Earl Grey with Honey: The Tiger Is Out

Hello, everyone!

I haven't poured you a cup in a few weeks—but that's because I've been very busy trying to wrap up some commissioned work, digging myself out of my own brain, and most importantly, writing about poetry! I'll be doing one of those things again today, so feel free to take a seat and sip!

Better Living Through Invocation

By the time you're reading this, Seattle Worldcon has just recently opened nominations for the Hugo Awards—which includes the Best Speculative Poem, which I am particularly excited about. Seattle Worldcon also named me the Poet Laureate of the convention, so I'm also very hype about that, but I promise the two excitements are separate: I am still trying to get used to being named the first Poet Laureate in the history of the World Science Fiction Convention, and the only reason I don't bring it up more often is because I don't want to seem like I'm gloating, but what really radicalises me is that the year 2025 is a banner year for raising the profile of speculative poetry as an art form.

I've been writing poetry since I was a teenager, and it was only in the hindsight of being a published science fiction and fantasy writer that I realised how much of my work was reaching out to the speculative for its depth. There is something freeing about visiting the real through the lens of the unreal: it is no less a documentary form, but I don't have to be there, I just have to be honest; I don't have to talk about now, I can talk about the past or the future, I can extrapolate and be jarring and beautiful in that moment rather than direct. I can explore a metaphor at its most overgrown, or look so long into a certain point that I can see the things that haven't happened yet, or the things that the world tries so often to hide from me.

So I've been beyond grateful to have discovered it here in the science fiction space, and even more grateful to have had so many opportunities in the space since then: serving as Poetry editor emeritus of FIYAH, being in several Rhysling anthologies, and my first poetry collection winning an Elgin Award are levels of fortune I cannot possibly ask for.

Being named Poet Laureate of Worldcon—the first in the convention's history—still takes some getting used to for the same reasons. I love Worldcon as a kind of emblem of SFF fandom's best possibilities of community and education, so being able to give back to that in a poetic sense, in a year when the stocks in speculative poetry is arguably rising all over the place, feels like a privilege I am both ill-equipped and effortlessly eager to fulfill. Between this, and the ability to join SFWA with poetry submissions, and having verse nominated for the Nebula Awards for the first time this year as well, poetry is having a wonderful time.

Of course, with this fact comes a common refrain from some readers: I don't get poetry. Some people tend to be worried that poetry is not a regular part of their diet, or more curiously, that they are not sufficiently capable of chewing it. This is something I believe to be fundamentally untrue. I think in everyone's heart is enough of a sense to get through any poem. I believe just like people who aren't ballet dancers know what a routine they like looks like, and people who aren't opera sopranos know what a song they like sounds like, people who aren't poets know what a poem they like sounds like.

So what's in the way?

Bias. The same bias that says what makes a play high art or low art, or makes a movie blockbuster schlock or an artsy award-winner. The inherent assumption that poetry is not allowed to be pedestrian, that it is somehow more academic or more aristocratic than other art and there can only be written, read, and shared in certain ways, lest it become less-than, like the others.

When you put it against the rest of that assumption, though, it wavers. What others, though? What is less-than about prose? Is poetry also fighting against the essay, and then who wins between those two? When a poem is 'prosaic' and a short story is 'poetic', who wins? Did the short story usurp a neighbouring throne somehow?

I'll be talking enough about this particular issue until the Killer Klowns arrive to destroy us, but the ways in which education culture—by which I mean not education itself, but the social construct of what education is supposed to do for people—has us confused about what poetry is also supposed to do for people. Poetry is as pedestrian as they come, and it should be. It should be one of the common ways we describe the world around us, get deeper into our own bodies' sensations and emotional states, and allow us free frameworks to be open about those things outwardly. That should come commonplace to us, and it does. In fact, I'd argue that the idea that poetry is some kind of inaccessible or elitist work is one of the many ways society has worked to keep us as out-of-touch with our feelings as possible.

