1. Ok, let’s get the Hugo insider info out of the way: Is the Poetry Hugo heavy? How the heck does one carry it? And, where did you put it once you got it home?
Not only is it heavy, it is top-heavy! Half the reason they have a rehearsal for Hugo finalists before the ceremony appears to be to give you a chance to hold the award, so that if you win, you won’t be surprised by the weight and drop it. We were strongly advised to put one hand under the base and one around the rocket, and not to carry it one-handed—especially since this year’s award has the free-floating glass element, which could knock against the rocket and crack.
It is currently living on a low bookshelf in my office, where I can see it every time I go to sit at my desk. At some point I’m going to relocate it to the front room of our house, though, so I can show it off to…basically nobody, because we don’t get a lot of random visitors! Just friends and family, who have already seen it. But it will get pride of place—and also museum putty underneath the base, because I live in earthquake territory.
2. Please talk a little bit about how you got into writing poetry, especially as you have already had such success with your short and longer fiction works.
I kind of got into it by accident—but then, that’s also how I got into short fiction from novels, so I guess it’s on-brand?
These sea changes feel to me like finding a new gear in my brain, one I didn’t know how to look for before that. With short fiction, it was the light-bulb epiphany of “ohhhhh, that’s what a short-story-sized idea looks like.” With poetry, it came about when I was looking at my list of story ideas to write someday. Some of those have been on the list a really long time, and in some cases it’s because…honestly, there isn’t really a story there? Just a thought, which would need to grow more substance before I could call it any kind of narrative.
And deep in the shadows of my hindbrain, a little voice whispered, “What if…poem instead?”
I had actually tried this once before, years ago. I wrote a flash story that got a very unenthusiastic response from my crit group; when I tentatively floated the idea that it might work better as a poem, they agreed. But I got about three lines into writing it as free verse and already hated the result, so I decided to try it as various kinds of poetic form—and god help me, the moment I looked up forms, the concept decided it wanted to be a sestina. Which I think is the correct choice, but also, that’s a heck of a mountain to climb as your first real attempt at poetry! I wrote a fairly bad sestina, poked at it a couple of times over the subsequent years, and never got anywhere with it. (That one remains my white whale: I aspire to write a version I’m proud of.) But in 2021 I had the same impulse with a different idea, and I produced a sonnet I did like—in fact, “The Great Undoing” was published recently by 4LPH4NUM3R1C. And then a few months later another idea reared up that I didn’t even put on the short story list, because I could tell it was better suited to being a poem; that became the first one I sold, “Damnatio Memoriae.” After that, I’d found the poetry gear, and it became a thing I do on a semi-regular basis.
3. Do you have any favorite poets (speculative or otherwise)? What do you think makes for a good speculative poem?
I’m partial to A. E. Housman, who at his best can pack a hell of a punch into fairly simple language, but I tend to like specific poems more than specific poets. I keep a journal where I copy out pieces I like, and they’re all over the place in terms of source.
For both speculative and realistic poetry, I like the poet to be doing something with their language, whether that’s Housman using plain speech but it’s rhymed and metered, or someone writing free verse but attending to alliteration and a wrong-but-right choice of verb. Anything that takes it a step away from the ordinary! My least favorite poems are the ones where, if you reformatted it without the line breaks, you’d have a completely unmemorable piece of prose. At that point, your work lives and dies on the sheer power of its concept, and it’s damn hard to say something so gobsmackingly original that I don’t think, “you could have said this more vividly than you did.”
Speculative poetry does extend into an interesting grey zone, though. Because poetry so often plays with metaphor and imagery, I think the boundary between genre and not is far blurrier than it is with fiction. I’ve sold what I think of as a fantasy poem, a villanelle about the ghosts of princes who died trying to get through the hedge around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, to a literary journal; I’d be surprised if I could do the same with a prose short story of that idea. On the flip side, it’s much harder to fit worldbuilding and plot into a poem, unless you’re willing to write very long. So poetry is often playing in a different zone than fiction, with some overlap.
4. Your poem “A War of Words” won the first Poetry Hugo Award in 2025. Can you tell folks how this particular poem came to be written? Is losing language something as a writer you worry about?
The seed of it came from a story narrated by the Haida storyteller Kilxhawgins, in Robert Bringhurst’s book A Story as Sharp as a Knife. (Yes, I read anthropology books for fun.) In that story, some young men on a raid overhear women making an odd cry of delight, and it’s implied they steal the cry along with the women and various resources. The notion of being able to steal words in a raid sparked my speculative writer imagination, and so I promptly sat down and wrote the poem.
Only after I’d written it did I think about what the piece meant, which is fairly typical for me and my writing. Because of its source, I think of it as being, above all, about Indigenous language loss—and yes, that’s something I care about a great deal. I’m not fluent in anything other than English, but I’ve studied five languages, and I know that there’s not a simple word-to-word correspondence between them. What they say and how they say it can differ a lot, and those things intertwine with culture. So language loss is culture loss, too.
But the poem can resonate with other kinds of language loss as well. Right now, we’re seeing an effort by the US government to stamp out words like “diversity” that we use to talk about injustice and how to fix it; that is absolutely a kind of war. Or you have a loved one suffering from dementia, maybe the poem makes you think about the losses that brings on. That kind of multiplicity is why I often do best when I write a thing and then figure out what themes are in it, rather than going theme-first—it leads to a richer, more flexible result.
5. What is your poetry writing practice? Do you approach it differently than writing fiction? Do you think about collaborations differently?
