"what grief to speak to you for the first time in the past tense”: Danez Smith writes to Renee Nicole Good.
#DanezSmith #ReneeNicoleGood #HarpersBazaar #Minneapolis #Poetry #Grief #Murder
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a69957102/elegy-for-renee-nicole-good/
Hello, fellow travelers!
Nominations for the Hugo Awards are finally open! Surely that means you’ve been going through the things you’ve read in the past year and whittling them down to the most arresting work you’ve enjoyed—so let today’s Con-Verse serve as yet another reminder to not forget to consider poetry for the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem as well!
As we continue to equip you to engage with speculative poetry, we’ve recently been talking about some of the ways one can start discovering and interacting with the speculative heart of these poems. Let’s keep going by using another question-metric one can apply while reading: What is the poem speculating about?
Something we apply often when reading science fiction and fantasy prose is the question of what this imagined world or an element of its worldbuilding is meant to ask or suggest about the real world. The speculative in speculative fiction, after all, implies that the work is trying to ponder or argue something about our real world using elements that are novel to an imagined reality.
So, sometimes identifying a speculative poem is as easy as asking, “What is this poem trying to ask—or answer—about the things that I know are real?” As a genre tool, it shows up more often in subgenres of poetry that are inherently playing with time; time-travel or alt-historical poems are good speculative spaces because they allow the poet to ask new questions or draw conclusions about what the world would look like after a different set of past experiences, but they are not the only places we can so speculate in verse.
A good first base for what it looks like when this tool is applied is by looking at Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” On its face, it may seem like a bit of a stretch—Shelley is invoking the past power of a real historical figure, and even as an exaggerated image, it isn’t impossible for just the setting and its objects to potentially exist. But how the persona frames it is meant to prime the reader for assuming something just a bit out of the realm of our present reality:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…
Even without necessarily needing to assess the poem’s symbolic intensity, there are some questions those lines are immediately provoking. Who—and where, or even when—is the persona? Who is this “traveler,” and where in fact are they from? What are the circumstances under which this conversation and this discovery would even take place? Even if this poem is happening in our real world, it does imply some radically startling relationship to that world that draws your attention. That priming heightens your reaction to the poem’s otherwise accessible themes of the ephemerality of legacy and the hubris of those with power. It speculates about witnessing the ruins of a past superpower—a real one, just a bit heightened by imagery—and therefore the naivety of our present leaders and the inevitable fall of even our own future society.
What this also shows is that a poem doesn’t necessarily have to speculate by asking a “what-if” question about the past or future—sometimes the themes are just the same now as they ever have been. Shivanee Ramlochan’s “A Letter from the Leader of the Android Rebellion, to the Last Plantation Owner of the Federated Caribbean Bloc” in the Caribbean speculative fiction anthology Reclaim Restore Return uses the imagery of a robot uprising—already an available language for discussions of the body, autonomy, and labor since the 1920s—placed specifically against the backdrop of both past Caribbean indentured servitude and the imagined future of a version of the same Caribbean where such inhumane structures would persist, or be revived, long enough for the robots to take over. It speculates twice—once about the real past through its imagery, and again about the future through recollecting that past—asking questions about labor, agitation, and our connection to our histories.
One of my favourite acts of speculation in a poem is in Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere,” a capstone poem in their collection Don’t Call Us Dead. The poem’s persona imagines a future place—either a Heaven in the wake of, or, in my preferred reading, a living space transcending far beyond the tragedy of gun violence and police brutality that Black boys find themselves in a world where it is now impossible for death to visit them. So much of its language even dares to imagine a world where, even if some of the symbols of mourning linger, the concept of being in danger of losing a life may even be too novel to name:
no need for geography
now, we safe everywhere.
point to whatever you please
& call it church, home, or sweet love.
paradise is a world where everything
is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.
Even if a poem’s speculative question is a radically intense one like this, it becomes all manner of more pointed real-world speculations in the reading: Why should we have to imagine such a world, especially in mourning, when we can and should instead live in a safer world here? Those layers of questions—from the esoteric or the futuristic down to our present reality—shine bright in poems like these because the act of reading them is also the act of asking or answering them and hoping those questions or answers linger when you put the poem down.
