The SF Site Featured Review: The Magazine of Speculative Poetry

The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Volume Six Number One, Spring 2003

The Magazine of Speculative Poetry
The Magazine of Speculative Poetry (MSP) was founded in 1984 by Mark Rich and Roger Dutcher. Mark Rich published one the first speculative poetry magazines, Treaders of Starlight. Roger Dutcher published Uranus, another speculative poetry magazine. Finding themselves in the same city, they decided to collaborate on a new magazine. MSP went 13 issues with both as editors when Mark Rich, having found success in his writing, decided to "move on," both literally and figuratively. MSP has been edited by Roger Dutcher since then. Mark Rich continues as a contributing editor, providing reviews, essays and cover art. David Memmott is also a contributing editor. Magazine of Speculative Poetry
PO Box 564
Beloit WI 53512

The Magazine of Speculative Poetry Website
Science Fiction Poetry Association
Ultimate SF Poetry Guide

A review by Stephen M. Davis

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This edition of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry doesn't have the strength of previous numbers I've seen, and the best poem of the lot, "The Water Bulls" by Ray DiZazzo, doesn't appear particularly speculative. The second half of that poem runs,

"Huddled in the reeds
their crescent horns
ringing with the
frequencies of night
they never see
never understand
that stars give off
so little warmth
lunar light is icy
and the calves are
shivering beside them."

Roger Dutcher, magazine editor and publisher, is represented with the poem "Stones":

"They have no pact with humans,
As do the animals;
Their part is less than the tree
And the waters,
For the tree and the water
Can be transformed,
But even our Lord
In his hunger did not
Turn the stones to bread." (lines 13-21)

Bruce Boston remains ubiquitous, and it is no more surprising to find one of his poems here than it would be to find a regularly-serviced Coca-Cola machine in Usama Bin Laden's safehouse: both are, for good or for bad, towering presences that saturate their respective media.

Steve Davis is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a long-standing contributor to the SF Site. Currently, when not reviewing, he teaches for Anderson College in South Carolina and for the Kaplan College online program.