Poetry Recommendations by Editors – Samantha Henderson

At the end of last year, I approached a few editors of speculative poetry to recommend five “Best of…” poems of 2012. I asked that the five recommended poems would be written, edited and published by other people, rather than the editors themselves.

Today’s list has been contributed by Samantha Henderson, a speculative poet and writer who edits inkscrawl.

Samantha’s notes and recommendations:

These can’t be “best of,” because my reading 2012 didn’t even approach comprehensive; like many busy eaters of poems, I take at the table what I can and remember the particularly tasty. Looking over the list it strikes me that all these poems had an urgency of voice, a compelling need to tell something that attracted me.

In no particular order:

“Thousands of Years Ago, I Made This String Skirt,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane (Stone Telling 8)

The voice-craft of this poem is stunning: the long-dead narrator, an archeological find, is made alive by the urgency of what she can say – at once angry, joyous, exultant, incredulous – if the reader listens instead of looks with a scholar’s limited eye. My bones remember me, she concludes, less defiant than simply aware that no matter the context in which she’s perceived, she simply is.

“Skin Walker,” by Amanda Reck (Goblin Fruit, Spring 2012)

In Reck’s poem a scar – the wear and tear, but also the mapping of the body – becomes a path to the primal: a way of understanding the narrator as a beast (shapeshifter, werewolf, skin walker). Part of that understanding is, I feel, that the beast is a mask and a map in itself, that both disguises and points to the narrator’s willingness to devour experience:

Catch the moon,
if you can. I’ll snatch it back,
clad in this troll’s skin
and eat it like a hot, white heart.

“Memphis Street Railway Co. v. Stratton: 1915,” by Elizabeth McClellan (New Myths, June 2012)

This poem spins an eldritch, dark tale from the bare bones of a hundred-year-old lawsuit:

There is only so long you can stare into a hole
in a darkening street before the mind wanders
to someplace abysmal

“A Tanaga,” by David Edwards (Astropoetica, Summer 2012)

I like good science and science fiction poetry; it’s sometimes hard to find (Sofia Samatar’s 2011 poem “Girl Hours” is wonderful example of crunchy science-y goodness ). It’s often especially hard in find in short form; too often I’m reminded of what Catherynne Valente once called “the Future/I mean/wow” poems. I liked this Tanaga’s clever focus on a simple but not intuitive scientific fact – the moon is always full – especially coupled with the accompanying photo of full, half, and crescent moons.

“bell, book, candle,” by Gwynne Garfinkle (Strange Horizons, March 2012)

I like Garfinkle’s use of popular culture and wry tone in this melancholic take on making the choice to lose one’s magic (you even lose your cat), perhaps because it reminds me of watching Bewitched and wondering why Samantha would ever forgo her magic for mortal love.

Hacking update, and sales

Dear readers,

As some of you know, roselemberg.net has been hacked recently. I have finished unhacking it today, but the price of this is the loss of my previous website theme/design. I have installed a clean, but basic theme. This is a temporary situation before I settle on a more permanent new look for roselemberg.net, but meanwhile, please bear with me during this transition.

As for sales: as some of you already know, I recently sold two Jewish pieces.

“Likhvod a Strune” (In Honor of the String), a poem, will appear in the second issue of Through the Gate;
“Geddarien,” a short story, will be reprinted in the Journal of Unlikely Architecture.

2012 Poetry Recommendations by Editors – Alexa Seidel

At the end of last year, I approached a few editors of speculative poetry to recommend five “Best of…” poems of 2012. I asked that the five recommended poems would be written, edited and published by other people, rather than the editors themselves.

Today’s five picks are by Alexa Seidel, a speculative poet and writer who edits for Fantastique Unfettered and Niteblade.  Thank you, Alexa!

Alexa’s Recommendations:

* The Vigil by Mike Allen, Goblin Fruit Autumn 2012.

Mike does dark stuff really well, plus this is a horsewoman.

*Qasida of the Ferryman by Sofia Samatar, Goblin Fruit Winter 2012.

