Jon Stone's Blog: Stray Bulletin, page 2

AI is no threat to poetry; we’ve already got it licked

Note: I’m going to start adding occasional short essays to this Substack as well as general updates. This one was prompted by a few recent encounters cross-pollinating in my brain.

Why do artists feel threatened by AI? Loss of income on the one hand; on the other, the fear that art as a medium of communication — as a testament to subjective human experience and the reach of the individual human imagination — will be replaced by art as mood lighting, as mechanism, as a grey soup of reiterated styles and trends. Remember the promo ad for Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, where the tech bros interrupt their poker game to check out some ‘3D street art’? “Wow, this is stunning”, “That’s awesome”, “I love the movement”, they chime, before drifting onto the next thing — because in a capitalist utopia, the purpose of art is to inspire a warm, fuzzy feeling, either by representing some kind of accomplishment, or by recalling that which is comfortingly familiar.

AI poetry will be up to this task soon enough. But it needn’t bother — human beings have already produced more than enough to meet demand. Whereas in the case of visual art and prose fiction, AI can potentially fill a gap created by the exactitude of an audience’s desires — ‘a portrait of this person in the style of this artist’, ‘a story in this genre featuring a protagonist of my own design’ — poetry of any specific character is barely imagined. As Brian Phillips notes in ‘Poetry and the Problem of Taste’, it’s not that the reading public have poor taste in poetry, but rather that they have no taste at all — no sense, that is, of how their own personal preferences differ from anyone else’s. Poetry is poetry, the way table salt is table salt. You like a little, a lot, or none at all.

Relatedly, it’s become a lot easier for more people to write and publish poems. They’re short, and there are no rules left to break. You can study to be a better poet, of course, but no one is going to stop or even chide you for sharing whatever comes into your head and calling it finished, in which case AI really isn’t much of a time-saver. In the future, it might double or quadruple the scale of poetry production, but what does that matter when the current rate already exceeds our collective ability to respond to its existence?

I’ll just make this clear, in case this is your first time reading one of my commentaries: I don’t think too many people are writing poetry, and I don’t think that the low quality of some or much of what is written is an issue. My position is that the whole artform is diminished by the narrow way it is persistently framed, such that the threat AI poses to other artforms is already a present reality for poetry: that is, we have a landscape where everything looks like a mash-up of everything else, and most of it seems designed to serve its creator’s aspiration to be regarded as an artist, rather than having any clear communicative or explorative purpose. Note: ‘looks’ and ‘seems’. This is an issue of perspective, of fogginess.

For as long as I can remember, people have complained that all modern poetry is indistinguishable. And for as long as I can remember, the principle way critics have tried to separate the ‘good’ poetry from what they implicitly agree amounts to a rubbish heap is through insistent use of subjective epithets. In other words, in place of an ongoing exercise to document what distinctive characteristics may or may not be possessed by an individual poem, book or author (the appropriate answer to accusations of sameness) we have perpetuated a game of ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’. The loudest, the most repetitive, the most passionate, fawning or grandiloquent claims are those that stick, and these on behalf of, inevitably, the better-connected, better-resourced, more shrewd and more well-behaved poets — though that point matters less than the fact that the qualities which are thereby attributed to them are vague, bland and frequently preposterous. Rather than teaching readers to discern and prize myriad specific attributes, and thus to tell one kind of poem from another by sight and feel, this process teaches them to think predominantly in terms of how ‘important’ a poet or poem seems to be, and to feel warm, fuzzy feelings that should on no account be interrogated further. It is one almighty confidence trick, at the expense of any sense that the new thing is much of a departure from the last thing. Gaze! Gasp! But do not look behind the curtain.

This in turn affects the way poems are produced and distributed:

It incentivises (for both poet and publisher) high output with minimal editing, since only recently released work is regarded as sufficiently exciting to swoon over, and right-place, right-time has more to do with it than content.

It incentivises broad, bombastic claims about the scope and purpose of a publication, lest it fail to speak to some common mood.

