Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Mary Soon Lee, author of How to Navigate Our Universe, a collection of astronomy poems.
Tell us about the inspiration for How to Navigate Our Universe. What was the kernel of the idea?
The
specific inspiration was a poetry prompt from The Daily Poet by Kelli
Russell Agodon and Martha Silano about writing an unlikely “How To” poem. This led
me to write a three-line poem titled “How to Be a Star” –
How to Be a
Star (first published in Uppagus)
Gravitationally
collapse a nebula.
Fuse
hydrogen into helium.
If desired,
explode.
Four months after writing that very short poem, I wrote a slew of other How-To poems that had nothing to do with astronomy (“How to Destroy a Dragon,” “How to Herd Cats,” etc.) About twenty poems into this, I returned to astronomy with “How to Circumnavigate Mars,” and kept on going.
The background inspiration begins far back with my father teaching me the names of the planets, along with his certainty that this was critical information. Then, when I was seven years old, a family friend gave me The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918, which introduced me to the world of grown-up poetry. Both science and poetry remained important to me from then on.
How to Navigate Our Universe is an eclectic set of works, “ranging from whimsical to serious — poems about planets, stars, black holes, and astronomers, complete with essential advice such as How to Surprise Saturn, How to Blush Like Betelgeuse, and How to Survive a Black Hole.” How did you choose to arrange them and do they follow a sequence?
The poems are arranged in five parts. The first part covers our astronomical backyard, the solar system, from Mercury and Venus out to beyond Pluto. Next come poems about our wider neighborhood, the Milky Way, and then on from there to more remote regions and more general topics (“How to Curve Spacetime,” “How to Battle Entropy,” “How to Brand Dark Energy.”) The fourth section, on pioneers, includes both humans (Galileo, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Stephen Hawking, et al) and non-human space probes (Voyager, New Horizons, Ranger, Pioneer). Lastly, there’s a shorter section of space-related poems that depart from the How-To format.
Two poems from the anthology appeared in our new release feature on October 12: How to Look Far - In memory of Galileo Galilei [February 15, 1564 - January 8, 1642] and How to End the Universe. What can you tell us about How to Look Far and why you chose Galileo as the subject?
How to Look Far was one of the first poems I wrote for the Pioneers section of the book. Galileo was an obvious choice, an iconic figure, one of the most famous of all astronomers, tried by the Roman Inquisition for supporting heliocentrism (that the Earth goes round the Sun). He died blind and under house arrest. The poem moves from Galileo’s tools – lenses, telescope -- to his observations (the Moon, Jupiter’s moons), to his conclusions, then ends with the lines:
No matter
what Ignorance insists,
banish
lies. Let there be light.
How to End the Universe seems both witty and dark. What is the significance of the title and the events in the poem?
The poem covers, very briefly, three theories of how the universe might end. Thus, the third scenario, the Big Freeze, gives a poetic interpretation to the possibility that – far in the future! – star formation will cease and, very slowly, the existing stars will stop shining, and then even the longer-lasting black holes will evaporate away.
N.B. About three years after writing the poem, I belatedly read Katie Mack’s excellent book, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), which discusses the ways the universe might end at far greater length and with far greater rigor.
You started out as a scientist and academic, with degrees in mathematics and computer science from Cambridge University, and an M.Sc. in astronautics and space engineering from Cranfield University. What led you to focus on writing and in particular, poetry?
I switched to writing because of the Gulf War. Elaborating on that: in 1990, I moved from Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I received a job offer to apply AI to molecular biology, but the Gulf War caused a delay in the issuing of my work permit. Not knowing how long the delay would last, I wrote while I waited. I wrote and discovered how much I liked doing so. As a result, I ended up withdrawing from the AI/molecular biology position to pursue writing.
For over a decade, I wrote fiction. Following the birth of my second child, I had very little free time. I found that I could (sometimes!) squeeze in writing a poem. As with my initial switch to writing, I discovered that I liked writing poetry. Nowadays, I am primarily a poet.
Is there something in the structure or elegance of poetry that reflects the precision of mathematics?
Form poetry – poetry that follows a specific pattern, such as end rhymes or metered lines – has a precision, but much modern poetry, including most of my own poetry, is free verse. There, the parallels to mathematics are more tenuous: perhaps elegance, as you suggested, and concision. More grandiosely, some poetry, like mathematics, could be thought of as trying to express truth.
You are a Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) and a three-time winner of both the AnLab Readers’ Award and the Rhysling Award. How did you become a Grand Master and what does it involve?
Each year, SFPA (the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association) invites Grand Master nominations, which are then voted on by the members. Some years, no one is selected (the first Grand Master was selected in 1999 and ten more have been chosen since then). In 2022, I was greatly honored to be chosen alongside Akua Lezli Hope, a poet I love.
I’m sorry to report that no secret powers or duties accrue to being a Grand Master. No tea-time with dragons, no colloquium with aliens.
Tell us about your book The Sign of the Dragon, a novel-length epic fantasy, winner of the Elgin Award, comprising over 300 individual poems, including the Rhysling-winning "Interregnum." What was the origin of the story?
As mentioned above, I switched to (mostly) writing poetry after my daughter was born. For reasons unclear to me, for nearly a decade those poems were predominantly realistic poems. Then, in the summer of 2013, I wrote several fantasy poems. The sixth of these, “Interregnum,” was about a boy chosen by a dragon to be the next king. I’d meant it to be a standalone poem, but the boy stayed with me. I returned to him, gave him a name – Xau – and wrote poem after poem about what unfolded after he became king.
