News of yay: my poem ‘Bitter Mnemosyne’ will be appearing in the fantasy and horror magazine Niteblade.
Am very pleased that this poem has found such a good home! It’s about memory, cherries, and a journey to the underworld. Greek mythology was one of my childhood’s great inspirations, so of course such themes surface occasionally even now.
Slept late, read a wonderful book for two hours, went for a walk. A poem rushed out, and I thought I’d share it here:
* * *
Crushed Ice
I can’t see my future, the coming years are hidden
but in this moment the sun’s
shining on me, the sky’s coloured
with promises. The night cold has faded,
the path’s filled with snowbroth –
I wade in spring, the ice cracks under my boots
water welling beneath. My smile
of satisfaction, my wet socks:
it’s like my first spring in Finland
when I learnt the magic
of ice to water
in our garden,
when I crushed ice into shards of the past.
* * *
(Snowbroth is among some delicious words I want to start using.)
Now for the nice stuff I mentioned yesterday! Publications!
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Two of my poems are now online in issue 11 of Curio, “a journal of poetry that explores the world at a micro-level: tiny spaces, instants, individual objects, scraps of dreams and memories, et cetera”.
‘Silver and Gold’ and ‘Man Playing Piazzolla’ can both be found here.
*
Both were written last year. The first draft of ‘Silver and Gold’ happened in early February. I was still working as a research assistant for the Varieng research unit at the University of Helsinki at that point, on the top floor of the Metsätalo building. Lovely views of rooftop Helsinki: the office room I worked in had a view of Helsinki Cathedral. Anyway, one evening in February I was at work late – well, no longer doing research assistant stuff, but working on my MA thesis after my paid job, as was my way. (Those were good times. Yes, seriously! Getting to write my MA thesis at an actual office at uni instead of home or in the library – brilliant.)
Anyway, early evening, I shuffled into the corridor for a break and chanced to see an enchanting view from the big glass wall: thus, a poem. It’s one of the approximately three poems I wrote during the three months I was both working and intensively writing my thesis. So I’m even more pleased that it has found a home!
‘Man Playing Piazzolla’ was written in September last year when I challenged myself with a “week of poetry” as I occasionally do. I was unemployed, wandering the city with my friend, and came across one of the most enchanting street musicians I’ve seen in Helsinki. I’ve seen him since, but that time in September was the first. Magic indeed. He was straight out of an urban fantasy story, and I may yet use him as character inspiration!
There you go. Long rambles about my poems. 🙂 Hope you enjoy them!
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And another poetry sale: my poem ‘Beauty Remembers’ is forthcoming in Polu Texni! Yay!
I just finished a poem I’ve been working on for the past month – at least, I think I finished it, because you never know. I might want to tweak it. I might get brilliant comments from someone that make me want to change it.
But soon it’ll have to be ready, because I mean to submit it to Interfictions tomorrow. HA.
It was wonderful to work on it today – to write, and to have written. I’ve been writing very, very little during the past couple of weeks, because I’ve been suffering from a nasty prolonged flu that flared into an ear infection last week. I’m on antibiotics now, though, and feeling much better. Fingers crossed that the flu doesn’t sneak up on me again. I’ve had enough of being sick and not getting to go to dance class, thanks very much!
But, poetry! Words again! Feels good. And feels especially good to have pretty much finished a long poem project – possibly my longest ever so far, and with my self, my soul, my history crafted into it. No matter if I never get it published anywhere; for me, this was an important thing to write.
I was down with the flu most of last week, so I’ve been too tired and braindead to work on any of my writing projects. Sad. Hopefully the coming week will be better in that respect!
I should post here more than just for Sunday recs. But on weekdays, after work + writing/socialising/dance class/insert other activity here, I’m rarely coherent enough to make sensible posts. Perhaps one day!
Anyway, now for some links.
Goblin Fruit’s winter issue is out! I haven’t had time to read any of the poems yet, but Goblin Fruit is a lovely publication and pretty much all their issues have fantastic stuff. So go there for your fairytale-flavoured poem fix!
Speaking of speculative poetry: Paul Cook writes about why sf poetry is “embarrassingly bad”. Dear readers, I’ll admit I huffed and rolled my eyes while reading this piece. Needless to say, I disagree intensely with Cook. The sample of science fiction poetry that he uses in his piece is hardly representative of the sf poetry genre as a whole! To me it feels like Cook’s just saying “I found a couple of science fiction poems that are bad; hence all sf poetry is bad.” Not very sound reasoning. I’ve read quite a bit of speculative poetry, and while some of it is bad – obviously! Sturgeon’s Law and all that – there are also absolute gems to be found. There are writers who pay attention to the sounds and words and hidden meanings, just like in any other genre of poetry!
F. J. Bergmann has written a response to Cook’s disparaging piece; Bergmann manages to articulate a lot of the things that occurred to me when reading Cook’s piece, so I recommend checking her response out.
And now for some more poetry links. Here are a couple of poems from Goblin Fruit’s archives:
– Huldre by Joshua Gage (a lush, Norse-inspired image)
– All the Mari’s Parties by Mat Joiner (about one of the creepiest creatures in Welsh folklore, the Mari Lwyd)
– Kingdom by Rachel Dacus (a shout of joy).
And finally, in defence of sf poetry: here are some examples of science fiction poems that I think are utterly wonderful. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
– Postcards from Mars by C. S. E. Cooney
– The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages by Megan Arkenberg
– Asteres Planetai by Amal El-Mohtar.
Happy reading! Speaking of which, I just started reading The Lord of the Rings again. For the I’ve-no-idea-how-manyeth time (I used to reread it at least once a year from around age 11 to 17), but this time it’s been almost a decade since I last read it, so it’s a bit of a different experience. And yet not. I absorbed that book so deeply when I was a teenager that each sentence is like coming back home.
Here’s a sundry bevy of recs:
If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names. Some more here and here. I especially enjoyed Eliot, Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams. The WCW parody made me giggle out loud. 😀
Here are a couple of my favourite poems from February’s Snakeskin. Fat by Beccy Pert: such luscious language. And House without Windows by Grace Andreacchi is absolutely gorgeous!
A story: Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters by Alice Sola Kim. A different kind of time travel.
ETA: And some nonfiction too: Eleanor Arnason writes about authenticity, cultural appropriation, and writing outside your own experiences in sf/f.
* * *
Also, today I sat down to write an all-new short story and actually finished the first draft in one go! First prose piece of the year, incidentally. And wonder of wonders, it’s actually short, too. My stories have the tendency to expand, but this one stayed at around 2000 words. Huzzah! It’s about an alchemist bartender, and I rather like it. Perhaps at some point it will be time to submit stories too, not just poems. 🙂
I woke up with aches and pains: it seems my neck and back did not appreciate yesterday’s shenanigans. But checking my email brought some lovely news:
My poem Kinds of Truth is now online in the February issue (#193) of Snakeskin.
It’s quite a recent poem, written in mid-December in the wee hours of the night.
Plans for this weekend:
– I should clean, get through the Mount Doom of dishes, and other housework… (sigh)
– Even though the weather isn’t that great, I want to go for a walk or few, for the sake of my jammed neck as well as for inspiration.
– I’m working on a long-ish poem (mentioned in my previous post); I need to continue with that.
– I want to get some prose written.
– I will also knuckle down to some academic writing. *happyface*
– I think a few episodes of Farscape might make their way into my plans, too.
Have a great weekend, dear readers!
Here are three stories I’ve read and enjoyed recently:
Selkie Stories Are for Losers, by Sofia Samatar: a gorgeous contemporary take on selkies.
The Flying Woman, by Meghan McCarron: a delightful atmosphere, an aching and haunting story.
And Their Lips Rang with the Sun, by Amal El-Mohtar: a lovely, poetic piece, strange in a good way and with a great narrative voice.
All three of these happen to be from Strange Horizons. What can I say? – they publish brilliant stories there.
* * *
And what of my own writing? Well, I just realised that I haven’t written any prose at all yet in 2013 (although I’ve written more than 15 poem drafts), so I should work on that soonish. There is that one novelette that needs to be finished and then edited; and I should edit the snail story. Also, there’s one burgeoning short story idea that I should get out at some point.
As for what’s left of today: I should clean my flat, do the dishes and various other useful household tasks. But earlier today I started a long poem – fragmentary, linguistic and deeply personal – and to be honest, I want to work on that more than I care about my home being spotless. I always care about writing more than cleaning.
