Speculative Poetry and the Writings of Jennifer Clement

by Wilda Morris

Speculative poetry is a fairly broad category. There is no universally accepted definition, even among journals for which it is a specialty. Alan Deniro has even argued that “All poetry is speculative in this sense: there is a chasm after every line break, and a deep unknowing of the next line until it is reached.” This statement would not provide a very helpful guideline for an editor selecting poems for a journal or anthology of speculative poetry.

It is generally more helpful to think of speculative literature as creating a world which differs in some ways from the world as we “know” it, from the perspective of Western rational realism. Magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, myth, folklore, fairy tales, and surrealism, the mainstays of speculative poetry, create their own worlds.

A few important prizes are offered for speculative poetry, evidence that the genre is being taken seriously by at least some critics. In 1978, the Science Fiction Poetry Association initiated the Rhysling Award. Each year the association picks one long and one short speculative poem from among poems nominated by members of the association. The nominated poems are published in an anthology. More recently, the Association announced the creation of the Elgin Award for a chapbook of speculative poetry. The Rannu Fund, founded in 2008, offers one prize in speculative fiction and one in speculative poetry.

Jennifer Clement, co-founder and director of The San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico first got me interested in trying my hand at speculative poetry. In a writing workshop, she challenged participants to try writing something surreal. She suggested that we find some way to persuade the reader to suspend disbelief. My poem began with the assumption that someone had dropped something into my cola.

Clement is an accomplished (and award-winning) writer of speculative fiction and poetry. You can read more about her on her website.

Clement’s work makes use of magical realism, surrealism, myth, science, science fiction, psychological suspense, history—and peculiar people and incidents about which she reads. In both her fiction and her poetry she makes use of all the senses. Taste and smell often play an important role. Her fiction and poetry are rife with myth and metaphor.

Clement’s broad-ranging interest show up in her work—anthropology, science, strange and unusual stories. Her poem series, “The Lady of the Broom” (for which Jan Gilbert composed “Eleven Song Setting”) is based on a character mentioned briefly in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. Another set of poems is composed of “Seven Letters Written by Marie Curie to Pierre Curie After His Death.” The astronomer Caroline Herschel shows up in her poetry, as does Einstein. It is often said that science fiction that depicts a coming era actually says more about the present than the future. These poems depicting the past are also speculative, saying as much or more about the present (and the poet’s interests and thoughts) as about the past. They are, in a sense, science fiction projected backward instead of forward in time.

I am intrigued by her poems “The Ocean House” and “The Night House,” both of which are in the “New Poems” section of her New and Selected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008), pp. 21-23). In these poems, Clement imagines new worlds. In “The Night House,” she says, “there is no shelf for my shadow.” Here is a line on which I could muse for quite a long time!

The Ocean House
He built a house for me on the ocean floor
and planted a pine tree and azaleas.
He even built a chimney in the water –
a chimney I can swim up and down inside.
When I live in our ocean house,
I am not interested in rivers
and streams or even drinking water.

On the ocean floor,
when he says kneel, I obey.
The sun is obedient to the shadow.
The clouds are obedient to the wind.
My breath is obedient to my heart.
So when he asks
I kneel down on the sand
and rest my head against his knees.

In our ocean house the bricks sink
and the wooden beams float away.
Our clothes (and this is the truth)
are devoured by sharks
and a barracuda has eaten all his hats.
But he does not mind.
and I do not mind
because, underwater,
we move so, so slowly
one dance can last for days.

~ Jennifer Clement

These two poems of Clement’s inspired me to invent a new world, a shadow world. Here is my poem:

Our Shadow House
after Jennifer Clement

Before entering,
we slide out of skin
and skeleton.

Even sun
cannot create silhouettes
of our abandoned bodies.

We eat the shadows
of apples and pears, sip
water from our phantom well.

When moon glows above,
you wrap an illusory arm
around me,

run fingers
along the penumbra
of my vertebrae.

The shadows of my toes curl.

~ Wilda

Speculative writing frees the poet to use his or her imagination. Although these poems are not “realistic,” they have their own logic. The reader can just enjoy these strange worlds or, with careful attention, may siphon truths hiding under the details and speculate about possible meanings. And maybe reading these poems will inspire you to write a poem in which you invent a new world.

Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair for Poets & Patrons of Chicago, and a past president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, is widely published in print and on the Internet. Her book, Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant, was published by RWG Press. Wilda Morris's Poetry Challenge provides a poetry contest for other poets each month. In addition to poetry, she writes an occasional nature blog (“Walking with Nature”) for the Bolingbrook Patch, an on-line newspaper.