It de-incentivises investigative reviews or cautious responses to a less visible work, since the only currency the reviewer may deal in is applause or heresy.

It positions the reviewer, or critic, as someone lesser than the poet, someone who is merely affected and reports the effect, putting people off a role that is potentially vital in leading to the formation of individualised tastes.

Most frustratingly, for me at least, it steers what ought to be healthy debate about and around the artform toward a sluggish kind of territorial warfare. Disagreement over which poetry deserves what kind of attention is rife, as it should be. But trapped within the confines of a metanarrative that characterises poems as sources of fleeting, powerful feeling, too many interested parties end up huddled around their shared prejudices and faiths, failing to mount any argument beyond “Thing bad, other thing good” — albeit spun out across thousands of words. Others, wary of outbreaks of ugliness, stick resolutely to “Thing good”. Tower-of-Babel-style, we are not really talking to or understanding one another, except where we already see eye to eye.

I mean this, as ever, at a general level. There is good criticism and there are productive exchanges that lead to one or both parties being able to say, “I now see a little more of what you see”. But so much of what is supposedly the serious attention paid to poetry by its champions is barely more than gestural, tribal, phatic. Basic maintenance of the same rhythms and rituals of praise and complaint. As long as that continues we will struggle to shift the impression that the artform amounts to anything more than a piquant condiment which some consume in greater quantity than others.

"Sometimes blurtingly"

A post-January update covering the start of this year and the end of the last one.

Dive, dive!

My first publication of the year is a short essay called ‘Next time you dive’ (or How to play a poem), published online in The Friday Poem. It’s a follow-up to my winter pamphlet, Poems Are Toys (And Toys Are Good For You), a considerably longer essay which began as a talk I gave for a conference at York University some years ago. Poems Are Toys argues, in short, that readers and critics ought to treat poems as tools of imaginary play, rather than exhibits to be admired, or coded messages. It’s an anti-elitist screed which took me most of the summer to write.

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Here’s how it begins:

Essays making grand statements on English-language poetry are usually pointed in one of two directions: either they’re intended for a general readership, seeking to persuade indifferent readers that poetry is sorely overlooked, or else they’re aimed at poetry’s scattered, somewhat fractious community of readers, practitioners and critics, looking to put some fresh cat among the pigeons. This essay is pointed in both directions at once, with the attendant risk that I fail to meet either audience on terms which they find comfortable. But since my concern is eroding the boundary between general reader and reader of poetry—since I believe, in fact, that this ingrained separation of interests is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction in how we relate to one another—I feel obliged to make the attempt.

‘Next time you dive’, meanwhile, is an attempt at a practical demonstration of what I argue for in theory in Poems Are Toys. I take a poem — ‘Swimmers’ by William Thompson — and discuss it in terms of how I imaginatively engaged with it, batting it around my brain, rather than adopting a pose of critical distance.

Two other reviews in The Friday Poem take a similar approach, one by the journal’s editor, Hilary Menos, and one by my old editor, Helena Nelson. To my mind, both of these pieces are far more readable and instructive than the average critical run-down of a poetry book, because they show us reader-and-book together, in the act of creative negotiation. This is an aspect of writing on/about poetry that has always existed, but it tends to get squeezed out by the impulse to act as salesman for a book we like, or headsman for a book we don’t.

Poor Beleaguered Wizard

For just about my final trick of 2023, I published three ‘Magician’ poems in Berlin Lit, edited by Matthew McDonald. The Magician is the star of his own book, forthcoming … when? I don’t know.

Here’s the first stanza of ‘What’s First Learned of Magic is Later Learned of Love’, a prose poem:

That it cannot be summoned, bid, baited, beckoned, smithed or shook from a tree. That it isn’t made from this or that raw material – and to the extent it’s sealed inside a fortress whose circumference you’ve begun earnestly to map and probe, that fortress is entranceless, its polished walls rising steeply into a sort of smudge of moon and sun.

