SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for comments about Some Houseguests Can't Be Helped, by Peg Duthie
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Hel
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Reged: Dec 09 2004
Posts: 41
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Very clever. :)
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JoanneMerriam
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Reged: Oct 07 2004
Posts: 93
Loc: Concord, NH
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I could not possibly love this poem more, especially the dedication.
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see how moonlight's sharp music breaks all of your windows
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Peg Duthie
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Thank you!
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BruceBoston
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I've read some very good poems by Peg Duthie. She is a talented poet. But this is far from the quality work she has to offer.
It's hard to believe, given the quantity of submissions you receive, this is the best you have to give us.
I suspect that Peg Duthie faces the same problem as I do when submitting to SH. The editors favor her trivial populist efforts over her serious and worhtwhile ones.
Every since Kathryn Rantala left the poetry staff the quality and the relevance of the poetry published here has declined.
I recently had an email interchange with the current editors. I was told, among other things, that since at least fifty percent of the nation was Republican, this needed to be taken into account when making their choices.
Reach your own conclusions.
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Hel
Regular reader
Reged: Dec 09 2004
Posts: 41
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Quote:
I recently had an email interchange with the current editors. I was told, among other things, that since at least fifty percent of the nation was Republican, this needed to be taken into account when making their choices.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but what does politics have to do with spec poetry?
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BruceBoston
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This was the reason given why they were reluctant to publish any poems with political connotations.
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Hel
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Reged: Dec 09 2004
Posts: 41
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Ahh... Thanks Bruce.
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JoanneMerriam
Regular reader
Reged: Oct 07 2004
Posts: 93
Loc: Concord, NH
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I agree that Peg has written a lot of poems that are more serious, more weighty, etc. than this one. But I like the poem, and I don't think every poem has to be serious for it to be good. I like what this poem has to say about family and civility.
What do you mean by relevance? I'm not asking to be combative, I seriously want to know. (Often when people complain about poetry's lack of relevance, they seem to mean it isn't about real people's - i.e. the non-elite's - lives, but I don't imagine that's what you're getting at here.) What would you want to see them publishing? Is your problem here with form/style, or content, or both?
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see how moonlight's sharp music breaks all of your windows
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BruceBoston
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The easiest way to answer that is to forward you to my commentary "The Failure of Genre Poetry" in the September Fortean Bureau. http://www.forteanbureau.com/sept2005/Sept_FB_Boston.html
To try to be succinct here, I was first attracted to the poetry at Strange Horizons as a reader and a writer because I often found it engaging in form and/or content. It spoke to my interests either as a poet, a human being, a sociopolitical animal, or all three. Lately, at least for much of this year, the poetry here has gone in what I would call a populist direction, the same approach that Asimov's SF has always had toward poetry, i.e., keep it light, keep it available, publish poetry that will appeal to people who don't normally read poetry. Some, even much of that, is fine, but here I feel that it is crowding out truly speculative work, at least as I define speculative in my commentary. It also seems to be crowding out poems that speak to our times, i.e., those that address the sociopolitical realities of today.
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