Sfpoetry.com
Title
The Science Fiction Poetry Association
Description
Suzette Haden Elgin
Talk about your passionate controversies: science fiction poetry is one of the worst. There’s the problem of how you define something as a poem in the first place, let alone defining science fiction poetry as a subgenre of poetry at large. (We’ll come back to that in a minute.) The big question, assuming you have the definitions nailed down, is this one: Is a great poem as valuable a literary item as a great short story, or a great novel or a great movie? Is it worth as much to the world?
In theory, the answer has to be yes, and no question about it. In practice, however, that would mean that someone who wrote a great science fiction poem would have the same status, and qualify for all the same perks, as someone who wrote Canticle for Leibowitz or [insert the title of any sf short story or sf novel or sf movie you consider great]. At which point a whirlwind of protest comes roaring out of the world’s corners, carrying with it objections that we can summarize roughly like this: "Now, wait just a cottonpicking minute! In the first place, there aren’t any great sf poems, and even if there were, nobody’s going to read them! Certainly nobody’s going to pay anything for them! And in the second and third place, it’s not fair! It takes maybe fifteen minutes to type a poem; do you have any idea how long it takes to type a novel???"
It’s a sad old story, yes, and this isn’t the place to tell it yet again. Suffice it to say that it was because it was so sad a story that I founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, so that there would at least be somewhere on this earth where the handful of people interested in the subject could get in touch with one another and share their thoughts — and their poems.