As Tolkien once said, the tale grew in the telling. Parts of Xau’s story arose without me consciously planning them. Thus, Xau and his imaginary kingdom took on Chinese elements, while the kingdom of his first enemy had Gaelic elements. I think I was drawing on things that mattered to me: my father, born in Malaysia, was ethnically Chinese; my mother, born in Dublin, spoke both Gaelic and English.
Xau is a conspicuously virtuous hero. My family teased me repeatedly that he was too good, but I didn’t want to alter him. He became very real to me. Xau is not a natural warrior, nor notably handsome, nor stunningly intelligent, but, at pretty much every turn, he chooses to do what he thinks is right, no matter how much it costs him.
I could talk about Xau and The Sign of the Dragon at very great length, but I will restrict myself to one more item: I loved writing the supporting characters. Because the story is told in individual poem-sized episodes, I was able to zoom in to show how things looked for Xau’s guards and advisors, his chief enemies and allies, his wife, grandmother, sister, children, a stablemaster, a midwife, a translator, a cleaning woman, the man responsible for dressing him for court – it was a great joy.
What were the challenges of writing such different cycles of poetry?
With The Sign of the Dragon, a major challenge for me was fitting writing alongside parenting. I wanted to be able to set my work aside once I picked my children up from school. Being rather obsessive, I would have found it hard to write a conventional novel and still pay attention to the rest of my life. Dividing the project into hundreds of poem-size pieces helped me greatly. I worked on one poem at a time, and then (mostly) paused to spend time with my children or do the housework.
How to Navigate Our Universe was also written one poem at a time, sometimes with extended breaks in between while I wrote other things. It required more assiduous fact-checking, being science-based. (I did research for The Sign of the Dragon as well, but I had more leeway since I was writing a fantasy novel in an invented world with invented rules and history.)
As with my first science poetry project (Elemental Haiku, 119 haiku for the elements of the periodic table), I tried to vary the poems so the collection wouldn’t become monotonous. There are serious poems and humorous poems, science-fiction poems and realistic poems and a few with a feminist slant. Although I mostly write free verse, I included rhymed poems, haiku, and a couple of pantoums. While most of the historical figures are approached straightforwardly, such as the poem about Galileo, others are not. Both Copernicus and Hubble are viewed from the perspective of their cats!
Are there any poets, past or contemporary, whose work you love?
Yes. It’s a long list, but a few should be singled out because of the influence they’ve had on me. I mentioned being given The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 when I was seven years old. In its pages, I discovered Tennyson’s narrative poem “The Lady of Shalott.” I loved it. I learned it by heart. I was entranced by the fantastical story, by the cadence, the imagery, the return to Lancelot at the poem’s close. Then, when I was nine, I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a book that I read and re-read many times. I loved the poems included in the book and learned several by heart. My father would ask me to recite favorite verses on long car drives.
And then there’s a very short poem, five lines long, at the beginning of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which I read around the same time as The Lord of the Rings. That short poem has a similar force and concision and contrast to a haiku, and has stayed with me ever since. At the other extreme, a few years later, I happened across Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-length narrative poem, Aurora Leigh. Again, I loved it. I had never read a novel-length work of poetry in the English language. Aurora Leigh was the work that made me aware such a thing was possible. Although I’d read Homer and Virgil, their poetry was less immediate to me.
Another classic, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji includes snippets of poetry. The main story of Genji didn’t captivate me the way Tolkien or Le Guin did, but the snippets of (translated) Japanese poetry were magical. From my mother, I loved poems by Yeats; from my father, poems by Auden. And then there were Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas.
Much more recently, all grown up now, I’ve met and loved the work of Li Bai (in various translations), Robert Hayden, Ted Kooser. I should stop now!
Some of the earliest forms of narrative were epic poems - Beowulf, The Song of Roland and Paradise Lost, for example. Is there a new readiness for longer forms of poetry?
I’m not well enough informed to judge whether there is, in fact, a growing receptiveness toward long-form narrative poetry, but I hope there is. As a reader, I’d like to have a smorgasbord of options: short stories, prose poetry, haiku, epic poetry, flash fiction, novellas, twenty-volume book series, works in translation, retold fairy tales, autobiographies, epistolary novels, graphic novels.
Why are poetry - and lyrics - so important? And has (some) prose become too prosaic?
Poems and songs can distill things into a brief, intense essence. A line in a song, a couplet in a poem can ring like a bell, echoing through you.
As to whether some prose is too prosaic, I’d say rather that some prose could be better crafted. In the right hands, prosaic prose can itself be powerful: spare and lean and telling. But inept prose, clunky prose is another matter. Even then, if the characters and the situation are beguiling, readers may overlook deficits in word choice and sentence structure.
Thank you
very much for the great questions!
SFS: Thank you, it's been a pleasure!
Amazon
About Mary Soon Lee:
Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but has lived in Pittsburgh for thirty years. She is a Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association and a three-time winner of both the AnLab Readers’ Award and the Rhysling Award. Her work has appeared in Science, American Scholar, Analog, Asimov's, F&SF, Strange Horizons and Uncanny Magazine. Her latest books are from opposite shores of the poetry ocean: "How to Navigate Our Universe," containing 128 astronomy poems, and "The Sign of the Dragon," novel-length epic fantasy, winner of the Elgin Award.
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