Prof. Timothy Miller Introduces Five "New" Poems of James Tiptree, Jr. / Alice Sheldon

With the permission of the Tiptree estate, Professor Timothy Miller has published five "new" poems of James Tiptree, Jr. / Alice Sheldon (née Bradley). The poems had previously only appeared in an undergraduate literary magazine at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1930s, decades before Tiptree/Sheldon would begin her career as a science fiction writer.

The poems are preceded by Prof. Miller's introduction and commentary. An excerpt:

Overall, the poems, with their delight in formal experimentation and their mimicry of high modernist obscurity, paint a portrait of a young woman who at the time perhaps aspired to become the next Gertrude Stein or H. D. rather than the speculative fiction writer whose career began over three decades later with a first short story publication in a 1968 issue of Analog. All the same, a few allusions in them betray a familiarity with and interest in the contents of early issues of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines […]. We can conclude from a quick look at the poems that, in some sense, Tiptree had in fact also been a ‘weird’ writer for nearly as long as she had been a fan, with the tentacle monsters and robots on the covers of pulp magazines creeping into her ambitious experimental poetry.

The poems and Miller's commentary are in an article titled '"Here we see our friends sprouting tentacles": Some New Poems from the Juvenilia of James Tiptree, Jr. / Alice Sheldon née Bradley*' that appears in ContactZone, issue 1.

 

 

 

Alice Sheldon in January 1946 as appeared in the Chicago Tribune; (image via Wikimedia Commons; public domain.