Basecamp Established, Over and Out

Towards the end of the year I helped organise and host a launch for the Cambridge Writing Centre — a new research group based at Anglia Ruskin University, where I work. I’ve also been hard at work developing a website, logo and podcast for the Centre, as well as planning various events for 2024 with my colleagues. The idea is (a) to have an umbrella brand for the different strands of writing-related research going on at ARU, inside and outside the writing department, and (b) to work more closely with other local literary groups to cross-promote readings, workshops and other activities.

The budget for doing all this is … well, let’s just say we’ll have to take it as it comes, and get a little creative. But hopefully the more we put ourselves on the map, the more opportunities will open up to us.

Maximum Vintage

Before returning from the Christmas break, I managed to finish Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. I read the first half the previous Christmas, but it’s my mum’s copy, so I left it a year before resuming. It’s gorgeously written, and the Manderley house and estate makes for a haunting, memorable setting (if only Emerald Fennell had paid as much attention to the titular mansion in Saltburn). It also becomes, gradually, a thriller, a page-turner, and in this respect it presented me with an interesting problem: while reading the final third I found myself wading through the paragraphs of sumptuous description as if they were snow drifts, almost leaping over some of them, since they stood between me and the coming revelations. The book seemed caught between moods, in the same way its protagonist lurches between passion and paranoia. This is almost a kind of ghostly ancestor to ludonarrative dissonance, the term coined by Clint Hocking to describe how a video game can have divergent narrative and ludic priorities, eg. the story demands a pressing-on, a sense of haste, while the game element rewards you for stopping to look under every stone.

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"Your skullsy secret"

The year’s nearly done, and this is the first of two planned posts picking out some highlights from all that I haven’t found time to blog about over the last six months.

Creels and rockpools

Although I’ve made a start on countless digital ‘ludokinetic’ poems over the last five years, hardly any of them have reached a complete, publishable state. Too much tinkering still required! Also, there’s hardly anyone to publish them with. The New River are one of the few outposts for such projects, and I’m very grateful to editors Amanda Hodes and Florence Gonsalves and their team for taking on ‘I could kiss, say,’, an interactive eco-poem in which you, the reader-player, get to romance the natural/unnatural landscape. Turn your sound on — there’s vocals and a little synth music to go with the movement and play.

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Dust and honey

I wanted to write so many more reviews and responses to books and individual poems this year! More than that, I want to start proving and exemplifying that reading and critical writing can and should be as expressive and creative as what we deem ‘creative’ writing. You’ll know if you’ve been following my thoughts on this subject that this is because I value poetry and art as an ongoing, inclusive conversation and that my bête noire is the idea of the poet, the writer, the artist as the one who speaks for, at or over the top of others.

But drafts and notes have mostly failed to coagulate into finished, publishable pieces — except in the case of one more ‘Single poem round-up’ where I investigate poems by Sarah-Jane Crowson, Kate Crowcroft and Callie S. Blackstone, published online in Stone Circle Review, Berlin Lit and Rust & Moth respectively. There are links to the pieces in question, so that you can read them in one browser tab and follow my thoughts on them in another.

Short extract from the review itself:

These are all poems about love, of one sort or another — though look what happens to the personal pronouns as each unfolds […] In all three, the traditional pose of the love poem quickly gives way to something more febrile, some more insistent energy which leaves me reaching to pull together the fragments.

Stereograms and anagrams

In the long-gone summer I made my way to Seville to present a paper at the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) international conference. I’ll get to the paper in a later update; for now, I’d like to link you to a digital copy of Hidden Entrance, a tiny pamphlet I put together to hand out to other attendees:

As well as a QR code linking up ‘I could kiss, say,’ and extracts from last year’s Look Again: A Book of Hidden Messages, it includes three brand-new, one-page ‘role-playing’ poems based on recent video games Sable, Citizen Sleeper and Stray.

To my knowledge, no one yet has solved the anagram on the final page. Perhaps I should offer a cash prize?

