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Troubles in SF Poetry—Part II

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[ Last week in Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed a poem by Poul Anderson and how he resolved the issue of creating a science-fictional context for a poem in an alliterative meter. Here in Part II, we now discuss Marcie Lynn Tentchoff’s “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” with a brief excursion into a few lines from Math Jones’s “Lenctenlong.”] While researching Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, when I first encountered “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” I instantly knew that here was one of the most throat-catchingly good SF poems yet to appear in an alliterative meter. Tentchoff herself is hardly new to verse-craft. Back in 2000, her long Arthurian poem, Surrendering the Blade , won Canada’s prestigious Aurora Award, but her love for all things Norse goes back even further. She’d grown up reading Poul Anderson, for instance, but at Simon Fraser University she also took classes in Middle English, Old English, and Old Norse literature … and
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I've Gone Viral (Judy-Lynn del Rey Edition)

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Well well well! So, it seems that my article on Judy-Lynn del Rey for The Conversation , " The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due ," has now climbed to over 150,000+ (EDIT: now 200,000+) pageviews ... which means that I've now "gone viral," as the kids say. I'd originally written the article almost spur of the moment, realizing that the PBS documentary on which I served as a research consultant, " Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal ," was going to premiere on October 1st. So I wanted to create some publicity for that , and just happened to know about The Conversation .  I've gotten a lot of extremely positive feedback about the article, too, and it's all very bemusing, especially for someone used to spending months on research articles that might garner one or two dozen readers, tops. Anyway, here's a few random reflections on going viral: Nobody looks at the writer's byline. One friend of mine post
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Against Academic Elitism: On Brian Murphy's History of S&S

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I've been meaning to blog about Brian Murphy's brilliant  Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery for literally two months now .... but life happens. Better late than never, though! Anyway, I can't recommend this excellent book highly enough. Given how greatly S&S has influenced modern non-Tolkienian fantasy, including folks like George R. R. Martin and Glen Cook, it's surprisingly hard to find good discussions of the subgenre. Fantasy literature tends to be marginalized anyway , but S&S is so pulpish -- so full of icky "-isms" -- that, frankly, most fantasy scholars in academia are ideologically ill-equipped to understand why normal or decent people might love this kind of fantasy at all. A ridiculously cool cover. Artist: Tom Barber That's obviously a problem for scholars. If you can't read a literature with sympathy, your critiques of -isms  in that literature will always risk being toothless or superficial. It also means you wo
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Troubles in SF Poetry—Part I

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For this entry, indulge me—I’d like to spend a moment on an alliterative poem that, at first glance, looks entirely humdrum. And at second glance too, in fact. Honestly, it’s a real snoozer of a poem. Still, if you remember, I once devoted a whole entry several months back to Poul Anderson, the second most prolific revivalist (after Tolkien) in the 20 th century. Several poems of his range between interesting and outstanding. Off the top of my head, I can name “Route Song of the Winged Folk,” “Autumn,” and his skaldic translations for the fanzine Amra . Nonetheless, if you picked any random poem by Anderson, I doubt most people would be impressed. One such “filler” poem is “The Scothan Queen.” This eight-liner appears in loose dróttkvætt meter, and it originated in a short story for the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories , “Tiger by the Tail,” the inaugural Dominic Flandry entry in Anderson’s Technic History series Mr. Flandry is your prototypical dashing male pulp hero, and as
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My reviews for WOOFUS TAKES and THE BEALLSVILLE CALENDAR

In my ongoing efforts to support alliterative poets in the Modern Alliterative Revival, I just added online reviews for two more poets: Michael Helsem (aka, "Graywyvern") and Jeff Sypeck. These are below, but if you 'd like to support the revivalist, click on the reviews below and "upvote" them ... it's very handy for the algorithms! Lancelot Schaubert ( The Greenwood Poet ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Adam Bolivar ( Ballads for the Witching Hour ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Amit Majmudar ( Dothead ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Mary Thaler ( Ulfhidr ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Zach Weinersmith ( Bea Wolf ): my  Amazon review  and this  Goodreads review Now for Helsem and Sypeck!
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"Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited"

It's official: my first review for the Los Angeles Review of Books has just appeared. It's called " Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited " (click link), and it tackles two recent books on Tolkien: The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns (Routledge, 2024) Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. (McFarland, 2024) I'm a bit nervous about it, honestly, not only because it's such a public forum, but because I share my honest thoughts about the current state of Tolkien criticism. If you're interested, check it out ... and always happy to discuss.
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The GOR novels of John Norman: Better or Worse than Terry Goodkind?

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Turns out I had to rewrite this entry significantly -- one of the perils, alas, of doing additional research. (There must be a moral in that somewhere.) Anyway, I originally wanted to read the GOR novels of John Norman  cuz everyone in SFF scholarship knows the common narrative behind them: Norman's the genre's resident evil, the pinnacle of misogynistic assholery, one of the eventual reasons sword-and-sorcery (S&S) died a rapid death in the 1980s. However, since I'm an instinctive iconoclast who always distrusts received opinion, I had to see for myself. So I finally took the plunge into Gor and selected a novel at random from my local Bookman's. This turned out to be  Priest-Kings of Gor  (Ballantine, 1968), and the sheer strength of its writing quality surprised me deeply. I'm not going to make any two bones about it ... this is a good novel of its kind. So you can only imagine how a-quiver with zeal my grubby little paws were to rant against Received Opinion
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