I was a natural novelist first, years before I ever learned to write short fiction (let alone poetry), so it’s absolutely different to me: with poetry, I can zoom from “I have an idea” to “I have a draft” in less time than it takes to write even flash fiction! Not every piece goes that fast, of course, especially because I love poetic forms—which are your things like sonnets and villanelles and haiku, where your poem has to fit certain requirements—and some of those are super complex, requiring a lot of careful finessing. But free verse in particular can go from nothing to finished product in just a minute or two, especially if you’re like me and don’t tend to write long poems. It’s great for the dopamine hit of having a new thing, a contrast to the endurance sport of novel-writing, which is what eats most of my time.
I know there are people who do collaborate on poetry; I have no idea how they do it. I can’t imagine doing that myself! I collaborate with Alyc Helms as M. A. Carrick, and I’ve done various other joint works like Born to the Blade, but that’s a much bigger kitchen, with more room for multiple cooks at once.
6. Any advice for folks hoping to improve in the craft of poetry?
Revel in your language! I’ve become a proponent of the idea—I can’t remember who this originated with—that the opposite of prose is not poetry, it’s verse, and “poetry” is an aesthetic quality either type can have, an artfulness of language for its own sake. Verse just tends to lean on that more than prose does, especially when the strictures of a form require you to find a different route to what you want to say.
A friend recommended two books to me on figures of speech—The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth, and Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn—and I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for them. One of those books defines a figure of speech as simply “an intended deviation from ordinary usage,” and argues that the point isn’t to memorize a list of specialized terms; instead, “The figures have done their work when they have made richer the choices [the writer] perceives.” We still use these devices; we just don’t teach them much anymore, and therefore when we deploy them, we’re largely doing so by accident. Training yourself to think about what effect it will have if you put the adjective after the noun, or create a mirrored structure in your phrasing, or use one part of a thing to refer to the whole, can lead to more vivid writing—in prose as well as verse! This doesn’t have to produce a purple or archaic result, either: I love that the other book cites examples from modern song lyrics to show how we still delight in these things, even if we don’t know the technical names for them.
7. There’s the famous William Carlos Williams quote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” What role does speculative poetry and other forms of speculative writing have to play in the world as it is now?
Speculative writing in general has always had the power to look at the world through a different lens, and that’s no less true of poetry. And because brains are weird, sometimes coming at a topic from a sideways angle—Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”—is more effective than going straight at it. I could rant at you about billionaires, or I could write a poem about how of course we have to protect dragons’ hoards, because eventually that will pay off for all the rest of us. The first lectures you; the second (which I have sold to Merganser Magazine) might entertain you, which is often better.
And, of course, we need art. We need it more, not less, when times are hard. Beauty isn’t some luxury we have to set aside in the face of adversity; it’s what gets us through adversity. So: speculative poetry can shine a light on both the good and the bad in our world. And it can do that with dragons and other things that give us a little bit of joy.
8. Having an established Hugo Award for poetry is a step forward in legitimizing the art form for the speculative genre. What do you hope to see happen specifically with the Hugo Award and for speculative poetry in general?
I’d love to see more people get involved! That’s the big thing I’ve noticed with the Special Hugo Award this year, and with the Nebulas adding it as a permanent category: They’ve inspired more people to pay attention to speculative poetry and even to try writing it themselves. The Codex Writers’ Group runs a poetry-based challenge, and this past year it had two and a half times the number of participants from previous years. I strongly suspect that’s because of how the awards have raised visibility.
I also think speculative poetry can help chip away at the assumption that poetry is some kind of rarified, elite art you need a degree in literature to understand. It sort of turned into that for a while, thanks to literary movements in the twentieth century, but across most of the world and through most of history, poetry has also been a very everyday art. (It still is, in some ways: I will die on the hill of asserting that song lyrics are poetry, though there are poets who will fight me on that point. And if you want to see a thriving poetic community, look no further than rap.) Speculative poetry can be about Deep, Meaningful Topics—but as with our fiction, it can also be about time travel shenanigans or getting into a bar fight with an alien or whatever tickles your fancy. We’re not afraid to have fun. And that can make poetry more appealing to people who haven’t been in the habit of reading it.
9. Any resources you want to point folks to, in their quest to read or write more speculative poetry?
The page for the Speculative Poetry Initiative, which is advocating for a permanent Hugo category, has a whole list of sponsoring publications. It’s far from a complete rundown of all the magazines publishing speculative poetry, but it would certainly give you a place to start! The Science Fiction Poetry Association also publishes annual anthologies for the Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Award longlists, which provide a cross-section of what came out in a given year.
As for writing it: Seriously, dive on in. You don’t need anybody’s permission to start! And while you may not have critique partners who know much about poetry in specific, any reader is capable of telling you “This part was confusing” or “I wanted just a little bit more here at the end, for emotional impact.” That ultimately matters more than whether they know the difference between a dactyl and an anapest. (Especially if you’re writing free verse, where meter doesn’t matter!)
10. For folks interested in hearing you read, speak, or teach, where will you be appearing in 2026?
As a resident of California, I find it delightfully convenient that both Worldcon and World Fantasy will be on my coast next year! So you should be able to find me in both Anaheim and Oakland. As for teaching, I have an on-demand class available through Clarion West (and hope to get more up there), as well as a long-running Patreon focused on worldbuilding. Anything else—new cons or events—will be announced on my site, Bluesky, and Mastodon!
© 2026 Betsy Aoki and Marie Brennan