So how do you get back in touch with that poetic sense?

Well, I'd argue that, in the words of Lao Tzu, "the way that can be told is not the true Way". This isn't about telling you that there are rules or guidelines for getting poetry. There are little passageways that someone can give you into a specific kind of poetry or a specific struggle you may have, small cracks in the wall you can peer through, doors that forever stand ajar. But that's not the same as trusting your own emotions--that's just a way to bridge your emotions and the act of understanding.

The Con-Verse segment I'm writing for the Seattle Worldcon blog may seem like I'm actually giving you those guidelines, but I hope that what it really accomplishes is pointing out to folks where some of those pathways are, so that the rest comes to them on its own. Because everyone has that sense, I am sure of it.

You may just need to stretch the muscle often, of course, but I promise you that this is also very easy: you just need to read poetry more often and trust your own feelings. You don't have anything to prove to anyone, least of whom another poet. You just have to dare to have the reactions that you do, be curious and gracious to the poem in front of you, and be willing to read generously. And when you do, there is that sense, revealing itself through you.

It is the sense that tells people that they do in fact like Mary Oliver's 'Wild Geese', or Maggie Smith's 'Good Bones', or Danez Smith's 'Dinosaurs in the Hood'. It is the sense that says that even when the sound of it being read is perplexing or the whole meaning of it is elusive, there is something deep within that poem that rings at a frequency some part of you is in sync with, and you can keep that sync if you keep still as you listen, as you read.

It is the sense that lets you know that this poem is good, and it is the same sense that gave this kid the ability to write it.

And you have that, too. I promise.

Tasting Notes

It would obviously be cheating for me to just make this week's Tasting Notes the Con-Verse segment on the Seattle Worldcon blog, but the truth is that there is a lot of good speculative poetry discourse content on the internet that you should read, and not a lot of it is necessarily fit for Con-Verse, only because Con-Verse is a 101-course for people who aren't accustomed reading poetry for awards. Here's some of the things I think are still accessible enough for you to go looking for if you just want to widen your speculative poetry frame of mind and hopefully keep exploring the form well beyond the Hugos.

My first and favourite—kind of 102-level in my opinion but the level of creative discourse that helps people discover their tastes and how to dig more deeply into the art form—is 'Defining Speculative Poetry: A Conversation and Three Manifestos' by Strange Horizons poetry editors AJ Odasso, Romie Stott, and Sonya Taaffe. This essay informs so much of how I have assessed speculative poetry as a reader, writer, and editor that sometimes I forget that I am repeating parts of it verbatim. If you want an essay that asks you first to challenge your own assumptions of poetry as a form and be willing to form your own complicating opinions about what breaks through that frame for you as a reader, read this and literally talk back to it. Say what you feel, even and especially when that thing is 'I don't get poetry'—because the game is not to get it, it's to receive it, and once you're willing to do that, on your own terms, you are reading it.

Ages ago, when I was still young to this space but the space was so kind to me, the inimitable Fran Wilde bought me a copy of Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars, and I have been enamoured of Smith's work ever since. Wilde has a wonderful essay about her poetry, published in Reactor Magazine back in the before-times, just after Smith had become the Poet Laureate of the United States, and if you have never read Tracy K. Smith before this point, let this essay convince you to fix that. I think there is no stronger reminder that so much poetry, especially so much Black American poetry, is on its face so deeply slipstream than this, and I hope that you not only read Life on Mars (and Wade in the Water), but let it guide you through an ocean of similarly challenging Black poetry like Danez Smith and Claudia Rankine and Nicole Sealey and Rita Dove.

And of course, if you're just looking for places to read more poetry, just check the Markets page of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association website and explore the sites you have never heard before. Just pick something at random and dig into their catalog if they're available online. There are so many places to start. Be excited to just find anywhere to begin and keep working your way through.

