Convention Wrap-Up and In Surreal Life

It's hard to believe it's only been a week since the Flights of Foundry convention - it feels simultaneously like it was forever ago and just yesterday. It was a marvelous convention, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a more literary-focused convention that's both international and online.

One of the biggest discoveries for me was the world of speculative poetry. The last few months, my writing has tended toward poetry, at least in part, and I have no idea why. If you had told me even five years ago that I would be regularly writing poetry, I would have thought you were nuts. High school and the need to analyze the bejeesus out of every word of every poem pretty well ruined any appreciation for poetry that I had for a long time, and it wasn't until I started realizing how much poetry is meant to be performed (thanks, Shakespeare, for a big part of that realization) that I started letting myself be interested again.

Speculative poetry is a space I hadn't really explored before, so when I saw that Flights of Foundry had a challenge to write a poem for each day of the convention, I figured I would give it a shot. I also managed to get into an intro to speculative poetry workshop run by Dawn Vogel, and a couple of co-working and open mic sessions (basically, everything on the poetry track of the convention). It was wonderful! Combining the speculative aspects of my fiction (sci fi, fantasy, etc.) with the lyrical language of poetry was a lot of fun and something I look forward to exploring further. Here's an example of what I came up with (be kind, it's a very first draft):

Light travels at speed, vanishing as quickly as it appears.
In a blink, the mystery of the dark drops away.
The unknown becomes known.

The flash reveals multitudes no one reckoned could exist.
What man thought was empty space was neither.
The abyss is strikingly full.

Millions of eyes (or eye-like structures) turn to the source of the light.
They had also assumed they were alone in the dark.
The sky now knows the others exist.

Since October 1st, I've been taking part in In Surreal Life, a poetry workshop/fellowship that has me working on a new poem every day, with a small group that I'm meeting with to go over critiques of a specific poem once a week. It is stretching my brain and my soul in ways I was NOT expecting, and putting me in a different kind of poetry community than I would have found on my own. I have no idea how I even found it, to be honest, but when I read up on the program and saw that there were scholarship spots available, I figured, "why not? Worst that can happen is I get rejected." Somehow, I got accepted! The mind, she boggles.

The community is wonderful, and I'm definitely learning a lot. I still hesitate to call myself a poet, but I've definitely written more poetry than prose over the last week and change, so there may be something to that. It isn't easy, and it's bringing up a lot of feelings that had been comfortably tucked away, so that's something to deal with. Still, I'm glad I'm doing it. (We'll see if I'm still saying that at the end of the month.)

In conclusion, the convention was wonderful, my presentation went over well, and I've finding a lot to love in poetry. Here, have a cat!