Yes, it's been a long time since I began doing this. Reality intruded there, in all sorts of unpleasant ways, and I barely escaped with my life. While I enjoy analyzing my reactions to poems, I hope that their authors take these criticisms as pure, impersonal, intellectual fiddling-after-Rome-burns; they are not intended to be offensive.

“After ( Read more... )

In reference to the fracas anent the poem "The Green Reich," which appeared in the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Star*Line 34.2, THIS IS RIDICULOUS, YOU GUYS. The description of the judge in the poem is deliberately casting its net as wide as possible (ludicrously impossible, really)--specifically, I would think, to avoid being construed as ( Read more... )

I'm posting critiques of a three-year-old anthology in hopes that the current one will not be dissected publicly before the voting is done. Discussion of poems whilst in the midst of the voting process can be misinterpreted as attempts to influence votes inappropriately, and puts poets in the uncomfortable position of having to defend their own ( Read more... )

I've got SF poems, including an illustrated Flash poem, at the new issue of Verse Wisconsin. And I also have an article on genre poetry there. Just got done with OdysseyCon, where I got to drive Harry Turtledove to and from the airport and otherwise hang out and chat with him. What a nice guy-and a wonderful writer! Fun panels, writing and ( Read more... )

I was asked to judge the 2009 Poetry Super Highway Contest because I won 3rd place in the 2008 contest. It's been a diverting and instructive experience. The contest was difficult to judge fairly, but the system did enable rapid decision-making. Where the difficulty in scoring lay was that, in reading the batches of poems, it was obvious that most ( Read more... )

I attribute the public decline in appreciation of poetry in the U.S. mainly to one phenomenon: the academization of poetry journals. The rise in MFA-to say nothing of Ph.D.-creative writing programs has created a cottage industry of academic literary journals that generally do not pay their contributors and do not market outside academia-or at all ( Read more... )

Disclaimer: I normally don’t review magazines; indeed, I normally don’t review at all, but an offer was made to send out gratis the first issue of Realms of Fantasy published under the New Order of Warren Lapine’s ownership to anyone who cared to blog about it, and I succumbed to the Lure of the Freebie. My familiarity with previous issues was ( Read more... )

Occasionally I dabble in false translations. The process involves taking a poem or other text in a language that one does not know, and writing a poem based on what the words look like, freeing up the subconscious like you wouldn't believe. I've just had one of these, "Should," published in elimae, here. The original poem, "Schuld," also posted on ( Read more... )

With great displeasure, I've received a call for submissions to Ito En Ltd's Haiku Project.

Basically, the idea is that you send them "positive" haiku, and they put them on tea-bottle labels. Oh, and you give up rights to the work and permission to use your name. That's right. You can provide packaging content and endorsement for a commercial ( Read more... )

I was ranting again about places that never respond to submissions-and then I got handed a stack of postal submissions that the general editor of Mobius: A Journal of Social Change (of which I am poetry editor) had allowed to accumulate, without my knowledge, since JUNE (yes, heads have rolled). On the other hand, that's June of '08. And most of ( Read more... )