Some bits of mermaid- and sea-related flotsam from the world of speculative and fantasy poetry:
The 2011
Rhysling Award winners have been announced.
csecooney's excellent poem
The Sea King's Second Bride won first place in the long poem category. It's a marvelous romp of a poem-tale about the woman the Sea King married after his first wife returned to land, an undersea stepmother who's far from wicked but no one's fool. You can read Ms. Cooney's poem in the
Goblin Fruit archive
here.
If you're interested in speculative or fantasy poetry, the
2011 Rhysling Anthology, containing all this year's Rhysling-nominated poems, features plenty of stuff well-suited to sea-lovers, including B.J. Lee's The Legend of the Flying Dutchman, Sonya Taafe's In the Earth in Those Days, Amal el-Mohtar (
tithenai) and Jessica P. Wick (
mer-moon)'s co-written
Courting Song for Selkies and Robert Frazier's Wreck-Diving the Starship, the third-place long-form finalist.
Speaking of
goblinfruit and mermaid poetry, my poem
The Sea Witch Talks Show Business is available in
the Summer 2011 issue. The titular Sea Witch is the familiar figure from the
Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, rendered somewhat less familiar. In addition to the text of the poem, the fantastic
s00j recorded the spoken word audio also available at the link, rendering it delightfully creepy. (Among her many other accomplishments,
s00j has many sea-songs, notably
Shipful of Monsters,
The Wendy Trilogy (a retelling of Peter Pan in which Wendy takes Hook up on his offered chance to become a pirate, which then spawned the
Lost Girls Pirate Academy), and most recently
Neptune, off her most recent album
Mischief.)
Enjoy the sea-themed poetry and musical delights! Fair wind and fair weather to you.