Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association

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Part 3 in a Series:

In my previous posts, I featured several poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with four very different genre poems that embody a spectrum of ghostly possibilities.

train

Not a Destination by F.J. Bergmann

In front of the hospital,
a somber chauffeur opened
the door of a limousine,
bowing, and he thought at first
that he would ride in style
all the way to the end…

In the last installment, we looked at how the ghost poems in Eye to the Telescope#22 transition from the abstract and epic to the intimate. F.J. Bergmann’s brief “Not a Destination” deftly moves us through a personal death towards what we might think of as the ultimate destination… only to find that the journey has just begun.

The blinking hospital lights and beeps of “Not a Destination” are a perfect fit with the poems just before and after: “Admittance” recalls a father’s resurrection in a hospital setting, while the you in Daniel Jones’ “Fevered Ream” slips from this mortal coil in room 607 of St Vincent’s.  To me, this trio of poems suggest a crossroads of possibilities: three slightly different routes for the departing soul.

The path of Bergmann’s “Not a Destination” takes a nicely dark turn; the deceased barely has a chance to settle into new accommodations before finding himself shuffled off again, sugar-plumb fantasies of  the afterlife dispersing with an ominous plume of smoke.  Like all the best ghost stories, this poem leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps; it is our imagination that takes off from the station, towards a dark unknown.

F.J. Bergmann dreams of a future in which bios will need to be neither provided nor updated due to the perfection of mind-melding via hyperspatial dimensions. See fibitz.com for more ideation. She is the editor of Star*Line and the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.

 

Planetary Nebula NGC 2818

Fevered Ream by Daniel R. Jones

you slip from your die-cast sarcophagus
comatose to ghost, soul tethered to body like a
dangling tooth a child is not willing to yank

 

“Fevered Ream” was one of those poems that rises up out of the slush and just stops time for a minute — what did I just read?  I love the breathlessness of this one, the rambling fever dream string of images, similes; a literary tossing and turning that suddenly lets go with an explosive stanza of light and motion and a curious mixture of religious and scientific references (“Elysian nebula”, “between the star of Bethlehem and another”, “…blip on the Hubble”, “…a far cry from Mount Moriah”).

“Fevered Ream” raises more questions than it answers ( where does the arc of the soul lead, and what happens when it lands?) ; however I find the pace and tone and vivid organic language offer a promising counterpoint to the dark machinery of the previous poem.

What really sealed it for me, though, was the final line.  Gorgeous sci-fi poetry, that is.  Still gives me shivers.

Daniel Jones is a an MFA candidate at Lindenwood University, and a writer from Indianapolis, IN. Previously, he’s had work published in Aphelion, the South Bend Tribune, In the Bend, Spill Words Press, Time of Singing, and he won an award for best poem in the 2013 edition of Bethel College’s Crossings. He is currently serving as an editorial assistant for Issue 7 of The Lindenwood Review.

 

Now with nanobots!

Now with nanobots! https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/3137493718

 

Hex Machina by Joe Nazare

The bitbots had been designed to reconstruct damaged cells,
But malfunctioned or mutated, escaped from the human
To overwhelm the landscape with a profusion of fabrication.

Speaking of science fiction: enter “Hex Machina” by Joe Nazare.  I just couldn’t say no to this one: ectoplasm, nanotech, an Armageddon of abundance… this was one of the most imaginative and clever poems in the bunch.

Truly, “Hex Machina” is so exemplary for this issue — a speculative poem that posits new and unexpected visions of the afterlife — there isn’t much more to say; except that “indiscriminate widgecraft” is my new favorite phrase ever.

Joe Nazare earned in a PhD in American Literature from New York University. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction can be found in such places as Dark Discoveries, Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, Pseudopod, Star*Line, Grievous Angel, Death in Common, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, and Butcher Knives & Body Counts. He is also the author of the collection Autumn Lauds: Poems for the Halloween Season, and is currently hard at work readying Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Ultimate Annotated Edition for ebook release on Amazon this autumn.

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Ma’s Late Knight Jam Session

by Oliver Smith

The long spines of his gooseberries
Were particularly impressive:
They grew sharper than lances, impaling
Dim-minded knights who had disembarked
From the number ten bus in search of Mount Badon.

Another one of my early favorites, “Ma’s Late Knight Jam Session” takes the chaos of “Hex Machina” and raises it to a level of delightful absurdity.  I LOL’d when I read this one, enamored with lines like “ground strawberries swelled red/ As the thrashed buttocks of masochistic elves” and “Now at breakfast time an eyeball stares/Accusingly from the bottom of the jar. It is red-rimmed and horribly medieval.”

