Speculative Poetry Archive Wiki

**Welcome to the Speculative Poetry Archive Wiki!**
A page dedicated to archiving speculative poetry since the 1900s. Created by Holly Lyn Walrath. The majority of this information is currently sourced from the Internet Archive Pulp Magazine archive. We are always looking for volunteers to help update this Wiki. Poets are encouraged to create their own pages for their poems, books, and Poet page.

We're a collaborative community website about Speculative Poetry Archive that anyone, including you, can build and expand. Wikis like this one depend on readers getting involved and adding content. Click the "ADD NEW PAGE" or "EDIT" button at the top of any page to get started!

## Categories

* Poems
* Poets
* Poetry Books
* Magazines

## Types of Poems Archived On This Wiki

* Speculative poetry (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror)
* Published in a Magazine of speculative fiction
* Published or self-published in a book by a speculative author
* Self-published online by a speculative author

## A Short History of Speculative Poetry

##### by Holly Lyn Walrath, creator of this Wiki

Speculative poetry is poetry that deals with fantasy, science fiction, horror, or science. Unlike most genres of poetry that are defined by their form (i.e., the sonnet, the haiku), speculative poetry is defined by the poem's content. In this way, the genre is perhaps more subjective, because while we can easily agree on what a sonnet is (and what it's rules are), it's less easy to define something as large as "science fiction".

Suzette Haden Elgin is one of the main figures in speculative fiction. She founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) in 1978 and says in her book, *The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook,* that a speculative poem must:

* Be about a reality different from our own.
* Contain an element of science (or, I insert: fantasy, scifi, horror, etc.)
* Contain a narrative or "story" element.

Of course, the last is considered more optional today. You may be aware that most genre fiction (I will use the term speculative fiction) tends to be more "story"- driven vs. character-driven. I think that Elgin was drawing on this idea in her third bullet point above. Elgin was writing in 2005, and since then, the world of speculative poetry has expanded to include not just narrative or storytelling poems, but also more lyrical and experimental works focused on word choice, emotion, and skill of execution.

I like Elgin's definition of speculative poetry because it is expansive. Using it, we can argue that any poem that contains a speculative element such as ghosts, unicorns, monsters, alternate timelines, and so on, is speculative.

Of course, this makes a problem too, because it makes the history of speculative poetry very very broad.

### Surrealism vs. Realism

I use the term "realist" vs. literary, which implies that genre poetry is in some way non-literary. So what distinguishes a "literary"  poem from a speculative poem? Perhaps nothing.

I find it helpful to answer this question by looking at the definition of surrealism. Surrealism is a movement of art, music, and literature that started in Europe in the 1920s. You may be familiar with some of its most popular artists: Dada, Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and so on.

In terms of literature, surrealism is often used to describe poems that are not strictly science fiction or fantasy poems, but that deal with some reality that is not our own.

Surrealist poetry was based around the idea of dreams--and the strange things that happen in them. As the leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, put it in his famous essay "The First Surrealist Manifesto," "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him."  In dreams, the strangest things can happen and we feel totally fine with it. But when we awake, reality sets back in and suddenly we see how strange the dreams were.

Breton goes on to say, "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak."

This state of expressing "surreality" or the merging of dream and reality, was considered a kind of higher goal or state of mind to which artists and writers should aspire. Breton defines surrealism as:
> "Pure psychic automatism [unconsciousness] by which we propose to express--either verbally or in writing or in some other manner--the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations...
> Surrealism rests on a belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected until now, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought."
>
>

Using this somewhat convoluted definition, we might say that speculative poetry is that which dreams are made of and that it comes from a place deep in the unconscious mind. And indeed, it's easy to see how vampires, werewolves, and other creatures of the mind might have sprung from the unconscious mind giving form to shadows in the woods, or how stories of people walking on mars came from looking up at the stars and imagining what might be out there in our wild, wide universe.
Have you ever had an idea in the middle of the night for a story or poem and woken up to realize it didn't make much sense? That unconscious mind is what we tap into any time we write. The very act of transcribing our imaginings, waking or sleeping, is surrealism. After all, we don't dream about mundane things. And poems are merely another form of waking dream. This is why I often suggest writers should write when they first wake up, before they've had coffee or petted the cat, or dealt with a screaming child. Because your mind is still in that dream state, and if you go to the page then, you might be surprised by what emerges in your words.