I do love a good rhyming poem, and this is a great one, mixing the here and elsewhere, something Sofia really knows how to do.

* Between the Mountain and the Moon  by Rose Lemberg, Strange Horizons.

It is beautiful, the language enchanting, and with every read, there is something new to be found between those lines.

* we come together, we fall apart by Lisa M. Bradley, Stone Telling 7.

There is a great story in this poem, and it pulls you into that story, doesn’t let you go until you’ve read it through, start to finish. And you won’t forget about it either.

* Thousands of Years Ago, I Made This String Skirt by Alex Dally MacFarlane, Stone Telling 8.

Because the string skirt feels so familiar.

2012 Poetry Recommendations by Editors – Amal El-Mohtar

2012 Poetry Recommendations by Editors – Adrienne J. Odasso

At the end of last year, I approached a few editors of speculative poetry to recommend five “Best of…” poems of 2012. I asked that the five recommended poems would be written, edited and published by other people, rather than the editors themselves.

I am now happy to share the editors’ recommendations with you! We begin the series with Adrienne J. Odasso, a poet and co-editor of Strange Horizons and the Dark Mountain Project. Thank you, Adrienne!

Adrienne’s Recomendations:

1. “How to Undress a Mountain,” by Aditi Rao (qarrtsiluni, The Fragments Issue, Autumn 2012)

This piece of prose-poetry explores storytelling in the form of a metaphor I’m sure I’ll never forget. We take mountains for granted: as bucolic backdrops, as inhospitable landscapes, as statistics in geology textbooks. After reading this, you will never look at mountains—or at yourself—the same way again.

2. “Sister,” by Alex Dally MacFarlane (Through the Gate, Issue 1, September 2012)

Tales of fox-creatures and other similar shapeshifting beasties have become (at least it seems to me) more prevalent in the landscape of fantasy and speculative poetry in the past few years or so, almost to the point of being overdone. Not so with this piece, as uniquely spun themes of anger, grief, obsession, and familial love hum through its lines to a haunting and satisfying finish.

3. “In His Eighty-Second Year,” by Dominik Parisien (Stone Telling, The Queer Issue, March 2012)

This poem stands as an eloquent, melancholy, and spellbinding example of why we need more narratives about and from the perspectives of those who are older, wiser, and see the world from perspectives that many of us cannot.

4. “Sarcophagus,” by N. E. Taylor (inkscrawl, Issue 3, April 2012)

We have waited long enough for a magazine that celebrates poetry in its briefest, most incisive forms, and, thus far, inkscrawl has more than delivered. In this brief, biting gem, history, magic, and mortality come full circle in two elegant lines.

5. “Heart Rot,” by Amanda Reck (Goblin Fruit, Summer 2012 Issue)

Fairytale echoes fuse seamlessly with the difficult reality of losing a parent to terminal illness; leaves and bark, pages and spines (trees both living and dead) guide us through a wistful, lovely text documenting decay and rebirth. Amanda Reck is one to watch, as her poem called “Skin Walker,” (http://www.goblinfruit.net/2012/spring/poems/?poem=skinwalker) which appeared in the Spring 2012 Issue of Goblin Fruit, nearly also made my list.

Sale announcement, and a short note on “Among Others”

My unclassifiable maybe-flash, maybe-prose poem “Bone Shadows” will appear in the poetry section of the new Interfictions. Sofia Samatar edits the poetry department, so if you have something suitable, please consider sending it to her!

Tangentially, there is an odd blog post on Black Gate entitled “SFF Corruption” in which a blogger is accusing Jo Walton and a few other authors of logrolling the Nebula. He also calls Among Others “banal.” I am not going to argue with this blogger, it is not worth my time. However, I wanted to remark on Among Others. In the interests of full disclosure, I have published a poem by Jo in Stone Telling 3, and have been talking with her on Livejournal, and she has been very kind to me on many occasions. But I am also an extremely critical reader, and it is very hard to get me to vote for anything. I only vote for things that astound me. So. When I was shortlisted for my academic dream job and the campus interview started going south, I stole moments to read Among Others on my Kindle, because it sustained me. I recommended this book to everyone – friends, colleagues, graduate students, undergraduate students, former students. I gave two copies away even though I could not afford it. I discussed the book with academic acquaintances with whom I hardly ever talk about SFF. And heck yeah, I put it on my Nebula ballot. That’s what I do when a work wows me to this degree. And I will continue to do so.