A reminder that this newsletter, as well as the rest of my writing and game design work, thrives with your support. My Patreon is where you can find snippets of new TTRPG projects, exclusive writing drafts, and more:

Today's Tunes

I've been really digging LEGION, the latest album by Japanese rap duo Creepy Nuts. I knew I was gonna enjoy it since they did the OP for DanDaDan, but I didn't expect how much I would enjoy it.

I could be here forever talking about how each of its songs makes me feel, but I just want to briefly focus on this one:

There is something both very cheerily fun and deeply heartwarming about this song. A part of me is actually pleased by, rather than critical of, the album's habit of relying on the Jersey club sound to initially build hype, not only because it fucking works, but because it sets the tone for 'Nidone', only to immediately become something else entirely. Without losing tempo or intensity, it becomes this very earnest track about seeking to get away from a tragic, mundane world into the realm of one's dreams.

The entire album feels like that to me, which may be exacerbated by the fact that I don't actually speak Japanese: songs that carry a force with them that comes to collide with its actual lyrical content in neat, inviting, intriguing ways. LEGION is definitely an album you should listen to, even if you're throwing it on idly in the background so it can build up hype for you while you're working.

Other quick things you should be listening to:

This January, Seabath finally dropped their EP, Songs for Rainy Season! Here's a reminder that 'Gilloteen' is a certified banger.

Ever since hearing it at last year's Kōhaku Uta Gassen, I have been fixated on one of Vaundy's latest singles, 'odoriko'.

I learned several weeks too late that there is a cast recording of the West End production of Hadestown, which includes the inimitable Melanie La Barrie as Hermes, so I had to replace the Broadway recording's reprise of 'Wait For Me' with this rendition almost immediately. Listen and you may be able to intuit why.

What's On TV?

The Files of Young Kindaichi

Randomly discovering AARO: All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office on Netflix, a part of my media diet has been slowly increasing in Japanese mystery dramas. This hunger has led me to discovering the latest series of The Files of Young Kindaichi on Disney+, and I have a lot of feelings.

I cannot comment heavily on the culture of Japanese mystery literature, obviously, but the little I can learn about Young Kindaichi is so interesting because it, like so much Japanese television, is an adaptation. What I mean is not merely an adaptation of a manga, although it is (of a series by Fumiya Sato and Seimari Amagi that is so long-running that, as of this year, the protagonist is older than I am), but that the very character of Hajime Kindaichi is an original creation, the imagined grandson of legendary private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, whose novels by Seishi Yokomizo number more than seventy between 1947 and 1980. Now, to be sure, as far as I can see, that makes Kosuke the protagonist of the largest catalogue of novel-only gentleman-detective mysteries of any canon--just above Simenon's appearances of Jules Maigret, far more than any single of Christie's most noteworthy sleuths, even more than some modern writers' roster of cop-thrillers. And Japanese media doesn't necessarily forget that, having adapted a large portion of Yokomizo's work to films and limited television series as a result.

But what is so intriguing to me about these details is that there is so much Hajime Kindaichi content--arguably as much of or more than that of his legendary grandfather--that I'd argue the young Kindaichi has become the more well-established, or more well-read, of the two. The only possible parallel I can imagine is if the West spent so much time adapting Enola Holmes that present-day teenagers didn't even really know who Sherlock was. The only reason this strikes me as hilarious and therefore noteworthy is mostly a branding one: Sato & Amagi (and previous collaborator Yōzaburō Kanari) essentially struck gold by being responsible for their own character for so long that they get to define the future of Yokomizo's world, where Western audiences would rather ask the (still meaningful) question of what their public domain interests would say or do if wholly transplanted in our present. Hajime Kindaichi isn't so much 'what if Kosuke were a kid' as he is a kid as smart as Kosuke, wholly unlike how we ask questions about Holmes or Poirot, so unlike it that Rian Johnson had to make Benoit Blanc in the image of Poirot and Columbo just to maintain the integrity of that temporal comparison.

