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Relocation!
Very belatedly: if you’re arriving here from an old link, I’ve moved all my blogging over to www.gojonstonego.com/blog/

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Modding the Waste Land: Intertextual Mutation Between Games and Poems
I’m presenting an extended abstract at the DiGRA 2019 conference in Kyoto this coming week, based on my practical PhD research. This is the final introduction/summary text:
In Ludic Mutation: The Player’s Power to Change the Game (2012), Anne-Marie Schleiner describes how artists and players alike resist the mechanically and culturally imposed rules of digital games by finding unconventional, expressive ways to interact with game content. In doing so, they reclaim play environments from commercial games publishers, treating games as sources of “play material” that can be endlessly appropriated, hacked, remolded and recontextualised. Fan art, fan fiction and other kinds of creative adaptation inevitably exert a transformative effect upon the material they adapt. Thinking of this activity in the light of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality – the understanding that all texts absorb, transform, and are in dialogue with other texts – we arrive at the idea of intertextual mutation: conscious alteration of a text or texts by creative reconfigurement through another text. This can be thought of as an extension of play, akin to the work performed by modding communities when they change the code or otherwise tamper with a piece of software directly.
Intertextual mutation taking place between games and poems is one dimension of a broader, emergent field of ludic-poetic interplay that includes games behaving like poems (poetic games), poems behaving like games (ludokinetic poems) and poem-game hybrids. In this sense, intertextual mutation might mean the reconfigurement of poems by their inclusion, partial or total, in a game, or it might mean using poetry as a means to play with and alter the content of an existing game. Since authors have always engaged in the activity of reworking other texts, and poetry in particular works on the basis of finding symbolism and meaning in artefacts both textual and non-textual, as well as in creative iteration of established patterns, it is not surprising that a number of volumes of poetry have already been published that use material from computer games and computer game franchises. These include The Mario Kart 64 Poems by August Smith (Cool Skull Press, 2015), But Our Princess is in Another Castle by B.J. Best (Rose Metal Press, 2013) and Level End by Brian Oliu (Origami Zoo Press, 2012). Myself and Kirsten Irving co-edited an anthology of computer game poems by UK poets in 2013, at a time when we sensed that a generation of younger poets were beginning to look to games for fresh poetic material. A number of the poets we published in this volume have gone on to win major awards, and among the books shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the UK this year is Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019), which borrows its structure and much of its imagery from Super Mario World.
The position of the poet engaging with the content of games is unique. Since there is little crossover between the audience for commercial games and the audience for poetry, they cannot easily rely on reader familiarity with the text they are reconfiguring. On the other hand, they do not face the same legal restrictions that fan artists, fan fiction writers and modders do with regard to copyright law. This is because fair use and fair dealing exemptions generally permit the use of copyrighted material both where there is a substantial “transformative” effect, and where it is being selectively quoted for the purposes of comment or criticism. Poets are very much in the business of metaphor, and metaphor is a process that is fundamentally both transformative and selective. As phrased by Philip Wheelwright, metaphor is marked by “the double imaginative act of outreaching and combining” (1968, p.72), an act that changes what it uses. The poet who works with the play material of digital games wields it as the semantic vehicle for something “more obscurely known” (Wheelwright, p.73), and in so doing articulates and expands on the symbolic properties of that material.
A typical strategy in the volumes of poetry I have mentioned above, therefore, is to redeploy characters, items and specific ludic situations from games as elements of a poetic conceit directed at broader themes of identity, intimacy and modernity. Oliu’s poems in Level End, for example, are staged as “boss battles” or “save points”, but each frames an account of events occurring outside the world of the computer game, mixing details we recognise as being derived from real-life experience with other elements imported from the unreality of games. The latter are invariably put to work as metaphor, enhancing both the immediacy and the polysemantic essence of the poetry.
As a poetry practitioner myself, I have found that characters from games can be used as personae, as imaginary interlocutors and as rich sources of imagery in exploring personal, interpersonal and sociopolitical issues, as well as simply inventing new unrealities. I consider this exploration to be both a form of play, connected to and extending out of the play engendered by the games themselves, and a kind of critical intervention. Furthermore, I would argue that the flexibility of metaphor allows the resulting poems to lead a double-life, both independently of the texts on which they draw, and as paratextual add-ons or modifications to them. In the full talk, I will develop these claims with examples from my own practice, giving particular attention to intertextual mutation as a creative-critical act related to both play and theory.
Best, B.J. 2013. But Our Princess is in Another Castle. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press.
Kristeva, J. 1980. ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’. In L. S. Roudiez (ed.), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (pp. 64-91). New York, NY: Colombia University Press.
Nintendo Entertainment. 1990. Super Mario World. Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo.
Oliu, B. 2012. Level End. Origami Zoo Press.
Schleiner, A-M. 2012. Ludic Mutation: The Player’s Power to Change the Game. Accessed 19 January 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.378401 (published in print in 2017 as as The Player’s Power to Change the Game: Ludic Mutation. Amsterdam University Press).
Sexton, S. 2019. If All the World and Love Were Young. London, England: Penguin.
Smith, A. 2015. The Mario Kart 64 Poems. Somervilla, M.A, USA: Cool Skull Press.
Stone, J. and Irving, K. Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge. London, England: Sidekick Books.
Wheelwright, P. 1968. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington, USA; London, England: Indiana University Press.
Off the Page: Chapter Two
I’m doing a short talk this Saturday at the British Library, alongside Kirsten Irving, discussing our various experiments with interactive and gaming poetry and also touching on my own research into this area over the last three years.
We’re on at 13.45, but as part of a packed schedule of speakers, including interactive fiction writer Emily Short and another of my long-term collaborators, Abigail Parry.
Full details of the event are here.
Poetry as a Game of Cops and Robbers
Here’s a video of 'The Lookout' being performed in puckish, animated fashion by the very lovely Guy Clark. The poem won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize 2018, and is currently available as part of Live Canon’s 2018 Anthology. What follows is an essay that poured out of me intermittently, in stupid little late-night bursts, over the last few weeks whenever I tried to put together a brief background to the poem.
Exhibit A. THE ROBBERS
‘The Lookout’ is a poem about a thief keeping vigil, over the street and over his or her state of mind. I say “his or her” because within the text itself, the gender of the thief is ambiguous. That he or she is part of a larger gang is implied but not made explicit.
The poem uses 17th century thieves’ cant to partially disguise its own meaning. It is itself shifty and duplicitous. In reading or listening to it, the reader communes with no real, whole person but a shadowplay, a persona made of stolen and spliced materials. Flesh and blood is temporarily lent to it by Guy in the video. It is a burrow of little deceptions.
The origin of thieves’ cant is not exactly certain. An account by Samuel Rid in Martin Markwell, Beadle of Bridewell claims that Giles Hather and Cock Lorel, “the most notorious knave that ever lived”, met at the Devil’s Arse cavern in Derbyshire, and there devised “a certain kind of language, to the end their cozenings, knaveries and villainies might not so easily be perceived […] And this their language they spun out of three other tongues, viz., Latin, English and Dutch – these three especially, notwithstanding some few words they borrowed of Spanish and French.”
There is a long association between the poet and the low-life, in part because of the poor pay each receives, in part because each is seen to flout the rules of society while contributing little to it. Poetry’s place in Western culture is overshadowed by Plato’s suspicion of poets as “guilty of making the gravest misstatements” and subsequent demand that the defenders of poetry “show not only that she is pleasant but also useful”. The poet is accused of being a dim breed of conman.
This criminal connection is not entirely disparaging, however. Aside from its romantic flavour, it operates as a metaphor – the poet as kleptomaniac pickpocket, gathering and arranging images like jewels. The smuggling of concepts and implications into the body of the poem by means of verbal and semantic association. The transaction with the reader as clandestine meeting. Rampant impersonation – the poem borrowing the dress, bearing and affect of all kinds of arch rhetorical forms, while its major characteristic is to do with tricks performed upon the senses – hoodwinking. Misdirection. Cheap magic.
