Reasons to love poetry
March 5, 2020
One of the reasons people love poetry is that they find in a poem something which resonates with their own experience, whether that is in Ferlenghetti writing in the 1980s about the erosion of freedom or Alan Spence, who can pinpoint in the few haiku syllables a moment which is both unique and entirely recognisable.
Susan Mansfield
Poetry review StAnza 2019
Your body like a downpour
March 5, 2020
A hand on my thigh. That is what I’m thinking about, most of the time. A hand slipping under my dress, the other holding the steering wheel, and me, upright in the passenger’s seat. Fearless. Always fearless in love, like I’ve had practice. Look, I know you’re sick of hearing about the skin of it all, but I’m not done being shameless with where I want to be touched. A hand pressed lightly against my neck. Lips grazing the apple of my bottom lip. Your name like a tongue over the ridges of my teeth. Your body like a downpour with me dancing underneath it.
Caitlyn Siehl
Most of the Time
difference between fantasy and science fiction
March 5, 2020
When asked to “define the difference between fantasy and science fiction,” I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into another. Definitions are for grammar, not literature, I say, and boxes are for bones. But of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paper — I work on paper) you get purple, something else again.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
man’s evil prying
March 5, 2020
There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.
H.P. Lovecraft
The Thing on the Doorstep