Some poets invent such free forms, either spontaneously or following a theory, and then use them repeatedly. Sometimes other poets think “Hey, look at that, I wonder if I can make that work?” and borrow the technique. This must be the way all the classic forms got started.
The fact is that having been long freed from a tyranny of conventional forms, we have no need to shun all regularity, all pattern, in obedience to a tyranny of formlessness. We can use rhyme, meter, repetition, however and whenever we choose—in conventional forms, or semi-conventional forms, or in once-only patterns we discover or invent at need. This, I think, is true freedom of verse.
A good many poems in this book are in free verse, a good many are in free form. The free-form poems include:
Kinship, The Canada Lynx, Contemplation, Hymn to Time, Geology of the Northwest Coast, Element 80, Hermes Betrayed, The Games, To Her Task-Master, Definition, Dead Languages, California Landscape, Seasonal Lines, October, Sea Hallowe’en, Crossing the Cascades.
Two poems are transitional:
Writing Twilight begins as free verse, then deliberately changes into a more rhythmic, rhymed, but still irregular pattern.
The Old Mad Queen: The first poem is in free verse with an increasing tendency to end-rhyme. The Queen Despairs is free verse, but grouped in triads. The Queen’s Ballad is in traditional ballad meter and rhyme.
These poems are in a more or less conventional pattern or a classic form:
The Small Indian Pestle: iambic pentameter
Constellating: iambic quatrains, rhymes abab baba
Whiteness: quatrains of rhymed couplets
Arion: “rima dissoluta” in quatrains (full and slant rhymes abcd, abcd, abcd)
This unusual rhyme pattern—end-rhymes repeated from stanza to stanza—can be extended to any length of stanza, so that the rhymes may be very far apart. I usually use it in quatrains, where the echoes are audible but not insistent. I have found it a most intriguing and suggestive form.
Messages: iambic pentameter in alternate rhyme.
The Dream Stone: Petrarchan sonnet
The section “Four Lines” is all separate quatrains, unrhymed or variously rhymed.
I’m stymied by haiku or tanka, but have found the quatrain amazingly roomy, versatile, and satisfying. For me, the master of its endless subtleties is A.E. Housman.
The Games: iambic, rhymed abba, cddc
New Year’s Day: curtal sonnet
Between: tetrameter, rhymed distichs
The Old Music: Goethe’s poem haunted me till I could work out this imitation of its pattern in English. It’s not a translation.
Disremembering: iambic quatrains in alternate rhyme
The Pursuit: ballad meter and rhyme
2014: ballad meter and rhyme
Sorrowsong: trochaic trimeter, quatrains in alternate rhyme.
POSTSCRIPT
Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,
November 2014
To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long—my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this—letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
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The Wild Girls
Ursula K. Le Guin
ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8
112 pages
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism, and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.
Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.
Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake While We Read,” (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.
“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”
—The Library Journal
“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”
—Time
Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology
Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
ISBN: 978-1-62963-035-9
352 pages
Sisters of the Revolution gathers a highly curated selection of feminist speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more) chosen by one of the most respected editorial teams in speculative literature today, the award-winning Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas.
From the literary heft of Angela Carter to the searing power of Octavia Butler, Sisters of the Revolution gathers daring examples of speculative fiction’s engagement with feminism. Dark, satirical stories such as Eileen Gunn’s “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” and the disturbing horror of James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Screwfly Solution” reveal the charged intensity at work in the field. Including new, emerging voices like Nnedi Okorafor and featuring international contributions from Angelica Gorodischer and many more, Sisters of the Revolution seeks to expand the ideas of both contemporary fiction and feminism to new fronts. Moving from the fantastic to the futuristic, the subtle to the surreal, these stories will provoke thoughts and emotions about feminism like no other book available today.
Contributors include: Angela Carter, Angelica Gorodischer, Anne Richter, Carol Emshwiller, Eileen Gunn, Eleanor Arnason, Hiromi Goto, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Karin Tidbeck, Kelley Eskridge, Kelly Barnhill, Kit Reed, L. Timmel Duchamp, Leena Krohn, Leonora Carrington, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, Rose Lemberg, Susan Palwick, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Vandana Singh.
“The VanderMeers are a literary power couple.”
—Boing Boing
My Life, My Body
Marge Piercy
ISBN: 978-1-62963-105-9
128 pages
In a candid and intimate new collection of essays, poems, memoirs, reviews, rants, and railleries, Piercy discusses her own development as a working-class feminist, the highs and lows of TV culture, the ego-dances of a writer’s life, the homeless and the housewife, Allen Ginsberg and Marilyn Monroe, feminist utopias (and why she doesn’t live in one), why fiction isn’t physics; and of course, fame, sex, and money, not necessarily in that order. The short essays, poems, and personal memoirs intermingle like shards of glass that shine, reflect—and cut. Always personal yet always political, Piercy’s work is drawn from a deep well of feminist and political activism.
Also featured is our Outspoken Interview, in which the author lays out her personal rules for living on Cape Cod, finding your poetic voice, and making friends in Cuba.
“Marge Piercy is not just an author, she’s a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence.”
—Boston Globe
“As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism.”
—Adrienne Rich
“One of the most important poets of our time.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.”
—Publishers Weekly
Report from Planet Midnight
Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-497-7
128 pages
Nalo Hopkinson has been busily (and wonderfully) “subverting the genre” since her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won a Locus Award for SF and Fantasy in 1999. Since then she has acquired a prestigious World Fantasy Award, a legion of adventurous and aware fans, a reputation for intellect seasoned with humor, and a place of honor in the short list of SF writers who are tearing down the walls of category and transporting readers to previously unimagined planets and realms.
Never one to hold her tongue, Hopkinson takes on sexism and racism in publishing in “Report from Planet Midnight,” a historic and controversial presentation to her colleagues and fans.
Plus …
“Message in a Bottle,” a radical new twist on the time travel tale that demolishes the sentimental myth of childhood innocence; and “Shift,” a tempestuous erotic adventure in which Caliban gets the girl. Or does he?
And Featuring: our Outspoken Interview, an intimate one-on-one that delivers a wealth of insight, outrage, irreverence, and top-secret Caribbean spells.
“A genuine vitality and generosity … one of the more important and original voices in SF.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Out-of-the-ordinary science fiction.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The plot and style get an early grip on you, the reader, and you don’t let go till story’s end. Hopkinson is a genuine find!”
—Locus
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