through writing about my son and his death. That may explain my current interest in swords. I have Jack’s nodachi in my living room. When I gave his swords away to his pallbearers, Geoff kept two back. The nodachi is a scary critter. I wish I knew its name. It haunts and feeds my mind.

GL: I guess I mostly get inspiration by playing with ideas, putting disparate things together and making connections. There are ideas all around. It’s the putting an idea into a concrete form that’s hard.

11) JCM: There are so many things that can be said/taught about the craft of speculative poetry. If you may, please expound on one of your favorite things. Consider this a teaching moment.

MT: Um, see above.

Ultimately, I think authenticity and natural language are so underrated. I think the most important thing a poet can do is not to kill his or her darlings, but to kill clichés. And you have to read a lot in order to recognize a cliché when it assaults you. I privately cringe when I see “pretty” verse, even by my friends. Lyricism is no excuse for flowery, adjective-driven effusions. Make it plain, darn it! Say what you mean. But say it with austerity, dignity, grace, rhythm, euphony, precision, and be sure to hurt your reader just a bit. If you can make the reader bleed, that’s excellent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, write a sonnet a day or a villanelle a day for a year, that’s cool. But at the end of that time, don’t let it just be about finding clever rhymes. Make it about what’s real. And speculate. Always speculate. What if?

GL: Oh, man. That’s hard. I do all the things that Mary says not to do, at least in my first drafts. So my advice, I suppose, is to stop thinking and just put it down on paper in your first draft without thinking, without worrying about making it poetic. You don’t have to show anybody your first drafts!

12) JCM: What is the back story of the your selection of poems here?

MT: Behind “Blue Tulips”: A few years ago, for personal reasons, I became very interested in the mind-body problem, and also in parallel worlds, as in Brian Green’s The Hidden Reality. I wondered if the human consciousness might be governed by exotic physics, such that we might be able to touch parallel universes in our dreams, narratives, and hallucinations. I imagined a quiet woman merging her consciousness with another mind. “Blue Tulips” is written with what’s called elocutionary, rather than syntactical, punctuation, with commas, colons, and line breaks used as tempo markers rather than grammatical indicators. Thus I’m tracking the woman’s inner experience.

Behind “Whales Discover Fireworks”: I treasure a photo of my grandmother as a ten-year-old girl sitting in a tree with a raccoon in her lap. Seventy-odd years after that photo was taken, a baby raccoon moved into my chimney. For two weeks I tried to evict him, and finally managed to lure him out. When I abandoned him in the woods, he gazed longingly after me, hoping, no doubt, for another cookie. The headline about the bottlenose whale is true. All the other stuff is true. We are domesticating all the wild things. Heaven help us. And them.

13) JCM: Tell us about your recent work and any projects in the mill.

MT: I did NaNoWriMo¹: a novel about a Martian cat. But that’s fiction. My poetry brain is taking a short rest right now, after the exuberance of writing the poems in Sweet Poison.

I’ve been engaged with dueling and fencing as a theme in poetry. It’s challenging, because after two years of fencing, I’m just beginning to recognize how ignorant I am of the depths of the sport. I’m in love with a history of swordsmanship, By the Sword, by Richard Cohen. I think this will provide me with interesting problems for years.

GL: Every sword fight is always a poem, anapests answering onto anapests, point and riposte, deft lunges and retreats, ending with a sudden spondee. Like a poem, a duel ends with a single sharp point.

I’ve been working on bits and pieces of all sorts of things. I just finished a story for an anthology called Hieroglyph, about a hotel in Antarctica. A technical report about sailing across the lava plains of Venus. A collection of poems for a local press here in Cleveland, working title “The Book of Whimsy. “ Stabbing people in the heart. The usual stuff.

¹ During National Novel Writing Month, November, the challenge is to write a 50000-word novel, http://nanowrimo.org/ JCM.

14) JCM: Are any collaborative projects on the horizon, especially featuring the two of you together?

MT: We don’t collaborate much, and when we do, sometimes we just can’t agree on a line or a word. I wanted to use a reference to an alewife in a collaborative poem, but that word had an unacceptable connotation for Geoff, so I had to give in and let him use just “fish.”

I still think he’s wrong. (Laughs)

GL: But, alewives are a North American fish! How can you put them in a classical setting? It’s completely wrong! Wrong, I tell you.

JCM: Many thanks Mary and Geoff!

Published by Associate Editor on February 9, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

Night at the Matinee Motel

Narrated by Geoffrey A. Landis

by Geoffrey A. Landis

Night at the Matinee Motel by Geoffrey A. Landis On the screen,
Godzilla is roaring
fighting some monster—
Rodan,
—or, no, it is Mothra
In grainy blue flickering,
it is sometimes hard to tell.

Crumpled pizza boxes on the floor.
The room stinks of sex.

On the screen,
as Japanese people scream and flee,
Godzilla grabs Mothra,
shaking the hundred-foot monster like a dog toy,
and flings it into the ocean
(sinking a passing ocean liner)
roaring.

The bed covers are rumpled, and
underwear is strewn across the room.

