 |
| Worldcon poet laureate Brandon O'Brien chatted with us at UHBCB about the value of speculative poetry. (Image via Facebook) |
Many Hugo awards recommendations lists — including our own — have been slow to include poetry. Poetry is not typically central to SFF consumption, and it can take some effort to disclose and discover speculative poetry. The form can also feel mystifying to readers who sidestepped learning about poetry in middle school and never stumbled across a welcoming introduction to it later in life.
Earlier this year, we had a conversation with 2025 Worldcon poet laureate Brandon O’Brien. He suggested that all readers have an ear for poetry. There are few people more qualified to speak to the question of speculative poetry than O'Brien, whose work has garnered multiple awards and has been published in almost every relevant genre publication.
Our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity.
UHBCB: What is the value of speculative poetry?
Brandon O’Brien: What I particularly find valuable about speculative poetry is the balance between what speculative fiction does well and what poetry does well — it's a form where you get to explore the unexpected and the unreal, to imagine the myriad pasts and futures of our world, but you also get to use its brevity and its strong formal quality as a place to play with sound and language and rhythm.
UHBCB: Does everyone have an ear for poetry? Should everyone vote in this year's Hugo for best poem?
Brandon O’Brien: Here's the thing — I think everyone undeniably has an ear for poetry, and everybody knows in their heart that they do. I just think that lots of little biases get in the way of how we see poetry.
It's the same way that I think everyone has a feel for dance even if they can't dance well, and then we grow up and we see expert dance as too technical or too high-art to judge, and it limits our appreciation — but when we see good dance, we know it, and good dance is not just ballet, but folk dancing and breakdancing and swing and salsa, and we can feel all of those, too.
 |
| O'Brien's collection Can You Sign My Tentacle is a first-rate little book, and one of the only tomes of poetry that's on our shelves. |
And in that same way, everyone is feeling poetry all the time: if you're listening to music you're listening to poetry, and depending on your favourite genre or favourite artist, whether you're listening to Kendrick Lamar or Metallica or Fiona Apple, you're probably listening to very challenging poetry, too. And if you're already a fan of speculative fiction you also know enough about the genre and its trappings to make an assessment of whether its tropes are being played with in interesting or revealing or emotional ways.
So if everyone who can nominate and vote in the Hugo Awards just used those senses that they already have, they're just as capable of deciding what should win in the Best Poem category.
UHBCB: What does speculative poetry do that prose fiction just can't?
Brandon O’Brien: I shudder to say ‘can’t’, because not only are there some very talented prose writers, but if I may give some love to my contemporaries, some of my favourite SFF prose writers are also poets.
Two things I think poetry gives you, as a reader and a writer, is both a sense of sound and a sense of weight. Sound because obviously you're playing with rhythm and meter in ways that should make the reader inherently imagine how the words flow on the page, how they create their own flow and their own timing. And in terms of weight, it's knowing that every word has a duty to perform, because you only have so many lines.
Even if you're writing a longer poem, you can only work with so much space before you're kind of stretching beyond your poem's range. So it's about finding ways for your poem to do more than one thing, or for them to do one thing so terribly well that your other words can do other things.
UHBCB: How did you become interested in speculative poetry?
Brandon O’Brien: I've been writing both poetry and prose since I was very young. In high school, writing poetry consumed so much of my life that even before I started performing, before I was interested in being published or anything, my classmates and my teachers noticed how invested I was in reading and writing poetry. But at that point, I wasn't aware that speculative poetry was a thing — I was writing the same sappy, emotional poetry I thought other teenagers elsewhere were writing.
It wasn't until I started widening my range that I found my way to speculative poetry. First it was discovering spoken word, and getting deep into performance; then it was performing in other spaces with other writers and discovering how many writers from the Caribbean were writing science fiction and fantasy, and wanting to be a part of that as well.
Discovering beyond those things that there was room for poetry in genre as well, that there was this whole other form that I didn't know had a name — and feeling like some of my younger poetry was actually scratching at the edges of this, trying to find a way to say unreal things — was actually really inspiring, and I've latched on ever since.
UHBCB: Is there a tension between the literalism and positivism of classic ("hard") science fiction and the genre of poetry?
Brandon O’Brien: I don't think there has to be. There is lots of room for poetry to be 'hard'. I think this is bias coming into play before the work does, again — the twin biases of real science, and therefore hard science fiction, being too pointed and strict with its language, and poetry being somehow universally defined by a freedom of language that some people interpret as looseness, as 'softness'.
But funnily enough, I'd argue that one thing I consider a strength of poetry is also undeniably present in hard scientific text such that it can be present in science fiction — a deliberateness with language, a series of strong choices about what words have weight in terms of defining the state of the world of that work.
So much of what we consider hard scientific language is inherently poetic in its application — the way scientists name things like plants or the suffixes of chemical compounds or the names of the quarks — that in a lot of ways they just blend together seamlessly with proper effort.
UHBCB: Who are some poets you think are doing interesting things in the genre right now?
Brandon O’Brien: There is a wealth of outstanding poets doing really neat work in the form. Off the top of my head: Terese Mason Pierre, Shivanee Ramlochan, Woody Dismukes, Sara Norja, Maria Schrater, Tiffany Morris, Uche Ogbuji, Sara Omer, Holly Lyn Walrath, Tamara Jerée... I could keep going for ages, but I probably mustn't.
UHBCB: Why is the Hugo Award for Best Poem important? How is it different from the Rhysling Award?
Brandon O’Brien: The Hugo Awards are one of the most prestigious awards in the genre, so having that accolade is important especially as a reminder that poetry is an equal element of the genre to prose.
The Rhyslings are just as valuable, to be sure, but it matters that there is a Hugo that values poetry just as much as it does the short story and the novella and the essay and the work of artists and podcasters.
We are in a new age as a genre community where more award spaces are opening up to rewarding the effort of poets, and I'm excited that the Hugos are a part of that mission especially because it's an award open to the public. Anyone can get a membership to the Hugos and nominate work right now as we speak, and become a part of shaping what earns an award. Especially right now, that reminder that your voice matters just as much as anyone else's is important.
No comments:
Post a Comment