Bittercon: Women Writing Speculative Poetry
I looked over the scheduled topics for this year's Wiscon, wistfully putting together my own "if I had been there" schedule. This was the panel that really caught my eye. I would even have applied to be on this panel, if I were there. Given how much I hate talking in front of an audience, that's saying something.
The first speculative poem written by a woman that I consciously read was "Goblin Market" somewhere between the ages of eight and ten. I'm not counting the numerous anonymous nursery rhymes and children's limericks I'd read and had read to me, many of which were no doubt written by women. I'm also not counting the bits of poetry that showed up in the midst of prose in all the faery tale collections my mother accumulated, things like witches' songs and the verses heroines and heroes spoke to protect themselves and those around them from evil. A lot of those retellings were written by women, now that I've gone back and looked them up, but at the time, I wasn't paying attention to authors, just subject matter. I also didn't separate, either consciously or I think unconsciously, between "fantasy" and other kinds of fiction. I liked faery tales, I liked Narnia, and I adored the storyspinning Sara did in A Little Princess, and the fragments of Joe's stories in Little Women. I didn't realize any of those would have been a different genre, though, from Little Women or A Little Princess itself. In fourth grade, I glutted on my school library's Greek mythology section, but I was also reading the popular "children's novelists" of the time, Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and the like.
Poetry was the same. When I was twelve or thirteen, my English class did Oral Interpretations. I selected several satirical faery tale poems from a book in the school library. I can't remember the name of the book, or whether it was one person who wrote it or several. In any case, the themes were things like Cinderella deciding to pretend the shoe doesn't fit, because she's not so sure about this prince guy, or Sleeping Beauty pretending to keep on sleeping because an anonymous kiss is no way to choose a husband. I picked the poems because of the faery tale themes, but I wasn't thinking of them as speculative poetry, because I didn't know there was such a thing. I grew up with my father's shelves full of Asimov and Tolkien and Clarke. I grew up surrounded by my parents collection of mythology, folklore, and the faery tales my mother kept collecting for us. While I knew about the genre of science fiction, I don't think I realized at that time that there was another genre called fantasy, and it was my favorite. It was just...what I read.
What I wrote was probably more interstitial. I started writing poetry at the age of seven under the guidance of a poet who came into the classroom...oh, about once a month. I went to an alternative school in San Francisco with connections to the Foundation for the Arts, so we got poets, musicians, dancers, and actors who'd come in and do mini-workshops with us. I don't remember the poet's particular style, but I tended to write very imagistic poems about sunsets, my classmates, the city. Sometimes fantastic imagery would creep in, usually as part of a dream, but I don't think I was equipped to separate and analyze my beloved myths and faery tales enough to do anything insightful with them. I remember trying, at about thirteen, after my Oral Interpretation, and getting frustrated because either it came out as a straight retelling in verse, or it was too much like what I'd read. As a teen, I continued writing imagistic poetry, a lot of it with a strong environmental flavor. Then I stopped writing poetry, except the occasional poem as a wedding present for a friend.
That lasted about fifteen years. When I started up again, I was very creaky, and the sort of thing I'd written as a teenager didn't feel like it fit anymore. I posted some of the old stuff to my online journal to see what people thought of it, and a good friend commented with some great detailed feedback. In gratitude, I asked her for a prompt or two for a poem. I might have specified faery tales, I don't remember, and I think I actually gave myself an out by saying I'd write a drabble if I couldn't think of anything for the poem. She requested either "Little Red Riding Hood" or "Beauty and the Beast." I sat on that for a while, trying to decide which to do and wondering if poetry was still in me. Then something clicked, might have been a friend suggested I smoosh the two together and see what I got. That led to " Incarnadine," which led to " Wingspan," and then to "Rosebed." All of these poems combine at least two faery tales as a means to examine both. That's kind of become my schtick, along with poetry about female "monsters," and a lot of watery mythology. Often, these poems address the ways in which women are constrained and punished in faery tales and mythology. A lot of faery tales, most famously those written by the women of seventeenth and eighteenth century salons, were told as reflections of women's experiences and objections to the system. I try to engage with that aspect, to see what's changed and what hasn't in the intervening centuries.
