THIS STRANGE LITERARY ARTIFACT is the bastard child of cyberspace and formal poetry. Jane Yolen and Joe Haldeman both talk to their readers and other writers via the GEnie Science Fiction Bulletin Board. Both of them are novelists who write a bit of poetry on the side—or poets who write novels because, as Willy Sutton noted, “that’s where they keep the money.”
The electronic conversation got around to “challenge” poems, where one poet gives the other one a subject and a set of constraints. Then, to be fair, the challenging poet does one herself.
It started this way:
Okay, Joe: let’s see… Interspecial marriage love poem, at least three of the following words need to be used (and one of them in an unusual way): centerfold, pouch, larder, ruby, increment, sacrament, moon, engorge. A specific time period. The poem to be in a rhymed, traditional format (sonnet, villanelle, etc.) and not more than twenty-five lines or less than eight.
Want to play?
Haldeman’s response was this:
To the marriage of two kinds
On either of our worlds our love would be obscene. But on free Ariel the hymns of marriage play in any key.
Your three breasts, the changing number of your limbs, the slippery centerfold that is the nexus of our love—my human sacraments never could apply. Your many sexes would confuse the law; our love incense the natives.
But on Ariel our marriage can have no impediments. For the space of one moon’s wax and wane, we are man and something. Let us move apace.
Let them tut, and mutter “Apples, oranges”—
I measure time by how a body changes.
Jane Yolen came back with this:
Intermarriage
As I slid down the aisle, he woke
To stretch inside my wedding pouch Like an odalisque upon a couch
Posed for the artist’s final stroke. Lardered there since birth,
My husband, child, and final meal Engorges on my blood, my weal.
He is my dowry, goods, and worth.
Who could have guessed the embryo Found in the egg beyond the stars
Would give us back a world once ours
Near lost when birthrates fell so low. The midwife by the altar now does wait
To help me bear the meal that is my mate.
Then Jane whacked Joe with another gauntlet—
If you are up for it, another poetic challenge to go along with the first. This time a human involved (somehow) in another species’ sexual activity—observer or commentator or involved in the act but not the actual other partner. Use at least two color words, one word from nature, and a set amount of time. Again the poem needs to be in a traditional rhymed pattern, but NOT a sonnet. Oh yes—there should be a pun somewhere in the poem, though it can be quite disguised and may be a second language pun.
—so he wrote this one:
Sex on the Planet of the Trees
At first I didn’t realize
that they were having sex at all!
It rather took me by surprise,
in that treetop shopping mall…
no one less well trained could see that they were having sex at all
(hard to tell the “she” from “he”).
She turned pink and held his hand—
no one less well trained could see
that both appendages were glands!
He turned blue and sighed because she turned pink and touched his hand;
in a moment’s pregnant pause
she’d made a father out of him.
He turned blue and sighed because she’d knocked him up. They looked so prim,
at first I didn’t realize
she’d made a father out of him…
it rather took me by surprise.
Jane responded to that terzanelle with a villanelle—
First Contact/Second Coming
I came upon the mating pair in pain,
As, ravenous, they fucked themselves apart.
I called an SOS, but all in vain.
Their golden blood was salty, like their rain,
A potpourri of sex, now sweet, now tart.
They seemed to be a mating pair in pain.
Yet neither one was by that mating slain.
They fought, they fucked through skin and bone and heart.
I called an SOS, but all in vain.
Still watching, I twice filled, and then was drained.
In alien engagements that I chart
I come, with all such mating pairs, in pain.
What sings through red blood, courses to the brain.
When watching partners cannot take a part.
I called an SOS, but all in vain.
Such voyeuristic voyages make plain.
The moment when first contact can first start.
I came upon that mating pair in pain
And called my SOS, but through a vein.
Finally, Joe moved to even up the score—
Okay; I guess it’s time for me to issue a challenge. A rhymed poem with nine stanzas, describing an alien sex act that is not being performed for procreation or (primarily) pleasure. The first and last stanzas are introduction and summation; each of the middle (presumably short) stanzas concerns one of these seven senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, interoceptive (thirst, hunger, pain, nausea, suffocation), and proprioceptivity (equilibrium or kinesthesia), in any order. Alien POV.
This was Jane’s—
SEX AMONG THE ABOS
Sex among the Abo creatures
On this planet has strange features.
There are seven in each act;
Sex in bed is tightly packed.
Creature one is there to glom,
Aboriginal Peeping Tom.
Creature two can hear them come,
Like the sanding of a drum.
Creature three licks up the mess.
Can’t have cum upon a dress.
Creature four does all the stroking,
Rubbing, tapping, touching, poking.
Creature five sits at the head,
Sniffing pheromones in bed.
Creature six can’t catch its breath,
Fainting at each little death.
Creature seven feels them all,
With its back against the wall.
We, of course, deplore the notion
Sex is heat and light and motion.
Sex is done inside the head
With a solemn five in bed!
—and Joe replied with this:
Come, talk
It’s time you see:
I have to get this thing across to you: those weird “human” creatures sometimes do make sense. But look: the twitching they call sex
has no familiar causes or effects!
Attend to me: