poetry

Today’s Greatest Science Fiction Short Story Is A Poem

The poem “Sci-Fi Violence” by Josh Bell (No Planets Strike) manages to tell a complete story of alien attacks and the trauma suffered by a survivor, with just a few well-chosen images here and there. It’s totally intense, and it’s well worth the five or six minutes it’ll take to read. Here’s how it begins:…

This Math Equation Is Also A Limerick

This week’s Sunday Puzzle looks like a mathematical equation. Well, it is a mathematical equation. But hidden in that equation is a poem. Can you recite it back to us? We’re traveling again this week, so we’re going with something a little more straightforward than usual. I say “straightforward,” but I’ve seen this equation stump…

How Many Scifi References Can You Catch At The Nerd Poetry Slam?

On January 15, the Vancouver Poetry House Society held its annual Nerd Poetry Slam. Matt Loeb’s came in fifth, but I really feel like “Sci Lingo We Ride” deserves a ton of accolades. The references fly thick and fast in this poem. Not give away all of them, but cheering erupted on my end when…

If You Don’t Understand Why People Love Erotic Fanfic, Watch This Now

In her slam poem Fantastic Breasts and Where To Find Them, Brenna Twohy quickly gets to the heart of why so many people love their erotica attached to familiar fictional characters while powerfully critiquing certain types of mainstream pornography. The video is NSFW and may be triggering for its images of sexual coercion. Twohy’s message…

A Latin Poem So Filthy, It Wasn’t Translated Until The 20th Century

Any student of Latin lyric poetry will tell you that Catullus’ poems get pretty raunchy, obsessed with genitalia, semen, and sex in general. But one of his poems is so vulgar that an uncensored modern English translation wasn’t published until the 20th century. The text below includes a translation of the poem which is NSFW…

We Can’t Stop Grinning At This Animation About A Delusional Stegosaurus

The rhyming animated short Wayne the Stegosaurus feels like a children’s book come to life. This pea-brained dinosaur may be stupid, but he also leads an incredibly charming life. Aran Quinn and Jeffrey Dates adapted Kenn Nesbitt’s silly Stegosaurus poem and the results are delightful. Dates translated Quinn’s illustrations into 3D, creating a 3D animated…

Check Out These Fantastic Examples of Sign Language Poetry

This short video shows us three different American Sign Language poems – two of which are less than a minute long. They give us an idea of poetry that is entirely out of most mainstream experience, and surprisingly understandable. We read science fiction and fantasy fiction to explore different realms of experience, but different realms…

Read The Dirty And Scientific Limericks That Isaac Asimov Wrote

When he wasn’t writing science fiction, writer Isaac Asimov was composing his Lecherous Limericks, dirty little ditties he wrote for his own amusement. So what does Asimov’s bawdy poetry sound like? In the foreword to his first Lecherous Limericks volume, Asimov explains that he wrote his first limerick in 1974 while aboard the Queen Elizabeth…

Is This Smiley Face From 1648 The Very First Emoticon?

Depending on who you’re talking to, emoticons have been adding drama to our typefaces since 1982, possibly even as early as the late 1960s. But was the emoticon actually invented 300 years earlier by an English poet? Over at The Atlantic Tech, they highlight Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem “To Fortune”, which Levi Stahl argues on…

Poetry-into-Sound

Another track from the same poetry-into-sound series that yielded Saturday’s Downstream entry (Vernal Drone” by Larry Johnson): Mike J Dayton’s “The Crumbling Ice Temple” takes as its subject a haiku, part of the Naviar Haiku Project. The poem is by Kristjaan Panneman. Dayton’s rendering is all gentle clatter and echoing resonance. Deep Silence In this…

JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf is finally going to be published

One of the major influences on The Hobbit was the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which was the subject of many of J.R.R. Tolkien’s lectures. Now, 90 years after Tolkien translated the poem, his version of Beowulf is finally coming to print. Tolkien’s estate has announced that HarperCollins will release Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, edited…

Can you tell the difference between poetry written by a human and poetry generated by a computer? Bot or Not is a Turing test for poetry; take the quiz to see if you can guess the provenance of each poem. It turns out that some of those bots aren’t half-bad poets. [via Nerdcore]

The final Iain Banks book will be published next February

Sadly, it’s not a novel — but it’s still pretty exciting to have one last glimpse inside the mind of the legendary author. A collection of Banks’ poetry, co-written by The Night Sessions author Ken MacLeod and edited by MacLeod, will be published on Feb. 16, 2015, which would have been Banks’ 61st birthday. Talking…

The Sciences Sing a Lullaby

Via It’s Okay to Be Smart comes this lovely trio of scientific stanzas by American poet Albert Goldbarth. (Who says science and art can’t get along?) https://gizmodo.com/the-makers-of-the-sagan-series-bring-you-the-feynman-se-5845923 https://gizmodo.com/these-science-poems-are-just-the-best-1488415900

These science poems are just the best

These science poems, courtesy of our very own io9 commenters, are just the thing for a holiday evening. Gather round the fireside and enjoy! https://gizmodo.com/scientific-discoveries-are-way-more-fun-when-they-rhyme-1488226585 The earth around the sun doth go and causeth Galileo woe. Eppur si muove, no epicycles needed. Even the church eventually heeded. – started by Father Anonymous (1st couplet) and…

Texts from William Blake is our new favorite thing

William Blake was regarded as insane by his contemporaries, due in no small part to the same “cryptic flights of poetic fire” and “marvellous, ineffable pictures” that would later see him labeled a genius. But brilliant though he was*, it’s hard to read “Texts from William Blake” and not sympathize with those Romantic-era peers who…

Profound and hilarious poetry written by arranging book spines

Nina Katchadourian borrows the words she uses for her unusual poetry from the spines of books. She arranges those spines, book upon book, so that they form brief poems that are often insightful and surprising. Katchadourian’s Sorted Book Project manages to become more than an experiment in medium. Her playful photographed poems are sometimes cleverly…

An incredible book of poetry about DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes

Is this your first visit to the 30th century? Those of you from a millennium past may experience disorientation. Know that we have addressed our epoch to utopia. Know that we looked to you when we designed the answer to the question of our future, a fiction. —”Welcome Visitors,” Raymond McDaniel (Special Powers and Abilities…

10 Ways John Milton’s Paradise Lost Is Like a Bad Comic Book

Yes, it’s a great achievement of English literature. Yes, it’s a deep work of spiritual belief and should be given due consideration. And yet, for some reason, Paradise Lost stumbles over the same things that bad comic books do. We’re going to look at ten mistakes that serial-fiction writers make — even the famous seventeenth…

The father of modern computing was also a poetry critic

Charles Babbage was known as the guy who invented the difference engine and was one of the founders of modern computing. His passion for nerdery didn’t just come out in design and technology. He also wrote to Tennyson with the best poetry critique ever. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of the most well-known poets of…