obscure poets: suzette haden elgin

by Kristen McHenry

I discovered Suzette Haden Elgin about a year ago. I was doing research for a science fiction poem, and I came across an organization called The Science Fiction Poetry Association. I was surprised (and excited!) to find that there was an organized group of writers working in this genre, and that the founder of the organization was a woman — Dr. Suzette Haden Elgin.

The multi-talented Elgin, grandmother of 10, holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego and has written numerous poems, short stories, songs and serial novels. She is author of the poetry guide The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook and inventor the language Láadan, which was used in her book Native Tongue. She’s also an accomplished visual artist and musician.

Elgin has worked hard over her career to bring literary credibility to the genre of science fiction poetry, to create meaningful definitions for the term and to encourage science fiction poets to apply high standards to their work. In her essay “About Science Fiction Poetry,” she states:

It seemed to me that the field of science fiction poetry badly needed rigor, so that there would be a way to stand up and argue for its literary value. People look at Picasso’s abstract paintings and object that their 6-year-old child could do that — but Picasso could put a pencil on a sheet of paper and draw a magnificently realistic horse as a single line, without ever lifting the pencil from the paper. That’s rigor. Because he could do that if he chose, he could also break all the rules if he chose; that’s fair. I wanted science fiction poetry first to prove that it could do the thing rigorously; after that, if it wanted to fly off into the never-nevers, it would at least be possible to point to the body of rigorous work and say, “When science fiction poets choose to, they can write like this; they’ve proved that, and now they have the right to break the rules.”

Elgin is also a strong believer in science fiction writing as a powerful tool for women and stated in a 1999 interview with Kim Wells, “Women need to realize that SF is the only genre of literature in which it’s possible for a writer to explore the question of what this world would be like if you could get rid of [X], where [X] is filled in with any of the multitude of real world facts that constrain and oppress women. Women need to treasure and support science fiction.”

Many of her works, including the aforementioned Native Tongue, use science fiction to explore themes of women’s personal transformation. In her poem, “Bardo Crossing,” Elgin describes the frightening journey of a young woman as she leaves behind her life acting out familiar roles and steps into the expression of her true self:

far away, on the silent deserts,
you can hear the singing of the lizards.

One creeps beneath a rock and shivers with joy.
So long as they sing in the purple desert light,
so long as they stay small,
they are bearable creatures.
Were one to see them large,
howling against a sky snagged by a raw moon,
the holy men of the sands would see the people
going out in the dead of night with their flasks of poisons
into the dens of the lizards,
destroying them utterly.

In order to reach the other side,
in order to pass the Window by,
she must see them large,
rampant, their claws covered with dung,
pierced by the spiny plants they skitter among;
she must know them for what they are.

Elgin’s poetry avoids the clichéd realm of space wars and time travel and instead uses science fiction as a springboard for exploring the vast potential of culture and society. In her poem, “Brochure from the Intensive Care Ward: 2081,” she imagines a futuristic hospital where those who have been exposed to poetry and are therefore “hopelessly infested/with images” are aggressively treated with prose:

… Poetry was a slow and agonizing suicide.

No more those gouts of wet and living rose.
Now we apply the tourniquet of prose
and staunch the torturing truth before it flows.

One of my favorite poems of all genres is Elgin’s “Psalm to Higher Power,” in which she explores the inner life of the numerous bacteria that we casually kill off in our everyday lives:

There is a bacterium the color of melted butter,
under the microscope,
stunned and limp in the maw of a great blue molecule
that can only be sicced upon it by prescription.
I look at the gory photograph by chance,
as it caught my attention
– I was just passing by — I feel compassion.
(I am reminded, eyeless though it is, of the baby seals.)
What plaints it raises, and to what power, I will never know;
but I cannot keep from thinking: “Poor little thing!”

We stand under the sky and we shake our fists.
We demand to know why You have forsaken us.
We flatter ourselves.
Holy One:

Do You ever think (perhaps of Somalia or the Sahel
or of the South Bronx):
“Poor little thing!”???

Although I’ve always been interested in science fiction as a concept, I’m fussy about the execution. My willingness to read any particular science fiction work is dependent on how well the author grounds the works in the realities of human experience. What intrigues me about Elgin’s poetry is that even as it reaches into the realm of the speculative and fantastic, it never feels overly abstracted or so far from common experience that I find myself bewildered or bored. She uses science fiction as a tool to expand and deepen her exploration humanity and society, an approach that inspires me to continue with my own forays into science fiction poetry. That’s been the missing link for me in so much of science fiction, so I’m really happy to have found this amazing, if perhaps not so well-known, poet!

Complete versions of “Brochure From the Intensive Care Ward: 2081” and “Psalm to a Higher Power” can be found at sfwa.org.

Elgin’s interview with Kim Wells can be found on womenwriters.net.

Kristen McHenry works on poetry by night and health outreach by day. She created and facilitates the Poet’s Cafe, a weekly poetry workshop for homeless teens. She shares poetry and her thoughts on writing at The Good Typist.