But we’ll see. I’m tired enough now that it may be that my brain’s not in the mood for poetry any more. In which case, dishes and hoovering, perhaps some fiddle practice too. But first of all: tea.
Lately I’ve been remembering my dreams quite vividly. They’ve been strange and powerful dreams, too, some of them. Those often tend to turn into poetry or inspire stories, if they’re adventure dreams. My latest dreams have been poetry inspiration. I’ll have to see if I can get the very latest (today’s) into a good enough shape to be able to read it at Friday’s writers’ group meeting. Vast landscapes, black sand, robots striding across the remote planet’s surface with giant’s legs… Powerful visual impressions and a feeling of desolation. How to convey these things in a poem?
One day I’ll get round to posting a couple of posts that I got the idea for many moons ago – posts that properly deal with writing, instead of random babble – but it is not this day. This day… is approaching tomorrow too fast. I should start preparing for bed, since tomorrow is really not a good day for feeling zombietastic at work. Tomorrow evening, though, I plan to make time for writing. More poetry submissions, perhaps (did some yesterday), or then continuing work on an old story that itches to be finished.
Am on sick leave today because the wretched remnants of illness still lingered this morning. My New Year’s Eve was spent with a fever; I was so out of it that I was extremely content to be alone, and toasted the new year with a cup of peppermint tea. I’ve been under the weather ever since. But since I feel okay right now (finally, an appetite and less nausea!) I’m hoping that I’ll be fully well again tomorrow.
Anyway. Due to being alone on NYE, I was able to start off the year with a poem. Nice. Wasn’t a good one, but it was good to write.
Today I’ve been trying to get back into a specfic-ish story (well, novelette, really) that I started back in December 2010. It’s got potential, I think. I need to finish the actual plot and then get to editing.
But so far I’ve been too tired and headachy to get into the novelette. Bleh. Instead I decided to do a poem challenge from Joseph Harker’s delightful blog (I’ve been reading through the archives. Damn, that man is a talented poet!).
The basic premise of this particular prompt is to create a little series of “poemlets”, like charms on a bracelet. See the original post for the full instructions. I chose seven of Joseph’s themes (childhood memory/linguistic beauty/keeping a secret/romantic encounter/discovering laughter/life goal/telling the future) and started playing. Here are the extra elements (quoted from his blog post):
first poemlet: mention your birthstone
second poemlet: use a word with three or more syllables
third poemlet: mention your zodiac sign
fourth poemlet: use at least three capital letters (“I” on its own, and the beginnings of lines, do not count)
fifth poemlet: pick a color and use at least two synonyms/varieties/shades of it
sixth poemlet: use as many different kinds of punctuation mark as you can
seventh poemlet: surprise us with something fancy!
Anyway, this is an experiment that I’m unlikely to end up submitting to be published, so I thought I’d share it with my readers. 🙂
[I would’ve wanted the roman numerals to be on the same level as the first line of each charmlet, with the rest of the stanza indented, but apparently that’s beyond my html skills and I’m too tired to figure it out now. So have this version, with the numerals above. /end perfectionism]
* * *
Charmlets
i.
sticky summer, eating watermelon
by the bucketful, the richness
of it, like gobbling down
soft tourmalines
ii.
peeling back the centuries
to Caedmon’s hymn
I shiver
at the reconstructed sounds,
the stark vowels
humming down in my throat
iii.
Scorpios keep secrets well, they say.
Perhaps I do, although I toss
horoscopes down the drain.
After all, some secrets I kept
for years.
iv.
when I first met you,
and You, and YOu, and YOU,
my heart didn’t know
what wonders were ahead
on this winding road
leading downriver
v.
That summer I learnt to laugh again.
The grass seemed greener
than heaven, as I sank down
onto the malachite bed
prepared for me
by nature –
that moss-fingered mother.
vi.
Oh – to struggle for it
and grasp it too! No fear
(no fear); just the blossoming woods
of my work: beauty written
down onto each petal…
dare I? dare I?
vii.
If
I could
reach down into my soul,
grasp a surety beyond the shoal
of slippery wishes, and see
my future before me –
if I could,
would
I?
* * *