"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.

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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.