As you’re still flexing your speculative poetry reading muscles, consider digging into some other classic or contemporary poetry outside the realm of the overtly speculative and see if you can discover the speculations they’re making in their work. You’d be amazed at what you may see—turns out poets are imagining a new world all the time!
And, of course, I hope this serves as another useful tool for reading your way into discovering nominations for the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem that will be awarded alongside the other rockets at this year’s Worldcon in Seattle! Maybe something will stick with you because it’s been asking the questions you’ve always been asking—or it may even have the answer!
Until next time, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!
https://seattlein2025.org/2025/02/17/con-verse-the-art-of-speculating-in-verse/
#DanezSmith #PercyByssheShelley #ShivaneeRamlochan #SpeculativePoetry
Con-Verse: The “Art of Speculating” in Verse: We’ve been talking about some of the ways one can start discovering and interacting with the speculative heart of these poems. Let’s keep going by using another question-metric one can apply while reading: What is the poem speculating about? … (#DanezSmith #PercyByssheShelley #ShivaneeRamlochan #SpeculativePoetry)
Full post: https://seattlein2025.org/2025/02/17/con-verse-the-art-of-speculating-in-verse/
We've been talking about some of the ways one can start discovering and interacting with the speculative heart of these poems. Let's keep going by using another question-metric one can apply while reading: What is the poem speculating about?
New York Public Library: Best Poetry of 2024
https://www.yearendlists.com/2024/new-york-public-library-best-poetry-of-2024
Guardian: Rishi Dastidar: The Best Poetry Books of 2024
https://www.yearendlists.com/2024/rishi-dastidar-the-best-poetry-books-of-2024
#YearEndLists #Poetry #bookstodon
#EllaFrears #DanezSmith #FadyJoudah #VictoriaChang
#DanezSmith! #AudreLorde! #KwameDawes! 27 new #books out today.
#Summer is nearing its (official) end, but with good places to be and great things to #read while at them, the #summer can last a bit longer. Read on, and let those #toberead #piles gloriously #grow.
#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Entertainment #TheArts #Literature #Books #Reading #Representation #Culture
https://lithub.com/danez-smith-audre-lorde-kwame-dawes-27-new-books-out-today/
Today's poem:
Dinosaurs in the Hood
- by Danez Smith
https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/741202179721936896/dinosaurs-in-the-hood?source=share
#poetry #race #power #agency #pride #strength #humans
#story #childhood #AfricanAmerican #DanezSmith #cinema #movie #dinosaur
"bare by Danez Smith
for you i'd send my body to battle my body, let my blood sing of tearing
itself apart, hollow cords of white knights' intravenous joust.
love, i want & barely know how to do much else. don't speak to me
about raids you could loose on me the clan of rebel cells who thirst
to watch their home burn. love let me burn if it means you
& i have one night with no barrier but skin. this isn't about danger
but about faith, about being wasted on your name. if love is a room
of broken glass, leave me to dance until my feet are memory.
if love is a hole wide enough to be God's mouth, let me plunge
into that holy dark & forget the color of light. love, stay
in me until our bodies forget what divides us, until your hands
are my hands & your blood is my blood & your name
is my name & his & his"
-- "Don't Call Us Dead: Poems", page 37
#DanezSmith #QueerPoetry #BlackPoetry #TodaysPoem #Poetry #BookWyrm
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Some of us are killed / in pieces, Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--Dear White America--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
"little prayer by Danez Smith
let ruin end here
let him find honey where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion's cage & find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing & if not let it be"
-- "Don't Call Us Dead: Poems", page 81
#DanezSmith #QueerPoetry #BlackPoetry #TodaysPoem #Poetry #BookWyrm
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Some of us are killed / in pieces, Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--Dear White America--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
alternate names for black boys
by Danez Smith
#TodaysPoem #Poem #Poetry #DanezSmith
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56843/alternate-names-for-black-boys
Andrew Shields
Seattle Worldcon 2025
Seattle Worldcon 2025
Year-End Lists
Susan Larson ♀️🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🌈
damian entwistle
Josh Simmons
Laura Esckelson