Jon Stone's Blog: Stray Bulletin

"I goon-march and glide", Part 3

With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent now well-and-truly arrived, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. This is the last of three parts, released substantially later than the first two!

Part 1: Events! | Part 2: Reviews & Critical Writing! | Part 3: New Work!

I write a lot. I just don’t publish a lot — of my own work, that is. Partly because much of it takes a long, long time to fully crystallise — I’m still regularly pulling up and rethinking poems that were first drafted well over a decade ago. But also, I find I drift further and further from the general trend. Easy, I know, to fixate on what doesn’t suit you and disparagingly label it ‘the general trend’, but I think it’s not unkind or too reductive to say that the majority of poetry sought and published by English-language editors today constitutes first-hand accounts of relatable experiences taking place in something like the real contemporary world, in which the poet — or someone you can well believe is the poet — is reassuringly present.

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You don’t have to look far, of course, to find complaints about UK poetry being dominated by identity politics. But if we only slightly expand that category to include any poem which revolves around, or circles back to, a persona of the poet conveying something of their values, then I suspect most complainants are caught in their own net.

Work of a different kind is permitted, even celebrated, but less readily, I sense, when the editor or critic does not know the poet from Adam. On the performance circuit, you do find more in the way of fantastical conceits — these, however, are mostly either comically ludicrous or intended as satire. The ‘general trend’, as far as there is one, is surely to look on poetry as, primarily, a performance of the self.

Tiny Assassins

So what do I think I’m doing that’s so damned different?

Well, one thing I’ve done this summer is make four more A8 microbooks to sell blind-bagged for £2 at book fairs. Each one is made of a single piece of A4 paper, folded and cut into a booklet, held together with a cover jacket folded from an A6 sheet. They’re tiny examples of ‘amalgamatic writing’, in that the contents are a mixture of quotes from various media, very short scholarly extracts, lists and poetry.

The theme for this latest set is ‘Action Princesses’ — a short explanation on the inner back page reads “exploring cult evocations of feminine power and sexuality”. I wrote one new piece for each book, and all of them are the kind of poems I would estimate as having a close-to-zero chance of being considered by editors of most journals. They’re mostly in third-person, and where there’s a speaker, it’s definitely not me. They also belong utterly to the cult genres their protagonists inhabit, even as they (mildly) spoof them. There’s no zoom-out to Cambridge, UK, 2025. This is from ‘Space Princesses’:

One is pinned by her skirt to a cosmic dartboard.
One is lashed by her heart to a handsome meathead.
One is trapped in a shrinking skintight spacesuit.
One is frogged, one spatchcocked, sputnikked, splayed out.
Not for long, though – nothing can hold them forever.
No beam, no jaw, no kiss rolled over and over.

See what I mean? The 21st century’s rejection of b-movie mash-up is Caliban’s fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

Booze Boutique

I have managed to find the odd piece a home. One appears in a wonderful little journal of “computational poetry and literary art” called Taper. Their restrictions on submissions are extreme: “All code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be placed between the template’s closing header tag () and the closing body tag (

"I goon-march and glide", Part 2

With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s continue with:

Part 1: Events! | Part 2: Reviews & Critical Writing! | Part 3: New Work!

I know I keep saying it but … I’d love to have more time to review books and write critically. Writing critically about something is a way of wading into it, thinking your way through it, adding something to it. I’ve got pages of notes towards reviews that never materialise. The beating heart of poetry criticism in the UK, meanwhile, is blogs and small-circulation journals —outside of this, it isn’t encouraged very widely or enthusiastically. Even among those who speak passionately of reinvigorating it, too many seem to approach criticism as part sorting machine (a way of ordering books into a hierarchy of quality), part ritualistic act of obeisance, whereby critics contribute to the aura of respectability enjoyed by a heroic figure.

And yes, I complain about this too often as well, but it disturbs me to see people of my own age talking, almost vindictively, about ‘sorting the wheat from chaff’ or lamenting a failure to recognise ‘great poets’ in this, an age of untold poetic abundance. They’ve benefited from a rich vein of work they value … but seemingly won’t be satisfied until their personal choices and tastes are allowed to supersede others’. I’m tempted to say that a golden rule of reading poetry should be that if you don’t sometimes come round to liking something you initially felt cool towards, or wind up disappointed in something you expected to knock your socks off, then you need to rethink your angle of attack. Anyway.

ノo_o)

My published reviews so far this year are thin on the ground: P.W. Bridgman’s The World You Now Own (reviewed for London Grip) was passed on by another reviewer who was indisposed. This can be a risky job to take on — what if you can’t productively connect with the book in question in any way? Luckily, I found Bridgman’s voice to be a ‘gentlemanly presence’ in a well-rounded and skilfully written volume:

The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into “Our Better Selves”, “Our Lesser Selves” and “Our Contemptible Selves”, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.

A little later, I submitted a review of Alex Mazey’s Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition to Tristram Fane Saunders’ new magazine The Little Review. As its name suggests, TLR is particularly dedicated to criticism. There’s poetry as well, but all poets who submit work must also include a review of something recent — I wish this policy were more widespread.

Ghost Lives impressed me a lot — more than half the book is made up of ASCII art poems featuring a character called Ghost. It sustains the atmosphere of a somewhat abandoned, neon-and-rainfall-spattered late-night-bar district throughout. I’ve written a follow-up review of another Bad Betty title — we’ll see if, when and how that one emerges.

Volcanoes, supernovas etc.

How about this for an even shorter section? The only article I’ve published this year outside of personal blog entries is a brisk dive into time loop video games, via Retorisk Arena, a Danish online journal focusing on rhetoric and communication. The brief was: don’t slip into academic jargon. Mission accomplished, I think? I talked about Outer Wilds, an already much-beloved sci-fi time loop game set in a tiny galaxy, and two less well-known titles: The Forbidden City and Pocket Watch.

