Please Sir, May We Have a Speculative Poetry Hugo? Again?

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Poet Andrew Joron said in 1988 that “Poetry is in some ways the most dangerous territory for SF to colonize…" (Synergy: New Science Fiction, Vol. 2). 38 years later, as we face yet another vote to enshrine poetry in its rightful place in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror (SFFH) cosmos with a permanent poetry Hugo award, I think Joron’s statement stands today.

Speculative poetry is dangerous because it challenges the SFFH status quo. Of all the potential changes to the SFFH community (yes, even AI), expanding its reach to acknowledge poetry is at the forefront of expanding its historically rigid mindset.

A Hugo for Poetry

I have been part of a group of poets (SPI: The Speculative Poetry Initiative) for the last several years, working to establish a permanent Hugo Award for speculative poetry. For me, the desire to see this happen was about equality. Early in my writing career, I became aware that writers of shorter works—poetry and flash fiction specifically—were often unrecognized. For a long time, if you wrote either, you could not qualify for membership in major SFFH spaces (SFWA: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and Codex, the popular and word-of-mouth online space for new writers, are two that come to mind). There was very little major recognition for poetry as a subgenre of SFFH.

Speculative poetry has long been a fixture of SFFH’s major mode of reaching readers—printed and online magazines. Poems by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Jane Yolen, Charles de Lint, and many more well-established SFFH writers. Poetry was often used as “space filler” in early magazines, but slowly gained a following and is now a part of many award-winning magazines like Uncanny Magazine and Strange Horizons. (A full list of sponsoring magazines is available on the SPI website.)

As Gary Westfahl stated in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2005: “Few readers complain about these poems, and many readers manifestly appreciate them. It may be, then, that poetry is destined to endure as an occasional and pleasurable respite in an everyday diet of prose; and since science fiction and fantasy may contain more instances of poetry than other fields of literature, these imaginative genres may play an important role in keeping poetry alive.”

At every turn, I found that poetry was not only a part of the SFFH from the beginning, it was the basis for science fiction and fantasy as a genre. Nearly every theme in science fiction has some basis in poetry that predates modern SFFH. Magic and Myth—see world and indigenous religious texts. Astronomy and star-travel—see John Donne’s lament in “An Anatomie of the World”: And freely men confess that this world's spent, / When in the planets and the firmament / They seek so many new; they see that this / Is crumbled out again to his atomies.” Naturalism—see Darwin (yes, he was a poet). Space Opera? I give you Aniara (1953). Sea Serpents? See “The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor” circa 2500 BCE. Vampires? They go back further than Dracula to the 1748 German poem Der Vampyr.

Not only does a poem exist in nearly every subgenre of genre, but I can also usually find you a poem that predates the prosaic form. This point shocked the SFWA Board when I raised it during a discussion of the new Nebula Award for Poetry.

And as a fiction writer, that fact might needle you. Find an idea—a poet probably wrote it first.

Despite all this, speculative poetry is often dismissed or ignored in the SFFH field. That is, until now. We are arguably in a speculative poetry renaissance. In 2025, we saw the creation of not just one but two new major poetry awards: The Hugo and the Nebula for Best Poem.

Worldwide, since the beginning of the good-old WWW, Google searches for “speculative poetry” have spiked in 2026: (I wouldn’t say this is a great metric, but it is kind of fun to consider.)

As part of my role in advocating for a speculative poetry Hugo, I’ve done quite a bit of research about the history of poetry and the Hugos. (See the crowd-sourced document “Hugos Speculative Poetry Award Report”). I found that speculative poetry panels first appeared at Worldcons in 1978. This isn’t surprising because 1978 was a banner year for speculative poetry. It was the year that the SFPA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association) was founded. In the years to come, writers would grapple with a new genre: sometimes called “science fiction poetry,” “fantastical poetry,” “surrealist poetry,” “thought poetry,” or “weird poetry”.

Early discussions about speculative poetry were often concerned with how vastly different poetry was from prose. They saw science fiction as a genre that was entirely technical or “hard”—none of that lyrical softness which is very common in today’s science fiction had yet seeped into the genre.

In the aforementioned article by Andrew Joron, he points out that poetry and fiction are fundamentally different: “…it is very difficult to join the two forms [SF and Poetry] and not have one of them cancel the other one out. One operates by means of a fictional plot, and the other, by means of a musical language and imagery. One cannot be simply reduced to the other.”

