A theory rises—sinks; another wins

  A transient credence. Some men will have naught

  Of simian kin, nor bear the shocking thought

  Of simple earthly sources of our sins

  And virtues. These are valiant paladins.

  But by slight hints may not deep truths be taught?

  Often when strolling idly out of doors

  The joy of upright carriage thrills me through—

  As though in some dim past I’d gone “all-fours”!

  And often speech, or victory in some test

  Of wits, stirs quick surprise, a wonder new,

  As though I’d once lacked language, groped,

  and guessed!

  “Radio Revelations”

  Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall–Winter 1932

  Before John’s new receiving set

  I listened, half expecting

  The music of the spheres to get,

  Some stellar fugue or canzonet,

  Man’s chatter intersecting.

  Instead, from empyrean heights

  Celestial gossip drifted;

  The greater and the lesser lights

  It seems have frolics, feuds, and fights,

  Even as the less uplifted.

  “It’s scandalous how Orion goes,”

  Quoth Vega in high dudgeon,

  “Can’t he afford some pants and hose?

  “Or is it that he loves to pose

  “In just his belt and bludgeon?”

  Then Vesta scolded, “Listen, pray!

  “Those wild beasts—where’s their cager?

  “As I went down the Milky Way

  “To get my Pasteurized Grade A

  “He bit me—Ursa Major!

  “Of course, surprised, I had no show—

  “I whacked him with my slipper,

  “But Aries, Serpens, Scorpio

  “And Taurus joined the scrap and so

  “I brandished the Big Dipper.

  “Then pranced up Sagittarius

  “And shot them! How I kissed him!

  “We two then harnessed Pegasus

  “To Charles’s Wain—absurd old bus—

  “And ranged the Solar System.

  “Now don’t tell, Dearie, on your word

  “Of honor as a planet;

  “The cause of Mars’ red face I’ve heard

  “Is booze! He’s sure the gay old bird—

  “It’s years since he began it.”

  Then burst forth Vega, “What’s the use

  “Of Luna’s mad endeavor

  “To change her figure and ‘reduce’

  “When in one month—the silly goose—

  “She’ll be as round as ever?

  “There’s Berenice! She’s marcelled her hair!

  “Her cute dog star she’s leading.

  “Here kid—take Cassiopeia’s Chair.

  “What news?—You don’t say! Did they dare?

  “Young Comet pinched for speeding?

  “Well! Well! I’ve, too, a tale to stir;

  “Now Venus is no pattern,

  “We all know that, but Jupiter

  “Is worse—I’m not much blaming her—

  “She has eloped with Saturn!

  “Of course she’s flirted lots, my dears,

  “But Saturn’s been her ‘steady.’

  “He has a bad ‘case’ it appears,

  “Old softy! Why he’s had for years

  “A choice of rings all ready!”

  “This Radio,” I rejoiced, “what fun!

  “And cheaper than a movie.”

  Just then John’s voice boomed like a gun,

  “Wake up, old girl—it’s half past one.

  “And put the cat out, Lovey.”

  VIRGINIA KIDD (1921–2003) was a Pennsylvania-born literary agent, editor, and author who influenced the development of American SF over the course of the twentieth century. Trained in Spanish, Italian, Latin, French, and German at the Berlitz School of Languages, Kidd began reading her brother’s SF magazines at the age of nine and, by the age of eleven, was sending letters to the editorial columns of those magazines on a regular basis. She quickly became close friends (by correspondence) with SF fans across the country and, at the age of sixteen, was engaged briefly (again, by correspondence) to the Futurian Robert A. W. Lowndes. During World War II Kidd relocated to New York, where Lowndes introduced her to other Futurians, including her soon-to-be housemate, Judith Merril, and her future husband, James Blish. In 1945 Kidd helped the Futurians create the Vanguard Amateur Press for the dissemination of SF fanzines; a decade later, she collaborated with Blish and Damon Knight to establish the Milford Writers Workshop, which still takes place annually.6