In this way, I feel like Anne Sexton is a kind of mentor, though I had only ever read one of her poems before I was in my late twenties. I suspect it was sitting in the my backbrain all those years, stewing, and then when I actually acquired a copy of Transformations, I got a feel for the variety, and therefore the idea that I could do my own take, and it would be okay. I also re-encountered "Goblin Market," and now I knew what I was looking at. Suddenly, looking around me, I saw a lot of speculative poetry by women. I can't comment on whether that history was ever "lost" as a generality, but certainly I wasn't aware of it. Though, to be fair, I wasn't aware of male speculative poetry, either. I'd been raised on the idea that you can't really separate poetry out by genre, only by form. It's possible that held me back a bit, because I did feel like I had to be "realistic" with my poetry in some way, despite reading poems that showed me otherwise. I think I might have felt that was something done "back then," and not accepted now. I'm very glad I finally found out I was wrong.
In the past several years, I've read a lot of speculative poetry, and I do get the feeling that the stuff by women is more...subversive, more likely to challenge the system. This is especially true in fantastic poetry as opposed to science fictional poetry. A lot of science fictional poetry seems to be challenging the science, or interrogating a classic setup based on a popular extrapolation of science, and men and women both get into that. In fantastic poetry, many women seem to be carving out new places where we fit, and challenging the flat archetypes of "witch" and "princess/heroine." There's a lot of passivity built into Western mythologies, faery tales, and folklore, because passivity was expected and demanded of women in the cultures and times where those stories arose. The work written by women often challenged that, or at least critiqued it, and we're critiquing and challenging it now. Not always as overtly as rewriting a faery tale witch as a sympathetic character, though we've got a lot of great poetry addressing that topic, but frequently just in shifting things slightly to examine them from a new angle. I think we're so used to having to adapt things to apply to us, that the habit of adaptation often just comes out subconsciously. I certainly think we've diversified the field.
The first speculative poem written by a woman that I consciously read was "Goblin Market" somewhere between the ages of eight and ten. I'm not counting the numerous anonymous nursery rhymes and children's limericks I'd read and had read to me, many of which were no doubt written by women. I'm also not counting the bits of poetry that showed up in the midst of prose in all the faery tale collections my mother accumulated, things like witches' songs and the verses heroines and heroes spoke to protect themselves and those around them from evil. A lot of those retellings were written by women, now that I've gone back and looked them up, but at the time, I wasn't paying attention to authors, just subject matter. I also didn't separate, either consciously or I think unconsciously, between "fantasy" and other kinds of fiction. I liked faery tales, I liked Narnia, and I adored the storyspinning Sara did in A Little Princess, and the fragments of Joe's stories in Little Women. I didn't realize any of those would have been a different genre, though, from Little Women or A Little Princess itself. In fourth grade, I glutted on my school library's Greek mythology section, but I was also reading the popular "children's novelists" of the time, Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and the like.
Poetry was the same. When I was twelve or thirteen, my English class did Oral Interpretations. I selected several satirical faery tale poems from a book in the school library. I can't remember the name of the book, or whether it was one person who wrote it or several. In any case, the themes were things like Cinderella deciding to pretend the shoe doesn't fit, because she's not so sure about this prince guy, or Sleeping Beauty pretending to keep on sleeping because an anonymous kiss is no way to choose a husband. I picked the poems because of the faery tale themes, but I wasn't thinking of them as speculative poetry, because I didn't know there was such a thing. I grew up with my father's shelves full of Asimov and Tolkien and Clarke. I grew up surrounded by my parents collection of mythology, folklore, and the faery tales my mother kept collecting for us. While I knew about the genre of science fiction, I don't think I realized at that time that there was another genre called fantasy, and it was my favorite. It was just...what I read.
What I wrote was probably more interstitial. I started writing poetry at the age of seven under the guidance of a poet who came into the classroom...oh, about once a month. I went to an alternative school in San Francisco with connections to the Foundation for the Arts, so we got poets, musicians, dancers, and actors who'd come in and do mini-workshops with us. I don't remember the poet's particular style, but I tended to write very imagistic poems about sunsets, my classmates, the city. Sometimes fantastic imagery would creep in, usually as part of a dream, but I don't think I was equipped to separate and analyze my beloved myths and faery tales enough to do anything insightful with them. I remember trying, at about thirteen, after my Oral Interpretation, and getting frustrated because either it came out as a straight retelling in verse, or it was too much like what I'd read. As a teen, I continued writing imagistic poetry, a lot of it with a strong environmental flavor. Then I stopped writing poetry, except the occasional poem as a wedding present for a friend.
That lasted about fifteen years. When I started up again, I was very creaky, and the sort of thing I'd written as a teenager didn't feel like it fit anymore. I posted some of the old stuff to my online journal to see what people thought of it, and a good friend commented with some great detailed feedback. In gratitude, I asked her for a prompt or two for a poem. I might have specified faery tales, I don't remember, and I think I actually gave myself an out by saying I'd write a drabble if I couldn't think of anything for the poem. She requested either "Little Red Riding Hood" or "Beauty and the Beast." I sat on that for a while, trying to decide which to do and wondering if poetry was still in me. Then something clicked, might have been a friend suggested I smoosh the two together and see what I got. That led to " Incarnadine," which led to " Wingspan," and then to "Rosebed." All of these poems combine at least two faery tales as a means to examine both. That's kind of become my schtick, along with poetry about female "monsters," and a lot of watery mythology. Often, these poems address the ways in which women are constrained and punished in faery tales and mythology. A lot of faery tales, most famously those written by the women of seventeenth and eighteenth century salons, were told as reflections of women's experiences and objections to the system. I try to engage with that aspect, to see what's changed and what hasn't in the intervening centuries.
In this way, I feel like Anne Sexton is a kind of mentor, though I had only ever read one of her poems before I was in my late twenties. I suspect it was sitting in the my backbrain all those years, stewing, and then when I actually acquired a copy of Transformations, I got a feel for the variety, and therefore the idea that I could do my own take, and it would be okay. I also re-encountered "Goblin Market," and now I knew what I was looking at. Suddenly, looking around me, I saw a lot of speculative poetry by women. I can't comment on whether that history was ever "lost" as a generality, but certainly I wasn't aware of it. Though, to be fair, I wasn't aware of male speculative poetry, either. I'd been raised on the idea that you can't really separate poetry out by genre, only by form. It's possible that held me back a bit, because I did feel like I had to be "realistic" with my poetry in some way, despite reading poems that showed me otherwise. I think I might have felt that was something done "back then," and not accepted now. I'm very glad I finally found out I was wrong.
In the past several years, I've read a lot of speculative poetry, and I do get the feeling that the stuff by women is more...subversive, more likely to challenge the system. This is especially true in fantastic poetry as opposed to science fictional poetry. A lot of science fictional poetry seems to be challenging the science, or interrogating a classic setup based on a popular extrapolation of science, and men and women both get into that. In fantastic poetry, many women seem to be carving out new places where we fit, and challenging the flat archetypes of "witch" and "princess/heroine." There's a lot of passivity built into Western mythologies, faery tales, and folklore, because passivity was expected and demanded of women in the cultures and times where those stories arose. The work written by women often challenged that, or at least critiqued it, and we're critiquing and challenging it now. Not always as overtly as rewriting a faery tale witch as a sympathetic character, though we've got a lot of great poetry addressing that topic, but frequently just in shifting things slightly to examine them from a new angle. I think we're so used to having to adapt things to apply to us, that the habit of adaptation often just comes out subconsciously. I certainly think we've diversified the field.