I enjoyed Smith’s lofty language and descriptive prowess throughout, as well as the opportunity to refresh my understanding of British history.

I’m also a sucker for food in poetry.  He had me at “summer fruit” – though the combination of ghosts, food, and humor is deliciously and brilliantly macabre.

Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He was born in 1966 and recently returned to university 25 years after graduating in Fine Art to study Creative Writing as a post-graduate research student. His poetry regularly appears in Spectral Realms and his short fiction has appeared in anthologies from Inkermen Press, Ex Occidente Press, Dark Hall Press, and History and Mystery LLC. Many of his previously anthologised stories and twenty poems are now collected in Basilisk Soup and Other Fantasies.  You can find out more about Oliver here.

In my last blog post, I featured several poems from the beginning of the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited.  The issue went live October 15th.

Today we continue the series with four poems that explore ghost tropes in skillful and novel ways, ranging from the abstract to the personal.

 

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Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits

by Robin Husen

The grandfather clock in the hallway
Chips away at time.
The heart of this old house
The stairs are the spine
And every step touches a nerve

As you might imagine, the haunted house was one of the most popular themes for Eye to the Telescope #22  submissions (second only to lost love poems).  In “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits” we find ourselves within the archetypal haunted house — no context, as if in a dream, no entrance or exit, just an Escher-like unfolding of housely features; the ticking clock, the creaking stairs.

In dream theory, the house represents the dreamer; Husen’s “Upstairs…Downstairs” suggests an eerie sympathy between the “you” that wanders room to room and the house’s bookends and edges, it’s beating heart.

I was particularly enamored with the second-to-last stanza, in which “everything turns on the/corner step” and the poem, too, takes a turn, a shift in perspective, speculating ominous possibilities.  It reads like a spiral, inviting you in, and down, again and again…

Robin Husen is a writer from Nottingham, England. He is an Open University graduate, and has an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, where he wrote his dissertation on the use of negation in creating a sense of unease. “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits” is his first published poem. His short fiction has appeared on Daily Science Fiction and is forthcoming on Far Fetched Fables.  When he isn’t writing, you can usually find him walking the dog. You can also find him on twitter @reliant_robin’

moonlight-kitchen

A Night at Gran’ma Ginny’s

by Dawn Cunningham

                                                                                                 Three
clear rectangles make a stairstep on the front door;
they stare into the changing
moon; the cymbals of oncoming clouds
talk     rock music; a light show speaks

Like “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits”, “A Night at Gran’ma Ginny’s” struck me as a delightfully different take on the haunted house trope.  In this poem, too, we view the house as if through a dreamer’s eyes; or, rather, one stuck in that moment between dreams and waking, when everything has a quality of unreality, and we’re not sure we can trust what we perceive.

Cunningham uses vivid and sensory language and creative use of space to evoke a fun-house of impressions that make this poem so much more than an accounting of something creepy that happened in the middle of the night.  Though what is left unsaid–the reason the narrator is asleep in Gran’ma’s chair, perhaps, with a coat for a blanket–keeps us grounded in real life, in a real place, which makes the encounter all the more uncanny.

I especially love the soft ending of this poem: the sigh of a closing refrigerator door, the quiet snuffing out of a light so as to not disturb those sleeping nearby (and those, perhaps, who have had enough) .

The career of writing stories and poems began with Dawn Cunningham’s Gran’ma Ginny, where the Native American tradition was passed down. Through the storytelling, Ms. Cunningham began to write, first fiction, then poetry, and now nonfiction as well. She earned a BGS and MA through Indiana University. Her recent publications are in Confluence, Flare: The Flagler Review, Misfit Magazine, Shuf Poetry, and the upcoming Dandelions first appearance.

polter

Be My Geist: A Villanelle

by Suzan Pickford

No white glove test for clear
(until there is and “they’re here”)
haunted by remnants hidden deep in your closet.
What a “geist-ing” game communicating
when small blonde children sneak tv time
it’s no wonder you lost it, perplexed by the vortex.

As far as haunted houses go, the cemetery-straddling, portal-pulsing suburban two-story in”Poltergeist” (1982) takes the horror cake.  I grew up with this movie, I identified painfully with the straight-haired Carol Ann (gods rest her soul), and what remake, I can’t hear you, lalalala.

One of the perks of being an editor is that you get to pick what you like; so when Suzan Pickford answered my not-really-joking call for Poltergeist-themed poems with this tongue-in-cheek darling, I couldn’t resist.  While I suspect that the term “villanelle” is loosely applied, I love how she roped the most iconic bits from the film into the form.  Plus I love the internal rhyme and turn-of-phrase in “perplexed by the vortex”.  I just want to hug this poem like a scary clown doll.

Suzan Pickford: master of insomnia and java enthusiast. Born in Virginia to two New Yorkers, Suzan has been writing since early primary school when she began running out of accessible reading material and began crafting her own. Most recently featured in the Summer edition of The Cicada’s Cry—a micro-zine of Haiku Poetry, Suzan Pickford brings levity to themes not usually considered comedic in the fields of poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.

 phone

Admittance by Cathleen Allyn Conway

Dad calls me and says to come pick him up from the hospital.
“You know they’re trying to kill me in here.”
“But you’re dead,” I say.
“I’m better now,” he replies.
“It’s happened before.”

With “Admittance” by Cathleen Allyn Conway, we move from more abstract ghost poems into the realm of the intimate; personal tales of lost lives and lost loves.

“Admittance” begins with a phone call from beyond the grave, which places it squarely in the speculative genre.  However, the details are so relatable (“the nurse/straddled his Buddha belly like a lover”, “the flag was folded and the rifle-cracks in the cold/shocked choking sobs from Mom”), and the voice of the narrator is so insistently normal, this poem strikes me as one of the most realistic of the bunch.

The father’s  impossible voice on the line is almost secondary to the voice of loss expressed within, subtle but exquisite.  The universality of that grief is what struck me most about this poem.  “Admittance” deftly reminds of that we cannot examine ghosts without examining the empty places left among the living.

Cathleen Allyn Conway is finishing her PhD in creative writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the co-editor of Plath Profiles, the only academic journal dedicated to the work of Sylvia Plath, and the founder and editor of women’s protest poetry magazine Thank You For Swallowing. Her collection Static Cling is available from Dancing Girl Press. Originally from Chicago, she lives in south London with her partner and son.

ETTT logo

This summer I was given the opportunity to guest-edit an issue of Eye to the Telescope, the online literary magazine of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.  As editor I chose the theme “Ghosts”, which I thought was fitting for the Halloween season and reflective of my lifelong love of the subject:

From an early age, I have been consumed with the question of what happens after we die; perhaps not the most psychologically healthy preoccupation for a little girl, but certainly a fruitful one for a budding speculative writer. In literature, as in real life, I am fascinated with ghosts—specters, hauntings, poltergeists, bean-sidhe, È Guǐ,—stories of spirit sightings that suggest our souls go on about their business even after our bodies go into ground. [From “Editor’s Intro, Eye to the Telescope #22]

The response to this issue was amazing.  The SFPA received a record number of submissions.  The overall quality was humbling; it was a challenge and an honor to curate the “Ghosts” issue in a way that I feel truly represents the breadth and vision of modern speculative poetry.

ETTT#22, “Ghosts” went “live” on October 15, 2016, with a super-sized issue of twenty-seven poets, including veteran speculative writers and promising new voices in the field.

To celebrate the “Ghosts” issue launch, I thought I would take us into Halloween by featuring various poems from the issue.  You can read the full text over on the ETTT website (and I hope you will!). Here, I’d like to look at highlights of the 27 “ghost” poems from an editor’s perspective, including what won me over about each and why I feel these poems took the tropes of ghosts and ghost stories in new, unexpected directions.

ebla_clay_tablet

Tulpa by L.W. Salinas


If ghosts are the memory of a person bound to a place,
then what are words bound to paper but another form of ghost?
With each word we resurrect the dead, allowing them inside.


A convenient definition of “Tulpa” refers to “a being or object created through sheer spiritual or mental discipline”.  While the idea has roots in early Buddhist teachings, it has parallels in many mystical traditions (modern occultists posit that magic is possible because thought has form; add intent to form and you get power). The concept of “tulpa” has even found its way into modern internet culture.

This was one of the later poems I received, after ETTT #22 was already taking form in my imagination, and in my computer’s notes.  So it was late to the party and at a disadvantage due its density of language (each issue of ETTT comes with a budget, and poems are paid per word).  It’s also one of the less genre-y poems in the batch.  While the literary ghosts that haunt “Tulpa” may also be literal, the poet really just posits a possibility: what if the written word is a kind of ghost — an afterlife in a sense, by which we can go on to haunt the living — the readers — even after our bodies are long gone?

Hypothetical, but creepy, if you think about it.  And let us not forget that “what if” is the true heart of speculative literature.  Everything sci-fi and fantasy and undefinable or not-yet-defined — heck, even science itself — begins with the question.

Also the idea of a poem about words as ghosts as the introduction to a collection of ghost poems was too deliciously meta to pass up.  Once I realized how perfect “Tulpa” was as a gateway to the ideas in this issue, it’s fate was (forgive me) writ in stone.

Plus, “Tulpa” offers us poetry that is simply beautiful in its own right:

Memories sheltered and protected between leather covers
like the last thylacine at a zoo, precious and endangered.
Or like the last polio virus, terrifying in scope.
Ghosts that weep, rage, laugh, and ponder in their thin paper hallways
and always find their way back to haunt the living who seek them.

L. W. Salinas is a podcaster, a voice actress, a writer, and a crafter from Houston, Texas. Her fiction has previously been published in the collection Ten Days of Madness. This is her first poetry publication. She can be found at lawofalltrades.wordpress.com

 a_trench_at_the_potters_field_on_hart_island_circa_1890_by_jacob_riis

Hart Island by Holly Lyn Walrath

There are too many ghosts here. The ferry brings more each day.
Its prow breaks the brown water, the cranes lifting our shells over masts,
into mass graves. Or else the current brings us more, sucking boats into its maw
and cracking them in its teeth like sunflower seeds.

If “Tulpa” was a treasure in the last wave of submissions, “Hart Island” was the very first poem to win my heart. I knew I had to have it from the first read, even before I’d done my due googling and learned that the titular island is a real place with a fascinating and appalling history.

Walrath’s descriptive prowess is the kind that makes my chest hurt.  I couldn’t tear my eyes away, and when the poem finally dropped me off a cliff with that abrupt and mysterious final stanza, I went back and read it another few dozen times, and kept reading it until I could send the poet an official “yes”.

What I wanted most for the “Ghosts” issue of Eye to the Telescope were poems of “the unexpected, the unmeasured… poems that belie the limits of life and afterlife and what we think a ghost story should be”.  With its nightmare vision of souls heaped and shoveled like so much refuse, “served up like a feast for the island’s heart”, “Hart Island” delivered the unexpected in spades, while still evoking the sense of place and tragedy that all good hauntings require.

I particularly like the element of the unexplained in this poem: the unknown “He” at the end, and the sense that there are stories within stories, here; archeological layers of humanity to lay bare, and haunted places within this haunted place, where even the ghosts dare not go.

Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, Liminality and Kaleidotrope, among others. She lives in Seabrook, Texas, just five minutes from NASA. She wrangles writers as a freelance editor and volunteers as the associate director of Writespace, a nonprofit literary center in Houston, Texas. Find her online @hollylynwalrath or hlwalrath.com

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Mysticeti by Akua Lezli Hope

When Inuits pray to whale
their prayer boat captain lifts his arms
sings aloud that all be kept from harm
that this vessel of life will surrender
relinquish its one self for their many
and that all whale is and carries
transforms…

When I began to select poems for the “Ghosts” issue, I found that many presented themselves to me as couples; distinct but complimentary spins on similar genres, ideas or themes.  While “Mysticeti” and “Hart Island” are very different poems, they both struck me with their imaginative and epic depictions of afterlife.  They are also both concerned with the fate of ghostly bodies, positing unusual landscapes in which the dead take up space, however supernaturally redefined — and they both raise questions of personal autonomy vested — or taken — from the “surviving” soul.

“Mysticeti” (which refers to a species of whale, often called “great whales”) was possibly the most unusual ghost story I came across.  In this poem, the spirits of drowned people cast from slave ships are sustained, woven to an ancient whale, protecting her from the same type of profit-minded greed that stole their earthly lives.  Perhaps the whale carried old Inuit prayers on her body, enabling her to catch up the souls of the dying as if with a net.  Or, perhaps there was some mystical symbiosis at work, born from kindred experience among victims, among the hunted.  Either way,”Mysticeti” offers us the hauntingly beautiful image of the ghost-wreathed whale, living out her life untouched, her autonomy preserved.

As one of the trio of poems to usher in the “Ghosts” issue, “Mysticeti” informs the reader that we are heading into uncharted waters.

