Clevelanders in the Eye's Body

You wouldn't know it, but Cleveland is seriously a hotbed of speculative poetry.  The Science Fiction Poetry Association has just came out with issue 9 of their online journal of speculative poetry, Eye to the Telescope. Each issue is a theme issue, and the latest, with guest editor Catherynne Valente, has a theme of "bodies:"

In science fiction and fantasy, the body is a battleground, a liminal space, a canvas, a friend, an enemy, an object, a subject, a transitory state, something to be left behind, something to be embraced, something to be denied, something to alter. All our experience begins in the body, and poetry, with its vivid, deep language, has always been uniquely situated to express the complicated relationship between the possessor of the body and the body itself. 

The issue has poetry by two local poets, with two poems by Marie Vibbert, and two more by Joshua Gage. Congrats to Marie and Josh!

The SFPA also publishes the anthology Dwarf Stars once a year, with the best short-short speculative poetry of the year (full disclosure: I edited it last year), where "short short" includes haiku, senryu, cinquains, scifaiku, and other miscellaneous poems of ten lines and under.  I just received this year's Dwarf Stars volume yesterday, and see poems by Mary A. Turzillo, dan smith, and me.

You want to hear what short-short speculative poetry is about?  You're in luck: next month five of the Dwarf-star poets will be doing a reading from Dwarf Stars (both the last issue, and this one) at the Second Wednesday Poetry Reading, August 14 at 7pm at Mac's Backs.  Come at 7 for the feature; but stay for the round-robin poetry that follows!

Or, if you can't wait, you can buy a copy for $5.00 (plus two dollars postage) from SFPA.

Dwarf Stars. Cover Art: "Elephant" by neisbeis.deviantart.com

A Sense of Place (Montreal, Damascus, Cleveland)

I just got back

from a long weekend in Montreal*, where-- among other things-- I met poet Amal El-Mohtar, the other winner of the 2009 Rhysling for best poem. (photo of Amal and me); not to mention a number of other speculative poets, too many to name**.

Amal is one heck of a poet. (She's also one of the three editors of the internet quarterly Goblin Fruit, which features mythic and fantastic poetry***). She won for her poem "Song for an Ancient City," a love-letter to the city of Damascus.

What strikes me most about Amal's poem is how deeply and beautifully it is evocative of place.

Amal placed third for the long poem Rhysling as well, collaborating with Cat Valente (a former Clevelander) on "Damascus Divides the Lovers by Zero," another poem deeply evocative of place.

So I've been thinking of poetry of place recently. There is some body of poetry of place about Cleveland, of course-- in fact, the Deep Cleveland poem o' the week is a long-running attempt to capture the city in all its myriad fragmented poetic angles, somewhat channeling the spirit of D.A. Levy.

Windfall has a nice little essay essay discussing poetry of place.

"Paul Shepard thinks that the lack or denial of our connection to the plants and animals in a given place makes us crazy. Rootless, detached people are dangerous. On the other hand, sanity happens when people understand that where they are is who they are. "

Any thoughts on poetry of place from the clevelandpoetics cabal?

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*for those of you who look for my usual post on clevelandpoetics every Sunday or early Monday, that's why I didn't post last week.

**I was originally going to list them all, but it occurs to me that with my sketchy memory I'd probably leave somebody out, and that person would then assume I was snubbing them deliberately.

***"fantastic" is often used as a generic adjective meaning "really good," but in this case I mean it in its literal sense (not that the figurative sense isn't also applicable). If I were Edgar Allen Poe, perhaps I'd say "phantasmagorical."

Cat Valente Wins Rhysling

A quick heads up. On Saturday, at ReaderCon in Boston, MA, local author Catherynne M. Valente won the 2008 Rhysling Award for her poem "The Seven Devils of Central California"

From the SFPA site:

The nominees for each year's Rhysling Awards are selected by the membership of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Each member is allowed to nominate one work in each of the two categories: "Best Long Poem" (50+ lines) and "Best Short Poem" (0-49 lines). All nominated works must have been published during the calendar year for which the present awards are being given. The Rhysling Awards are put to a final vote by the membership of the SFPA using reprints of all the nominated works presented in this voting tool called The Rhysling Anthology. The anthology allows the membership to easily review and consider all nominated works without the necessity of obtaining the diverse number of publications in which the nominated works first appeared. The Rhysling Anthology is also made available to anyone with an interest in this unique compilation of verse from some of the finest poets working in the field of SF/F/Horror poetry. The winning works are regularly reprinted in the Nebula Awards Anthology from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., and are considered in the SF/F/H/Spec. field to be the equivalent in poetry of the awards given for "prose" work--achievement awards given to poets by the writing peers of their own field of literature.

For more information about Cat and her work, visit her site:
http://www.catherynnemvalente.com/