In the book *Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology* (2017), Willard Bohn explains that there are several elements of surrealism:

* Psychic Automatism (the expression of the unconscious, dreaming mind)
* Le merveilleux or "the marvelous" (that which is so beautiful and strange that it provokes wonder but also fear, today described as the uncanny)
* Le hasard objectif or "objective chance" (the idea that the most powerful images are those that are surprising or unexpected. Breton and other surrealists believed that the best way of achieving these surprising images was by psychic automatism - tapping into the unconscious)
* Coincidentia oppositorum (the idea that opposites could be merged or banished, such as the idea of good and evil. Today, we refer to this as "the liminal" - the gray area between extremes.).
* L'amour fou or "delirious love" (described by Breton as "the only idea capable of reconciling every individual, momentarily or not, with the idea of love." Love continues to be one of the most popular subjects of poets, even among speculative poets.)

I find these elements useful as a way of describing speculative poetry. According to Bohn, another goal of surrealist poetry was to pick apart the relationship between certain concepts:

* The unconscious and conscious
* The person and the physical world
* The person and society

Speculative poetry today is very much concerned with the gray area between these concepts. From Afrofuturism to experimental poetry, poets are seeking to break down the binaries we hold as dear.

These points are all building blocks of speculative poetry as we know it today. The goals of speculative poetry and realist poetry are not all that different. Both seek to provoke a sense of wonder or emotion in the reader. Both seek to portray in as accurate a way as possible their reality or unreality. How they get there is the only difference.

### Speculative Poetry from the Dawn of Writing to Now

I think it's a good idea to provide a short history of the speculative poem. Of course, this could be an entire book, but to be honest, it's not necessarily one I would (or you may) be interested in reading. Why? because most speculative (and indeed, non-speculative) poetry was written before the magical, diverse, and thriving culture of poetry we have today. As with any dive into history, these modes of poetry may feel old-fashioned to you.

That being said, I find it important to establish that for many hundreds of years, speculative poetry has existed and thrived. Since science fiction has really only gained steam starting in the 1950s, there is often a misconception that speculative works did not exist before that date. I feel I must validate this history because there is a perennial debate about the "goodness" of speculative poetry, just as there is a debate about the value of speculative literature vs. realist literature.

I should also note that there is no real "anthology" or book that covers the history of speculative poetry. It is very much an understudied field of literature. Also, I write and study in English, so this history does not fully encompass the full view of global poetry.

If I can have one last also, it is that the speculative is a lens through which we can read historical works, just as afrofuturism or feminism or queer theory are lenses. Through a lens darkly, instead of asking "Is this poem about ghosts?" we might assume the poem is speculative, and that will allow us to read it from a deeper point of view.

So, putting aside those factors, here is a short history.

#### The First Epics & Religions

The elements used in speculative poetry date as far back as, and even beyond, the Christian Bible, Jewish Torah, The Qur'an, The Vedas, and The Sutras.

I begin with religious texts because as with most works of literature, they are the first to be preserved in history. And, every religious text has elements of the supernatural and speculative--from Moses parting the red seas to the enlightenment of Nirvana.

Even the oldest known work of literature, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (3rd Millenium BCE) contains many speculative elements (monsters, gods, heroes, and a mythic quest.)

So even as far back as the very first written texts, people were telling stories of the speculative.

In 700 CE the "dream poem" or poem set entirely in a dream, was born with the old English poem "The Dream of the Rood". The word "rood" refers to the cross.

When we look at these older works, the question that comes to mind is, where did these elements come from? If vampires, ghosts, and unicorns are as ancient as humanity, what in our human mindset causes us to record, orally or in writing, the wildest parts of imagination? We are living today in a world of literature literally built on human imagination. What we know as "vampire" or "ghost" or "unicorn" is a shared knowledge and history that allows us to understand the world we live in and our collective dreams.

What's more, this collective obsession with things not of our reality transcends culture. In every culture since the dawn of time, humans have imagined the strange, weird, and "other."

Many believe the oldest speculative poem to be "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor," written in 2500 BCE. It was written in a form of Egyptian cursive called Hieratic and was probably the first tale about sea serpents.

