Season 24 of the Final Thursday Reading Series starts with a roar and a blast! Iowa’s Poet Laureate, Vince Gotera, will launch his new speculative poetry collection, Dragons & Rayguns, published by Final Thursday Press. Gotera is also the author of two other FTP collections, The Coolest Month and Ghost Wars.
The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place on August 29 at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). Vince Gotera takes the stage at 7:30. The featured reading will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click HERE to register for a link.
Interview by Jim O’Loughlin
JIM O’LOUGHLIN: This is the first time I’ve interviewed you since you were named Iowa Poet Laureate. First, congratulations! Second, if wonder if this appointment has impacted your writing or the way you think about your role as a poet?
VINCE GOTERA: Thanks! My main message as Iowa Poet Laureate is that poetry can be fun. Many folks think of poetry as something hard to figure out, something that isn’t accessible, maybe like calculus or trigonometry. I’ve even had people say to me, “poetry is a lost art” ... uh, hello, I’m standing right here in front of you, not lost! Anyway, for decades, I’ve championed light poetry. I think some poets think poetry should be serious, weighty, dark even. Obviously, there’s merit to that viewpoint, but it shouldn’t be exclusive. The great poet Lucille Clifton was one of those who felt poetry can be fun, and she said so on a number of occasions. But at the same time, she wrote very serious poetry as well on, for example, race relations, feminism, and against child abuse. So poetry, in my view, can legitimately live on a spectrum from light to heavy, and it should. My poems in Dragons & Rayguns span that entire spectrum.
JO: There was a time when it would have been considered unusual (and maybe a little outrageous) to publish a collection of speculative poetry, but that’s what you are doing in Dragons & Rayguns. One of the things I love about this collection is the way you use demanding and sometimes intricate poetic forms to write about themes out of popular culture. Does that seem like an unusual juxtaposition to you, or do those high/low culture divides loom less large now?
VG: Well, this would depend on what literary circles one frequents. Those who think of poetry in elitist terms differentiate between “literary poetry” and “genre poetry,” assuming that genres like science fiction or detective fiction, etc., are less important, less accomplished, less difficult. I think such elitism is just bunk. As you suggest in your question, the divide between so-called high and low culture has been breaking down for quite a while, and it’s no longer unusual or outrageous for poets to write speculative poetry (science fiction, fantasy, horror), though, to be fair, there are some literary folks who still look down upon genre literature. I hope Dragons & Rayguns can help to alleviate that situation.
About “demanding and ... intricate poetic forms,” yes, I love to write those, for example, the terza rima haiku sonnet, which I invented in the late 1970s. This is a syllabic form, using strict 5-7-5 syllables, the traditional English haiku shape, without haiku essence per se. There are four of those 5-7-5 tercets finished off by a 7-7 syllable couplet (to add up to the 14 lines expected in a standard sonnet). At the same time, it’s a rhymed form, employing terza rima, the Italian rhyme scheme used by Dante in The Divine Comedy: tercets with interlocking rhyme: aba bcb cdc, etc. The terza rima of my sonnet form is similar to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” aba bcb cdc ded ee. Since the lines are pretty short overall, I often use slant rhyme to make the rhyming more subtle. Actually, this is true of my use of rhyme in general, รก la Emily Dickinson, Wilfred Owen, Marilyn Hacker, among other model poets.
Quite a few of my formal poems in Dragons & Rayguns are light poetry ... slapstick, even. A good example is my poem “Sestina: Dragon,” which uses dragon as the repeating end word, with some variations. In formalist circles, this approach is reminiscent of “Sestina: Bob“ by Jonah Winter (in fact, my title is intended to allude to this poem). Less well known but equally inspiring for my poem is my former student Nate Dahlhauser’s parody “My Love of the Sestina,” which uses the word sestina as its single repeating end word. In my blog, The Man with the Blue Guitar, I feature Nate’s poem, which he wrote in one of my creative writing classes. Check it out ... it’s brilliant, fun, and funny.