  Kidd published her own SF fiction and poetry sporadically throughout the midcentury decades but was, as she herself put it, mostly a “writer in the cracks” who excelled at putting other authors in touch with the right editor or press (qtd. in Liptak, “Clients”). Accordingly, in 1965 she established the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency, where she represented such writers as Judith Merril, Gene Wolfe, Anne McCaffrey, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Kidd was the first female literary agent in the SF community and an ardent advocate of New Wave and feminist experiments in SF. In 1970 Kidd launched the poetry magazine Kinesis and, with it, the mainstream poetry career of SF author Sonya Dorman. Later that decade, she edited several important speculative fiction anthologies, including Saving Worlds: A Collection of Original Science Fiction Stories (1973, with editor and author Roger Elwood), Millennial Women (1978, which earned Kidd a Locus Award), and Edges: Thirteen New Tales from the Borderlands of the Imagination (1980, with her client and friend Le Guin). Kidd continued writing “in the cracks” throughout her life, publishing her last short story, “Ok, O Che? by K.,” in 1995 and her last poem, “Argument,” in 1998. Kidd was also an active member of First Fandom (an organization for fans who were active in the SF community before the first WorldCon in 1939) until her death in 2003.

  Kidd is remembered primarily for her accomplishments as an agent and editor, but she was quite literally first and last an SF fan and poet. The short untitled poem included here—first published in the Fantasy Fan when Kidd was just twelve years old—captures the energy of both the young Kidd in particular and the nascent SF fan community in general. As the SF poet and historian Steve Sneyd notes, the first generation of fan poets (including Kidd and fellow Futurians Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth) found it “natural” to emulate the style and content of their professional counterparts (Elsewhen n.p.). Kidd was no exception. In six short lines, she cheerfully projects a world where young people make a clean break with the past, using “science and knowledge” to build a fantastic new future. This vision of youth-driven technocultural progress is very much in line with that of Hugo Gernsback and many of the authors associated with the Amazing franchise, including Lilith Lorraine and Leslie F. Stone (both of whom are featured in this anthology). Meanwhile, Kidd’s use of light verse is reminiscent of the stylistic techniques employed by one of Amazing’s most popular poets, Julia Boynton Green (also featured in this anthology). Indeed, while Lorraine, Stone, and Green can be seen as transitional figures who used the techniques of nineteenth-century women fantasy poets to explore twentieth-century technocultural hopes and fears, Kidd can be seen as a figure whose career connects the practices of women writing SF in the early twentieth century to those who are doing so today.

  “Untitled”

  Fantasy Fan, December 1933

  Science and Knowledge,

  And strong youth and power—

  Science, the creed of a nation!

  New customs for old,

  New ways, a new mold—

  The tale of the New Generation!

  LEAH BODINE DRAKE (1904–64) was a Kansas-born poet, editor, and critic. She attended the Hamilton College for Women in Kentucky and worked briefly as a dancer for the American impresario Billy Rose of Ziegfeld Follies fame before turning her attention full time to literary endeavors. Drake sold her first poem to Weird Tales in 1935 and became the second-most-published poet in that magazine (following Dorothy Quick, featured elsewhere in this anthology). Her verse appeared in August Derlith’s groundbreaking genre anthology, Dark of the Moon (1947), as well as prestigious mainstream venues including the Poetry Chapbook, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post. Drake published three collections of poetry (the last appearing posthumously), served as a poetry critic for the Atlantic Monthly, and earned prizes that included two Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards and several Poetry Society of America Awards. She was proud to count herself among the Daughters of the American Revolution—her ancestors included Davy Crockett—and was listed in Who’s Who in American Poetry as well as the 1958 supplement to Who’s Who in America.7