In the Homeric or Heroic Period (1200-800 BCE), the Norse, Greeks, and Latins wrote many speculative works which influence mythic or epic poetry today. From the pantheon of gods like Aphrodite, Cupid, Zeus, and Athena, to Thor, Loki, and Odin, most cultures and religions have some magical, powerful set of gods, often tied to certain elements of nature or human traits (thunder, love). From the Mahābhārata in India to the Odyssey, epic poetry dominated most of early documented speculative works.

In the 1200s, the Persian poet Rumi captivated audiences with his epic poem the Maṭnawīye Ma'nawī (Spiritual Couplets), which contained many stories of the Sufi mystic tradition which celebrated the individual relationship with God.

Indeed, the history of speculative poetry could be written as a history of human belief and disbelief.

#### The 1400s-1500s

Early English Poetry and the Birth of High Fantasy

The Old English period or anglo-Saxon period ended in 1066 CE, merging into the Middle English period in 1066-1450. Norman-French armies invaded England in 1066 and the french brought chivalric romances and french fables to England. The late or "high" medieval period (1200-1485) marks an influence by Italian and French authors alike.

This swath of time saw the publication of such fantastical works like Beowulf, written in early or old English, and laying the basis for our understanding of "high fantasy" tropes - knights, princesses, dragons, and monsters. The idea of a king and the knights who pledged loyalty to him comes directly from the legends of King Arthur in Britain.

You may have seen the recent movie adaptation of the poem, "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight" (if not, I highly recomend it). The movie is based on an early English poem and contains many tropes of fantasy.

Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* and other poems form the basis for pilgrimage tales, which can be seen in today's adventure and space journey poems.

Dante wrote his allegory the *Inferno* and set the foundation for many of today's dark imaginings of God and the Devil (and for many a horror game and movie.)

#### 1500s - 1800s

Fairy Stories and Fancies

From the Tudor Period (1485-1558) to the Jacobean Period (1603-1625), poetry in English was primarily written by courtiers and those associated with the court of Queen Elizabeth.

The English Renaissance was a time of fairy stories - from Spenser's Fairy Queen to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although some fairy tales date back as far as 860 CE, most of the tropes and poetic devices we know from this genre date to this period. This is also a time rife for fairytale poetry from Irish and Scottish poets. Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote many such fairytale poems, as well as the popular New Year's ode, Auld Lang Syne.

In Germany in the 1700s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote poems such as "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily" among other Volkspoesie or folksongs.

In the 1600s, Margaret Cavendish wrote "Poems and Fancies," a series of poems and stories that encompassed made-up worlds. As Cavendish said, "rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own." These made-up worlds and imaginings were deemed "Fancies" by the poet, who argued that using the imagination was a way to enjoy life better: "Fancy is the Ground whereon the Poetical aery Castles are built. There is no such sweet and pleasing Compagnion as Fancy, in a Poetical Head."

Of course, the trouble with this term is that fantasy and fairy stories later became associated with feminine qualities and romanticism, i.e., girliness, despite being written by men and women. There is also an interesting exploration to be made here of the idea of escapism in literature--which has long been debated in the speculative writing community. Realist researchers have in the past relegated speculative works to being somehow less important of study because they are "works of fancy".

The poetry of this time period was very rooted in form and structure. Shakespeare's Iambic pentameter and sonnets became the structure that many, many poets would imitate for years to come. This period was the first development of rhythm as a poetic device. The movements prior to this were primarily in older forms of English that did not translate in a way that showed their rhythm.

Across the globe, rhythm also made an appearance in the form of the Japanese haiku, which is a popular form in today's speculative poetry. 17th-century masters like Bashō popularized the form. There was also a thriving history of ghost and spiritual content in haiku, despite being a form that focused on nature traditionally. Robert Spiess, the once-editor of the magazine Modern Haiku said, "A haiku is the 'physical' form that the essence, the spirit, of a now-moment may take." Of course, he also said that "nothing in haiku should be unrealistic". We'll cover this more later, but I can just state that he probably was unaware of the thriving world of scifaiku!

The early aspects of gothic literature began in this time period. There was a school of poets referred to as "The Graveyard School" - poets who wrote often gloomy pieces about hanging out in graveyards.

#### Gothic Poetry and the Victorian Period

This is perhaps one of my favorite periods of speculative literature. The romantic period (1790-1830) in England overlaps the gothic period (1790-1890), as well as the Transcendental period (1830-1850) which took place in America. Whew!

