{"id":150,"date":"2013-02-17T21:05:14","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T19:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/suchwanderings.wordpress.com\/?p=150"},"modified":"2013-02-17T21:05:14","modified_gmt":"2013-02-17T19:05:14","slug":"sff-poetry-and-discussion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/2013\/02\/17\/sff-poetry-and-discussion\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday recs: sf\/f poetry and discussion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was down with the flu most of last week, so I&#8217;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! <\/p>\n<p>I should post here more than just for Sunday recs. But on weekdays, after work + writing\/socialising\/dance class\/insert other activity here, I&#8217;m rarely coherent enough to make sensible posts. Perhaps one day!<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, now for some links. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/goblinfruit.net\/2013\/winter\/\"><em>Goblin Fruit&#8217;s<\/em> winter issue<\/a> is out! I haven&#8217;t had time to read any of the poems yet, but <em>Goblin Fruit<\/em> is a lovely publication and pretty much all their issues have fantastic stuff. So go there for your fairytale-flavoured poem fix!<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of speculative poetry: Paul Cook writes about <a href=\"http:\/\/amazingstoriesmag.com\/2013\/02\/why-science-fiction-poetry-is-embarrassingly-bad\/\">why sf poetry is &#8220;embarrassingly bad&#8221;<\/a>. Dear readers, I&#8217;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&#8217;s just saying &#8220;I found a couple of science fiction poems that are bad; hence all sf poetry is bad.&#8221; Not very sound reasoning. I&#8217;ve read quite a bit of speculative poetry, and while some of it is bad &#8211; obviously! <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sturgeon%27s_Law\">Sturgeon&#8217;s Law<\/a> and all that &#8211; 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! <\/p>\n<p>F. J. Bergmann has written <a href=\"http:\/\/amazingstoriesmag.com\/2013\/02\/a-broader-view-of-science-fiction-poetry\/\">a response<\/a> to Cook&#8217;s disparaging piece; Bergmann manages to articulate a lot of the things that occurred to me when reading Cook&#8217;s piece, so I recommend checking her response out. <\/p>\n<p>And now for some more poetry links. Here are a couple of poems from <em>Goblin Fruit&#8217;s<\/em> archives:<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goblinfruit.net\/2012\/winter\/poems\/?poem=huldre\">Huldre<\/a> by Joshua Gage (a lush, Norse-inspired image)<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/fund_drives\/2012\/special-issue-joiner-p.shtml\">All the Mari&#8217;s Parties<\/a> by Mat Joiner (about one of the creepiest creatures in Welsh folklore, the Mari Lwyd)<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goblinfruit.net\/2012\/fall\/poems\/?poem=kingdom\">Kingdom<\/a> by Rachel Dacus (a shout of joy). <\/p>\n<p>And finally, in defence of sf poetry: here are some examples of science fiction poems that I think are utterly wonderful. I&#8217;ll let them speak for themselves.<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/stonetelling.com\/issue6-dec2011\/cooney-postcards.html\">Postcards from Mars<\/a> by C. S. E. Cooney<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/2011\/20110627\/arkenberg-p.shtml\">The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages<\/a> by Megan Arkenberg<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/stonetelling.com\/issue7-mar2012\/el-mohtar-asteres.html\">Asteres Planetai<\/a> by Amal El-Mohtar.<\/p>\n<p>Happy reading! Speaking of which, I just started reading <em>The Lord of the Rings<\/em> again. For the I&#8217;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&#8217;s been almost a decade since I last read it, so it&#8217;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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was down with the flu most of last week, so I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,30,6],"tags":[36,31,37,13],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-linkage","category-poetry","tag-goblin-fruit","tag-recs","tag-stone-telling","tag-strange-horizons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}