One might reasonably infer, therefore, that the time loop had been invented as an ingenious solution to the problem of video games jolting players out of their stories whenever the protagonist – their avatar – anticlimactically snuffs it. Instead of having the player artificially retread the same story beats, like someone who’s lost their place in a book, a time loop game follows the lives of one or more characters who are themselves trapped in a temporal circuit. Certain events and interactions recur, but it is the protagonist/s – not just the player – who negotiates encounters differently with each visit, and in so doing learns more about the world and their place in it.

My conclusion? Interactive time loops might just be better at representing certain aspects of modern experience than chronologically coherent narratives.

They added a little drawing of me, which means I’m two for two, ‘24-’25. Can I keep it going?Barbarian Yellow Crane

What else for this part of the three-part catch-up post? Well, I’ve joined the editorial board of Jordan Magnusson’s Game Poems Magazine, and a chunk of my summer was spent reviewing and discussing with my fellow editors the various submissions for the first issue, due out later this month.

What kind of work is being published? Terminology around the field of poetry-game crossover is still fluid, but Jordan’s term ‘game poems’ roughly maps onto my term ‘poetic games’ from Dual Wield. So: video games that are primarily lyrical, seeking to express or explore a subjective experience through their mechanics and/or audio-visual systems, ideally without too much emphasis on narrative. Most are the work of individual game developers, very short — a few minutes from beginning to end — and either focus on a particular moment in time or offer up an entirely figurative landscape.

As well as those submitted to the journal, many are shared by their authors on the Game Poems Discord. Here are a few recent ones I’ve looked into:

Kibble, by Andre Almo — a brief account of feeding a (stray?) dog. It takes the of-replicated bomb-catching mechanic from Kaboom! (1981) and uses it to represent how fragments of memory must be caught and accumulated in the telling of even a simple story, via the image of dogfood and bowl.

The Sun Lights Up by Jack Kutilek — Based on a monostitch by John Wills (“the sun lights up a distant ridge another” is the entire poem), this game poem comprises three scenes and a soundtrack. You can take it very slowly if you like. As in the poem, one ridge, then another is lit up, but only if the player moves their tiny avatar along the road — as if to say that for sunlight to appear to ‘strike’ something majestically, there must be a witness moving through time.

A dying snake by Koway — This is a neat inversion of a very familiar game mechanic that lends it pathos; it’s Snake, except the snake gets shorter and the game gets slower, until there’s no snake left. A single note rings out at the moment of each collision, suggestive of softening footsteps or gradually dimming senses.

黃鶴楼 by PublicDomainFriend — I’m not entirely sure whether this is offered as a game poem, a translation (of a Mao Zedong poem), a tech demo, or all three at once, but it simulates the process of translating from Chinese in a novel way, pushing the player to click through multiple possibilities in order to assemble an English version of the work, using a single line of framing narrative to suggest the experience as an autobiographical retelling.

The Sun Lights Up was made in Bitsy, an incredibly beginner-friendly game engine!

End of Part 2.

"I goon-march and glide", Part 1

With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s begin with:

Part 1: Events! | Part 2: Reviews & Critical Writing! | Part 3: New Work!

I’ve never considered events-organising to be my strong suit — let alone drumming up an audience, generating anticipation, compering an evening’s entertainment. But I have ideas, access to rooms, equipment and noticeboards, students who need opportunities to perform, and now a number of friends and colleagues who are as eager as I am to build a busy poetry scene in Cambridge. So this year, I’ve been involved (in some capacity) with an almost overwhelming number of live readings and gatherings, while managing a growing mailing list of interested parties.

Thanks for reading Stray Bulletin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

(The mailing list is driving me up the wall, by the way — it keeps dropping people I know I’ve added!)

Spread the jam

To start, there have been three more Future Karaoke lit jams: Memories and Dreams (that is, poems and stories inspired by time travel tales); Mixology (poems and stories inspired by classic cocktails) and Brew It Up! (poems and stories inspired by Milton Brewery Beers, which themselves happen to be named after mythological figures). The latter two were held in, respectively, a restaurant and a pub, so gave rise to a rowdier, sort of ‘round-the-campfire’ atmosphere as we entered the late spring/summer months.

Emma Gant reading at Future Karaoke: Mixology at d’Arry’s Restaurant in April

We’re returning to the ARU Recital Hall for the next one (Major Arcana) in early October, while the Future Karaoke brand/event format is also spreading to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, under the stewardship of my former student, Lisa Sargeant, which is very exciting.

“Feather — Stone”

We’ve also had readings from poets with brand new books to promote, kicking off with Yang Lian and Yo-Yo in March. I hadn’t seen Yang Lian perform since Poetry Parnassus, a huge global poetry event at the Southbank Centre that was occasioned by the 2012 London Olympic. Not to repeat the publicity all over again, but he currently lives in exile after rising to prominence in China in the late 1970s. Yo-Yo, his partner, is a writer of short fiction, as a painter.

The event was multilingual; the writers read in their native language, and we were joined by their translators, Brian Holton and Callisto Searle (Brian via Teams link — he serenaded us with guitar during the set-up). We booked the big lecture hall for this one, and all books were sold!

Yang Lian read from the Chinese edition of A Tower Built Downwards

Not long after, we hosted Rebecca Watts, Claudine Toutoungi and Matt Howard, who performed individual sets before coming together on stage for a ‘poetry Q&A’, where I asked three carefully crafted questions, and each responded with a current or back-catalogue poem. I then had to dash to the bookstall with my new card machine, since the audience were, again, very keen.

I know Rebecca and Claudine well — Matt I met more recently. All are lovely — they’re very different writers and readers, but in a way that mixed extremely well.

L-R: Rebecca Watts, Matt Howard, Claudine Toutoungi (one Bloodaxe and two Carcanet poets)The Winding Road

2025 happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Cambridge Poetry Festival, and I’ve joined a committee dedicated to bringing it back, headed up by Angus Allman, the host of the monthly CB1 Poetry night. Sadly, we couldn’t put our ducks in a row in time to bring back the full festival this year. Instead, we rolled together a number of chronologically and spatially dispersed events under the CPF banner and promoted them with a hastily whipped-together brochure.

