Troubles in SF Poetry—Part I

Click here to see Part II or Part III of "Troubles in SF Poetry."

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 an agent for the Terran Empire, he often does his best James Bond impression by wooing a new ladyfriend whenever possible.  “Tiger by the Tail” is no exception. Here, Anderson’s Scothani are a barbarian tribe who had just recently stolen interstellar technology from another people, and to complete his mission, poor Flandry – always willing to take one for the team – must seduce the queen of the Scothani. (Duty, amiright?) Luckily, Queen Gunli is more of a poetry than a flowers kind of gal, so one measly verse is all Flandry requires to sweep the royal lady off her feet. And since the Scothani are barbarians, naturally he selects a meter in their
native bardic form: the alliterative Old Norse court meter, dróttkvætt.

Only one thing, indeed, makes this dull little sexist romp of a poem worthwhile – the sheer fact that it counts as science fiction.

Granted, Anderson never invokes any SF tropes in these scant eight lines of text. Dominic Flandry, though, is clearly a science fiction protagonist dashing about in a science fiction magazine, so that largely determines our genre expectations for “The Scothan Queen.” And moreover, SF poems in the Modern Revival are remarkably rare. The revivalists’ most common genre is fantasy … and it’s not even close. Horror follows at a distant second, and non-genre speculative verse has a strong showing thanks to pagan poets and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

SF poetry, though? Not so much. That’s about as common as finding enlightened gender relations in pulp-era interplanetary adventure stories.

The main hurdle, I think, is how strongly most speculative poets associate medieval content with the Germanic alliterative meters. Now, obviously, there’s no strict, logical, or unbreakable connection between poetic form and historical period, but insofar as “fantasy=past” and “SF=future” in most people’s minds, yeah, most revivalist poems are going to be fantasy. Anderson’s solution to this little conundrum is to combine past with future in “The Scothan Queen.” He grants his barbarian people, the Scothani, just enough interstellar technology that an SF magazine could legitimately publish “Tiger by the Tail.” Yet that’s a very specific plot premise that can’t be utilized too often … and as it happens, Anderson’s second SF poem in an unmodified alliterative meter wouldn’t arrive until 38 years later in Boat of a Million Years.

Still, Anderson’s method of combining a poetic form linked to pre-industrial Europe with a technologically advanced far-future society, in due time, found two remarkable heirs. And it’s precisely Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Rosemary Kirstein whom I would like to discuss next.

So, without further ado ….

[Here ends Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry.” For my discussion of Tentchoff in Part II, tune in next week.]