Late in the Day (5 page)

A good many poems in this book are in free verse, a good many are in free form. The free-form poems include:

Kinship, The Canada Lynx, Contemplation, Hymn to Time, Geology of the Northwest Coast, Element 80, Hermes Betrayed, The Games, To Her Task-Master, Definition, Dead Languages, California Landscape, Seasonal Lines, October, Sea Hallowe'en, Crossing the Cascades.

Two poems are transitional:

Writing Twilight begins as free verse, then deliberately changes into a more rhythmic, rhymed, but still irregular pattern.

The Old Mad Queen: The first poem is in free verse with an increasing tendency to end-rhyme. The Queen Despairs is free verse, but grouped in triads. The Queen's Ballad is in traditional ballad meter and rhyme.

These poems are in a more or less conventional pattern or a classic form:

The Small Indian Pestle: iambic pentameter

Constellating: iambic quatrains, rhymes abab baba

Whiteness: quatrains of rhymed couplets

Arion: “rima dissoluta” in quatrains (full and slant rhymes abcd, abcd, abcd)

This unusual rhyme pattern—end-rhymes repeated from stanza to stanza—can be extended to any length of stanza, so that the rhymes may be very far apart. I usually use it in quatrains, where the echoes are audible but not insistent. I have found it a most intriguing and suggestive form.

Messages: iambic pentameter in alternate rhyme.

The Dream Stone: Petrarchan sonnet

The section “Four Lines” is all separate quatrains, unrhymed or variously rhymed.

I'm stymied by haiku or tanka, but have found the quatrain amazingly roomy, versatile, and satisfying. For me, the master of its endless subtleties is A.E. Housman.

The Games: iambic, rhymed abba, cddc

New Year's Day: curtal sonnet

Between: tetrameter, rhymed distichs

The Old Music: Goethe's poem haunted me till I could work out this imitation of its pattern in English. It's not a translation.

Disremembering: iambic quatrains in alternate rhyme

The Pursuit: ballad meter and rhyme

2014: ballad meter and rhyme

Sorrowsong: trochaic trimeter, quatrains in alternate rhyme.

Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,

November 2014

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who've been excluded from literature for so long—my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just
saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this—letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I've had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn't profit. Its name is freedom.

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The Wild Girls

Ursula K. Le Guin

ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8

112 pages

Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since
The Left Hand of Darkness
, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism, and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.

Her Nebula winner
The Wild Girls
, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.

Plus: Le Guin's scandalous and scorching
Harper's
essay, “Staying Awake While We Read,” (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America's best-known SF author. And delivers.

“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin's characters have a long afterlife.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”

—
The Library Journal

“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”

—
The San Francisco Chronicle

“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”

—
Time

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer

ISBN: 978-1-62963-035-9

352 pages

Sisters of the Revolution
gathers a highly curated selection of feminist speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more) chosen by one of the most respected editorial teams in speculative literature today, the award-winning Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas.