Poetry is having a moment in science fiction and fantasy, and I obviously could not be happier. With the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association recognising poetry not only as an art form whose creators are worthy of membership but as one worthy of a category in the Nebula Awards, and with this year’s Worldcon in Seattle, Washington offering the same for the first time in the Hugo Awards, it stands to reason that people are seeing an increased value in poetry as a part of this great genre that we love.

I can speak at length about how this is a damn good sign for SF/F. Poetry is not only precious to me personally, but I believe a strong case can be made for poetry at the very heart of the genre itself. Some of the genre’s oldest touchstones are works of verse: when we speak of the epics such as Beowulf or the Odyssey, of the Kalevala or the Poetic Edda, of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Mabinogion, we speak obviously first of form—of the fact that they are poems. We often underestimate how poetry can be a bridge between “genre” and “literary,” however arbitrary those definitions may already be, but I’d argue that it’s been doing so for some time now, not only historically in the epic way, but in contemporary writing as well—Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars is a speculative collection, and Franny Choi, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has also won an Elgin Award with Soft Science.

I can only ever be grateful that we are showing more appreciation for poetry in genre. I am obviously biased, but I think speculative poetry is the best of both worlds: embracing lyricism and brevity to tell arresting stories, alongside the capacity for Science Fiction and Fantasy to give us strong metaphorical tools for imagining our reality in interesting and complex ways. I love that these small shifts in visibility mean that, even slowly, more people are getting to read poetry and develop their own tastes in the same ways they would any other literary segment of the genre.

However, at the risk of aggrandizing the art form, I’d argue that poetry is doing so much both in and out of genre, navigating an abundance of assumptions in order to be read. It has to be rhythmic, but it shouldn’t feel simplistic; it must be lyrical enough to not be mistaken for prose, but not so intensely so that it seems dense and impenetrable; it must compel the reader to emotion but not feel artificial; it has an attachment to earnestness that we don’t require at the same calibre as prose—the assumption some readers make that contemporary free verse is, as often as possible, about a thing that really happened to someone real, and not merely the imagination of a moment with real weight.

I don’t say this to be bitter—all writing is hard work, and getting through it to tell the story you are holding in your heart is part of the joy of the craft. But the assumptions also have the effect of making poetry seem uniquely confrontational to both write and read, and I believe it is part of a poet’s duty, beyond simply writing the thing, to help disabuse people of these assumptions so that they no longer get in the way of someone’s lay appreciation of verse.

One way I can imagine doing so is to first get in the way of how people view earnestness.

On the third episode of the seventh season of the Dropout game show Game Changer, the absolute old-timey cartoon villain that is Sam Reich asked contestants Ally Beardsley, Lisa Gilroy, and Zac Oyama to engage in several bouts of what can only be described as the most blush-worthy exercises in sincerity that someone can imagine. This is already one of the most sinister things one can make someone else do on the spot under duress, and of course, being professionals, they lean into it pretty confidently. The joke is that when you tell a comedian that there are no bits allowed, you are inviting the audience into the inherent comedy of unbridled candidness—it turns out that anything can be funny.

This is the first thing I want you, reader, to keep in your heart: this also means that anything can be a poem. But that is not immediately what I want to discuss here.

One of this episode’s exercises in earnestness is to “write a breathtaking poem.”

Now, I obviously have a lot of thoughts right away. “Breathtaking” is a hell of a charge to make of someone, especially someone who allegedly has never written a poem before—if you ask even the most venerated poet, even they’ll tell you “breathtaking” is not something you can achieve with just a dash of rhythm. But also, as I said before, a poem is a hyper-scrutinised space. Earnestness is simultaneously presupposed and constantly critiqued. What, then, is the rubric being used here?

The answers, in hindsight, are scattered all across the episode. For one, in an earlier exercise—an even more dramatically revealing request for the players to “share what they’re working on in therapy”—Reich offers a tip that, in hindsight, has been informing the way I view storytelling in verse, especially in genre:

“It doesn’t matter if you tell the truth or a lie—so long as I believe you.”

This may seem hollow, or unintuitive, but to me it gets to the heart of storytelling. We innately understand that a story doesn’t need to be about the author, or something they have seen with their own eyes—but it does have to be about something that you would never doubt the reality of. In fiction, to butcher a famous Sherlock Holmes quote, once you eliminate all the ways in which it is improbable for a person to behave, whatever else may be happening in the scene, however physically impossible in the real world, must be the truth.

But in that vein, poetry is often held to a stricter standard of sincerity by outsiders. Speculative poetry, then—a form where absolute sincerity is expected, using story elements born entirely out of fabulism—otherwise sounds contradictory. I’d argue the attachment to being genuine in verse is one that is attached to poetry, and therefore one that warps the attention of speculative poetry, at the reader’s peril.

In the late Louise Glück’s essay aptly titled “Against Sincerity,” the poet opens with definitions, distinguishing between actuality, or “the world of event,” the realm where real things take place, and truth, “the embodied vision, illumination, or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art.” She qualifies them as distinct not only from each other, but from what she defines as sincerity: “‘telling the truth,’ which is not necessarily the path to illumination.”

I reckon anyone working in the speculative can see the potential usefulness of these distinctions: there is a way to get to truth—to the part that matters, the beating heart of the story, the theme that glows unavoidably red-hot the more you stare at it—that has absolutely nothing to do with telling the story of something that actually happened, and is often harder the more you try. The logic, I would argue here, is that the path can get easier when we return to the foundation of telling stories—almost all of which is to a core, a history, of fiction that is more speculative than it is not, and draws on things so fundamental to our shared psychic identity that we know what they mean, what they say, even when we know they are not true.

One of the strengths of genre moreso than any other literature is that it is capable of effortlessly navigating the veil between the genuinely real and the undeniably unreal. If suspension of disbelief is what gets a reader from the front cover to the back of a novel, a genuinely arresting Fantasy or Science Fiction premise is a stress-ribbon bridge, connecting the truth of human emotional depth to the clarifying lens of the unreal. Once you put the two together—once you travel the path that connects them—the result is looking through that impossible thing to witness the truth in more stark relief.

In speculative poetry it is no different—rather, it is in the effortful navigation between that assumption of earnestness and that clarifying lens of the unreal that the poet hopes to discover undeniable illumination. The end goal, radically, should be for someone to read a speculative poem and go, “none of this is real, but all of it is true.” This is true of the epics, most undeniably of all: we should not believe necessarily in nymphs or witches or sirens, but when we read the Odyssey, we should find the heart of Odysseus’s goal impossible to reject. Similarly, when you read Choi’s “Turing Test_Love” or Kazumi Chin’s “Homeland Security Arrests Godzilla Without Reading Him His Miranda Rights as ‘White Christmas’ Fills the Air,” the busywork of being tied up asking or answering what is “actual” gets in the way of what the poem’s truth is.

It does not matter if the poem is a fact or not—so long as you are willing to discover the truth that is hiding beneath the dragon-wing and behind the vampire-fang, in the whir of the heart beneath the cyborg chassis, in the hum of overhead wire that sustains the false utopia. There is nothing less than genuine—in fact, the goal should be revealing a deep and irrefutable genuineness, one that comes to you as obvious as your knowledge of those fantastic things.

© 2025 Brandon O’Brien