Years ago, an author whose name I can’t recall wrote a story about a man who saw the essence of people as the animals they most resembled, only to discover than his fiancée resembled a very predatory feline… and he, figuratively, had feathers. Along the same line, one of my daughters has observed that while dogs are generally loyal, cats are opportunists. Having both cats and dogs, I’d agree with her observation… and to some degree to the idea put forth in the story whose title and author I cannot remember.

Others, obviously, must share those thoughts, or why would a general’s nickname be “mad dog” and why are some women termed “catty” and some men “mongrels” or “birdbrains” or “cold fish”? In fact, I found several internet sites that list scores of animal names purported to be those applied to acquaintances of the lister, which ranged from the relatively understandable, i.e., mule, jackrabbit, honey bee, bull, and squirrel, to some that, shall we say, were a little more exotic – snake, whistlepig, shadface… and a few unsuitable for print, at least in my view.

Of course, given that we share a certain amount of DNA with all mammals and lesser amount with virtually all living creatures, it’s not totally improbable that there are some vague resemblances… or that we think there are. Or that we’d like to impute unfavorable ones to certain individuals. I know one individual who is referred to as “Sir Hiss” – not favorably – by certain of his relations because his slinky superficial charm conceals a great amount of disguised venom.

This is a long-standing human tradition. In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare compared one male character, simultaneously, to the lion, the bear, and the elephant, and in Othello, came up with the description of a supposedly faithless woman’s tears as crocodile tears. In The Comedy of Errors, Dromio is termed a snail and a slug.

Many, many years ago, when I was a teenager [yes, that long ago], there was a rock ‘n roll song that was the number one country single by the Everly Brothers, entitled “Bird Dog,” with the lines, among others, “Hey, bird dog, get away from my quail/ Hey, bird dog, you’re on the wrong trail…”

And, of course, in one of the earliest commentaries on male proclivities, in Homer’s Odyssey, the enchantress Circe turns most of Odysseus’s crew into swine after a banquet, but the wily Odysseus charms her and gets his crew back, but it takes him a year before he can break away from her enchantments and resume his voyage homeward [I wonder if he ever mentioned that to his wife, faithful Penelope].

Oh… as for the science fiction story, the young man found another fiancée, one who was a love bird like him, and they ended up very happy.

Possibly because a high percentage of science fiction and fantasy authors don’t always fit comfortably into “conventional” roles in society, an equally high percentage of F&SF is about outsiders or some sort or people who fit poorly into the society in which they find themselves. Yet how many “outsiders” are there? What percentage of people don’t really fit?

That all depends on the degree of “outsiderness.” Certainly, at least some members of the Society for Creative Anachronism [SCA] feel different enough from U.S. society that they participate in SCA events and pay dues – but the paid membership of the SCA is about 30,000, or less than 1/1000 of one percent, and these are individuals who, for the most part, are anything but total outsiders, most of whom fit without obvious notice into society. A darker kind of outsider is represented by the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership is estimated at between five and ten thousand. But, as members of groups, are these individuals really “outsiders”?

Certainly, historically speaking, while true individual “outsiders” may be striking figures, they seldom threaten societies as a whole and almost never change them. While Jesus and Mohammed were outsiders, what changed societies as a result of their preaching and doctrines was their converts. Once someone has thousands or millions of converts, that individual is no longer an outsider, but a competing cultural force.

Another kind of outsider is the “inside-outsider,” the individual who is apparently part of a culture, but who perceives it, or some part of it, in a very different fashion than almost anyone else. In the 1930s England, one could have cast Winston Churchill in that role. He’d been disgraced by the Gallipoli disaster in WWI, and he had very few supporters within the British government, especially given his unwelcome warnings about Adolf Hitler at a time when no one wanted to listen. In a way, one could also categorize Bill Gates initially as an “inside-outsider.”

Then there are outsiders who create their own groups to challenge the status quo. Certainly, Dorrin in The Magic Engineer is an outsider at the beginning. Even his friends don’t understand or appreciate his obsession with machines and devices. Creslin in The Towers of the Sunset is clearly a total outsider, almost from birth, but he can’t accomplish much of any lasting significance until he can enlist others and build support.

The reason I bring this up is because in life (and as it should be even in F&SF) a true outsider who stays an outside can do little except create mayhem against a limited number of people. To do any more than that requires resources, comrades/accomplices, and supporters… and anyone who’s developed all that isn’t truly an outsider. Harry Potter isn’t the outsider; Voldemort is.

I have to confess that I’m a bit of a cynic about the “New Year,” as I am when someone hypes something as “the newest and greatest.” Just because the annual calendar starts over doesn’t really change anything. We’re all just a day older than we were twenty-four hours earlier, even if it is officially 2018, instead of 2017. The extra weight I gained from excessive holiday consumption didn’t magically vanish, nor will it, new year or not.