But that's enough backstory: this iteration of Young Kindaichi on television, the fifth series so far and starring Shunsuke Michieda as the titular Hajime, is just a lot of wild fun. The series cares very deeply about certain things as a natural result of being related to Yokomizo's work, namely the locked-door mystery as a puzzle-space, and myths and superstitions as the language humans use to excuse that which seems immediately impossible, which deeply intrigues me. Still telling those stories in the present decade implies that even when we think we are sufficiently 'in the future' enough to not give way to ignorance or fear, the moment someone doesn't know how a tragedy occurred, we are prone to give in to those same fears instead of asking what lengths evil people will go to pull off the perfect crime.

This is even more interesting in the shadow of another recurring element of Young Kindaichi's mysteries: that moment, after the hero's reveal of how they pulled it off, when the bad guy confesses that they were motivated by fear or revenge or sorrow to kill someone who is often just as cruel or crueler than they were. That particular narrative sense feels like it is saying something about the capacities of truly evil people--after all, Kindaichi is never catching the person blackmailing a struggling spouse about how he got his partner's life-saving surgery, or the medical scam that several doctors framed on an unsuspecting nurse. It feels like the interesting merging point of two unfortunately contradictory ideals: that all wrongdoing must meet justice, and that sometimes otherwise good people are pushed to their breaking point when they see those who get away with it continue to prosper in the face of their loss.

But also, it's just fun to see kids be smart, ain't it? What's really engaging about Michieda as Hajime is that he is truly the world's most aloof boy: so disconnected from the stakes that he will often enter crime scenes alone at night, so unmoved by the ordinary lives of his peers that he doesn't consider it strange at all that one of his best friends is a police detective. Hajime truly doesn't care about anything other than a good mystery--save for his best friend Miyuki (played astoundingly with both joyful curiosity and earnest teenage frustration by Moka Kameshiraishi), made even more comical by the fact that his feelings for her are simultaneously shockingly earnest and so deeply oblivious to even himself that he doesn't know when other people are watching him be bound to her. Which... isn't perfect, but hey, there is something to that trope of the boy who is only not an idiot in the worst possible time that just hooks deep into my brain and doesn't let go.

So yeah--if you're into ten-minute-long Summation scenes where the hero patiently walks through every puzzle of the episode, kids in high school uniforms being smarter than adults, and boys who can't pass their midterms suddenly locking the fuck in when a murder is involved, you should watch The Files of Young Kindaichi.

All episodes of this series are on Disney+ (but apparently not in the US. Take that, Northerners! But seriously, I am not mocking you and you should watch the thing if you have a VPN).

Watson

I am not always in the mood for a medical drama. In fact, it either takes a well-known face doing remarkably well as a doctor or something incredibly emotionally moving for me to keep going: Oliver Platt as Dr. Daniel Charles, and his seeming magical prescience for deeper underlying psychological issues in his patients, keeps drawing me to randomly rewatch clips of Chicago Med, and even though I was a wee infant when E.R. came out, something about Noah Wyle returning to his medical drama roots as a very burnt-out but very inspired doctor in the apparently very busy and intensely overwhelming action of The Pitt is intriguing enough to draw me to binge it soon.

But otherwise, I have never cared much for the genre. Medical procedurals are complicated puzzles to put on television because there is evidence I cannot put into context. You can hit me with all of the detailed medical jargon you can find, but it doesn't always actually help me gain any context because I am not a doctor; it's like watching a murder mystery only to learn I've never even heard of how a weapon like this can even kill people. It takes a lot of care for me to be invested in essentially learning what the risks of a certain medical anomaly may even be. I haven't even cared for House, M.D.—I get the draw, but just having a complicated puzzle doesn't necessarily draw me to any kind of character, even if I believe they definitely know more about this than I would.

But I am immediately all in on Watson.