Flirtwort and fossils

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow has been termed a gnostic horror game — not normally the kind of thing that attracts my attention (too many horror games are just slavish adaptations of Lovecraft, or zombiefests). In this case, though, a few things swayed me: it’s a traditional point & click puzzle adventure, utilising primitive-looking graphics to unsettling effect; it’s more indebted to M. R. James than Lovecraft, dealing in the obsessions of a Victorian archaeologist; and it’s set in Bewlay, a fictional village just down the trainline from Bakewell. This does not place it, as some players seem to think, in the Yorkshire Moors, but rather in the Peak District, close to where I spent most of the pandemic.

The script and voice-acting is generally of a high standard, with only the odd dodgy accent, and the story is well-paced, becoming gradually more uncanny the more you uncover of the protagonist’s background and present situation. The backdrops are wonderfully bleak, capturing the feel of the Peaks on a foggy day, and the occasional close-up animation is richly disturbing. Impossible not to think of The Wicker Man as you weigh up the likelihood that the residents of the village are conspiratorially toying with you, keeping the answers just out of reach. The point & click genre lends itself well to this kind of tale, since its puzzles are always so oddly contrived — must I really jump through all these hoops just for some puddings, a horse hair, a pail of goat’s milk? Yes — because in this case, it adds to the sense that you are being led, step by step, toward some grim fate.

As to the ending, I was left a little unsure. It might be that the story lost its footing in the final act, becoming overly predictable, or it might be that I just wanted a little more agency in a supposedly interactive medium. This aside, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is one of my favourites of the games I’ve played this year.

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"The time it takes to shush a flame"

Part two of the mega February-to-Mary catchup (June up next!)

Mock Tudor Necromancy

The third Future Karaoke event took place back in March, on Friday 24th, with the theme of ‘Cambridge Book of Magic’. The Future Karaokes are multi-author readings which I’ve been running from ARU in Cambridge (except the second, which was staged at Old Divinity School at St. John’s College). There’s no headline act; instead, between 15 and 20 poets and writers each perform one new piece of work written off the back of a prompt, in the style of the Broadcast events that Roddy Lumsden used to run at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon.

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For this one, we made use of The Cambridge Book of Magic: A Tudor Necromancer’s Manual, a sixteenth century manuscript translated from the Latin by Dr. Francis Young (under the pen name Paul Foreman). Pieces/spells performed included ‘To know about those things you desire’ by Golnoosh Nour, ‘That someone should sleep well’ by Kate Potts, ‘A general rule for the working of necromancy’ by Adam Crothers (pictured below) and ‘To have a horse’ by Tim Jarvis (which is about to be published in Tim’s new book of stories, Treatises on Dust).

Future Karaoke is on a break now until September, when it will return (fingers crossed) as part of a programme of events under the banner of Cambridge Writing Center, a new research collective I’m setting up with colleagues at ARU. The events will continue to be hybrid in nature, which means anyone can join them online through Zoom if they book a slot in advance.

Dabbling in Malevolence

It’s been a little quiet on the journal front, but in May I published three poems with Bad Lilies, each of which deals (appropriately enough) in sinister business. ‘Ambush’ is a sonnet about being set upon; it’s the first of a sequence of five sonnets revolving around the theme of traps. Then there are two castle poems; in the first, the castle itself is a kind of demented merry-go-round, inspired by the non-Euclidean (ie. impossible, infinitely looping) geometry of video games like Manifold Garden, but also by wind-up musical carousel toys. In the second, the castle is home to members of the gentry, whose lives are disrupted by an apparently useless gift.

Since I don’t have a book review as part of this update, here’s a photo of the Everyman’s Library Pocket edition of Measure For Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, which is responsible for my regalvanising my interest in metrical forms of late.

“If only I could hold your hand.”

I continue to try to carve out the time to engage properly with and write about other people’s poems and poetry collections, since — as covered in my last update — any literary scene without an accompanying culture of reading and discussion of reading is in danger of receding into itself. As part of this exercise, I’m hoping to look at more individual poems from individual online journals and root out links or points of commonality between them. My first such effort looks at poems by Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone, Phillip Crymble and Sara Hovda.