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass and  metal  to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, wearables, sculpture, adornments and peace whenever possible. Her awards include two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, a Hurston-Wright scholarship, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts.  Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest  book award for poetry. Her manuscript Them Gone, awarded Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Editor’s Prize, will be published in 2016.  She won the 2015 SFPA short poem prize.  A paraplegic, she’s developing a paratransit nonprofit so that she and others may get around in her small town.

 

UNDOING WINTER is the winner of the
2016 ELGIN AWARD
for Best Speculative Poetry Chapbook!!

Winward_Shannon_Connor_Cov

Thank you, thank you, thank you

to the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Winter has officially melted.  I feel warm and tingly in all kinds of places!

xoxo

July, 2016

ETTT logo

Eye to the Telescope Issue #22

“Ghosts”

edited by Shannon Connor Winward

As guest editor for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s online magazine, Eye to the Telescope, I chose a theme close to my heart (and fitting for the month of October).

For this issue I am looking for more than thumps in the attic and pretty dead girls on a moonlit road. I want the unexpected, the unmeasured—I want poems that belie the limits of life and afterlife and what we think a ghost story should be. Give me phantoms and poltergeists, yes, bean-sidhe and È Guǐ, pathos or parody, space ship specters or transmigrating alien souls—I want any and all of it, as long the poem has meat on its bones.

No restrictions on genre or form (though “speculative” is a must). Graphic violence or gore will be a hard sell. More than anything, I want to be moved.

Full guidelines here. Be sure to check out the current and back issues or visit SFPoetry.com to get a feel for what we mean by “speculative”.

SFPA logo

Deadline for submissions is September 15, 2016.

So if you go here, you can hear me perform my poem “Beansidhe” – a classic Irish ghost story turned tragic romance – on the SFPA’s Halloween Reading page (which I’m co-editing with poet Liz Bennefeld).

As noted on the page: “The pronoun play in “Beansidhe” can be misleading—it may be helpful to remember that not every narrator is reliable.” “Beansidhe” (the Irish spelling of “Banshee”) first appeared in Ideomancer and later my poetry chapbook, UNDOING WINTER (Finishing Line Press 2014) , which was nominated for the SFPA’s Elgin Award.

If, however, you stay here, you can listen to me, my daughter, and my cat playing with my new headset.

Much thanks and kudos to fellow SFPA’er Diane Severson Mori over at Amazing Stories Magazine for her review of UNDOING WINTER!  In addition to maintaining a regular column at Amazing Stories to highlight speculative poets and poetry, Diane also manages the not-insignificant task of rounding up the spec-poetry related publications and activities for Science Fiction Poetry Association members.

If you haven’t already, please do check out Diane’s thoughts on UNDOING WINTER, complete with recordings of three poems from the chapbook!

COVER FROM WEBSITE

I’m busy getting ready for the DDOA Poet and Prose Writer’s Retreat this weekend (leaving my babies for four days! EEP!) but Diane’s post provides some food for thought that I’d like to revisit later [Watch this Space!!] To wit: while it’s true that none of the poetry in UNDOING WINTER is SciFi – indeed, i think I have all of one poem in my entire portfolio that I’d call straightup Science Fiction – I draw much of my inspiration from myth, folklore, and dreamscapes – all of which are snugly at home under the “Fantasy” category, which also counts as “Speculative Poetry”.

I think Speculative Poetry can be read in layers. The poems are metaphors, yes, but they also speak of their own realities. In my opinion, poems of ghosts, pagan gods, and slipstream are no more or less metaphorical than of any other genre – for what is SciFi, really, but the same, age old questions of the human condition, wrapped up in futuristic tropes?

 

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October is Witch Awareness Month, and did you know, the Science Fiction Poetry Association celebrates this Grand Season every year with links to members reading their Halloween-inspired poems.

My poem, ALL SOULS’ DAY, appears here, read by little ol’ me and edited/produced by the talented Justynn Tyme of Radio Active Mango Recordings.

ALL SOULS’ DAY appeared in Jack-O’-Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy (Raven Electrick Ink, 2011), Spec-tacular: Fantasy Favorites by Raven Electrick Ink (2012) and the 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and was first read by the author on Write Around Here, the podcast of the Written Remains Writers Guild.

The page also features work by SFPA members David Kopaska-Merkel, David L. Summers, Adele Gardner, Dennis M. Lane and F.J. Bergmann, and is edited by Liz Bennefeld. There may be more to come, as well –  so go ahead.  Show your appreciation for the Season, fly on over, and sit with us for a spell. 

 

Find us at : http://www.sfpoetry.com/halloween.html