Reprint sale

My Jewish magic realist short story “Seven Losses of Na Re”, which originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction, will be reprinted in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s feminist speculative fiction anthology.

Small poetry announcement

My two small poetic fragments from the Crow Epic, “The Journeymaker, Climbing” (written for Sonya Taaffe) and “The Journeymaker to Keddar,” will appear in the Winter 2013 edition of Goblin Fruit.

“The Three Immigrations” up at Strange Horizons

My magic realist poem “The Three Immigrations” about real and fantastic immigrations (and languages) is up at Strange Horizons. Many thanks to the SH team for giving it a home.

Languages in contact: Pidgins and Creoles

This started as a discussion on Requires Hate’s blog. RequiresHate questioned, among many other things, Mary Robinette Kowal’s usage of “patois” in a recent story in Apex magazine. Since this is something I happen to know a lot about, I chimed in with comments about language generation through contact, be it in colonial contexts or otherwise.

I feel this is worth reposting here, with slight modifications, to hopefully start a discussion about sociolinguistics and languages in SFF settings, and/or help people think about these issues in more nuanced ways.

Note that this is an entry in specifically about pidgins and creoles. There are other models of languagage generation, language suppression, attrition, and death – if this is of interest, let me know, because this could become a series. In the interests of full disclosure, I am 1) an academic working in this area, 2) a multilingual directly affected by processes of language attrition and death.

Caveat: This is a discussion of languages in contact. This not a place to discuss Mary Robinette Kowal’s story, which I have not read. Please do not derail. Thanks.

Also important: real life situations are significantly more complicated than the exposition below, and there is no unanimous agreement among scholars regarding theory, terminology, and/or specific scenarios. For an in-depth treatment of any of these issues, please consult peer-reviewed literature.

***

If two linguistic groups are in close contact, new languages may arise. A very common scenario is the process of pidginization/creolization.

A pidgin is usually defined as variant which arises when two or more linguistic groups come in contact. A pidgin usually has simplified vocabulary and syntax; it usually has no native speakers. “Usually” is important, because there are exceptions, such as extended pidgin languages, which have complex vocabulary and syntax. Creoles are commonly said to develop from pidgins that have acquired native speakers (there is a fair bit of nuance and debate here, that I cannot get into); a creole as a rule develops extended vocabulary and syntax in opposition to a pidgin, though a creole that has developed from an extended pidgin (which already has complex vocabulary and syntax) may not change that much. Pidgins are not by definition “temporary languages” that always give way to creoles. Some are long-lived; trade pidgins especially may have a long lifespan.

While pidginization/creolization is a common scenario to language birth through contact, there are other scenarios, such as fusion languages, and other language contact scenarios which do not, strictly speaking, lead to the creation of lasting new variants, such as language attrition and death. All of those processes tend to be of great emotional significance to speakers and cultures, as they directly touch upon issues of identity, belonging, displacement, and access to one’s cultural heritage, which is very often encoded through a specific language or languages. These processes are also very often tied to issues of power, prestige, and hegemony.

Languages do not randomly come in such a close contact as to generate new variants. There are a few common scenarios, most centrally trade, multi-ethnic work environments, slavery, and colonialism. Note that there are more than two sides to this equation, which may be balanced or unbalanced in terms of power, so let us consider each of these scenarios separately.