“Will you all burn together?”

I love finding short games to play — in fact, I’ve developed an aversion to anything that jubilantly promises 40+ hours of gameplay set amidst vast tracts of explorable terrain. My days of having days to spare mapping digital continents are long gone. Happily, Bad End Theatre is the shortest title I’ve come across in some time; going at a very leisurely pace, it took me all of 75 minutes to reach the conclusion, and there’s not much left to do beyond that point. It’s the perfect length for what it is: a cute interactive parable about (I think) how easily we trip one another up while doggedly pursuing our own goals, and how much more productive it is to stop and thoroughly compare notes.

I’m making it sound more moralistic than it is; the draw is that it’s an interactive visual novella or short story, but one where you have the ability to change the key decisions of every main character, which leads to you opening up different branches of story in an effort to avoid the many terrible endings. The closer you come to getting all of the cast to cooperate with one another, the more apparent it is that there’s a malevolent entity working against you, trying to ensure they destroy themselves.

The artwork is bright and cartoony, the writing light and witty, cribbing from fairy tale and pantomime. I enjoyed it well enough.

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Bored Readers

A lot of 1* and 2* reviews on GoodReads lead with the fact that they found a book dull, slow-moving or ponderous.

This is also how a lot of readers respond, by default, to poetry. And also -- not coincidentally -- how I started feeling about ALMOST EVERY NOVEL I'VE TRIED TO READ since the age of 18. Because the dullness of a literary work is almost always more to do with the reader -- what they're searching for and how they're searching -- than it is the work itself.

I figured this out at some point. I figured out that if I wanted to find novels readable again, I would have to be ready to put some effort it. It wasn't that the novels I was reading as an adult were worse than those I'd consumed as a teenager; it was that I'd started becoming more impatient, more easily distracted, and wanting something from books which the majority were unable to supply. But if I pushed forward through enough of a book to work out what it had to offer (there's almost always something), I could eventually re-tune my mind to go in search of that.

I think it's a real shame that this isn't already received wisdom. So many readers seem to think it's the author's job to quickly captivate and entertain them, not realising that no author is remotely capable of giving every possible reader the thing they think they want. This results in silly discussions around books where some people say they were hooked while others say they were bored out of their skulls, and neither group understands the others' reaction.

If I could click my fingers and make a sweeping cultural change, I'd have it so that readers everywhere approach the problem of their own attention span/ability to connect with a book as a project to keep working on. The more you grow, the better you get at *finding* something to keep your attention, if what you really want is to keep learning and enriching your life with a wide variety of materials.

"Reckless extravagance"

Part one of a mega February-to-May catch-up.

Saucy Seaside Postcards

I’ve published a large number of poems over the last decade which have never been collected into one single-author volume. Some are part of Sidekick anthologies and very happily nested there, while others are intended for future books that may or may not materialise. For now, I’m experimenting with making some of them into digital postcards and adding them to the jukebox/gashapon machine on my website. I’m also trying to line up their publication with relevant dates. So ‘Pangolin Documentary’, for example, went online on World Pangolin Day 2023 (18 February) while the below poem (originally published in Aquanauts) was given the postcard treatment in time for John Steinbeck’s birthday:

Supple Companions

I’ve recently reviewed Tania Hershmann’s debut collection, Still Life With Octopus. Here’s an extract:

Still Life With Octopus begins and ends with poems titled ‘Arrival’, and is full of things arriving or becoming, or suggesting they might like to be more deeply involved with one another somehow — the theme of tying, sewing, stitching recurs as well […] and the octopus as symbol of fleshy entanglement is never far away. Body parts — chiefly, internal organs — and their relationship to one another also come to the fore more than once …

“Awe is cheap.”