Joron also notes that form is often a source of controversy. At the time, he lamented that most speculative poetry followed outdated poetic forms. In short, it rhymed. This “rhyming or nonrhyming” free verse vs. traditional form is an age-old poetic argument in larger poetry circles, too. Of course, today’s speculative poetry has for the most part kept up with the contemporary poetic cycle: some of it rhymes, most of it doesn’t, and readers pick what they like between the two binaries.

What I find interesting about Joron’s essay is the nascent leaps he makes about how speculative poetry can defy the colonization of literature. “Why doesn’t poetry rhyme anymore? and Why does it so often not seem to make any sense? we would have to look back at the concrete historical forces, things like technology and economic structure, that help to condition the way people think and write about the world they live in.”

I’ve written some in the past about how I think poetry in general is often dismissed because it is often written by women, but I want to explain why speculative poetry specifically is so important to recognize for what I see it doing in terms of the social conditioning that Joron predicted.

Testimony and Witness through the Speculative Lens: Why Speculative Poetry Is So Dangerous

There is a larger interest in the poetry community in using poetry as a form of decolonization. (Webster: to free a people or area from colonial status;/to free from the dominating influence of a colonizing power.) This movement spans global cultures—from the reclamation of the Latin American “testimonio” form, which testifies to collective experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and class to womanist/black feminist explorations of the privilege of affirmative poetry to South Asian separation of poetic voice and identity as postcolonial.

This new school of decolonizing and postcolonial experimentation—which relies on deconstructing traditional forms—is at the heart of most of today’s popular speculative poetry. Again and again, I see today’s speculative poets deconstructing ideas of race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and class. As the editor of Interstellar Flight Press, the intersection of these ideas is central to every speculative poetry book we publish.

Juan Manuel Pérez’s Bury My Heart Under the Martian Sky re-examines the haiku through the lens of Mexican Indigenous language and themes. Listen—a Poetic Creature by Griffin Rockwell reinvents the cento by reclaiming found SFFH texts on gender and monstrosity. Maxwell I. Gold’s anOther Mythology places queerness at the center of new myths in the form of the weird prose poem.

This deconstruction is evident in the poems nominated for the 2026 Hugo. Mari Ness’ “Care for Lightning” flips the gender script on Greek myth (with a bit of body stuff in there too), Elis Montgomery’s “Hex Supply Customer Log” is a found form rhyming poem that reinvisions the witch trope, Brandon O’Brien’s opening ceremonies poem from Seattle Worldcon 2025 “Seattle: Landing” is speculative memoir in poetic form, and Angela Liu’s “The Mourning Robot” deals with robots facing invaders.

I know, it’s not like speculative poets invented this experimental deconstruction. Throw a rock, and you’ll find a speculative fiction story or book that’s doing something similar. But you won’t find as many examples as exist in speculative poetry. There’s something inherently dangerous about the speculative poet’s approach—it both destroys the form the reader is most familiar with and destroys the social pillars that hold up what society deems as norm.

Today, you can read a speculative poem and know nothing about form. But you can also learn about form through this deconstruction. Poetry is always at the past-front and fore-front of groundbreaking. It’s what has come before and what has not yet been discovered. Poetry can simply break the rules in ways fiction can’t.

That’s what makes it so dangerous.

Please Help! We’re Stuck in a Vortex of Ratification!

Let me be clear: The point I’m trying to make here is not to scare you. I want you to want to read speculative poetry. I want you to fall in love with it.

It’s been fascinating watching people react to a poetry Hugo in the last year. The poets have been over the moon. It was heartwarming to meet so many poets at Seattle’s Worldcon, many who said they attended just for poetry. Those who don’t read poetry have fallen all along the spectrum from “I am ashamed to admit I don’t read poetry or know how to read it” to “Umm, I used to write poetry and then I switched to fiction”. Or, a a little more disconcerting: “I read SFFH widely but haven’t discovered speculative poetry yet” (It’s right there! In the same mags you’ve been reading from!)

All reactions please me. Because it means more people are reading speculative poetry and enjoying it in all its variations. We’re in a moment in this world where we need more poetry. When I’m staring down the barrel of dystopia—I write a poem.

So this is where I do my little song and dance and ask: Won’t you please consider voting for a poetry Hugo in 2026? All the info you need is on the Speculative Poetry Initiative website: poetryhugo.com. As of right now, the poetry Hugo Award is up for ratification on July 26. If you’re a Worldcon member, please consider adding your voice to the discussion and voting for a permanent Hugo Award.

And now for a word from my gracious sponsoring overlords:

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