A few of the CPF 50th anniversary brochures dropped off at Cambridge University’s English Faculty

These included: a reading from Theophilus Kwek at Magdalene College — which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend — and a one-off anniversary reading at the new refurbished Pembroke Auditorium, uniting contemporary poets with some of those who read at the original 1975 and 1977 festivals and celebrating the work of these older poets in particular, including those — like John Ashbery, Ted Hughes, Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Roy Fisher — who’re no longer with us. This attracted about 100 attendees — a good sign for the future of the festival.

The final event listed in the brochure was Summer in the Square: actually a broader, month-long event organised by Cambridge Bid which we were invited to take part in. That involved coming up with poetry games that would be of interest to passers-by, since we were set up under a marquee outside the station and left to our own devices for a few hours. No need to overdo it, of course; I made a simple racing game, with counters and dice, using quotes from various poems, and brought along a mix-and-match-the-couplet exercise — to which another former student Freya Sacksen (also a trustee of the Festival, and an endlessly inventive poet in their own right) ably contributed.

On the other side of the sign: an incomplete D. H. Lawrence poem that guests were invited to finish …“I need ya, Deck.”

Finally for now I’ll mention the Transmedia Reading Club, which is reaching all the way back into April again. I came up with this as a way to generate some kind of active exchange between the different arts-related departments of the university, so that this image of excitable cross-medial conversation might then be promoted image to the wider public. The idea is simple: meet to discuss three different artefacts, each in a different medium, united by a theme. The first theme was Retro/Future Noir and we’re following this up with Gothic Americana in October.

Happily, it required only minimal organisation — a room, a flyer, a mailout — and was designed to work with a small number of attendees. I’m not sure how the format should change if it grows in popularity — so far, we’ve simply sat in a large circle working through some very general questions and opinions.

I briefly covered the two spring Sidekick launches in the last Stray Bulletin; I haven’t included here the cross-university open mic or any of the events where I was reading/giving a talk myself, but this seems a good point to draw a line under Part 1.

Thanks for reading Stray Bulletin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

"I goon march and glide", Part 1

With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s begin with:

Part 1: Events! | Part 2: Reviews & Critical Writing! | Part 3: New Work!

I’ve never considered events-organising to be my strong suit — let alone drumming up an audience, generating anticipation, compering an evening’s entertainment. But I have ideas, access to rooms, equipment and noticeboards, students who need opportunities to perform, and now a number of friends and colleagues who are as eager as I am to build a busy poetry scene in Cambridge. So this year, I’ve been involved (in some capacity) with an almost overwhelming number of live readings and gatherings, while managing a growing mailing list of interested parties.

Thanks for reading Stray Bulletin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

(The mailing list is driving me up the wall, by the way — it keeps dropping people I know I’ve added!)

Spread the jam

To start, there have been three more Future Karaoke lit jams: Memories and Dreams (that is, poems and stories inspired by time travel tales); Mixology (poems and stories inspired by classic cocktails) and Brew It Up! (poems and stories inspired by Milton Brewery Beers, which themselves happen to be named after mythological figures). The latter two were held in, respectively, a restaurant and a pub, so gave rise to a rowdier, sort of ‘round-the-campfire’ atmosphere as we entered the late spring/summer months.

Emma Gant reading at Future Karaoke: Mixology at d’Arry’s Restaurant in April

We’re returning to the ARU Recital Hall for the next one (Major Arcana) in early October, while the Future Karaoke brand/event format is also spreading to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, under the stewardship of my former student, Lisa Sargeant, which is very exciting.

“Feather — Stone”

We’ve also had readings from poets with brand new books to promote, kicking off with Yang Lian and Yo-Yo in March. I hadn’t seen Yang Lian perform since Poetry Parnassus, a huge global poetry event at the Southbank Centre that was occasioned by the 2012 London Olympic. Not to repeat the publicity all over again, but he currently lives in exile after rising to prominence in China in the late 1970s. Yo-Yo, his partner, is a writer of short fiction, as a painter.

The event was multilingual; the writers read in their native language, and we were joined by their translators, Brian Holton and Callisto Searle (Brian via Teams link — he serenaded us with guitar during the set-up). We booked the big lecture hall for this one, and all books were sold!

Yang Lian read from the Chinese edition of A Tower Built Downwards

Not long after, we hosted Rebecca Watts, Claudine Toutoungi and Matt Howard, who performed individual sets before coming together on stage for a ‘poetry Q&A’, where I asked three carefully crafted questions, and each responded with a current or back-catalogue poem. I then had to dash to the bookstall with my new card machine, since the audience were, again, very keen.

I know Rebecca and Claudine well — Matt I met more recently. All are lovely — they’re very different writers and readers, but in a way that mixed extremely well.

L-R: Rebecca Watts, Matt Howard, Claudine Toutoungi (one Bloodaxe and two Carcanet poets)The Winding Road

2025 happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Cambridge Poetry Festival, and I’ve joined a committee dedicated to bringing it back, headed up by Angus Allman, the host of the monthly CB1 Poetry night. Sadly, we couldn’t put our ducks in a row in time to bring back the full festival this year. Instead, we rolled together a number of chronologically and spatially dispersed events under the CPF banner and promoted them with a hastily whipped-together brochure.

A few of the CPF 50th anniversary brochures dropped off at Cambridge University’s English Faculty

These included: a reading from Theophilus Kwek at Magdalene College — which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend — and a one-off anniversary reading at the new refurbished Pembroke Auditorium, uniting contemporary poets with some of those who read at the original 1975 and 1977 festivals and celebrating the work of these older poets in particular, including those — like John Ashbery, Ted Hughes, Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Roy Fisher — who’re no longer with us. This attracted about 100 attendees — a good sign for the future of the festival.

