Resonance Dark and Light by Bruce Boston (Amazing Stories Mag)

I have interviewed SFPA Grandmaster Bruce Boston and reviewed his work before. This is his most recent collection. I enjoyed this addition to his oeuvre very much! I love the cover, which Boston designed himself.

Poetry Review - Resonance Dark and Light by Bruce Boston

I recorded three full poems for your listening pleasure as well.

Poetry Planet No. 14 - Elgin Award Showcase 2014 Part 1

This week on StarShipSofa No. 367 you'll hear the next Poetry Planet. In it I showcase the winning and placing poetry collections of the Elgin Award 2014. I read at least one poem from each collection and talk a little about the collection itself and the poet. Below you'll find links to the collections and poets as well as the reviews I've done of the collections on Amazing Stories, which contain more audio examples.

Winner:
Demonstra, by Bryan Thao Worra.

2nd place:
Unexplained Fevers, by Jeannine Hall Gailey. Review on Amazing Stories (with more audio).

3rd place:
Dark Roads - Selected Long Poems, by Bruce Boston. Interview (Part 2) on Amazing Stories (with more audio from Dark Roads). Do check out Part 1 as well!

I'll follow up with the chapbook winners and honorees in a few weeks! Stay tuned!

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Amazing Stories: Speculative Poetry Round-up January 2014

I'm on vacation visiting family in Montana. I'm doing my best not to spend tons of time online and on my phone (and being marginally successful) but deadlines will be deadlines and my regularly scheduled post for Amazing Stories was due yesterday. It came out this morning, 1 January 2014: 

Speculative Poetry Round-up January 2014. Poetry around the web by Ann K. Schwader, Lisa M. Bradley, Brian Garrison, Bruce Boston, Dennis Lane and Beth Cato. Plus an article about poetry by Isaac Asimov. 

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2014/01/speculative-poetry-round-january-2014/

Enjoy! 

Amazing Stories - Interview with Bruce Boston Part 2

The second half of my interview with Bruce Boston is published today. Here's a teaser...

In the last installment I began an interview with Bruce Boston, the first Grandmaster of Science Fiction Poetry as granted by the SFPA in 1999. I introduced him and he told us a bit about his life as a successful poet. We talked about his most recent publications – Anthropomorphisms and Notes from the Shadow City (a collaboration with Gary William Crawford). If you missed the first part, you can catch up here!

Diane Severson for Amazing Stories Magazine (ASM): You have two new collections forthcoming in the next year, both from Dark Renaissance Books: Dark Roads, Selected Long Poems, 1971 – 2012, due out in a few months, and Tales of the Mutant Rain Forest, a collaborative project with Robert Frazier, due in late 2013 or early 2014.

Dark Roads, contains, well, the title says it all. Long poems, if we take the Rhysling Award categories as our basis, are those fifty lines or longer? The poems you sent me as a preview are all well beyond fifty lines. I think they are all over a hundred lines even. Are these longer poems different from short poems in some qualitative way, or just quantitatively? Why did you decide to make these long poems when you were writing them? Or did it just happen? Why did you choose to collect them in one volume? Have they all been published in previous collections or are they scattered around the SF magazines and the Internet?

Bruce Boston (BB): Yes, I used the categories of the Rhysling Awards as the standard for defining length. I believe the shortest poem in the collection is just over fifty lines and the longest is over five hundred lines.

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To read more please go to Amazing Stories: Interview with Bruce Boston Part 2

For your listening pleasure I've also included readings of two poems, one each from his forthcoming publications. Enjoy!

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Amazing Stories: Interviews galore!

This Friday your cup runneth over in all things interview.

First, my own next blog posting on Amazing Stories is the first of a two-part interview with Bruce Boston. Boston is a house-hold name among SF poets, but outside that circle and the horror writer's circle possibly unknown. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Bruce Boston. Among speculative poets and those who read it, he’s a well-known name. But just in case YOU are not familiar with him, here’s a brief biography of the Man (gleaned from his own website):

Since this is an interview I’ll let him speak for himself – Tell us a little about yourself, your history.

I was born of Catholic and Jewish heritage in Chicago in 1943, and grew up in Southern California in an era of rock and roll, the Cold War, and the Space Race. From
1961-2001, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, attending and graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, while active in the psychedelia and political protests of the 1960s.

