I have a poem in the new issue of GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) Magazine. It’s called “Monkey Bait”, and is inspired by the story of how the jellyfish lost its bones.
This is an odd announcement for me, as I stopped writing poetry years ago. There were a lot of delays with the magazine, which is why this poem is surfacing now. Some might recognise that it was also in my collection, as the exclusivity part of the contract with GUD was waived some time back.
I’ve always liked poetry, but never really in the way the current market likes poetry. I like writing poems about ideas I find neat. They might be serious sometimes, but they’re not linked to serious issues in the real world. Neat idea poetry tends to get flatly rejected (sometimes with strained “this isn’t the direction we’re going in” messages). So there’s always that pressure to be more meaningful and make it relate somehow to a real world issue, even if it’s a poem about robots.
Added to that, poems don’t have space to clarify what they’re about. That’s much more of an issue when it is about a real world thing. It’s more likely to hurt someone, which is exactly what happened when I tried to write poetry that was better suited to the market. That poem was a science fiction scenario with some things based on my own experiences, but there wasn’t really space to make that clear, so that wasn’t how the poem was taken.
That “Monkey Bait” is my last published one is fitting in a way, as it wasn’t a market-pleaser. There isn’t a hidden metaphor here for anything else. Just a different take on the theme of the original tale. I won’t say I’ll never write another poem, but it’s not something I have plans to do. In the meantime, I hope GUD readers enjoy my take on the story.