The final event listed in the brochure was Summer in the Square: actually a broader, month-long event organised by Cambridge Bid which we were invited to take part in. That involved coming up with poetry games that would be of interest to passers-by, since we were set up under a marquee outside the station and left to our own devices for a few hours. No need to overdo it, of course; I made a simple racing game, with counters and dice, using quotes from various poems, and brought along a mix-and-match-the-couplet exercise — to which another former student Freya Sacksen (also a trustee of the Festival, and an endlessly inventive poet in her own right) ably contributed.

On the other side of the sign: an incomplete D. H. Lawrence poem that guests were invited to finish …“I need ya, Deck.”

Finally for now I’ll mention the Transmedia Reading Club, which is reaching all the way back into April again. I came up with this as a way to generate some kind of active exchange between the different arts-related departments of the university, so that this image of excitable cross-medial conversation might then be promoted image to the wider public. The idea is simple: meet to discuss three different artefacts, each in a different medium, united by a theme. The first theme was Retro/Future Noir and we’re following this up with Gothic Americana in October.

Happily, it required only minimal organisation — a room, a flyer, a mailout — and was designed to work with a small number of attendees. I’m not sure how the format should change if it grows in popularity — so far, we’ve simply sat in a large circle working through some very general questions and opinions.

I briefly covered the two spring Sidekick launches in the last Stray Bulletin; I haven’t included here the cross-university open mic or any of the events where I was reading/giving a talk myself, but this seems a good point to draw a line under Part 1.

Thanks for reading Stray Bulletin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

"Low-gravity Fever"

In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, specially commissioned poems, it includes an appendix, in the form of an alternative timeline of Moon landings utilising characters from European comics, and images from James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.

Last week we launched the book in London at one of Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover readings at Senate House, hosted by the wonderful Briony Hughes. This week (tomorrow, that is), we’re doing a Cambridge launch at Waterstones, so as an extra little promotional push, here’s a list article, wherein I will introduce you to three more books of space poems, and deliver my run-down of the Top 5 space-themed Transformers.

Three more books of space poems1. Space Baby by Suzannah Evans (Nine Arches, 2022)

Kicking off with an epigraph by Edwin Morgan, one of the first poets to consciously attempt sci-fi poetry, Space Baby is full of poems that fuse astronomical imagery with earthbound scenarios: above a shopper laden with bags, Betelgeuse goes supernova, ‘lurid across the cosmos / like an overripe peach leaking / wet and gold’. Factions of poets — the ‘moon-purists’ and ‘moon-maximalists’ — start seeing moons wherever they go, while in ‘Cassini Love Poem’, the loss of a NASA probe, burning up on entry into Saturn’s atmosphere, becomes a metaphor for self-immolating infatuation.

Evans has a light touch; the poems are zippy and easy to follow, and there are some wonderfully lurid conceits (‘The Glacier Attends its Own Funeral as a Ghost’, ‘Inside Each Universe is Another Universe’, ‘The Dreaming Octopus Colour Chart’) fuelled by a host of intertextual and factual reference points. Here’s the second half of ‘Supermassive Black Hole’:

Above your head the dilating pupil of sky
will show you how everything turns out —
the pinkblue future of undiscovered galaxies
possibilities forking like lighting. The air
is treacly with gravity and you fold yourself
inside it — you chose this —
the rest of time will go on happening.

2. A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue) (Carcanet, 2001)

Elson was a scientist first and foremost — she worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in the 1990s, researching globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. A Responsibility to Awe was published posthumously, after her early death, and is made up of material gathered by her husband and close friend, including extracts from notebooks.

Science and poetry aren’t entirely incompatible, and some exciting projects have arisen from attempts to bring them together (see Simon Barraclough’s Laboratorio and Project Abeona, run by Andy Jackson, one of the poets featured in … Dark Side of the Moon). But there is something of a tension, since scientific writing aspires toward precision, literalness, practical conclusions, while poetry attempts to leave room, lean into the figurative, pose ever wider questions.

Elson’s grappling with this tension resulted in a singular voice — spare, for the most part, with quick turns, and a focus that rarely drifts from its chosen subject matter, instead pinning it in place. In the punchy ‘What if There Were No Moon'?’, she lists: “No bright nights / Occultations of the stars / No face / No moon songs”. There’s more than space poems here — moths, nuns and salmon are equally keenly observed, while eels and kites are deployed as metaphor — and like Evans, Elson worked hard to connect concepts from her astronomy research to everyday phenomena:

‘Dark Matter’

Above a pond
An unseen filament
Of spider’s floss
Suspends a slowly
Spinning leaf

3. Watcher of the Skies, edited by Rachel Piercy and Emma Wright (The Emma Press, 2016)

A children’s anthology, made eminently more readable both by Emma Wright’s simple, scratchy line illustrations and the plethora of accompanying notes supplied by University of Edinburgh’s Rachel Cochrane. Many of the poems are by adult-audience poets trying their hand at children’s writing, and while this can result in some clumsiness at times, it’s also freed the poets up to be sassier and more direct. Cheryl Moskowitz’s ‘The Algonquin Calendar of Changing Moons’ is mostly a gorgeous list poem (“Wolf Moon / Snow Moon / Worm Moon … Pink Moon / Flower Moon / Strawberry Moon”) while Inua Ellams delivers a lesson in basic astrophysics both teasingly and succinctly: “Everything we are is everything they were. / Everything they were is everything we are.”

I contributed to a short sequence of pastiches called ‘Poets in Space!’ which is also included in this book. Here’s my take on ‘The Thought Fox’:

‘Ted Hughes in Space’
Guest-starring Fox McCloud AKA Star Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s starfield:
Something else is blasting
Through the vacuum’s loneliness
Past the moonbase where my instruments tick.

Through my telescope I see no comet:
Something more near
With a flamier tail
Is entering the lunasphere.

Hot, hurtlingly as an asteroid,
A combat spaceship rips through dark;
Fine paws serve a moment, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Slips the ship between debris
And satellites, and neon laser fire
Lights up the sky and the cockpit
Where the pilot boldly plots his course

Through systems, his eye
A narrowing deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, pluckily
Striking at an evil empire

Till, with a sudden sharp shot, Star Fox
Is gone again into a hole in space.
The telescope is empty still. The instruments
Have gone crazy.