Speaking of my blog, you’ll find many of my formal poems there (along with free verse, of course), especially during the month of April, when I write a poem a day during National Poetry Month. Some of the poetic forms that appear in Dragons & Rayguns include abecedarians (ABC poems), hay(na)ku (123 poems), concrete poems, and many other forms, especially curtal sonnets, a short sonnet type invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, another of my model poets.
JO: You were the editor of a speculative poetry magazine, Star*Line, for a number of years. Did that editorial experience influence this collection, or does your writing and editorial work happen in separate parts of your head?
VG: I became editor of Star*Line in 2017, about a year after I ended my run as editor of the North American Review. I wanted to offer my experience of 16 years running the NAR to the field of speculative poetry and to the SFPA (the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, which sponsors Star*Line). This editorship did affect my speculative writing because of community; it was inspiring to be among so many speculative poets who care so much about the genre. (Two SFPA presidents, past and present, wrote the blurbs for Dragons & Rayguns.) To answer your question more directly, I’m not sure the editorial work affected my writing so much ... maybe the other way? My editing was affected by being a practicing speculative writer, and I was honored for a few short years to influence the ongoing development of the genre.
JO: You often write about figures from Filipino mythology, and some of that work appears in Dragons & Rayguns. What has drawn you to that subject? Were these tales that you knew growing up or have you researched them as an adult?
VG: I’ve been writing poems about Philippine life, culture, history, etc., for at least 40 years, if not longer. I wrote my first aswang poem (the aswang is a mythical Philippine monster) around 1986, when I was pursuing an MFA in Poetry Writing at Indiana University. I didn’t hear about the aswang from my parents but I’m sure I must have heard about them from my cousins. Certainly, aswang tales are very common in Philippine culture. I began to do research on the aswang when I was in grad school. I found that the mythology and folklore focused on the aswang only as monsters and I wondered about their inner lives as people, monsters though they may be. In 2016, I started writing about two aswang lovers, who pass themselves off as ordinary humans during the day but do their monster thing at night. This project turned into a novel in poems about the family life of these two people and their son. A couple of aswang poems that did not fit into the novel appear in Dragons & Rayguns. Incidentally, the aswang novel in poems is complete and I’m seeking a publisher for that book right now. There are also a couple poems in the book about Bakunawa, the Philippine sea dragon. Philippine myth tells us that there were once seven moons in the sky and Bakunawa ate six of them until people figured out how to prevent him from eating the last one, the single moon we still have, which coincidentally is a full moon—supermoon and blue moon—as I write this. Good thing Bakunawa didn’t eat this one!
JO: Is there any other question I should have asked you but didn’t? I was going to ask you about how it feels to be retired, but then I realized that that is probably only really going to kick in when classes start up again.
VG: I suppose a question might be “What other elements influenced Dragons & Rayguns?” Besides science fiction, pop culture is an important element: Doctor Who (or more particularly the Doctor Who universe), Frankenstein, Marvin the Martian, even Jimi Hendrix. Another element would be science itself, apart from science fiction. For example, I have a poem about xenobots, the first artificial creature or organism, created in a Petri dish, so to speak. There’s also a poem about ‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object detected passing through the solar system, which some experts initially suggested could be an alien spaceship. About retirement, the first of June was when I retired so it’s still pretty new, and as I write this my former colleagues at the University of Northern Iowa are probably working on their course syllabi at this moment [Ed. note: yes, at this very moment] since the first day of class is in less than a week. I’m happy not to be doing that, though I’m sure I’ll miss teaching quite a lot. I’ve been having stressful teaching dreams for a couple weeks now, like being unable to find my classroom on the first day or being in class and not knowing what the subject of the class is. I’m realizing this must have happened every August for many years, though I didn’t really notice a pattern before because I just took it all in stride. I just want to tell the dream machine in my head, “Stop! We’re not doing teaching any more!”
Thanks for this interview, Jim. And thanks for being a champion of my poetry for so long. This is the third collection of mine you’ve published and I’m very grateful.