I’m trying to find more time to read and write about poems and poetry books (other than my own!), in part because I continue to be alarmed by the lack of a vibrant critical culture around poetry. Promotionism is the default mode everywhere I look; everything is great. Everything is exciting and everyone is chuffed to be involved, or chosen, or featured. Everything must be read, or seen, or attended. These are all, quite deliberately, conversational dead ends. The problem is not (as is sometimes expressed) that people need to dislike or criticise more; it’s that there is a total lack of faith that attention can be generated and maintained by straightforwardly describing what any particular piece of work is and does, or by investing time in responding engagedly to it. The currency is awe, faux-awe and pompous pronouncements as to something or someone’s importance.

So I’ve been writing pieces which advocate for an alternative way forward. The longest and fullest of these so far is called ‘Search More Widely, Look More Closely: A minifesto on reaching one another’, using the same title as the podcast I’ve recently started (though I may change the title of that to just ‘The Stray Bulletin Podcast’). It contains some analysis and some suggestions, linking our modern propensity for promotionism to the lack of scruples among those in power, and to the present-day loneliness epidemic. My chief recommendation is really very simple: that we stop crowding around the big, glitzy stuff and start paying thought and attention to all that lies neglected.

“Tell them I was brave.”

I played through Stray in March — it’s a single-player, story-driven adventure game lasting about six hours if you take it at a leisurely pace. For many players, the draw is that you play as a cat. A cat who acquires a tiny backpack and tiny robot companion, no less, and who can stretch, mew, claw at rugs, scratch at doors, purr and rub up against people’s legs. This is all very agreeable, but I was more taken with the fact that the world design is heavily inspired by Kowloon Walled City, a small region of Hong Kong which was demolished 30 years ago. There’s a seven-acre park where it used to be, with a brass model of the city at its entrance. I visited there in 2015, wishing I had arrived a quarter of a century earlier — since the city was famous for, among other things, the fact that sunlight never reached its lower levels. It was akin to a man-made, artificially lit cave system or subterranean electric labyrinth. BlueTwelve Studio, the developers behind Stray, have done an excellent job of building on the atmosphere suggested by old photographs of KWC, ramping up the neon without omitting the dampness.

Photograph from http://www.architectural-review.com/

It’s an easy game with a few light puzzles, some enjoyable chase sequences and a large cast of charming but mostly undeveloped robot characters. You can access a number of the homes of these characters, which are lovingly furnished with junk, books, plants, pictures, knick-knacks and worn materials. Some of the most fun I had in Stray was just nosing around, inspecting the features of a room and trying to imagine how I could reproduce it, come the day when I own my own place.

Frog

"The cold black pearl of you"

A catch-up on December/January news.

Labyrinths and Long Poems

Previously, two of my shorter labyrinth poems have been published in Bristol-based Raceme. The third of five has now appeared in Long Poem magazine (the only magazine of its kind), and combines the theme of cave exploration with the form of a Snakes and Ladders-style dice game. It’s a version of a poem I’ve worked on for about a decade, and is partly inspired by subterranean video game mazes — particularly the kind that the player tumbles into from a high plateau and must work their way out of with only a fragile light source and a scant few items.

Obviously it’s intended as a metaphysical adventure as well. From the short introduction in the magazne: “[This] form seemed very well suited to describing the experience of becoming absorbed in a system or subject, or even an intense personal or bodily encounter; there is a pronounced tension between the idea of a numerically ordered sequence of events and the stumbling, back-and-forth movement dictated by dice rolls and penalty squares.”

A very short sample of ‘A Labyrinth’:

‘I know not what Instructions to give you, you must herein trust to your own Judgment, and the Chance of the Dice.’
— Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester

Cave, your flesh is bunched up, barbeled.

1. You are the inside of an instrument.

2. You are the inside of a death mask.

3. My torch beam tastes every caruncle and papule.
(I MISS A TURN
AS THE BATTERY BURNS LOW)

4. Gloom is pumped through your blood vessels.

5. You wring the neck of the match-flame.
(I MOVE ON THREE STEPS
AND LIGHT ONE MORE)

Towards a General Theory of Love

This year I’m creating, shaping and teaching my first MA module, called ‘Writing To Stand Out’, on the theme of expressive use of form and structure across all genres of creative writing. One of the first books we looked at was Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love (Bloodaxe, 2022), a book of interlaced sequences, which positions itself as part philosophical investigation and introduces the character of Monkey, who (so it seems to me) scrambles across and between the themes and shapes of the poems, trying to understand love in his own way — reminiscent of both Sun Wukong and Ted Hughes’ Crow.