On the screen,
Mothra is back!
Godzilla bathes it in a blast of blue flickering fire,
lovingly playing his flame up and down.
He lashes his tail,
and entire city blocks are destroyed.

It is two in the morning.
You have gone
home to your wife and children
who do not even know
of the time you spend in motel rooms
or the things you do
with other men.

On the screen,
Godzilla roars
—the cry like a jet engine as it goes hypersonic—
as he pounces on Mothra;
holds Mothra down with one foot
(crushing a subway train with the other)
grabs it by the back of the neck.

But the room is paid until tomorrow
and I have no one waiting for me
no better place to go.

On the screen,
Godzilla bites Mothra on the back of the neck.
They are not fighting, I see now,
they have never been fighting.
This is the mating dance of monsters.

This room is my Yokohama
lit by blue flickering light,
destroyed by mating monsters.

appeared in Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction (2011)

AUTHOR BIO: Geoffrey A. Landis is a scientist and a science-fiction writer. He is the author of eighty published short stories and novelettes, and just under fifty poems. His novel Mars Crossing appeared from Tor Books, and a short story collection Impact Parameter (and other quantum realities) from Golden Gryphon. In 1990 his story “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” won the Nebula award for best short story; in 1992 his short story “A Walk in the Sun” won the Hugo award; and in 2003 his short story “Falling Onto Mars” won the Hugo. His novel Mars Crossing won the Locus Award for best first novel of 2000. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages.

He is the recipient of the prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Award (the ceremony will be at the Balticon, May 2014).

Find more about Geoff here: http://www.geoffreylandis.com/

Published by Associate Editor on February 9, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

Curiosity

Narrated by Geoffrey A. Landis

by Geoffrey A. Landis

Curiosity by Geoffrey A. Landis

We are curious creatures,
born to wonder,
ever wanting to know what is over
the ridge, the horizon, across the ocean.
What lies
beyond the sky?
Behind the moon?
We yearn to fly.

We are curious creatures,
born to wander,
yearning to know
where the path wends,
where the forest ends,
What is beyond the curve of the world?
What lies beyond the river’s bends?

We are curious creatures,
born to be builders,
to build towers, and clockworks,
build spaceships and robots
to send us out faster
to let us see farther
to probe the dark,
to pierce the sky.

We are wandering creatures,
our sails unfurled.
What monsters lie past
the edge of the world?
“I want to see!” is always our cry.
We have no wings, but yet we still fly

He is the recipient of the prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Award (the ceremony will be at the Balticon, May 2014).

Find more about Geoff here: http://www.geoffreylandis.com/

Published by Associate Editor on February 9, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry

Blue Tulips

Narrated by Mary A. Turzillo

by Mary A. Turzillo

A knack for reading minds:
mostly of children
(“that baby’s tummy hurts”)
or animals
(“he wants you to scratch his ears”)
but one day she saw blue tulips
that had mouths
and a butterscotch sky with green clouds
and she knew
the other mind lived far far away
too far ever to visit.

So this mind lived with her
they became friends
talked about hunting parties
(the blue tulips had wheels and tasted like—
well, delicious, with a mirnish tang)
and how you could float straight up to the pring
if you just closed your elibs and let go
and there were colors so beautiful
quite beyond the red to indigo of earth.

She told the other mind
of the world she saw with her senses
and that mind marveled that creatures,
could live in gas,
could talk with bursts of sound,
could make copies of themselves,
made patterns of sound called music.

Everyone knew she was strange
they thought maybe epilepsy
or maybe a touch of schizo-something
but she was harmless
and since she had no children of her own
and a monotonous job
they let her be

and she stopped talking
about her telepathic knack
because the things she saw
were not what folks at the factory
wanted to hear about.

And one day the other mind
said, please, help me, please, I’m yugling,
and it won’t stop and it hurts

they both knew about hurt
but she couldn’t help
and her friend hurt even more
and called out again, again, again.

So she stayed home from work,
and wept with shared agony
and the horror of seeing her friend going
going going going going away

the next day, the hurt stopped
it all stopped
the blue tulips
the wonderful butterscotch sky

and her knack went away
she went back to the assembly line job
and wished she could hear dogs and children
but inside, she knew,
she was dead.

AUTHOR BIO: After a career as a professor of English at Kent State University, Dr. Mary A. Turzillo is now a full-time writer. In 2000, her story “Mars Is No Place for Children” won SFWA’s Nebula award for best novelette. Her novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog in July-Nov 2004. These two works have been selected as recreational reading on the International Space Station.

Mary’s Pushcart-nominated collection of poetry, “Your Cat & Other Space Aliens,” appeared from VanZeno Press in 2007. Her collaborative book of poetry/art, Dragon Soup, written with Marge Simon, appears from VanZeno in 2008.

Mary’s collection Lovers & Killers, in addition to winning the Elgin Award, was also on the Stoker ballot and contains “The Hidden,” second place winner in the Dwarf Stars award for 2012, plus two Rhysling nominees: “Tohuko Tsunami” and “Galatea.”

See http://www.duelingmodems.com/~turzillo/ and http://maryturzillo.livejournal.com/ for more information