Trade: a pidgin arises between two or more language groups who engage in trade, e.g.the Yimas-Alamblak pidgin (Tanim Tok) in New Guinea. While pidgins are said to often arise from trade, I personally believe that this is no longer the main scenario for pidginization due to the prominence of colonial processes to language generation. Note that there is no obvious power imbalance in the creation of a trade pidgin – multiple sides participate as equals. Yet power can certainly be a factor even here, when one trade group is for some reason stronger than others.

Multi-ethnic work environments: pidgins can develop in multiethnic crews, e.g. Melanesian Pidgin English was first used by multiethnic whaling ship crews in the Pacific; Fanagalo is a language used by miners and is one of the rare example of Pidgins and Creoles based on an indigenous language (in this case, Zulu) rather than on a colonizing language.

Slavery: not that different from multiethnic work environments except the power balance is completely different. Here, multiple linguistic groups are forced together in a context alien to them, say on a plantation. This scenario is so common that some scholars speak of “plantation creoles.” There has been some recent literature that suggests that many of these creoles started forming already in Africa, in interactions between slave traders and the colonized. Both theories show creolization as a process in which the enslaved form or continue to develop a new language using the colonizing power’s language as its base. An example of this process is Haitian Creole, with French at its base; though the exact processes that gave rise to Haitian Creole are not documented, it is a language that arose as a result of colonialism and slavery, even if trade has been a component at its earliest stages. The process is similar for Gullah Creole, which has English at its base. Some scholars claim that AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is a Creole, since it shares certain grammatical features with other Creoles and is likely have arisen through similar processes; others dispute this. Note again the power imbalance: such languages tend to draw heavily on the hegemonic language, but the speakers of hegemonic languages look down upon the speakers of such languages (more on this below).

Colonialism: Please consult this list of English Creoles, most of which arose as a result of colonialisms. An English Creole can compete with indigenous languages and may endanger or marginalize the indigenous languages, in a process not dissimilar to that of World Englishes. Again, the power imbalance is present, since this process is a direct result of colonization.

There are additional scenarios, but those are the common ones.

Attitudes.

Native speakers of creoles and of other languages that arose from power-unbalanced contact tend to be denigrated by speakers of hegemonic languages. Such words as “jargon,” “slang,” “patois,” “broken language,” “broken speech,” and such adjectives as “low-brow,” “uneducated,” “substandard,” “bastardized,” “backwards,” and others are used to indicate that the native speakers of creoles and other languages that arose through contact phenomena are somehow lesser than native speakers of hegemonic, often colonizing languages. This is so pervasive that even Wikipedia, which is supposed to be unbiased, says this about Haitian creole: “Yet another theory is that in attempt to learn the informal French of the White colonists and the Free black Creoles, African imports butchered the French patois spoken to and around them.”

WTF, Wikipedia?!

We must, we absolutely must think about what it means to perpetuate these linguistic stereotypes.

Every time you hear things like “they are butchering the language”, or “they cannot even speak English properly” said about a native speaker, the processes of power, prestige (often associated with class and race divides), and/or forces of colonialism and oppression are at play through linguistic judgments.

Creoles and similar languages often struggle with recognition and literacy. E.g. Haitian Creole was recognized as a state language only in 1961. French served as literary language, which is to say the language of prestige and literacy was the language of colonizing power. Since literary languages are gateways to status and power through education and advancement, such situations (by no means unique to Haitian Creole) are often stratified by race and class, where the disempowered have less access to a hegemonic language and thus advance less.

I think this is enough theoretical discussion for now.

I grapple with those issues as both an academic and a writer. In my recently finished novel Bridgers, one of the protagonists is a linguist from a marginalized culture who travels to study another marginalized culture. Ulín is not a sociolinguist (sociolinguistics does not exist yet in Birdverse), but when she, for the first time in her life, interviews a lower-status speaker, she discovers that speech can be significantly stratified by class, and that this realization can affect every aspect of our understanding. While Ulín has this realization and is trying to follow where it leads her, the privileged people around her are trying to convince her that only the hegemonic dialect should be studied as the most “pure” and “representative” of what language is.

The book is about more than just linguistics, but I am curious to see what people will think about it.

Questions and thoughts most welcome.