SCI-FI ENTERTAINMENT INTERVIEW WITH SFPA GRANDMASTER BRUCE BOSTON

by Keith ‘Doc’ Raymond

Bruce Boston is a writer, but at heart he is a science fiction poet. In this rarefied world, he has published in most of the major magazines of the genre from the 80s to the present and won numerous awards, including the first Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Of course, his peregrinations have taken him to other forms, but here we will first focus on his poetry.

Why science fiction poetry?

I prefer the term speculative poetry, which in my case includes science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, and surrealism. Speculative poetry differs significantly from mainstream poetry in several ways. Mainstream poetry deals with the here and now, the everyday world as we experience it. Speculative poetry is more akin to fiction. It deals more with the imagination, the world as it might be. It often asks ‘What if?’ For example: Heavy

Weather

If gravity changed like the weather, covering the planet in waves and pockets, fronts and depressions, there would be days on which we could not move an inch.

We would lie helpless, strapped to the slowly turning Earth by a rain of weight that limited both our breath and movement. We would have time to consider the nature of such an existence, to daydream about an end of the storm and those perfect feather days when we could fly like birds over cities and forests as if we had wings.

(First appeared in Asimov’s SF, 2004 Asimov’s Readers Award, included in my collection Brief Encounters with My Third Eye, Crystal Lake, 2016)

Speculative poetry also differs from the mainstream regarding the use of the “I” voice. In mainstream poetry, the “I” voice is most often the voice of the poet, the person writing the poem, whereas in speculative poetry, it is most often the voice of a fictional character. For example:

Beyond the Edge of Alien Desire

Seduced by pheromones more potent to the senses then my species’ own, I ride her blue cries to crimson excitations, and for a trembling instant the light years between our limbs collapse.

Charged by the tendrils of her spiked electric fur to telepathic sight, I feel pain raining down, see blue fields blown in the searing light, know the wiles of victims for the pale glabrous beasts who handle them by night?

At dawn the dreadnaughts leap, another world to take, her scent is still upon me, blue miles to go before I wake.

(First appeared in Star*Line, 1987, included in my collection Brief Encounters with My Third Eye, Crystal Lake, 2016)

I would also add that the best speculative poetry, while it takes place in an imagined world, often reflects and comments upon the real world.

As to why I chose speculative poetry: In my early years as a reader, I became enamored with science fiction and read everything that was sf in my local library, joined the Science Fiction Book Club, and supplemented that by buying both sf novels and magazines at the local newsstand. Later, both in high school and college, I read a lot of the classics of literature and was taken with the poetry of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

Dark poetry and fantasy poetry were fields that had a long history, but with science fiction I discovered a virgin field that was just coming into being and being explored, both through the Science Fiction Poetry Association (founded by sf novelist Suzette Haden Elgin in 1978), and also, the major science fiction magazines, that had previously published only humorous rhyming poetry, and were now beginning to publish more serious poetry that was often free verse. It was catching up with the reality of the contemporary poetry world. In short, it was a field that was new enough so that it offered the most possibilities and vistas to explore.

How does surrealism fit into your category of speculative?

Surrealism often creates strange and unique ways of looking at the world by juxtaposing words, images, or events that one rarely thinks of as belonging together. A prime example would be Dali’s melting clocks. In fact, the title of my first speculative poetry collection was All the Clocks Are Melting (Velocities, 1984). However, most of my surreal poetry appears in my collection Surrealities (Dark Regions, 2011), including my poem “Surreal Domestic,” which is full of such juxtapositions.

Surreal Domestic

I open the refrigerator and instead of food, it is stocked with automatic weapons and hand guns and ammunition.

I make love to my wife and find that she has a third eye where her navel should be.

I have a clock that makes a different noise every hour. Sometimes it sings like a bird. Sometimes it is a train pulling into a station.

At least once a day, it is a bullfight or a shuttle launch.

I took it to a jeweler to have it fixed.

He told me not to fool with it or it would melt.

I have a giant flea for a pet. It has little dogs running around on it.

When I turn on the TV, the stereo comes on.

When I turn on the stereo, the toaster heats up.

When I pop a slice of split-topped wheat into the toaster, the garbage disposal begins de- vouring itself.

I have all of this memorized. It changes every day.

At the back of my walk-in bedroom closet there is a giant zipper that runs vertically from the floor to nearly the ceiling. I have never touched it. Believe me.

(First appeared in Strange Horizons)

Besides poetry, you’ve also published two novels and more than a dozen story collections. What differences do you find in writing fiction versus poetry?

Less than one might think. It seems to be a human tendency to categorize the world in order to understand it. This is certainly the case with creative writing. Yet I also see the field as a continuum. There are many poems, including many of my own, that are also narratives, that tell a complete story just as fiction does.

