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The A/A Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction Anthology was originally meant to be a special double issue of Riverrun, a small press mainstream poetry magazine I edited for Glen Oaks Community College for five years, from 1991 to 1996.
I worked for a little over a year to compile 150 poems for the special H/F/SF issue. Then, in the fall of 1994, with an anthology I thought would open up a whole new audience for Riverrun and the college ready to go to the printers, the powers that be pulled the plug - i.e., the administration, who hadn't said diddley up to this point, now had "an image conflict" with the content.
But what should I have expected? After all, who takes H/F/SF seriously?
The answer, of course, is that the mainstream itself takes H/F/SF quite seriously - as long as the H/F/SF label is nowhere to be seen.
To further the irony, while I did eventually solicit numerous poets identified with the H/F/SF fields, the project came about in the first place because I'd started to realize how much crossover there was between mainstream and so-called "genre" poetry. Riverrun often published mainstream poems by John Grey, W. Gregory Stewart, and several others directly associated with H/F/SF. At the same time, many of our "mainstream" contributors routinely dealt with subject matter that could, on various levels, be classified as H/F/SF.
Indeed, many of the poems in this collection are by mainstream poets who did not, at the time, know their poems would be considered for a H/F/SF anthology. They were simply submitting poems to another small press literary magazine. I think it's worth mentioning, especially in light of the college's reaction, that not a single poet said, "Ack! How dare you! I'd never have my name associated with that 'genre' stuff!" or anything remotely like it. (While I feel all the poems are worth publishing, I believe my selections reflect more Riverrun's sensibilities than my own, especially in the horror section; I read for the anthology with my then-employer's outlook in mind. Again, irony.)
At the same time, I feel I should make a point regarding what many call "cliquishness" within the H/F/SF field: If you see the same names over and over again in the magazines and anthologies, it's because they're the ones who know what they're doing. Many who submitted poems specifically for the H/F/SF anthology didn't make it because, well, their poems simply weren't good enough.
In defense of such a stance, I'll put forth that I came into this project with no ties to H/F/SF poetry except to the few associated poets who contributed mainstream work to Riverrun. Despite this fact, the "cliquish" H/F/SF community enthusiastically embraced this project. Furthermore, although I wish my brain were built to compose it, I usually fumble when I try to write overtly H/F/SF-oriented poetry and am bright enough to know it. In other words, I was not seeking to further my own work in the eyes of H/F/SF editors by publishing theirs. Then again, I had read widely in H/F/SF poetry - from August Derleth's historic anthology "Dark of the Moon" to the Robert Frazier-edited masterpiece, "Burning with a Vision" and Lee Ballentine's "Poly," both of which defined, along with others, what was at the time that I was reading the current state of science fiction or "speculative" poetry. Plus I tried to stay current with the related magazines, and feel I had a pretty good idea of what H/F/SF poetry was currently out there.
My own intentions were not to match the outstanding quality of the above-mentioned anthologies, which more or less defined H/F/SF poetry in their time periods. My primary goal was, as always, simply to present what I thought was good reading to the few souls who might chance upon one of the 500-600 copy press run of the magazine I edited. If I had any other goal with this special issue, it was perhaps to blur the distinctions between the pigeonholes of mainstream and genre a little, in my own small way.
Once the project was nixed by the college, I intended to publish it myself, issuing each of the six sections as a separate chapbook. Alas, this never happened. Although layout happened in various forms, I was never happy with it, and meanwhile there was still Riverrun to tend to along with things like getting married, building a house, jobs, jobs, jobs, etc. (At this point readers can feel free to pull out the world's smallest violin and play it for me....)
Then...the Internet! I decided, eventually, on publishing the anthology in electronic form because: 1) I had never intended to make money on this project; 2) I had found a number of the poets to be online and saw that, through links, the anthology could be a resource as well as "good reading;" and 3) I wanted to learn about this fascinating new medium and see what it could do.
The decision to publish the anthology on the Internet cost me 10 poems. About five poets did not want their work where literally anyone had access to it. That might sound like the editor griping, but I honestly understand these individuals' concern. Anyone who doesn't should read Neal Bowers' excellent short book Words for the Taking. Another five poems were lost because I was unable to contact the authors for permission to post the poems on the web.
As of this writing, I plan to solicit replacement poems for the lost 15, making this quite likely the first anthology one could read before submitting to!
My gratitude goes out to all the contributors who were so patient with me for so long before this project came to fruition, and I thank those who dropped out for their professional demeanor while doing so. Despite their administrative anxieties, I also want to thank Glen Oaks Community College for giving me an excellent forum to work with for five years.
Finally, I'd like to note that, once the project went electronic, an enthusiastic dialogue began with many of the contributors, dialogue which was often instructive and enlightening - the only major difference I ever saw in "genre poets" while reading for the project was that they tended perhaps to be more outgoing than much of the "mainstream."
One of the contributors, no less than that exquisite Weird Tales/Worlds of Fantasy & Horror editor Darrell Schweitzer, urged me to take this project back to print format for my monetary benefit. His arguments, and the methods he described for me, were convincing. His excellent publishing advice did not fall on deaf ears. I'd rather be done with this one - and I was, in my opinion, too deep into work on the electronic version to pull up stakes yet again - but I might someday pursue similar print projects.
These, however, would most likely be collections of fiction, not poetry.
I mention this not for self-promotion, but in the spirit of the free exchange of information, which is, in my opinion, the Internet's best quality. With that in mind, this piece does not end with my thoughts, but connects instead to those of another: I'll close with a link to an excellent essay by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, an editor who has been doing this longer and better than I could ever hope to. You will find his essay on why Internet pages will never take the place of printed ones by following this link
David Bain
12-1-98
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