Top 5 space-themed Transformers5. Moonrock

Moonrock is a member of the Astro Squad, a ‘Micromaster Combiner Squad’, meaning his original 1990 toy was only a couple of inches tall in robot mode and transformed into the front half of a lunar missile transport vehicle. He’s made no appearances in any Transformers narrative media, so we only have a couple of back-of-the-box profiles to work off, but he sounds like something of a daydreamer and introspective philosopher, inclined to gaze at the stars all night long in wonder, or endlessly speculate on the nature of the universe.

Here’s a poem about Moonrock by Harry Man, part of my online Mechamorphoses project.

4. Cosmos

Cosmos, who transforms into a bright green Adamski flying saucer, sounds like cyborg Peter Lorre in the original Transformers cartoon. This was a deliberate choice on the part of his voice actor, Michael McConnohie, for reasons never elaborated upon. Because of his novel alt-mode, Cosmos is also a rather squat little robot with gorilla forearms and what appears to be a severe underbite — and since his job is orbital reconnaissance he spends most of his time on his lonesome, making him a rather eccentric character in the round.

Here’s a poem about Cosmos by Claire Trévien — another from the Mechamorphoses project.

3. Astrotrain

As the first major character to transform into a space shuttle, Astrotrain gets heavy rotation in Transformers media as a means of interplanetary transport. Yes — the other Transformers ride around inside him, despite him usually standing the same height as them in robot mode. Unfortunately, his original character profile failed to give him a distinctive personality, which means he’s taken on all sorts of odd roles within the various fictional continuities: a dim-witted petty schemer who tries to take over the world with an army of locomotives; an abused underling who turns against his master; a vengeful widower (?!?); and a non-sentient ‘devil train outa Perdition’.

His second alt-mode, as his name suggests, is a train, which means that if Transformers fiction aimed a few notches higher on the realism scale, he would face the choice of changing into a land vehicle which can only move in a straight line, or a flying vehicle which can’t leave the ground without the help of a solid rocket booster.

Astrotrain once visited the Moon, where he got into a fight with Omega Supreme, the Autobot titan.

2. Countdown

Countdown is another Micromaster, and has only very briefly featured in the stories. His character concept is outrageously good though; he’s a Cybertronian space explorer, landing on alien worlds long before the other Transformers characters and intervening in their politics, Flash Gordon style. As a result, the diminutive size of his 1989 toy and his minimal impact on Transformers lore stands in stark contrast to his standing on thousands of distant planets, where there are presumably statues of him and public holidays held in his honour.

The reason he’s so high up this list, however, is because he’s the only character in the franchise, to my knowledge, who transforms into a moon buggy.

Apparently his toy was a Woolworths exclusive in the UK.

1. Sky Lynx

Sky Lynx is ludicrous. He’s a space shuttle and NASA crawler-transporter that traverse space together and transform into a pair of creatures who share one conscience. The shuttle becomes something like a giant archaeopteryx, the transporter a blue puma with sleek golden head. These two forms can also join back together as a six-limbed monstrosity (a griffin?) that walks and flies, negating the need for the shuttle mode entirely.

Personality-wise, he’s constantly telling everyone how great he is, and providing commentary on his own escapades: “Everybody out! Another perfect flight completed by yours truly, Sky Lynx. Flawless, right down to the landing.”

Here’s a poem about Sky Lynx by my Sidekick co-editor, Kirsten Irving.

Source of all toys images: tfwiki.net

Mifune!

I went to see Rashomon at the cinema for my birthday last month, and it reminded me that I published a Toshiro Mifune poem in The Rialto going on for a decade ago. So I dug it out and rejigged it, trying to get an anagram of ‘oni’ onto the end of two thirds of the lines:

Mifune!

‘I saw a raging man.’ — Akira Kurosawa

We all feel the tug of oblivion:
black dot at the edge of the eye.
Few, though, circle it of their own volition.

One such is he, who is chain reaction
and hot (as in scorch-your-fingers) ghosty-boy
trapped in the fizzing television.

In pinstripe, in lacquer, stock-still or in motion,
wearing as crude neck jewellery
one bloodied arrow or a bag of ammunition,

part blizzard, part dog, cop-bandit-boss fusion,
beard a smear of iron filings and fury,
he rips at shadow and earth and fortification,

drags a belt of beaten silver bullion
through bristling rain to the mouth of the sky.
He’s tarsmoke. Sword a fresh-plucked pigeon pinion.

Human coruscation,
chorus of do-do-die,
hellion.

Blowing Open the Door on 2025

Out picking up ingredients for Christmas dinner, I made a last-minute impulse buy: a pair of blind-bagged Dungeons and Dragons Lego minifigs for me and my partner to crack open alongside our other presents. I’ve a soft spot for ‘what’s in the box’ toys, especially when it’s variations on a theme, especially when that theme has a tangential connection to something I’m working on — and minifigs don’t take up a lot of space.

When it came time to reveal the contents, I found myself putting together a sort of Mesoamerican priest, with robes of fiery orange, green and gold and a feathered mask. The figure ‘floated’ atop a transparent brick and carried a translucent cube or die with a diagram of a mountain range on one side. I wasn’t sure who or what it was meant to be, so I did a bit of research. To my delight, it turned out to be The Lady of Pain, an unseen background character from Planescape: Torment, one of my favourite games of the 90s. She’s the ruler of Sigil, City of Doors — a hub at the centre of the multiverse containing portals to every possible plane of existence. Not a human, not a god either — no one knows what she is. Her die is a ‘cubic gate’, a means of opening further interdimensional portals, and what I’d taken for feathers were, in fact, sparkling blades; those who meet her vanish onto a maze, or become covered in lacerations.

