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.

Amazing Stories: Me and My Sofa

Today, an extra article by yours truly will run on Amazing Stories. It's a piece Steve Davidson asked me to write about my history and connection with the podcast magazine StarShipSofa.

A teaser:

Ah yes, me and my Sofa. I feel confident calling it my Sofa. With a capital S because the sofa I’m referring to, StarShipSofa, is a podcast magazine. And I can call it mine because it’s a collaborative effort. It belongs to everyone else who works on it too. Yes, it was Tony C. Smith and Ciaran O’Connor’s brain-child and is kept up and running now by Tony and a small tea...

Read More »

Enjoy!

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An amazing revival: Classic sci-fi magazine makes its way to web | Concord Monitor

This is a nice, concise report on what the magazine is all about.

An amazing revival: Classic sci-fi magazine makes its way to web | Concord Monitor

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Amazing Stories Blog: Various and Sundry Science Fiction Poetry

Hello everybody,

With this post I'm just going to point you toward my most recent article which went up on Amazing Stories on Friday. Yes, I'm very bad at this. I'm 3 days late posting here. But perhaps (hopefully?) you already knew about it?  I will have a new article go up at Amazing Stories every two weeks, so in case I forget, you can check it out every other Friday.

Here's a bit of a teaser:

Welcome back! I have a bit of a hodge-podge for you today. The interview with Bruce Boston has been postponed for two weeks – life got in the way for both me and Bruce. But I promise you won’t be disappointed. Bruce Boston is a thoughtful... Read More »

Remember, you can always comment on the article here, but if you want to say something about it there, you must register. There's nothing to it, but it is a requirement.

Enjoy! And I'll be back soon with some news that ISN'T about Amazing Stories. I promise.

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House of Forever Review

My second post over at Amazing Stories Magazine has been published - a review of The House of Forever, by Samantha Henderson.

Here's a teaser:

This volume of collected poetry comes to us from Raven Electrick Ink and is edited by publisher/poet Karen A. Romanko.

Her bio, lifted from her website: Samantha Henderson lives in Covina, California by way of England, Johannesburg, Illinois, and Oregon. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, various podcasts and Year’s Best collections. She’s the author of two tie-in books from Wizards of the Coast, Heaven’s Bones (Ravenloft) and Dawnbringer (Forgotten Realms). “In the Astronaut Asylum,” a collaborative poem with Kendall Evans was the winner of the 2010 Rhysling Award for long-form poetry.

To read the full review please head over here...

You can also hear my reading of "When They Woke" from the collection.

Enjoy!


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First Article on Amazing Stories live!

As indicated in the title, I just wanted to let you know that my first article/post for Amazing Stories was published today. It's very cryptically entitled "Science Fiction Poetry". For SF poets, this is probably a post you can skip, but I'd love it if you went over to Amazing Stories and checked it out. It's meant to entice people to join me in discovering new SF poetry (I'll be reviewing collections and anthologies and maybe poetry magazines), read about what the SF Poets have to say about themselves and their poetry (I'll be doing regular interviews, beginning with Bruce Boston) and delve into the world of SF Poetry in general. Join me! And while you're at it check out the rest of the site, which is chock full of articles on nearly every aspect of Science Fiction and SF Fandom you can think of.

I'm a little nervous, because I'm not really a writer. I never took any writing classes and my style is definitely not polished. There are a lot of writer types on Amazing Stories writing really interesting stuff very well. I hope I don't put anyone off! But I've decided to take the plunge. The editor seems to think that everything's fine... :-)