Free Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions by Hal Duncan

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I think that we should flay the shite,
Write sonnets in his blood
And then make drums out of his hide,
Sing as we drag his body through the mud.
     
    This does not have fourteen lines and a volta. It is, however, a poem. It’s not terribly poetic in places, I grant you. Indeed that second verse is deliberately designed to parody a type of not-terribly-poetic poetry, to simulate the sort of poem that makes some of us (on days when we’re feeling particularly snarky) mutter darkly, “That’s not a bloody poem; it’s just prose chopped up into bits.”
    I include this as illustration of a somewhat reactionary attitude I’m not m yself immune to. More extreme and committed reactionaries will often express a similar sentiment in regard to works presented as being of a certain idiom but which, to put it bluntly, fuck with the conventions of said idiom, whether it be poetic or prosaic: that’s not a poem because it doesn’t rhyme; that’s not a story because it doesn’t have a proper plot; that’s not SF because…well, because it doesn’t satisfy some non-negotiable criterion.
    Of course, the fact that I present that poem as a poem means that I’m tacitly accepting that the form of poetry it criticises is nonetheless poetry, that you can indeed chop up prose into bits, lay it out in lines and call it a poem. I just think the result is shite. I like my poetry to have the sort of formal structures of the sonnet. I reckon a sonnet does have to follow the rules. But I also want to fuck with those rules, to add extra voltas, or breach the tightly strictured rhyme scheme, to do something extra twisty .
    Yes, I’m conflicted.
    What I’m trying to illustrate here is the difference (and conflict) between a strictured generic form such as the sonnet, where the conventions of the template have been negotiated to the point they’re now non-negotiable criteria, and an aesthetic idiom such as the poem, where some readers may well bristle at the absence of characteristics that are expected as part of a local tradition, but will do so wrongly, the idiom itself opened in definition such that what we’re really dealing with is a fundamental mode of the medium. The question I’m leading to is this: is SF really comparable to the sonnet, or is it better seen as analogue of the poem?
    It’s no doubt obvious that my stance as regards strange fiction leans toward the latter, to put it mildly. My stance is perhaps, however, not the prevailing one. Well, if you i nsist your science fiction is a sonnet…
     

The Spirit of ’76
     
    In the SF Café there are a fair few arguments over the music on the jukebox. There are those who hate punk rock (because they are idiots) and those who love it (because they are not idiots); even among the latter there’s a disagre ement not unlike those arguments over the roots of this thing we call science fiction . To wit: there’s no doubt that both The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were heavily influential to punk rock, but does this mean we should class them both as punk bands?
    Put it this way:
    With The Velvet Underground, we have the far more complex sound of art rock and an attitude more that of the bohemian auteur than the suburban anarchist. Associating this band with the genre of punk at any deeper level than that of influence seems a pretty spurious claim. But The Stooges are a different matter. While they’re more generally considered a garage band, and a seminal one at that, the distinction between early ’70s garage and mid ’70s punk is largely a matter of labelling. Somewhere between The Sonics (Chuck Berry on strychnine) and The Ramones (The Beach Boys on speed), garage rock seamlessly morphs into punk. The Clash song “Garageland” makes that lineage explicit, in fact, acknowledges the origins of punk in garage. So at what point does garage become punk?
    We could