Strange choice for a children’s toy, but a perfect miniature totem for me, thinking back on the year just gone and where to turn my focus going forward! Gateways, doorways, nodes and connections — these have become increasingly important themes in my writing and teaching (eg. the titles of the last two pamphlets I brought to international conferences: Hidden Entrance and Steal Through the Gap in the Hedge). There’s good reason for this: everything that weighs on me, that is a cause for grave worry — the ongoing diminishment of the arts and instability of the university sector, the disastrous tepidity of centrist policymaking, the growing numbers needing support for illnesses and impairments, the racialised murder sprees sanctioned by my government, the toxicity of social media and so on — all of it is tied to a thinning of possibilities, a barricading of doors and filling in of passageways.

That is to say, the failure and volatility of market capitalism has produced louder and more frequent demands that we simply make do with less, stay in our individual pens and think of little beyond toiling away. Everything else is deemed frivolous and punishable. Conservative reactionaries, whose representatives keep securing stronger and more permanent footholds in power, are not shy about outlining their vision for civilisation: dramatically less emigration, education reduced to vocational training, no social safety net, no experimental art, no politics or philosophy in our entertainment media — no politics at all, in fact, outside of nationalist propaganda. The message is clear: we should no longer think of social improvement, except via those technological cures beloved of the culturally disengaged, which encourage emotional isolation and remove ever more autonomy from the workforce.

Not coincidentally, my third article for The Conversation — by far the most popular in terms of reads — was about the recent Porter and Machery study showing people can no longer tell the difference between AI poetry and that written by humans. The article is hopeful rather than angry; I dismiss the idea that there’s any threat to the existing demand for human-written poetry, paltry though that demand is. But the offensiveness of AI poetry doesn’t really have anything to do with how good the poetry is, or how easily it fools us; rather, it’s the very idea that poetry should be viewed as a product, an output. This makes it a matter of routine, something that might as well be done mechanically, as opposed to an engine or cognitive process, a way in which we generate new ideas and ways of thinking.

In turn, this makes me think of one of the books I finished reading toward the end of the year: Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, in which a fugitive discovers an island full of facsimile humans who play out the same sequence of actions every day. They turn out to be the solid-light projections of an advanced recording and playback device. The inventor of this device, Morel, wants to preserve his friends and the object of his desire for all eternity. In using it on them, though, he accidentally kills them, replacing them with lifeless dolls that only convince as humans to the degree you don’t directly interact with them. Not far off the corporatist-conservative ideal, then: everything captured and replicable, predictable, hard-coded. Nothing left to chance.

Chance is a doorway. Randomness and unplanned — or only loosely planned — meetings are a route to new opportunities, potential ways forward. That’s why a roll of the dice can be so exhilarating — sometimes it nudges everything into place. And that’s why I jumped at the chance to be a part of Collusion’s ART / TECH / PLAY event in November, despite a ridiculously busy term and the fact that I’d said yes to doing another presentation just a week later. For this event I wanted to talk about card game poems, or what chance mechanics bring to poetry. I brought my long-abused prototype of Whispering Leaves (in which doors are a prominent visual motif, the leaves in question being door leaves), along with some new, just-about functional digital simulations of other card games.

But the real joy was mixing with other practitioners in the same area, include Danny Snelson, who was coincidentally in town for a lecture on ancestral intelligences in visual culture, delivered by his partner, Mashinka Hakopian. Danny’s work combining poetics and gaming/VR technologies slotted neatly into the theme of the night, alongside talks by Jon Ingold, narrative director of Inkle and writer of Heaven’s Vault, and Laura Trevail, a ‘contextual artist’ — someone who combines tech, writing and visual art in response to specific sites and situations.

Laura’s work had been recommended to me not two weeks earlier, by the poet Sarah Wedderburn, on the way back from another gig which I’d said yes to in spite of the heavy schedule — this time involving a five-hour round trip to Oxford on a Monday night. This gig, organised by Helen Eastman of Live Canon — long-term stalwarts and allies on the poetry scene — took place at the Former United Reform Church, and due to a last-minute change of readers, I found myself following up Glyn Maxwell, the poet whose work had first inspired me to throw myself into poetry, age 17. More doors: present to past, from one kind of performance to another, conversation to conversation.

Due to an unusual and painfully costly arrangement with our Scottish distributor, I now keep several boxes of Sidekick Books stock in my garden shed for posting; as a result of this, we are now officially — I would say, anyway — an East Anglian as well as a London-based publisher. This qualified us for a spot at the Norwich City of Literature Christmas Publishing Fair — back in the city where Kirsty and I first met and started making lit magazines together. We made some good sales, including of the new Ten Poets series.

Which brings me on, finally, to some projects forthcoming in 2025, while continuing the theme of portals and crossings. Out very soon with Calque Press is Ragged Band of Travellers: Writing from the Threshold of Dungeons and Dragons, taking us right back to the opening topic of this post. This is a short anthology of poems and stories written for one of our Future Karaoke nights at ARU, with some extra pieces by George Herbert, Christina Rossetti and Edmund Spenser sprinkled in, the idea being to cover a whole bunch of the D&D classes and species. The title and theme evokes the idea of different people with different backgrounds coming together, and chance meeting leading to adventure. A preview snippet from my introduction:

For my part, I believed then (and do now) that the relationship between distinct-but-adjacent voices is just as important as what any one voice conveys to a reader or listener, especially where there are gaps and awkwardnesses to be reckoned with – where the voices could almost be bickering. (…) As such, you’ll find there’s no common setting to the pieces in this anthology, nor any shared lore informing them. This is not a love letter to D&D, or a commemoration. The way in which these poems and stories work together – belong together – is instead akin to the way the spells, skills, attacks, traits and equipment of different player characters combine in sometimes useful, sometimes surprising ways that must be tested to be discovered.

The next Future Karaoke, meanwhile, is likely to be in early February, on the theme of mixology.

