What I was trying to capture with mentioning a “temporal argument”: cuing the reader in (somehow; there’s probably no one single way) that a poem is “future literature”. E.g., with Robert Browning setting the table, so to speak, that he’s writing a persona poem.

(Now that I think about it, in a way this type of speculative literature is a supra-genre of persona poetry.)

but longer SF/F poems that are so descriptive that
they can actually “make tactile” alien or fantastical worlds are very rare–and generally the high-water marks of the field. Yeah, I could see poems like this being a person’s magnum opus. And this points to that blurry line between fiction and poetry, and the relationship between the two when they cross.

Thanks for mentioning a lot of concrete examples, one thing that I’m bad at doing in the middle of blog posts like this; I’ll have to follow through with some of them.

“Speculative poetry, in seeking out a future, is simultaneously exploratory and archival”: I’ve been reading a lot of SF/F/H poetry from the first half of the 20th-century and I’m often struck by how those poets’ visions of the
future reveal more about the decades in which they were written than about the future that we now live–and in that way “archive” some aspects those eras.

“Speculative poetry has no one single formal or metrical argument. It has a temporal argument”: I’m not sure what a “temporal argument” is, but I agree that, as much as we can talk about the one overall argument of speculative poetry, it’s most likely something other than an argument about prosody.

“Science fiction also prizes the building of worlds, memory palaces of the future, detailing hypothetical or extrapolated ecologies”: I do tend to like SF/speculative poetry that draws on the circumstances of our world in order to speculate about how things might be in x years from now; some of Disch’s poetry does this well, as do the poems in Ackerman’s The Planets, as well as some of the Rhysling-winners in Alchemy (Lightman and Landis come to mind).

“Speculative poetry can either create the literature of worlds that may or may not be our own, or make tactile the worlds themselves”: Ok, I’m not sure what you mean here, Alan…but longer SF/F poems that are so descriptive that
they can actually “make tactile” alien or fantastical worlds are very rare–and generally the high-water marks of the field. The idea that speculative poetry could somehow create the literature of other worlds is intriguing. Adam Roberts’s Jupiter Magnified and K.S. Robinson’s The Martians come to mind (each of
these books begins with prose that introduces the reader to a futuristic world and some characters that inhabit it and then ends with poetry–in Roberts’s case, the poetry is written by one of his fictional characters; in
Robinson’s case the poetry is about the Mars of the story). In these instances, the speculative poetry is, fictionally speaking, the literature of these future worlds. One other example that comes to mind is Frederick Turner’s Genesis, a 10,000-line poem that, the book’s intro tells us, was written by a poet living in the future (a future described by the poem) and sent back in time to 1988…and so literally claims to be the literature of the future. Again, I’m not sure what you mean Alan, but your phrase does make me think about this one similarity between these three texts–which I hadn’t thought of before.

I tried to e-mail you the other day but it looks like my contact info might be out of date…