I've worked in a variety of occupations, including computer programmer, college professor, technical writer, book designer, movie projectionist, gardener, and furniture
mover. I now live in Ocala, Florida, once known as The City of Trees, with my wife, writer-artist Marge Simon and the ghosts of two cats.

Boston’s fiction and poetry have appeared in hundreds of magazines – in both print, online and audio. I, myself, was first introduced to his poetry through StarShipSofa.com, for which I recorded a number of them. He’s won too many awards to list here, but suffice it to say he has won the important ones record numbers of times. He became the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s first Grand Master in 1999. He has published over 50 books and chapbooks, many of them available as ebooks. In addition to writing he is also a visual artist, having produced cover and internal art for his own books and for others. He is book editor for Dark Regions Press and speculative fiction and poetry editor for Pedestal Magazine. If you would like more detailed information on his life, publications and appearances, including links to more interviews, head on over to his website. He does an admirable job of keeping it up to date.

I hope your interest has been piqued! Please go and read the actual interview part of the interview at Amazing Stories Mag: Interview: Bruce Boston .

The second interview is of me, myself and I! I'm the second blogger from Amazing Stories to be interviewed. I was supposed to be the first, but someone else got his act together sooner. So, here we are. Fran Friel, one of the staff bloggers for ASM has been given the task of interviewing all of the other staff bloggers for your reading pleasure. She, herself, is an award winning horror writer and one of the nicest people I've had the pleasure to meet through Amazing Stories. You can read all about me here.

Poetry Planet No. 5 Time Travel Part 1

The 5th installment of Poetry Planet has gone live! This one is on the theme of Time Travel and is the first of 2 parts. Find it here.

Poetry by:

Rachel Swirsky, Things to Pack for my Trip Through Time

• Through the Drowsy Dark, from Aquaduct Press

Bruce Boston, Polar Chronologies

• Surrealities,  from Dark Regions

Sandra Lindow, An Introduction to Alternate Universes: Theory and Practice

• Touched by the Gods, Sam's Dot Publishing

G. O. Clark, Looking to the Past

•  In Shroud of Night and other poetry collections at Dark Regions
• The Saucer Under My Bed (short stories), from Sam's Dot Publishing

G. E. Schwartz, Centering; and Intermediary

• Only Others Are: poems and Living in Tongues: poems, from Legible Press

Michael Fosburg, Illo Tempore

Laurel Winter, Time Travel Verb Tenses

• Growing Wings (YA Novel), Puffin

 Go in droves!

In Poetry News:

• Eye to the Telescope - SFPA's online Magazine
• What Rhymes with 'Undead'? Some Poets know, in the New York Times
• Rhyme and Reason: the Victorian Poet Scientists, in the New Scientist
• Star*Line, the SFPA's quarterly journal

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Poetry Planet No. 3 "Rhysling Award Showcase"

I've done it. I've finally managed to finish another Poetry Planet! I pre-empted the planned theme for this edition because I lost the complete recording and didn't want too much time to pass before I podcast the Rhysling Award winning (and placing) poems.

Poetry you'll hear:

CSE Cooney, Dogstar Men (3rd place, short form)
Robert Frazier, Wreck-diving the Starship (3rd place, long form)

Karen A. Romanko, Binary Creation Myth (2nd place, short form)
Bruce Boston, Dark Rains Here and There (2nd place, long form)

Amal El-Mohtar, Peach-Creamed Honey (winner, short form)
CSE Cooney, The Sea King's Second Bride (winner, long form)

They are all wonderful poems - wonderous, whimsical, erotic, funny, wry, sentimental. Those are some of the words I'd use to describe these poems. Go listen to them. You can find them at StarShipSofa Show No. 202.

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Pending Poetry Planet Projects

I suppose, being on vacation would mean I'd have gotten around to posting about this sooner, but sand is no place for an iPhone. And I still have a 2 year old to look after once in a while!

ANYWAY, PP No 3 "coming home" has been significantly delayed. Had a snafu with Audacity while editing and had to revert to a back-up version which was unedited. That happened 10 days before going on vacation and I spent 5 of those singing in Poland. Nevertheless, it will go live as soon as I can finish editing it and submit it to Tony.