As for Sidekick and Ten Poets, the series has been successful enough for us to think about making it a regular thing, and as such, we are currently reading through the results of our first open submissions call in three years. Four submissions will be chosen to be published alongside six commissioned pieces to make up Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon, out at the end of April. I’ve been seriously impressed with the range and quality of everything sent in, and the number of ways different poems could be fitted together to make completely different kinds of book is making my head spin somewhat. Onto the shortlist!

I’m going to finish up with a shot of one of my Christmas presents — The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Aatsuji — in order to keep with the regular pattern of Stray Bulletin cover images. It’s a book which converses with the past (all the main characters are named after golden age crime writers) while rearranging those familiar elements just enough to make something new. That’s the kind of business we need to keep up, right? Happy New Year!

"Like a pair of thin keys"

With the teaching semester nearly over, I have a moment — at last! — to reflect on some recent developments.

Hobgoblin Mode

Things have been a little dry on the publishing front — at least when it comes to new poems of mine, out on their own. But earlier in the year I was drawn to Mark Antony Owen’s After… project — a journal of ekphrastic poetry which publishes a single new piece every full moon. My poem, ‘Not Receiving Visitors’, based on Sidney Sime’s The Incubus (1899), was revealed on 17th October. I’m not sure exactly where it fits in to the various forthcoming or in-progress collections I’m hoarding, but here is the opening:

Lately I have lain awake while a lamp throbs and flutters, my face turned upward into a pool of dark – as if that pool had been lowered like a scrim, or a coffin into its pit.

So Long, Moral Seriousness!

Since I haven’t been publishing a lot of my own work lately I also haven’t had a lot of critical feedback, so it was rather thrilling to find that my debut collection, School of Forgery, is mentioned in Andrew Duncan’s new Shearsman volume, Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen Grabs of British Poetry in the 21st Century. If the title sounds dismissive, that isn’t the intent; Duncan’s starting point is that ‘beautiful feelings of sensitive people’ is, broadly, what people expect of poetry and poets — that any more sophisticated understanding of what the art can achieve has lost its grip on the collective conscience … for now. This is in part due to the sheer abundance and variety of poetry being published, such that any other general characterisation runs into trouble immediately.

His ‘screen grab’ approach is refreshing. Rather than presume to pick out a few poets as the leading lights of a generation, thinning the herd in order to tell a neat story, he accepts that any serious expedition into the landscape of contemporary UK poetry “can last for years”, and involves travelling through many ‘micro-climates’. The book is therefore a series of snapshots from one such expedition. When he comes to School of Forgery, he finds the key to the book is the poem about Bleach dōjinshi (fan comics in which the characters often enjoy intense romantic liaisons), adding:

Stone seems to prefer inauthenticity, but this allows him to jettison the apparatus of realism and moral seriousness, so that the poems have a wonderful lightness, bursting like fireworks.

It’s a huge book, covering 80 poets in all, and so far I’ve only read the entries for about a quarter of them.

Real Talk

It seems I’ve taken up writing articles for The Conversation, in the hope of reaching a new audience and building up my academic credentials for the next annual review. They favour a very short kind of article — which suits me very well — with very short sentences and paragraphs — which I’m not so hot on. I’ve never had my writing edited quite so severely, and am still getting used to the effects. On the other hand, the editors are very friendly and efficient, as well as receptive to pitches.

My first two articles are: 1) a quick look at the idea of adapting a video game into a poem, mostly drawing on research I’d already done for the PhD, and 2) a round-up of giant monster poems. The latter is the kind of article I’d like to write more of, going forward. Yes; listicles. Poetry listicles.

Muzot, 1924-26

Toward the end of the summer, I decided to pick up Will Stone’s translations of some of Rainer Maria Rilke’s last letters, published as Letters Around a Garden. I’ve got my own garden now — not that I’ve made much progress with it — and am picking my way little by little toward my own garden-themed book. Even more painstakingly slowly, I’ve been making my way through the Rilke.

It’s an odd book; the letters are addressed to one Antoinette de Bonstetten, from a chateau in Muzot, Switzerland. Rilke is in exile, and earnestly seeking de Bonstetten’s expert help in establishing his garden. Her replies have been lost, and his various reports, musings and pleas are so scattershot that he comes across as something of a hermit romancing a ghost. He is besotted with his garden, with de Bonstetten (whom he has never met), and with everything else besides — almost a cartoon sketch of an eccentric old poet. Here he is in letter no.12:

Dear Mademoiselle,

Is it, is it really possible! And I who continue to conceive these little Provençal plans for you; it’s true that you have (invited to this sudden decision) concentrated the juice of ripened farewells and made more arduous the beautiful and sorrowful face of departure. And why would you not, at the same time, have obliged the honour of destiny to arrange for you a happy return?

Occasionally, his writing on the Swiss climate or a species of flower is wonderfully crisp:

Here, when the sky is obscured, the breath of snow which comes down the mountains immediately expunges any aspirations the rain may have had. It rains awkwardly, and the sky inscribes these few lines in the air, without pleasure, like a schoolchild with fingers frozen stiff.

I feel, though, as if I’m foraging in a mind and life so foreign to my own that I’m almost nodding along out of pained politeness. It makes me wonder to what extent we expect poets to be people like us, and to what extent we intentionally reconstruct them as otherworldly figures.

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"Cool, sure, swish"

It’s me. I’ve returned once again, and I’ve got a bunch of new stuff to show you.

Come Trespassing With Me

At the beginning of July I was in Mexico for the international Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference. You may remember I went last year as well, with a paper on Disco Elysium and an armful of free pamphlets to hand out. This year my short talk (not a full paper) was about the idea of digital trespassing — housebreaking, grass-trampling and generally going where you’re told not to in virtual worlds. I brought another set of pamphlets, this time filled with experimental puzzle poems based on the idea of sneaking through a stranger’s garden. You can download a digital copy of Steal Through the Gap in the Hedge from here. I plan to revisit and further develop the form at some point — maybe with obstacles? Birdbaths and so on?