I’m also not happy about another phenomenon that I’ve observed about “new years.” They seem to come faster than they used to. When I was very young, the month of December seemed to last years. Now, it’s come and gone before I know it, and the deadline on my next book appears to be rushing toward me, without my having written all that’s necessary to meet it. Realistically, that’s not quite so, but it’s the way it feels. When you’re young, it seems as though you have time, rushed as you may be. I still feel rushed, but it’s clear I’ll never have enough time to write everything I want to write.

Being a curmudgeon about the “new year,” I also find I have fewer grand expectations about change, especially unbounded change for good. Once upon a time, I thought we might have regular space travel, at least to the moon, in my lifetime, and supersonic commercial air travel. The first is looking more and more unlikely, even if I live another thirty years, and the second may be possible, but only for the very rich, simply because of the “dismal science” of economics, and the requirement that greater expenditure of resources is necessary to move a given amount of mass at higher and higher speeds, but all the rosy expectations of my youth in these areas ran afoul of the results of Einstein’s now-effectively-proven [or so far not disproven] theories.

For similar reasons, some things won’t happen in 2018. There won’t be a huge increase in clean vehicles or in non-polluting power plants. Nor will there be any significant increase in coal-mining jobs or U.S. steel plants. That’s not because of politics or sinister acts by one side or the other, but because great changes in existing systems and industries require advance planning and extensive economic support… neither of which is forthcoming.

Some good things will happen in 2018, but they likely won’t be anything I, or almost anyone else, will be able to predict, because anything good requires change, and change upsets those whose position is dependent on the status quo. So visible change for good, such as a better and more workable health care system or further significant reining in of the patriarchal power structure, will have to come from unforeseen developments below the radar of the establishment. The good aspect of this is that American society is varied enough that some changes for good will occur. The bad aspect is that there won’t be as many as there could be.

But then my cynicism may just be the result of years of collision of my fundamental optimism with reality.

From both the comments on the blog and essays and comments elsewhere, it strikes me that, first, at least a few well-read individuals share my concerns about “modern” poetry and “second, that a great many current poetry editors and poets have made a value judgment that’s not necessarily supported by either history or logic. That judgment, stated in various ways, is that rhyme and metrical language are artificial and antagonistic to natural speech and therefore any obvious meter or rhyme is, in effect, “bad” or “less” because it is unnatural.

Yet all speech that that differs from that of the speaker can be called unnatural.

Moreover, the fantastic and bizarre images, or the convoluted word pictures and contrasts that inhabit a high percentage of the free verse that sprawls or creeps across the pages of literary and poetry magazines is anything but natural or unforced.

So structuring rhyme and meter is unnatural… or forced… but twisting words and metaphors is not?

And… what ever happened to one of the bases of poetry, the rhythmic and metrical dimension?

What I’m seeing and hearing is that it has been abandoned because it’s often badly done. Perhaps that’s because too many would-be poets don’t have the skill and/or vocabulary to write poetry with a rhythmic and metrical dimension… or because too many readers can’t or won’t take the time to really “read” a poem. Or even because metrically structured language somehow puts people off.

But whatever the reason for this change, I object to the idea that a word picture or metaphorical construct or any other structure of words without a rhythmic and metrical dimension can be termed poetry. As I wrote before, true poetry is expressed in patterned, rhythmic language, even when it is not strictly rhymed.

Anything else is just word-play with images, elaborate or sparse as it may be, even if it appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, or The Atlantic Monthly.

According to the doubtless outdated Sixth Edition of A Handbook to Literature, “poetry” is defined as “a term applied to the many forms in which human beings have given rhythmic expression to their most intense perceptions of the world…. The first characteristic of poetry, from the viewpoint of form, is rhythm…marked by a regularity far surpassing that of prose.” The discussion of poetry goes on to note that poetry is marked by “variety in uniformity, a shifting of rhythms that, nevertheless, return to the basic pattern.”

In short, poetry is patterned, rhythmic language, even when it is not strictly rhymed.

Last year, I read and clipped every poem from The New Yorker, except from one issue that vanished while we were on vacation. Exactly one from the ninety seven poems had a discernable rhyme scheme. A handful had internal rhyme schemes. Most had minimal alliteration, and most were essentially free verse, with largely iambic rhythms and irregular line breaks, presumably for either punctuation or emphasis.

The entire point of every one of them was to convey some sort of image and/or philosophical point. To my personal way of thinking, not a single one was memorable, and none of them stuck in my thoughts or mind.

I’ve also read the poetry in The Atlantic Monthly and in various literary magazines and current anthologies… and the vast majority of what is widely published today appears to fall into the “intense image” or “incident in life creating meaning” model, with very little, if any rhythmic support or rhyme.

Like so much in current life, poetry has become “of the moment,” to be read, momentarily enjoyed or considered, and then discarded.

And one of the reasons why it will be discarded is that those “vivid images” need rhythmic aids and/or rhyme for people to remember them. That’s one reason why rhymed song lyrics are far easier to remember… and why almost all the “modern” poets will vanish as if they’d never been.