Gothic writings overlap between the romantic and victorian periods in history, combining romanticism's focus on relationship and nature with a new interest in horrific subjects--ghosts, spirits, personal trauma, reanimated bodies, budding science, and vampires--that would become the gothic.

There are so many fantastic speculative works of this early time period that it's difficult to list them all. Some main authors to consider include:

* Emily Dickinson - Emily created the concept of telling a story slant. Her poem "Because I could not stop for Death" is perhaps one of the most widely known American gothic poems.
* Alfred Tennyson - Andrew Lang, the famous fairytale author, said of Tennyson, "To one age Tennyson may seem weakly superstitious; to another needlessly sceptical." Many of his works are considered epics of romanticism and fantasy poetry and he retold Arthurian tales to great success.
* Walt Whitman - Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a surrealist triumph and often overlooked as a speculative work. Many of Whitman's poems dealt with death, war, miracles, dreams, imaginations, and transcending the body.
* Elizabeth Barrett Browning / Robert Browning - These two poet spouses were most known for their romantic works, but also wrote works that dealt with the supernatural.
* Christina Rossetti - One of the peak poets of this age, Rossetti wrote the famous poem "The Goblin Market", which is still read today.
* Bram Stoker - Although Bram Stoker only wrote about 3 poems in his lifetime and they can't necessarily be called speculative, his most famous work Dracula was a huge inspiration for horror poetry today.
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Perkins wrote the famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which has influenced many writers since, and used supernatural imagery to convey the political message of the women's suffragette movement. (See: She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping).
* The Brontë Sisters - Although they are best known for their novels, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne also wrote poetry and made up a mythopoeia of their own in their imaginary world of Gondal.
* Oscar Wilde - Wilde is best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray, but his poems were often just as gothic and death-focused. He wrote many poems about the graves of his contemporaries, as well as poems about myths.
* Mary Shelley - The authoress of Frankenstein wrote poetry as well, although it is not strictly speculative, but her name feels important to list here as her work has inspired so many poets.
* Edgar Allen Poe - Poe is one of the most prolific speculative poets of this time, and his most popular horror poem is "The Raven", but many of his other terrifying poems are still very enjoyable today.
* John Keats - Myth, the supernatural, romanticism, and the gothic collide in Keats' poetry. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is one such ballad that deals with fairies, knights, and elves.
* Victor Hugo - The author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables wrote poems such as The End of Satan, a spiritual epic poem, and "Tomorrow at Dawn" which dealt with some of the gothic themes of the time.
* Charles Baudelaire - One of the most interesting poets of this time, Baudelaire's poetry drew heavily on gothic imagery of death, nightmares, spirits, and demons.
* Lewis Carroll - Although primarily a children's book author, Carroll pioneered the fantastical comedic poem, playing with word choice and sound in "Jabberwocky".
* W.S. Gilbert - W.S. Gilbert is best known for being part of the duo Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote many popular plays including The Pirates of Penzance. Gilbert wrote was the librettist for these works, but also wrote many poems in the speculative vein.
* Katharine Pyle - Pyle wrote and illustrated children's books of fairytales. Her artwork and poetry would likely be very familiar to you today, as they formed the basis for many children's books to come.
* H.G. Wells - While his work in creating The War of the Worlds for radio was extremely popular as a dramatic play, it wa also full of poetry.

> "And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens." --H.G. Wells, The Star
>
>

#### 1900s-1950s

The Modern Period

At the turn of the century,  Queen Victoria died, ushering out the age of the Victorian period and pushing the world into a new and modern century. In many ways, we might define this period as a series of new technologies, from the Wright Brother's creation of the first airplane in 1903, along with Ford's invention of the automobile in the same year, to Einstein's theory of relativity in 1916, to the First World War and thus machinations of death in 1914, to Dane Niels Bohr's Nobel Prize for atomic theory in 1922, to Charles Lindburgh's first solo flight in 1927 and the introduction of animation with Walt Disney's Mickey mouse in 1928, to astronomer Edwin Hubble's theory of the expanding universe in 1929, and so on.

The boom of the second industrial era saw the fast creation of several huge technologies such as the light bulb and the telephone, along with major shifts in politics and several upheavals in the world.

