Friday, March 29, 2013

Amazing Stories - Interview with Bruce Boston Part 2

The second half of my interview with Bruce Boston is published today. Here's a teaser...

In the last installment I began an interview with Bruce Boston, the first Grandmaster of Science Fiction Poetry as granted by the SFPA in 1999. I introduced him and he told us a bit about his life as a successful poet. We talked about his most recent publications – Anthropomorphisms and Notes from the Shadow City (a collaboration with Gary William Crawford). If you missed the first part, you can catch up here!

Diane Severson for Amazing Stories Magazine (ASM): You have two new collections forthcoming in the next year, both from Dark Renaissance Books: Dark Roads, Selected Long Poems, 1971 – 2012, due out in a few months, and Tales of the Mutant Rain Forest, a collaborative project with Robert Frazier, due in late 2013 or early 2014.

Horror in nightDark Roads, contains, well, the title says it all. Long poems, if we take the Rhysling Award categories as our basis, are those fifty lines or longer? The poems you sent me as a preview are all well beyond fifty lines. I think they are all over a hundred lines even. Are these longer poems different from short poems in some qualitative way, or just quantitatively? Why did you decide to make these long poems when you were writing them? Or did it just happen? Why did you choose to collect them in one volume? Have they all been published in previous collections or are they scattered around the SF magazines and the Internet?

Bruce Boston (BB): Yes, I used the categories of the Rhysling Awards as the standard for defining length. I believe the shortest poem in the collection is just over fifty lines and the longest is over five hundred lines.

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To read more please go to Amazing Stories: Interview with Bruce Boston Part 2

For your listening pleasure I've also included readings of two poems, one each from his forthcoming publications. Enjoy!

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