A Missionary of the Mutant Rain Forest

In nominee Patris et Filii et Felidae Sancti

Cassock torn, rorschached by blood and sweat, a detailed gold crucifix with a broken chain clutched so fiercely in one skeletal fist, that an intaglio of the thrice-nailed Jesus imprints like a scar in the hollow of his palm, he trod through patches of light and shadow cast by vast vegetal eruptions he cannot name except to christen them infernal or sublime.

Having penetrated farther into the wilderness than any of his far less stalwart brethren, all of whom have fled to the coast or died, his aquiline features are increasingly set in a rigorous mask of beatific masochism, he is sustained by the fervor of a faith more maniacal than the landscape he tracks.

The creatures of the forest do not harm him, in awe of the madness inherent in his quest.

Swarming clouds of carnivorous red jackets shun the taste of his pale fevered flesh.

Or it may be his sermons that protect him, leaden tracts rehearsed till letter perfect in the sanctum of some distant spartan cell, now raged and chanted through the awful glens, against the scattered shards of unthatched sky, embellished by a rising hallucinatory passion, peppered with the mucous rattle of his breath.

On a morning born from nightmares, he awakens, no memory in his mind of how he came to sleep; the congregation he has sought is all about him, a flock of clever felines who walk upon two feet.

With the scraps of human tongue, they've gathered, they listen to his tales of the sacrificial son.

Here his faith is heresy, his form abomination, he whets their appetites with his talk of blood. As their paws and claws defrock him, pry the gold from his hands, strip away his sacerdotal shreds, his dreams take flight beyond a martyr's death. He envisions the pomp of his future consecration, in the Holy City, a host of hosannas sung on high, yet the fate he soon discovers is far from divine. Bound by mutant skins, stained with mutant dyes, he becomes a penitent before a graven shrine, novitiate and servant to a pagan panther priest. For visionary madness is familiar to their kind, and they only devour the ones they cannot teach.

In the ghetto of Caracas, you can see him every day, an excommunicate, a derelict, a holy man, some claim, a strangely tattooed apparition, both hirsute and gray, who preaches the imminence of a feline Second Coming, and sees the reborn Savior as a bestial incarnation, complete with taloned forepaws and the eyes of a cat.

(First appeared in Asimov’s SF, 1990, included in my collaborative collection with Robert Frazier, Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest, Crystal Lake Publishing, 2017)

This is clearly a poem. This is clearly a short story. There are also many flash fictions (up to a 1,000 words) that can stand as prose poems because of their use of language. And even looking at novels, one can find many authors that employ a good deal of poetic language to enhance the effects of the tale they are telling. To name just a few: Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Ross Macdonald.

What advice would you give to younger writers?

There are hundreds if not thousands of books by established authors that supposedly tell you how to write fiction or poetry. They may help some, but I’ve never read any or put much stock in them. I think all writers create work that is a product of the world they were born into, their personal experiences, and the books they have read. My advice to younger writers is to read as much as possible and write as much and as often as possible. Discover the authors you like and figure out why their creations work for you. Learn the techniques of fiction or poetry by seeing how such authors employ them successfully. Writing is an art and also a craft. The art won’t matter — none will read it — without the craft.

You’ve been writing and publishing for sixty years. From your vantage as a writer, how has the field changed in that time?

In too many ways to list here, but here are a couple. When I first began writing, it was far more difficult to be published. Now it is much easier to publish both stories and poems because of the Internet and the sheer quantity of the publications available to which one can submit. It’s also easier to self-publish entire books, since it’s much less expensive because of the lowcost technology of laser printing. On the downside, the pay rate increases for writers, even in professional publications, have fallen far below the rate of inflation.

Kurt Vonnegut once observed that there was a time when one could make a living from writing short stories. Not only is that time long past, but now the same can be said about writing novels. Most novelists these days, even those who turn out a book or more a year, have to supplement their incomes elsewhere to make a living.

What works of yours would you most recommend to readers?

Depends on what they are after. If they are interested primarily in mainstream fiction, I’d suggest my novel Stained Glass Rain, a coming-of-age tale set in the drug culture of the mid-1960s. For genre/ speculative fiction, I’d recommend my dystopian sf novel, The Guardener’s Tale and my best of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. If they are interested in genre/speculative poetry, I’d mention my retrospective collections Brief Encounters with My Third Eye for short poems and Dark Roads for longer ones. All the above books are available online, and they can order most of them through bookstores or on loan from your local library.

What are your plans for the future? What works do you have forthcoming?

Plans, you ask? Well, at my age they aren’t in the infinite range. I think I’ll keep doing what I have been doing, writing and submitting both poetry and short stories. If I catch the dreaded novel fever and inspiration, I may try to finish one more novel. Currently, I have poems forthcoming in Analog, Asimov SF, Weird Tales and several anthologies.

Thanks again Bruce, for your body of work, and your time. We are honored.

Do you consider yourself a sci-fi aficionado? Mr. Boston's poem is featured in the Imaginaria section of this magazine. After reading it, turn to page 31 to see if you can solve mystery contained in this speculative poem and test your knowledge against other fans of science fiction.