My rabid and demanding fans (both of them) need not fear. My poetry hasn’t changed.
The niche artistic field of “Speculative Poetry,” on the other hand, has. What was once a venue for the absolute cutting edge of poetic expression–not to mention the only legitimate “poetic movement” since modernism or, God forbid, the beat movement, has devolved into “radical bumperstickerism.”
There was a time when “speculative” poetry felt like the first SF book I ever read (Trapped in Space, Jack Williamson). It (speculative poetry) was so fundamentally wrong that it transcended…it became the only poetry worth reading from somewhere in the late 1970′s well into the 1990′s. Maya Angelou my ass. Give me some John Calvin Rezmerski, Ivan Arguelles, or Lucius Shepard any day.
It doesn’t feel like that any more, so I’m going to take my Joron’s and my Frazier’s and my Boston’s and go home.
Home being here. Look for some fancy-ass poetry tab in the near future.