The students really took to this book; those who were the least conversant with poetry had the most to say about it, finding that it developed its own legend or language of images across the whole body of poems. As part of the focus of the module, I asked the students to describe what kind of author Shaw is in the form of a job or role, and they opted for ‘therapist’. In other words, rather than these poems coming across as therapeutic or cathartic for the poet, they stood out as tools with which the poet means to reach out to and heal the reader.

“Under the ice, a hole in the fabric of the universe”

In December, at about the time the streets of Cambridge were at there most trecherous with black ice, I published ‘Ice Play: What Ice Does in Lyrics, Novels, Toys and Games’ on DeGruyter Conversations. It’s a roaming essay that touches briefly on my own Unravelanche and Ice Dive mini-projects, but also Anna Kavan’s Ice, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Celeste, Disco Elysium, Doctor Who, Lego and ice shows. It also contains another stereogram/magic eye poem.

“That demon kissed my wife!”

As a fortieth birthday present, my cousin Jim bought me Demon Throttle, a retro scrolling shooter in which you play a “beautiful vampiress” and a “dusty gunslinger”. These two join forces to fight the demon who stole her sacred chalices and made frantic, satisfying love to his wife. It’s available only as a physical game cartridge for the Nintendo Switch, and is all straightforward shoot-and-dodge mechanics. I’ve not even managed to make it through the first level yet but I adore the simplicity and teeny, blocky sprites. One of the things I enjoy most about video games which hark back to — or are actually from — the late 80s and 90s is how the foregrounding of gameplay, game ‘feel’ and movement permits an odd mixing together of different, sometimes clashing cultural tropes. Narrative and aesthetics are let off their leash, so why not a game that’s part gothic fantasy, part western revenge tale, with the briefest flash of softcore porn in its opening titles, animated like a cute cartoon?

"Holes for the eyes"

A round-up of news for October / early November:

‘Playing Poetry’ Exhibition

The Playing Poetry exhibition at the National Poetry Library runs until January 15th. It’s been curated, hooked up and debugged by my friend Nick Murray — no simple feat, since it includes a mixture of digital poetry games displayed in mini arcade cabinets alongside card decks and other object poems.

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I have two pieces exhibited. The first is Erratum, which is a work-in-progress — a kind of stealth jigsaw game in which you play a rat at a terrible party, making his/her own speech out of the spilt fragments of others’ murmurs. I’m still working on updates to help it play more smoothly.

The second is Adversary, a prototype poetry card game I made with Abigail Parry, in which players compete to complete couplets and quatrains in the most satisfying way. This got a brief mention in The Financial Times at the start of the month.

I read some new interactive and labyrinth poems at the launch event for the exhibition on 20th October, and revamped an earlier article on ludokinetic literature to bring it up to date.

“Now that kind of talk is everywhere”

I wrote a very short essay in response to a longer one. It’s called ‘End of a Fantasy: The Panic Behind Literary Reactionism’. It’s about why people get rowdy about the idea that there is some sort of ideology and political leaning behind all expressive works, and it starts like this:

“[Contemporary] fiction is about society,” says Clare Pollard, in a short essay asking how writers can respond to the present moment. I wouldn’t have thought this statement at all controversial, but somehow it prompted a fierce rebuttal from A. Natasha Joukovsky on ‘literary moralism’ and “the Rampant Conflation of Fiction and History”, full of much more dubious statements. Social reform is distracting novelists, Joukovsky says, from their aesthetic responsibility to beauty. Fiction and history are ‘discrete’ – never the twain shall meet. The success of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has nothing to do with its politics, but is due to it being “stylishly written”. While Pollard’s essay is addressed to people for whom writing and reading are ways of negotiating the world, Joukovsky’s is squarely aimed at those who consider themselves capital ‘w’ Writers – members of a sacred order – and so rounds off with a list of commandments, in the form of a hodgepodge of aphorisms that have little to do with the preceding argument.