It's no wonder that this time is often considered the foundation of science fiction literature, where authors were beginning to contend with technology but also to dive deeper into the dark realities of our world. Ghosts seemed more real during a World War. The idea of technology that could allow us to fly to the moon seemed like a reality when people could fly through the air.

Literature as we know it shifted as more and more people were able to read and had access to books. It was not just that writing became more accessible and more people were able to write (other than the wealthy and elite), but also that writing for the common person was seen as preferable and a way of earning a living (whether it did or not was another story).

This was the time of the early pulp science fiction books and the beginning of science fiction and fantasy magazines, which from their inception, often included poetry as a kind of respite between stories. *Amazing Stories* was the first English language magazine to solely publish science fiction, and was sold alongside magazines like *Astounding Stories, Wonder Stories,* and *Weird Tales.*

In the late 1930s, a group of writers emerged called the Futurians, which included Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wolheim, James Blish, and others. This was the beginning of Robert A Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell, and Ursula K. Le Guin's work.

Important to note is the existence of magazines geared directly toward women. These pulp magazines can be seen as the foundations of most gothic literature and the reason that many women writers found their way into speculative genres. They began far before this time, though. Victorian periodicals contained such fantastical material that it's astounding to me they are not often researched. "There were tales of adventure, of gothic castles or unsurpassable mountains, of husbands losing their lives at sea or becoming blind and c----, of travels into dark woods prowled by thieves and bands of vagabonds. Hardly a month passed without an 'odd' marriage, either sudden or based on mistaken identity," says Jeffrey A. Auerbach ("What They Read: Mid-Nineteenth Century English Women's Magazines and the emergence of a Consumer Culture," in Victorian Periodicals Review.) And although poems were seen as content meant to fill the page in the case of empty space, they were also enjoyed by the public, living alongside these periodical stories.

It is frustrating that although it's easy to find information about short stories published during this time in the pulps, it's harder to find any repository of poems published in these magazines. Poems were often unmarked in the table of contents, or if they were, they simply said "verse" or "poem". Weird Tales seems to be the magazine that published the most speculative poems, based on my research. It's also important to note that it seems that most writings by women were poems--and that women were published in science fiction and fantasy magazines, but mostly as poets and not short storyists.

##### A list of speculative poets of the early 1900s:

* Rudyard Kipling - Kipling or the "poet of the empire" is seen by many as an imperialist poet who applied mythical and metaphorical status to the British Empire through creature poems like "The Centaurs". IMHO, his work is rife for re-visionist retellings. Kipling's work influenced many writers of the time, and is important to understand in its historical context as his stories and poems were popular prior to World War I, but later in life these ideas left him isolated.
* T.S. Eliot - Eliot's works remain a huge influence on the speculative poetry genre. The Waste Land (1922) and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) are probably the most well-known of his works. Eliot was influenced by writers like Dante, Shakespeare, and Joseph Conrad.
* H.P. Lovecraft - There is too much to say about Lovecraft to fill a short paragraph. Lovecraft's poetry continues to influence science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature, poetry, film, and culture today. Despite its inherent problems, Lovecraft's work is a necessary point on this timeline.
* Langston Hughes - Hughes is considered by many to be an early father of the Afrofuturism genre (more on this in our section on Afrofuturism in Lesson 4). His assistant Lindsey Patterson explains how his work was highly controversial in its time because it dared to dream, "Hughes … was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll." Hughes remains one of my favorite poets, for his work is simple and yet deeply complex, enjoyable, and heartfelt.
* C.S. Lewis - A contemporary of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis is most known for The Chronicles of Narnia and wrote primarily in allegory. Much of his poetry was rather bleak, but he did write the occasional science poem such as "The Meteorite". Lewis dwelled in images of supernatural creatures in his works and is responsible for much of the fantasy tropes we have today.
* Clark Ashton Smith - Smith was a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and was published widely in Weird Tales magazine. A critic once said of his writing that "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse." He was said to draw on his nightmares for inspiration. He was never able to make a living with his poetry and spent most of his life poor and working hard labor. Many of his short poems are available to read online and are quite poignant.
* George Santayana - A Spanish-born American philosopher, Santayana also wrote poems that utilized myth, such as his poem "Before a Statue of Achilles." He is quoted as saying, "There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable."
* Laura Riding Jackson - Called metaphysical, quirky, and difficult to read, Jackson's poems are better interpreted through a speculative lens. Her poem "The City of Cold Women" reads like a precursor to the poems of Margaret Atwood. It's also an important example of early structures that defy the common rhyme schemes of the time - with its fragmented structure.
* Carl Sandburg - Although many of Carl Sandburg's poems are not considered speculative, I had to point out his delightful Halloween poem, "Theme in Yellow", a delightful horror poem with a wonderful twist.
* Marianne Moore - Moore's poetry deals heavily with nature as a subject. She wrote many poems that could be considered science poems from a naturalist perspective.
* Guillaume Apollinaire - An italian poet who is considered a precursor to the surrealist movement. Apollinaire was one of the early creators of the "calligrams" structure - or concrete/visual poem, where the words from an actual image on the printed page.
* Mina Loy - A futurist and precursor to surrealism, Loy's work was seen as too experimental for its day. Lush and full of surprising images, I find Loy's work enjoyable to read through the speculative lens, in particular "Human Cylinders" which reads "The human cylinders / revolving in the enervating dusk / that wraps each closer in the mystery / of singularity".
* E.E. Cummings - Cummings is considered one of the first poets to truly experiment with structure, grammar, punctuation, and wordplay. Cummings identified with Cubism, Dada, and surrealism, and wrote of ghosts, angels, and death in fascinating ways. Most of his poems can be read through a speculative lens.
* Ezra Pound - Pound's Cantos have been interpreted by researchers in many disciplines, including speculative readings. This was Pound's life's work, an avant-garde epic. Pound was one of the first poets to come up with the idea of imagism--which forms the basis for poetry as we know it today--simple free verse with the use of clear visual images. Pound said, "I am at best trying to provide the average reader with a few tools for dealing with the heteroclite mass of undigested information hurled at him daily and monthly." This movement had three particular focuses:
	+ Direct treatment of the subject of the poem
	+ The idea that every word should count
	+ Rhythm that is musical, not repetitive

