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Title page of the earliest published text of Edward II (1594) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’ve come back to Two-For-Tuesday on Poetic Asides. This morning’s prompt calls for a poem about a Forest and one about a Tree.

Pastoral poetry has a long history around the world, both as metaphor and as observational verse. The Poetry Foundation says this about this verse form.

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s“Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”Browse more pastoral poems.

Some of us continue to write about those sublime, still pools populated with lilies like freckles on a lady’s cheek. We enjoy finding new and different ways to express the feeling experienced within the deep woods while spring rains moisturize the earth and wild ginger puts out its sweet scent to rival the subtle hint of redbud blossoms and dogwood earthiness.

There are also cowboys out there who produce some terrific verse about life on the plain, gardeners who speak to their labors and rewards, and fishermen who wax eloquent about reeling in hard and losing face and fish at the last second.

Verse about nature themes, love, and virtues could blanket the earth several times over if stretched end to end and side by side. Poets w

Title page of the earliest published text of Edward II (1594) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’ve come back to Two-For-Tuesday on Poetic Asides. This morning’s prompt calls for a poem about a Forest and one about a Tree.

Pastoral poetry has a long history around the world, both as metaphor and as observational verse. The Poetry Foundation says this about this verse form.

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s“Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”Browse more pastoral poems.

Some of us continue to write about those sublime, still pools populated with lilies like freckles on a lady’s cheek. We enjoy finding new and different ways to express the feeling experienced within the deep woods while spring rains moisturize the earth and wild ginger puts out its sweet scent to rival the subtle hint of redbud blossoms and dogwood earthiness.

There are also cowboys out there who produce some terrific verse about life on the plain, gardeners who speak to their labors and rewards, and fishermen who wax eloquent about reeling in hard and losing face and fish at the last second.

Verse about nature themes, love, and virtues could blanket the earth several times over if stretched end to end and side by side. Poets w

I don’ t think I’ve made anyone mad for a while; let’s see if this does it.

There’s a fine tradition of fantasy (or horror) in rural, even pastoral, settings, from Tolkien to King. So much so that you could call it the default; fantasy set in cities gets its own sub-genre, urban fantasy.

Science fiction, by contrast, probably because of its more technical nature, tends to have more urban sensibilities: think space ports, crumbling dystopias that once were fine cities, overpopulated masses, etc.

I’ve been thinking about this because I have noticed what seems to be a bias in publishing, probably a function of its New York/New England foundation: a lot of movers and shakers seem to think that readers can’t relate to rural stories, country people, or simple lives. DAIRY QUEEN is a lovely exception that almost proves the rule… but where I live, a LOT more kids relate to kicking cowpies than to riding a subway, or to growing up in a metro apartment instead of a house with a yard.

And I wonder if that bias encourages gatekeepers to think of rural = fantasy (vs. real-life). Which is why, perhaps, I know writers who’ve been told things like, “Nobody wants to read about a girl living in a trailer park.” (Besides THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY, I guess.) And I’ve gotten personal feedback about things I know in everyday life that folks in NY or LA have thought was old-fashioned because it’s more rural — or simply more lower-middle-class — than their personal experience.

Just throwing it out there. I might be making it up. Any thoughts?  And to bring it back to spec-fic, at least nominally: can you think of any relatively recent, rural or pastoral sci-fi that’s not that way because the world ended?

— Joni, who likes both the city and the country for different reasons

3 Comments on City aliens, country aliens, last added: 9/20/2010