During every submission window, Jerome and the editorial flock scour the woods for the tastiest and shiniest speculative fiction we can find. Time and time again, you, our wonderful dreamers, have given us so many of these fascinating trinkets to pilfer through. In today’s blog post, the editorial flock would like to shine a light on one particular dreamer who has wowed us time and time again with his endearing and engaging poetry. Published in both Volume 1 Nightmare Issue: Sunrise and Volume 2 Dream Issue: Cosmos, Bob McAfee is a retired software consultant turned poet who has published eight books of poetry. For the last several years he has hosted a Wednesday night Zoom poetry workshop, and we asked him to give us a glimpse into the methods he teaches there.
Something that we editors squawk about during our flights is the nature of speculative poetry. In form and technique, it really isn’t so different from other stories told through poetic genres, but for us, there is a distinct taste like umami in the back of the mouth ignited by speculative poetry. Speculative poetry goes beyond pure metaphor and invites the reader into a unique world of wonder and enchantment—and sometimes nightmares! While speaking with Bob about his process, we were sure to ask him to delineate the methods he uses to bring his poems out of the metaphorical space and into the enchanted.
On Writing Poetry and “The Vampire Bride”
In Volume 2 Dream Issue: Cosmos, Bob’s poem “The Vampire Bride” is a standout. We asked him to walk us through the process of writing this piece from concept to finished piece. About finding the idea for this piece, he said:
The characters of Lucy Westenra and her fiancé, Arthur, in “Dracula” inspired me to write about a man in love with a vampire. The husband (narrator) is a working man. His wife has a great sexual appetite. While he sleeps, she travels by night satisfying her other appetite. He may be starting to realize who she really is.
As you can see from his description, he seeks inspiration in clearly speculative spaces. Vampirism, lycanthropy—anything that diverges from reality can be a great start for your future speculative poetry. If your inspiration is grounded in reality, try shifting some elements into the speculative space.
Once you’ve found your inspiration, understanding how to arrange your thoughts on the page is the next major step. As all writers know, this can be the most difficult aspect of the process. However, Bob has a few pointers for anyone struggling to articulate their thoughts. When describing his own process for writing poetry, he said:
I look for a “Hook” to get me going—a word or phrase from which the whole poem emerges. Early on in the process of writing “The Vampire Bride,” these lines came to me: Lips of cherry berry wine, hair of gold is spun, kiss the stars and ride the moon and back before the sun. This sounded like a musical chorus so I decided to write in the form of a ballad. After some experimentation, I ended up with ten-line stanzas followed by a variation of the chorus. About half of my poems have at least some rhymes and musicality is important to me even in poems written in free verse or prose poems.
Often the poem suggests its own vocabulary. This poem had words like dead, bed, fed, red, night, flight, delight, appetite, etc. Before I knew it, each stanza was filled with lines end-rhymed with “ed” or “ight”.
The editorial flock here at Snoozine is particularly taken with this part of his process. Despite the popularity and freedom gained from free verse poetry, the flock would love to see more structured poetry come our way. Like Bob, we encourage our dreamers not to be afraid of reigning in their ideas with some clever rhyme scheme or meter. As Bob explained, some ideas come with an innate rhythm. Don’t be afraid of embracing it!
The thematic elements of poetry can be particularly hard to nail—trust us, we know! In our personal writing practice, this is something each of our editors struggles with, too. However, choosing a viewpoint to approach the theme can greatly help you hone in on your subject. For Bob, too, solidifying a viewpoint, whether that be through character or aesthetics is an impactful part of his practice. He explains:
I strive to exhibit a sense of magical realism, surrealism or witchcraft. My scenarios employ the myths and lore of the locale or characters. In this case I chose to pick and choose the vampire attributes that best fit my poem. My vampire is a sexual being, she eats, she loves, she is a creature of the night. She is a real woman who just happens to be sanguinary. She may or may not ever take the form of a bat.
On Writing Speculative Fiction Poetry
When asked what the best methods are to ensure a poem is firmly planted in the speculative space, Bob suggested finding an alternate persona for the speaker of the poem. He explained:
Most of my fiction poems are “persona” poems in which the narrator is some character other than Bob McAfee, someone who is free to enter dark places that Bob would not dare to go. Jerome, the crow, says speculative fiction describes any story that diverges from reality (setting, character, or other elements can’t be found in the real world). Examples of my speculative poetry include poems written in the voice of Alice (from Wonderland), a new recruit to the Living Dead, the king of the werewolves, the husband of a vampire bride, a man negotiating his future with the Grim Reaper, Satan on a night’s stroll, the ghost of a 911 firefighter, Frankenstein’s monster, a man newly arrived in Heaven, and a serial killer.
Even when describing a personal story through your poetry, you may find it beneficial to shift the narrator into a new character. This can create a new viewpoint for you to approach the poem from while putting distance between you—the writer—and the speaker of the poem. Taking this distance might give you the space you need to make hard-hitting commentary or remove ultra-personal pieces that might prevent the audience from fully engaging with your piece.
To see this in action, we highly recommend checking out other examples of Bob’s speculative poetry. To date, Snoozine has published 7 of Bob’s pieces, and Jerome is hungry for more of this style of poetry! Bob admits that speculative poetry can be difficult to publish in mainstream magazines, but rest assured that there are plenty of speculative fiction magazines that want it—including us! As you move forward in your speculative poetry journey, we encourage you to explore various forms. Give us a haiku or tanka, or maybe even a lyrical ballad. Experiment with the various genres and forms out there. Our submissions nest has so much room for these poems.