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And Mexico? I enjoyed it a lot — especially watching El Felino and El Felino Jnr vs. Blue Panther and Blue Panther Jnr at the Arena Coliseo de Occidente!

View from my hotel room in GuadalajaraHear Me Say ‘Homeoteleuton’

With any luck, I’ll have some new publications to promote by the end of the year. But in the meantime, both my 2021 pamphlet Sandsnarl and my 2022 monograph Dual Wield are featured in August sales from their respective publishers (for 50% off the latter, use the code DGBSS24 at checkout). To help things along, I’ve recorded a short reading from the introductory chapter to Dual Wield (four pages, ten minutes) and set it to video:

The video is also on Youtube in case it’s something you feel like sharing.

Incidentally, that tiny figure sitting on the book is a Molb called Padlock. He and his friends/enemies/siblings are available from False Forest Toys.

Return to the Stage

Perhaps some of you remember the Magician poems from February’s Stray Bulletin? Well, here’s one more to add to the collection: ‘Magicians Trick With Scissors’. This has just been published in Magma Poetry 89, and I read it at the issue’s launch at Limehouse Town Hall earlier in the month. After a long break from reading in London, it felt good to be — briefly — back in the thick of it, on a hot night, among many interesting and talented poets. A suitable setting for the Magician’s live debut, since this and other poems see him struggling to reclaim his once-formidable powers.

Managing, Just

I’m currently dipping in and out of many books — including two audio books (I’ve paused Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost to take in M. John Harrison’s shorter and zippier Light). It’s been a particularly notable experience to absorb Julia Bird’s pamphlet is, thinks Pearl in the middle of making my way through Richard Berengarten (aka Richard Burns)’ The Manager. Both are poetry books with protagonists, named after their protagonists, and in both cases the protagonist seems adrift in the midst of their own life. Pearl hovers semi-transparently at the edge of the events she observes; the poems are named (or so I thought at first) after types of pearl, and in each there is the pleasure of finding out how the title will come to make sense in the context of the unfolding observations (‘Red Pearl’, for example, turns out to be to do with carnivorous instincts). The Manager’s one hundred poem-parts are almost like chapters (they are named ‘ONE’, ‘TWO’, ‘THREE’ and so on) and toward the middle seem like they could be referring to the Manager’s advancing age as he flits between women and lunches, hotels and airports. The long lines in this book, which Berengarten calls ‘verse-paragraphs’, embody both the runaway thought and the runaway mouth, while the neat columns of Pearl’s single-stanza poems speak to Pearl’s softer tucked-away-ness, of being confined by a more intrusive sense of what is proper. The contrast is rather sad and beautiful.

Other poetry books I own which have protagonists: Matthew Caley’s Rake; Jen Hadfield’s Almanacs; Ben Borek’s Donjong Heights.

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"My skeleton a scree of spoons and saucers"

An end-of-May update covering a few notable happenings from recent months.

Fire engine, raspberry, emerald

Just recently, one of my ludokinetic poems, ‘L and the Empress of Sand’, was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize. The winner, Florence Walker’s ‘I Dreamt of Something Lost’, is a ghost story told through the medium of a simulated chat programme on a PC desktop — it’s incredible well realised. ‘L …’ was the only poem on the shortlist, however, which is both a compliment and, I think, a sign that poetry still struggles to assert itself as an interactive form (though Charlotte Geater’s ‘Head Girl’ made the longlist). More broadly, you could say that poetry will always struggle when up against fiction in contests, among other reasons because it’s harder to break down, to summarise, and therefore tougher for a panel of judges to discuss critically.

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The judges said of ‘L ...’, simply:

A truly great work with an interesting format and mechanics.

I would say it’s a poem about the effort we have to put in to win back even a sliver of self-determination from those who rule over us.

Man the barricades!

In April, the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair returned for the first time in four years, at St. Columba’s Church in West London. Kirsty and I were there with old and new Sidekick Books titles — including Ten Poets Defend Their Cities From Giant, Strange Beasts, which isn’t officially released until September, and a small number of mystery mini-pamphlets. It turned out to be our best year yet, both in terms of sales and the general enthusiasm of the public — but we’re still struggling a little with the cost of keeping old titles in warehouses. A really good way to support the press and our future plans at the moment, if you’re so inclined, would be to order Sidekick titles into your local bookshop, or from online retailers.

Lessen the Sting

Also in April, I gave a talk to Computer Arts and Technology students at Norwich University of the Arts:

It was largely a condensed version of some of the key points from Dual Wield, updated to include a showcase of some of my latest experiments — which I’ve been trying to keep as simple as possible, for the purposes of passing on the formula in future workshops. One thing I wanted to emphasise: a ludokinetic poem doesn’t have to be a digital poem. To give an example, I passed round a physical print of ‘Three Snow Shrines’, a poem which is completed by having multiple readers add a cross at the bottom. It’s a kind of poll, but also a paper-and-pen imitation of a site of votive offerings or communal graffiti.

Men Like Us

Most of my fiction-reading this year so far has been made up of Japanese murder mysteries and Ursula Le Guin. I finished The Word for World is Forest a while ago, but it’s stayed with me, in part because (and I knew this going in) it’s quite obviously the template for the Avatar movies and similar fare: futuristic colonisers brutalise a peaceful, pre-industrial, forest-dwelling species and provoke a guerrilla war. Le Guin’s book is very slim — a novella, really — and notably avoids relating events solely from the point of view of a sympathetic turncoat colonist. It also doesn’t shy away from portraying the natives, once roused, as murderously violent.

Just as with Marvel’s recent cartoon revival X-Men 97 — which depicts an island nation of mutants being viciously blown up by expensive military hardware — it’s difficult not to see the parallels with the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, except that in both fictional storylines, the victims are given a means to fight back and ultimately defeat their enemies. Le Guin’s Athsheans massively outnumber their colonist oppressors, while Marvel’s mutants have super-powers. Hard to see what Palestinians have to fall back on, as Western powers once again betray their own stated principles and allow religiously motivated massacres to take place with their blessing.

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