In other news, I had the brilliant idea to podcast the top 3 poems in each category of the 2011 Rhysling Awards. I went about gathering permissions, bios and back-stories and am eased to say it's all set! I had huge problems getting in touch with Robert Frazier because my ISP apparently sets off some spam filter function and rejects my email. Just like that. Luckily, Bruce Boston came to the rescue and acted as middle man. I'm hoping to get that show done before the end of August.

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Seekrit Projekt is Reality! "Poetry Planet"!

Poetry Planet is Reality, folks. What is Poetry Planet you might ask? It's a monthly segment I've decided to produce for my favorite podcast, StarShipSofa. And as you might guess it showcases Poetry. Science Fiction Poetry. Or Fantasy Poetry. Or Dark Poetry. Or Speculative Poetry. All of the above and more, probably.

This has been a long labor. I first had the idea last year to record more poetry for Tony, but he wasn't fielding submissions anymore. It's a lot of work! I had the idea that I could do a monthly segment and do all the work of receiving submissions and just deliver a finished project to Tony. But I just couldn't wrap my mind around getting it done. Then it was New Years, and I was considering what could be my New Years Resolution. I decided I would create a first article and spring it on Tony, so he couldn't refuse! I joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association and ordered Suzette Haden Elgin's Handbook of Science Fiction Poetry. I roamed around the web familiarizing myself with things. I rolled the formatting around my mind and decided the first show would be simple, with only one poem - an SF poem about poetry by Suzette Haden Elgin that I'd found on her website, and otherwise, just talking about poetry, how I've come to enjoy reciting and reading it aloud and giving guidance on how listeners might learn how to appreciate poetry.

But then life happened. I got radio silence from the powers that be (all volunteers) at the SFPA. Life happened for them too, I guess. I couldn't raise any signs of life from Ms. Elgin and so I started looking around for other poems I could. I turned to a couple of the poets whose poems I'd already read for SSS and inquired about poems about poetry. I introduced myself at the SFPA Forum and YahooGroup and announced my intention for creating the segment and got good feed back (not overwhelming though - I guess I was too vague in my request for submissions). Laurel Winter and Bruce Boston gave me wonderful poems that I'm using and Ann Schwader was so helpful and supportive of the idea, that I am indebted to her indefinitely. Check out Bruce Boston's poem "The Poetry of Science Fiction" on his site.

Finally about a month ago I wrote my first draft of the article, recorded it in very rough form and sent it to Tony for approval, which he gave with his usual enthusiasm! Yippee! I could get going! Then I couldn't find the time to record the actual thing. I had grand plans of using a new recording software, but I had even less time to delve into THAT. I wanted to have music and well, it all seemed insurmountable.

Then I discovered that April is National Poetry Month in the USA. Oh MAN! I've got to get it done before the opportunity comes and goes! So I gave myself a kick in the butt and submitted the final product (flawed as it is) to Tony.

You can listen to show No. 184 by going to StarShipSofa's website. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to listen on the website or listen on iTunes Poetry Planet is after the main fiction at the 51 minute mark (Thanks Steve!).

And if you are a fan of poetry or of StarShipSofa, or of all things Science Fiction or just of me :-), please link, link, link! Thank you! And if you are a poet, my idea for the next segment in May 2011 is "First Contact". If you have any poetry even vaguely fitting that label, please get in touch with me. For discussion of the SSS show go to the Forum, where all possible links will be posted as well!

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Narrations on StarShipSofa

Recently, I reported having done a lot of work lately on narrations for the StarShipSofa. Many of those stories haven't aired yet, but these are the ones that have:

Poetry by Ann K. Schwader - In Aural Delights Episodes #69 and #70 toward the beginning of the shows you can hear "Time Trapped" and "If Cold is a War" respectively.

Bruce Boston "People" poems - This is a small collection of 3 poems which are loosely related, entitled, Chess People, Marble People and Gargoyle People. On my suggestion Tony interspersed them throughout the show. I thought, since they have similar structures, listeners might get more out of them if they could hear them in one show. Normally Tony would have only included one per show. Feedback on the Forums was positive!

Aural Delights Episode #71

The good ship StarShipSofa undertook the massive task of publishing in audio all the Nebula Award Nominees in the Short form category. You can hear the one I narrated - "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson in Aural Delights #72 This is a nice story, and not so out there that folks who don't like Science Fiction or Fantasy much might actually enjoy. It's about 30 minutes long, so not a whole lot of investment!

Enjoy!

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