On the third hand, ReaderCon, for example, has been very accommodating to poetry, and has acknowledged that the new people drawn in by that thread have brought new energy to their convention. Anita (my wife) ran a poetry reading at the World Fantasy Convention in 2010 that the attendees didn’t want to end after two hours, and Rose Lemberg ran one at WFC 2011 that I understand was a huge hit.

It’s true that many genre fiction review venues ignore the poems for reasons that seem silly — as Gemma observed in the previous entry, often “speculative poetry is speculative fiction writ smallest.” But there is a review venue for poems, Versification, ( http://www.versification.org ), Tor.com has run poetry reviews, and some blog reviewers out there such as Terry Weyna roll up their sleeves and tackle the poetry too.

While I don’t dispute your point about American anti-intellectualism, I feel the need to point out that it wasn’t always the case. In the horror genre, Edgar Allan Poe established his career almost as much on the basis of his poetry as on his short fiction ( if I’m not mistaken, “The Raven” may have been his most popular piece, during his lifetime). Poe also wrote an entire small book, THEORY OF POETRY. In fact, his famous essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (so often cited to short story authors as laying out his case for a “unity of effect” in short fiction) is almost-exclusively about poetry!

I’m not sure exactly when horror started to stroll away from poetry. Maybe during the pulp era of the original 20s, 30s and 40s version of WEIRD TALES? I mean, obviously pulp authors like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were writing poetry, but many of the horror pulps seemed to popularize a certain action-adventure template. Then there’s the horror boom of the ’70s and ’80s, with its (in my opinion, dysfunctional) reliance on book-to-film adaptations.

Perhaps there is some hope, though. After attending ReaderCon last year, I started reading speculative poetry and found some to my liking. (ReaderCon had a poetry reading, actually…something that I’d enjoy seeing at other cons). I’ve also started reading the prose-poetry of W.H. Pugmire. Let’s also not forget that Toby Barlow seemed to pull off the impossible by writing a (at least somewhat) commercially successful horror free verse, epic poem (marketed as a novel…but my understanding is it was a free verse epic poem), SHARP TEETH.

So perhaps all’s not lost?

Another pleasant discovery was how the submissions were almost universally free of obvious typos and formatting mistakes. They may not have always followed the page layout rules we set forth in our guidelines (neither did the prose pieces, frankly), but they were good, clean manuscripts. This may be easily attributed to a poet’s innate carefulness with the words he or she chooses to put on the page, but I think there’s something more to it than that. I’ll leave it to others to debate what that might be.

Finally, some of the themes in the poems we received were top-notch SF/F/H ideas — and this was taking into consideration that we were looking for work that would fit into our chosen theme of “communication and information” for the issue. Even many we chose to pass on addressed topics that would make for good discussion fodder. Mind you, not all of them did so, but I was again pleasantly surprised at what we received.

Hopefully there will always be space in the SF/F/H fields for poetry, because if we dismiss it too readily, we risk killing the very sense of wonder and “what if” thinking that birthed our genres in the first place.