Interview with SF poet Steve Sneyd (Amazing Stories Mag)

There is a nowadays little known master of SF poetry living in the UK named Steve Sneyd.

He's (still) well-known among British SF poets, and also American SF poets who've been around awhile, but I, for one, had never heard of him until last year, when I was researching a Poetry Round Up on British SF Poetry. I have nominated him for the honor of Grandmaster of SF Poetry awarded by the SFPA (voting through June 15, 2015) and I sincerely hope he wins. It's important to remember poets like him. 

He is pretty much completely offline and only writes handwritten letters or anything for that matter, including his SF Poetry newsletter DataDump. I interviewed him by snail mail and transcribed his hand-written responses:

Interview with SF Poet Steve Sneyd

Amazing Stories: Speculative Poetry Round-up 2/2014: (Mostly) British

My latest blog post on Amazing Stories came out today. Since the reviews I'm working on, especially of the anthology of British Science Fiction Poetry Where Rockets Burn Through, are taking me longer than expected, I decided to do another round-up. This has become my emergency back-up plan, but it seems that they are also quite popular, so I don't feel too badly about doing it a week earlier than planned. I've had British SF Poetry on the brain lately, and I seem to have found a lot of historical stuff, so I hope you enjoy.

Now, however, I'll have to make sure I have poetry recorded for the review planned February 26 before we leave on vacation. My son has the last 2 weeks of February off of school and we are going to Italy to visit his Nonna and Nonno. Needless to say, I'd rather not miss a scheduled post and miraculously I'm pretty well-prepared.

Anyway, here's a little snippet of today's post:

First, we have a very small ‘Zine, a Newsletter really (only one sheet of paper printed on both sides!). It’s called Handshake and it’s produced sporadically by John Francis Haines,. I found a little introduction written by Haines which states:
HANDSHAKE started in 1992 after discussions between myself and Steve Sneyd, as we felt there was a need of some kind of “British” equivalent of the USA based Science Fiction Poetry Association.

I found this intro to the pamphlet on a webpage no longer maintained by John Howard in which he collected the poetry printed on Handshake into the Handshake Anthology. There’s lots of great poetry to be read there by Steve Snyde, Giovanni Malito (and Italo-Canadian active in Ireland at the time), Douglas Forward, Andrew Darlington and others as well as the well-known US poet Bruce Boston:

Handshake Anthology

John Howard produced a short-lived WebZine called House of Moonlight, which also has some nice poetry by British poets you can still read online:

House of Moonlight

These poets seem impossible to find and further digging has uncovered...

...uncovered what, exactly? Well you'll just have to go to Amazing Stories to read the full post:

Speculative Poetry Round-up 2/2014: (Mostly) British

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