#### 1950s - Today

The Golden Age of Science Fiction

Isaac Asimov said that "The dropping of the atom bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable. Once the horror at Hiroshima took place, anyone could see that science fiction writers were not merely dreamers and crackpots after all, and that many of the motifs of that class of literature were now permanently part of the newspaper headlines".

Today, we are living in a golden age of science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature. It began in the 1950s with the advent of the pulp magazines, and has not lost steam yet. The movement of literature that embraces the surreal, strange, weird, and magical, has grown to one that enters the consciousness of every consumer of art.

It is my opinion that the very early speculative poets of the 1950s and beyond were working their best to make poetry as equally important as short fiction and novels. Throughout the history of the golden age, magazines regularly published poetry alongside short stories.

This was the period when subgenres bloomed. Surrealism turned into magic realism, originating in Latin America with Gabriel García Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In America and beyond, women writers, writers of color, queer writers, and disabled writers slowly found footing in speculative fields. We have now seen a stage of speculative poetry in which every possible topic has been explored, yet poetry is also becoming even more accessible to the everyday reader and has gained popularity beyond just the speculative markets.

Early magazines focused on speculative poetry itself include Kineses (1968-1970), Speculative Poetry Review (1977-1980), Uranus (1978-1984), Treaders of Starlight (1978), Cthulhu Calls,  Umbral (1978), Star\*Line (1978-current). Some have called the poetry collection Wine of Wonder by Lilith Lorraine (penname of Mary Maude Dunn Wright) from 1952 the first-ever volume of science fiction poetry.

There seems to have been a gathering of speculative poets focused around the forming of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) in 1978 by Suzette Haden Elgin, around which many magazines emerged and many authors started publishing books.

In this week's reading, I've included Elgin's chapter on how SFPA was founded for those that are interested in the history of the organization.

Speculative poetry is now mainstream. Authors like Tracy K. Smith have straddled the line between "literary" and speculative markets. We have an organization dedicated to the genre, as well as several award categories:

* The Elgin Award: For chapbooks and full-length books
* The Dwarf Stars Award: For individual poems under 10 lines
* The Rhysling Award: For individual poems over 10 lines (short

There are so many important poets of this time, that it would be difficult to show examples from every one. Instead, I am providing a list of names in case you want to dive further into this field. I highly recommend the resources on the SFPA website.

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