Speculative Poetry at Flights of Foundry
Photo by Trust “Tru” Katsande on Unsplash
I spoke on a couple of panels about poetry at Flights of Foundry, specifically ones on form poetry and the history of speculative poetry, along with teaching a workshop as an introduction to speculative poetry.
Form poetry is a huge topic, one I’ve been tackling here with my slow reading of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Traveled. After the panel I spoke on, I also picked up a copy of The Book of Forms by Lewis Turco, which other panelists recommended. I feel like the biggest takeaway from the panel is that there are hundreds of forms, most of them have variants, and it’s totally legit to create your own “nonce” form. And if your nonce form gets popular enough, then perhaps someday someone will include it in a book about poetry forms!
The history of speculative poetry panel was also interesting, in looking at the places where the speculative emerges in historical poetry, which is honestly all over the place. Even many of the classic poems that we learn about in school are at least marginally speculative, if not entirely speculative. (Do we really think a raven talked to Edgar Allen Poe? Okay, maybe.)
The intro to speculative poetry workshop I taught was an utter delight. I had a small group of people familiar with poetry who hadn’t necessarily tried their hand at speculative poetry, but they all took to it immediately and came up with brilliant poems even in the limited time I allotted to each of the exercises. We wrote scifaiku, slightly longer poems inspired by images, and poems in which we all used the same occupation, location, and object in our poems. Amusingly, I realized after the fact that the poem I wrote to the last prompt was not even remotely speculative, but it turned out so wonderfully that I didn’t mind!
The two panels I spoke on should eventually be available to watch. The intro to speculative poetry workshop will not be, but watch this space, as I’m trying to find a way to offer that again!
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