  Given Drake’s heritage, it is perhaps no surprise that her poetry is part and parcel of the American weird tradition extending back to Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As the SF poet and historian Steve Sneyd explains, early European settlers on the American East Coast gravitated toward what we would now call weird or horror storytelling as a way of managing anxiety about what they perceived to be the suffocating vegetation, dangerous animals, and alien—even demonic—native inhabitants of their new home (Fierce 6). In a similar vein, the short biography included on the dust jacket of Drake’s first book of verse, A Hornbook for Witches (1950), notes that the author’s “choice of the macabre in poetry comes naturally, for her earliest memories include the tremendous silences of the Navajo country, the woods and swamps of the deep South, and tales of ‘ha’nts’ told by Aunt Coopie, a Negro member of the household.” And indeed, while the narrators of poems such as “They Run Again” and “The Wood-Wife” speak in watered-down versions of the rural British dialects popularized by Robert Burns a century earlier, the heavy oaks, fern-thick forests, and supernatural animal-human hybrids that inhabit them are clearly indebted to the American landscapes with which Drake was most familiar.

  Like the creative output of many other women associated with the early genre magazine community, Drake’s poetry can be seen as a bridge between the practices of her nineteenth-century predecessors and the sensibilities of contemporary feminist SF authors. This is particularly apparent in “Sea-Shell,” which, like the poems of Felicia Hemans and Adelaide Proctor, uses the narrator’s encounter with an everyday object as the occasion to imagine strange new worlds and celebrate the female poet’s creative agency. But while Hemans and Proctor focus on the domestic objects of the nineteenth-century middle class housewife’s domain, Drake’s narrator draws inspiration from the wider natural world through which she roams. The refusal of women to be confined by enclosed domestic spaces and the traditional gender roles associated with them is a common thread throughout Drake’s work, informing the actions of the heroines in both “The Wood-Wife” and “They Run Again.” In these poems, women refuse the safety of good homes and well-established men, preferring instead to take their chances with treacherous terrains and supernatural creatures. As such, Drake’s verse tells a tale about the lengths to which women will go in their attempts to escape patriarchy, a tale that informs a number of twentieth-century feminist SF stories, including Lilith Lorraine’s “The Celestial Visitor” (1935) and James Tiptree, Jr.’s celebrated classic, “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973).

  “They Run Again”

  Weird Tales, June–July 1939

  Beyond the black and naked wood

  In frosty gold has set the sun,

  And dusk glides forth in cobweb hood …

  Sister, tonight the werewolves run!

  With white teeth gleaming and eyes aflame

  The werewolves gather upon the howe!

  Country churl and village dame,

  They have forgotten the wheel and plow.

  They have forgotten the speech of men;

  Their throats are dry with a dreadful thirst;

  And woe to the traveller in the glen

  Who meets tonight with that band accurst!

  Now from the hollows creeps the dark;

  The moon like a yellow owl takes flight;

  Good people on their house doors mark

  A cross, and hug their hearths in fright.

  Sister, listen! The King Wolf howls!

  The pack is running! … Drink down the brew.

  Don the unearthly, shaggy cowl,—

  We must be running, too!

  “The Wood-Wife”

  Weird Tales, March 1942

  In a hollow oak tree

  I live by the wood,

  A bit more than human

  And far less than good.

  I’ve queer spells, and potent spells,

  That I went to learn

  From the goat-hooved and shaggy ones

  Who hide in the fern.

  The good-wives, the house-wives

  They shudder at my sin:

  But much they’d give to learn to weave

  Cloth of spider’s-spin!

  My pet fox, my russet fox,

  He ravishes their geese:

  Yet none dare call out the hounds

  If they would know peace!

  On a day of falling leaves

  I met the young Squire.

  I gave him a sideways look

  That set his face afire.

  The bonny young Squire,

  He dreams in a spell;

  But not of golden curlylocks

  Of Parson Jones’ Nell—

  But of red hair, and green eyes

  That have looked on hell!

  Dream, pretty Squire-kin!

  It’s small use to burn!

  For when the moon is up

  The wood-wife will turn

  Three times widdershins,

  And greet where you stood

  The shagged-men, the satyr-men

  Who creep from the wood!

