Hello, fellow travelers!

Nominations for the Hugo Awards are finally open! Surely that means you’ve been going through the things you’ve read in the past year and whittling them down to the most arresting work you’ve enjoyed—so let today’s Con-Verse serve as yet another reminder to not forget to consider poetry for the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem as well!

As we continue to equip you to engage with speculative poetry, we’ve recently been talking about some of the ways one can start discovering and interacting with the speculative heart of these poems. Let’s keep going by using another question-metric one can apply while reading: What is the poem speculating about?

Something we apply often when reading science fiction and fantasy prose is the question of what this imagined world or an element of its worldbuilding is meant to ask or suggest about the real world. The speculative in speculative fiction, after all, implies that the work is trying to ponder or argue something about our real world using elements that are novel to an imagined reality.

So, sometimes identifying a speculative poem is as easy as asking, “What is this poem trying to ask—or answer—about the things that I know are real?” As a genre tool, it shows up more often in subgenres of poetry that are inherently playing with time; time-travel or alt-historical poems are good speculative spaces because they allow the poet to ask new questions or draw conclusions about what the world would look like after a different set of past experiences, but they are not the only places we can so speculate in verse.

A good first base for what it looks like when this tool is applied is by looking at Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” On its face, it may seem like a bit of a stretch—Shelley is invoking the past power of a real historical figure, and even as an exaggerated image, it isn’t impossible for just the setting and its objects to potentially exist. But how the persona frames it is meant to prime the reader for assuming something just a bit out of the realm of our present reality:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…

Even without necessarily needing to assess the poem’s symbolic intensity, there are some questions those lines are immediately provoking. Who—and where, or even when—is the persona? Who is this “traveler,” and where in fact are they from? What are the circumstances under which this conversation and this discovery would even take place? Even if this poem is happening in our real world, it does imply some radically startling relationship to that world that draws your attention. That priming heightens your reaction to the poem’s otherwise accessible themes of the ephemerality of legacy and the hubris of those with power. It speculates about witnessing the ruins of a past superpower—a real one, just a bit heightened by imagery—and therefore the naivety of our present leaders and the inevitable fall of even our own future society.

What this also shows is that a poem doesn’t necessarily have to speculate by asking a “what-if” question about the past or future—sometimes the themes are just the same now as they ever have been. Shivanee Ramlochan’s “A Letter from the Leader of the Android Rebellion, to the Last Plantation Owner of the Federated Caribbean Bloc” in the Caribbean speculative fiction anthology Reclaim Restore Return uses the imagery of a robot uprising—already an available language for discussions of the body, autonomy, and labor since the 1920s—placed specifically against the backdrop of both past Caribbean indentured servitude and the imagined future of a version of the same Caribbean where such inhumane structures would persist, or be revived, long enough for the robots to take over. It speculates twice—once about the real past through its imagery, and again about the future through recollecting that past—asking questions about labor, agitation, and our connection to our histories.

One of my favourite acts of speculation in a poem is in Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere,” a capstone poem in their collection Don’t Call Us Dead. The poem’s persona imagines a future place—either a Heaven in the wake of, or, in my preferred reading, a living space transcending far beyond the tragedy of gun violence and police brutality that Black boys find themselves in a world where it is now impossible for death to visit them. So much of its language even dares to imagine a world where, even if some of the symbols of mourning linger, the concept of being in danger of losing a life may even be too novel to name:

no need for geography
now, we safe everywhere.

point to whatever you please
& call it church, home, or sweet love.

paradise is a world where everything
is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.

Even if a poem’s speculative question is a radically intense one like this, it becomes all manner of more pointed real-world speculations in the reading: Why should we have to imagine such a world, especially in mourning, when we can and should instead live in a safer world here? Those layers of questions—from the esoteric or the futuristic down to our present reality—shine bright in poems like these because the act of reading them is also the act of asking or answering them and hoping those questions or answers linger when you put the poem down.

As you’re still flexing your speculative poetry reading muscles, consider digging into some other classic or contemporary poetry outside the realm of the overtly speculative and see if you can discover the speculations they’re making in their work. You’d be amazed at what you may see—turns out poets are imagining a new world all the time!

And, of course, I hope this serves as another useful tool for reading your way into discovering nominations for the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem that will be awarded alongside the other rockets at this year’s Worldcon in Seattle! Maybe something will stick with you because it’s been asking the questions you’ve always been asking—or it may even have the answer!

Until next time, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!

Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and tabletop game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions and the 2020 Ignyte Award for best in speculative poetry, and has been published in many genre magazines and collections. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, available from Interstellar Flight Press, is the winner of the 2022 Elgin Award. He is the poet laureate for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and the first poet laureate of any Worldcon.

https://seattlein2025.org/2025/02/17/con-verse-the-art-of-speculating-in-verse/