At first I found all of this merely haughty, its passion misplaced. Once I started to look at the parts that were being quoted admiringly on social media, however, I began to recognise the animating concern behind the essay’s proclamations.

Maskplay

We launched the second two titles in the Sidekick Books Hipflask Series, Look Again: A Book of Hidden Messages and You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories, last Sunday as a part of The Glue Factory, David Collard’s weekly online literary cabaret — which is sadly coming to a close at the end of this year. The format allowed us to display some of the pages from the books on screen while they were being read — somewhat essential for those pieces in Look Again which yield hidden lines when looked at in a certain way. The ‘Stereoscopic Masks’ series, for example, works just the same as a stereogram or magic eye; by adjusting one’s focus until the the two columns merge into a single central one, an illusion of depth is created so that some of the words stand out:

Hallowe’en

Finally, having missed out on making costumes and carving pumpkins for Hallowe’en for several years, I decided to knock up some poem posters. Kirsty’s ‘On Being the Night’ was originally written for Future Karaoke #1: Creatures, the first poetry night I put together and compered since moving to Cambridge. The others are from a sequence I wrote for, and published in, Battalion — micro-portrait poems collaged from Charles Darwin’s The Different Forms of Flowers ... and T. W. Reid’s Cabinet Portraits: Sketches of Statesmen.

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"Sea-ravaged, sea-remade"

A round-up for the first two weeks of September. Many books and a review!:

Larkeekies, Thunderseeds, Meldery and More

This month I’ve added Hot Cockalorum by Kirsten Irving to my bookshelf. I helped Kirsty pick out these poems from her archive of drafts, then refine and order them into a manuscript, so it’s tremendously satisfying to see them in the form of a hardback book in reclaimed leather, with a little cat skull on the cover, courtesy of Guillemot Press. Hot Cockalorum is full of strange words and phrases, sinister tales and modern reworkings of folk stories. Just in time for my autumn poetry module!

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Lyonesse by Penelope Shuttle

I’ve published a short review of one of my favourite collections of last year over on my ‘Share Your Toys’ blog. It starts:

Lyonesse (Bloodaxe, 2021) presents a problem. On the one hand, it’s tricky to talk about because I don’t feel able to map out the book’s depths. Parts of it remain sunken and mysterious to me – I can claim no commanding vantage point, despite having browsed it on-off for a couple of months and read some of the poems upwards of a dozen times.

On the other hand, it’s tricky to talk about because it describes itself, its themes and its subject matter clearly enough without any need for me to add gloss. In the preface and on the cover and in the poems themselves we are introduced to Lyonesse as “a submerged land”, “a city under the sea”, “an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change”,  “a fluid magical world”, “a feasting-cup city”, “just what you want it to be / streets paved / with the sea”. And in a sense, this is all we need to know; the poems expand on and exemplify these core traits, even foreseeing my present dilemma by referring to Lyonesse as “a place of paradox”.

The Hipflask Series

Over at Sidekick Books, we’ve finally launched the Hipflask Series, four brand new multi-author collections that delve into the various meeting points between poetry and other written forms. For the most part, they do what they say on the tin: a book of games to play, a book of love-hate stories, a book of misquotations, a book of hidden messages. It would be a great help to us if people could start ordering them or asking after them at bookshops, as we’re hoping to get them stocked as far and wide as possible.

Reading

I’ve jumped into Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris — a book that, on evidence thus far, attempts to get as close as possible to simulating the experience of wandering through a well-tended, assiduously organised garden of herbs and flowers. Not much narrative but abundant tresses and thickets of descriptive language. Plenty of words I don’t know. Review at some point, if I can find the right angle on it!

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