In Memoriam: Bruce Boston

Bruce Boston: an Appreciation

by Mary A. Turzillo

Bruce Boston

Bruce David Boston, emperor of the weird, the esoteric, the absurd.  Once a year at least, my husband Geoffrey Landis and I would sit around the table in his and Marge Simon’s house in Ocala, drinking wine and eating cheesecake or dried fruit.  The conversations were esoteric, comical, scandalous, divine.  There were other meetings, although as years went by, Bruce became more retiring and skipped Conference on the Fantastic, where he’d been a Creative, and other conferences where he would have been lionized, and even StokerCon.

            There was no one like Bruce.  His work was galactic and personal and so so unlike anything else ever written.  He did a lot of unpaid editorial, mentoring, art, and design work, too.  An amazing man, a poet of unique stature and a crafty, frolicsome, iconoclastic fiction writer. At the same time, he was an unforgettable human being, wry and full of high wisdom.   We will not see his equal again.

            As a very young fan, I discovered Bruce through his collaborations with Robert Frazier in the Mutant Rain Forest poems. And what a world the mutant rain forest was.  Of course that work just led me to look at his non-collaborations. 

I don’t think anybody has read ALL of his work–his isfdb page is daunting; it takes 22 pages of very fine script to print out. I’ve followed him for decades, and I’ve reviewed several of his collections. Right now, Geoff is half-way through reading the new edition of Stained Glass Rain.  The scope of Bruce’s work is hard to gather in a concise essay, and I have no intention of trying.

            Together, Geoff and I socialized with Bruce through many dinners and late night skull sessions, but most of all through those delicious yearly evenings hosted by his wife Marge Simon and himself in Ocala. Two Grandmasters at the same table.  He was witty, sly, immensely insightful of poetry itself and of the world and practitioners of speculative poetry. 

            His fiction (see, for example, his fiction collection Gallimaufry) demonstrated Dada influences, as well as Beatnik, Surrealism, and the New Weird. And I was not surprised to learn that as a very young writer (early 30’s) he was awarded the Pushcart award for his story “Broken Portraiture.”

            Some jewels in Bruce’s poetic crown: he had an astonishing, Herculean vocabulary.  I don’t know if his IQ was ever tested, but I suspect that it was very high, especially in the linguistic realm.  He never selected just the “right” word–it was never merely the right word, but also the unexpected, a little crack in reality that led a reader to realms beyond the page–and beyond the mundane world.  

            As to poetic form, I would often read one of his poems and think it was rhymed verse.  But it wasn’t.  Bruce was so deft that you thought he was writing tight, clean quatrains whereas his skillful wit had created exquisite, balletic free verse.  Dancing.  Singing. 

            Bruce was also a talented editor, commentator, and skilled designer.  He designed the cover of Lovers and Killers, my Elgin-awarded poetry collection.   Several times he created and designed bookmarks for collaborations by Marge and me.  One of his most remarked-upon was for Lovers & Killers, which featured a woman’s foot in a sexy high heel, to go with my poem “St. Theresa and the Fuck-Me Shoes.” His sense of humor complemented his wit and genius.

            Some might be surprised to know that Bruce was deeply romantic, a devout believer in long-term, marital love, His first wife, Maureen, passed away as a result of kidney disease, ending their 22 year relationship.  His poem “My Wife Returns as She Would Have It,” won the 2001 Rhysling award. In the poem Maureen returns as a Red Admiral butterfly: “a quick flutter of velvet wings/dark against the pale dome of the sky.” 

            For Bruce, meeting and bonding with Marge Simon was the anodyne to his grief, and their marriage in 2001 cemented a deep love affair with Marge, who shared so much in terms of intellect and literary skill with him.

            His interest in marriage as a human institution was wittily demonstrated in his poems with personae as wives of various weird beings, as for example his  Rhysling winning “Curse of the Shapeshifter’s Wife.”  There are at least fifty of them, published with droll wit over the years.  And I believe they showed Bruce’s ability to see marriage, and a wife’s side of marriage, in speculative, witty, fantastic way. 

            He also collaborated with Marge in fiction and poetry, an intimacy only such alliances can so deeply foster.  

            Later in life, Bruce expressed disappointment that his work had not reached a larger audience.  He did live long enough to see the publication of a splendid second edition of his literary novel of the 60’s, Stained Glass Rain.  I think he would have been mollified by the huge outpouring of praise heaped upon his work after his departure from this world. 

            There was no one else like Bruce.  His work was galactic and personal and so unlike anything else ever written.  An amazing man, a poet of unique stature and a clever, roistering luminary.