Watson is an adaptation of the very best sidekick from Arthur Conan Doyle's canon of Sherlock Holmes stories, with Craig Sweeny as showrunner. Sweeny's addition already intrigues me, not only because he was a producer and writer on the 2012 series Elementary—also a CBS drama adapting Holmes—but also because of his work as executive producer and writer on the comedy mystery drama Limitless, which for my money is the best version of that flavour of 'savant hero' mystery series that Holmes' character has bred on television: one that does not take itself too seriously. (No, really, there's an entire episode of Limitless about hacking where the protagonist admits that the audience doesn't actually give a damn how hacking is really done, so we don't have to pretend to use the jargon.) I want to believe that Sweeny and his writers' room have the same concerns that Robert Doherty's did on Elementary—asking interesting questions about the canon in the modern day, exploring intriguing hidden corners of Holmes and Watson's relationship to each other, and reminding us that the core of the Doyle stories wasn't mysteries so bafflingly inconceivable that they work on Rube Goldberg logic, but otherwise very understandable conflicts that reveal themselves to be perfectly within our range of solution if we discard our easy assumptions and work to make real conclusions, however improbable.

Watson is set in the present day, after the events of 'The Final Problem'—the last thing we see is the good doctor himself, played by Morris Chestnut (!!!), going over the Reichenbach Falls to save his friend, only to take a nasty blow to the head in the rapids and lose consciousness. After waking in the hospital some days later, Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster) lets him know that Holmes was apparently loaded, and in his will left Watson enough startup capital to get his own private practice. Smash cut to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania one year later, where Watson runs his own clinic where he consults on complicated medical cases with his own team of specialists, treating each new patient as if they are not merely an ill person, but the victim of a mystery only doctor-detectives can solve.

It's... fun. Again, I think the show is obviously setting up some interesting process-questions. What does it say about the act of medicine, or about his past relationship with Holmes, that Watson now sees himself as a detective with medical skills first, and not a doctor with a detective hobby? What does it say about Watson's relationship with Mary Morstan (Rochelle Aytes--!!!) that the show establishes they were trying to make it work before he ran away to follow Holmes? What kinds of medical afflictions will actually count as 'mysteries', and what does that offer as a narrative perspective on the practice? Then, there's the obvious racial beat that was a well-played element in Elementary as well—the fact that Watson is Black here doesn't change anything about how the man is written as a doctor, as a companion to the world's greatest consulting detective, or as an estranged ex-husband, but it obviously implies a great deal of very strong and inviting things about his relationship to Holmes and the comfort level of his work before this point.

And then a thing happens. Without spoiling too much, suffice it to say that one of those big things you expect to happen in a Holmes adaptation happens at the end of the very first episode, and the reveal itself and what it sets up for future episodes is indeed asking so many questions and implying so many juicy answers. It immediately opens the door for this medical drama to still become a thriller, and what's most fun about it is that the audience knows this, but Watson doesn't.

So I'm eager to see where this goes next. I am cautiously optimistic that it will continue to be interesting and challenging while not pushing all of my medical-drama buttons. Maybe it'll be up your alley as well.

Watson airs on Sunday nights at 9pm Eastern on CBS.

The Leaves

So that’s all for today.

A reminder that you can help keep this newsletter and the rest of my work afloat by supporting me on Patreon, buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or sending a donation via PayPal, or by buying one of my small game projects over on Itch!

I almost forgot to mention: I've gotten a bit of good press these past few weeks that is worth mentioning, including:

• a piece in the digital magazine Loop News TT about my work and being named Seattle Worldcon's Poet Laureate; and
• an interview in the latest episode of SH@25, hosted by friend of the newsletter Kat Kourbeti (whose own newsletter you should absolutely check out, by the way).

And don't forget to check out the Con-Verse feature on the Seattle Worldcon blog! If you have a membership for this year's convention, make sure to nominate for the Hugo Awards--including for the Best Speculative Poem category!

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the tea!