  “Sea-Shell”

  Weird Tales, September 1943

  Stranded upon the sand

  Here is a twisted shell:

  Lift it within your hand,

  Press it against your ear;

  Listen! … And you will hear

  Echo of deep-sea bell

  Ringing in belfry beneath the brine,

  Where mermaidens, scaled with tourmaline,

  Toll a dolorous knell.

  ’Tis the voice of a city beneath the sea!

  Gold-eyed fishes stare endlessly

  At turrets and ramparts of porphyry

  Drowned in the gold-green well.

  Who built that city forlorn?

  What was its perilous fame

  That tymbal and gong and horn

  Blared from the torch-lit wall?

  When did its doom befall?

  What was the reason it came

  Crashing down over palace and keep,

  A sea that rose like a mountain steep,

  Quenching the living flame?

  Hark! Does the sea-shell’s echoes tell

  The name of that city before she fell?

  Ah no! I can hear its cry, its bell,

  But never its fabulous name!

  TIGRINA is one of several pen names used by the American editor, author, and singer-songwriter Edith Eyde (b. Edythe Eyde in 1921). Eyde grew up on an apricot ranch in Fremont, California, where she studied violin. In 1945, after two years of college and a secretarial course, she relocated to Los Angeles and took on work as a secretary at RKO studios. By that time Eyde was already an active participant in the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, where she was nicknamed Tigrina by her good friend and writing partner, Forrest J Ackerman. As Tigrina, Eyde published Hymn to Satan (the first fanzine dedicated to filk, or SF and fantasy music), served as an associate editor of the Detroit-based SF fanzine the Mutant, and wrote poetry and stories (some coauthored with Ackerman) for a number of other amateur genre publications.

  While Eyde’s involvement with SF fandom did not lead to a career as a professional SF writer, it had a profound influence on her work as a pioneering lesbian journalist. When Eyde came out in 1946, she drew upon her experience with fanzine culture to produce and distribute Vice Versa, the first publication in the world devoted to lesbian issues.8 Vice Versa ran for more than ten years and, as the media historian Rodger Streitmatter argues, its provocative mix of editorials, book and movie reviews, and SF stories “set the agenda that has dominated lesbian and gay journalism for fifty years” (2). When Vice Versa folded in 1958, Eyde took the pen name Lisa Ben (an anagram for “lesbian”) and became a journalist for the Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian magazine.9 In 1972 Eyde was formally honored by the gay rights organization ONE, Inc., for the creation of Vice Versa. Since then she has appeared in numerous documentaries, including the 1984 film Before Stonewall. In 1997 Eyde was honored as a founding member of the Los Angeles LGBT community, and in 2010 she was inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association Hall of Fame.

  Given the influence of SF fandom on her career as a lesbian journalist, it is no surprise that Eyde explores LGBT themes in her speculative poetry. While SF writers rarely included out LGBT characters or worlds founded on alternative modes of sexuality until the advent of New Wave and feminist SF in the 1960s, the SF author and editor Nicola Griffith argues that LGBT readers (and writers) have a certain affinity with the mutants, aliens, and other outsider characters found in speculative fiction because “in a largely heterosexual society we are, after all, often treated as aliens” (7). This certainly seems to be true of Tigrina’s “Affinity” and “Defiance,” both of which sympathetically depict vampires and witches as brave outsiders in search of a like-minded community. In many ways, Tigrina’s poems seem to pay homage to Weird Tales veterans Dorothy Quick and Leah Bodine Drake, both of whom regularly featured strong, supernaturally talented women in their weird verse (for further discussion, see the entries on Quick and Drake in this anthology). But while their association with the paranormal sometimes destroys Quick’s heroines and Drake’s protagonists ally themselves with preternatural men, the women of Tigrina’s worlds survive persecution by forming bonds with one another across space and time. As such, her poems anticipate the kinds of stories told today by Elizabeth Lynn, Mercedes Lackey, and the dozens of authors featured in Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel’s award-winning Bending the Landscape anthology series.