When Johan Huizinga lists the shifting functions of poetry as “ritual, entertainment, artistry, riddle-making, doctrine, persuasion, sorcery”, or when Umberto Eco defines the poetic effect as “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed”, it recalls scenes from the crime caper series Lupin III where the protagonist removes rubber mask after rubber mask, cycling through identities to dizzying effect.
This in turn reminds us that the chicanery of the poet is a form of play-acting. Just like the rubbery cartoon criminal, they are an agent of disorder – or rather, re-order – whose shapeshifting is an intrinsic part of their function. There may even be more than one of them at work, if the piece is collaborative, or an adaptation or translation.
But the willing collusion of the reader is needed for the trick to work. Because the action of the poem takes place in its own world, it requires someone to step into that world, to accept its conditions. They must go beyond reading or listening and join in the caper, connive with the poem, even drive the getaway car.
The reader who enters the world of the poem will find it considerably more pliant, more turbulent than the external world – more so than any narrative, more than a cartoon. It is one of ‘semantic plenitude’, to borrow a phrase from Philip Wheelwright’s Metaphor and Reality – a living labyrinth, where one thing may stand in place of another, or two things occupy the same space simultaneously. Meaning is always provisional, and the reader may escape through a secret door at any time.
But because the world of the poem unavoidably recalls our world, and because it is consciously navigated, the transformations and elisions within it seep back through the membrane. The reader returns with something – a share of the loot. Poetic language therefore goads us to break with conventional order, to transgress in our thinking. It is fundamentally wayward-leaning, topping up our glass with a wink, however grave the occasion.
In the main, this is to be celebrated. Perhaps the famous Canadian poet Irving Layton intended doing just that when he titled his 1958 poem ‘Whatever else, poetry is freedom’. But the freedom Layton revels in is discomforting: two stanzas into the poem, he appears to casually confess to an act of domestic violence. And this, it transpires, is hardly out of keeping with his reputation.
Exhibit B. THE COPS
If the poet is a rogue, they are also a police detective, both within and without the poem. Within the poem, they are ever in pursuit of some quarry and – as the author of the work – imposing a tentative authority upon it. Their play is serious, as all play is to some extent. For Wheelwright, the semantic plenitude of poetry is an effort to properly account for reality as it is perceived, a task for which normal language is hopelessly inadequate. “Reality is coalescent,” he says – a negotiation between the particular and universal. Everyday delineations between things are “a subterfuge of thought”.
In other words, the chicanery of the poet is performed in order to turn up the level of magnification where the commonplace version of reality is zoomed out and fuzzy. It is a branch of forensics.
Meanwhile, outside of the poem, at large in society, the poet is the moral variety of trickster, the wise fool. They feel a duty to maintain and improve the world they live in. They have burdens to discharge and monsters to expel. Poets, we are told, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world – their forerunner is the thulr of Norse literature, orator and keeper of knowledge, who drew on his repository of lore to challenge boastful claims in the court of the king.
But where is the court nowadays? How galling that as legislator, wisdom-seeker and knowledge-keeper, the poet’s instrument of choice – the tool that sits neatly in their grip – the poem – is a thing suited to slippery skulduggery. It dodges and teases, disrupts narrative and logical progression, and requires its audience to act as partner in crime, so that even the most violently potent poem, when aimed at the sceptic, has all the stopping power of a pebble tossed in the path of a tank.
Invoking Layton’s ‘poetry is freedom’, Leonard Cohen said, “I don’t think the poet has a mission. I think that activity more appropriately applies to the priest, the teacher, the politician, and the warrior.” But this is a purist notion of the poet, Len. The human mess of poet is also a priest, teacher, politician or warrior – a crossbreed who mingles poetry with mission. A meddler.
This leads the poet to act as police detective in a third sense: policing themselves and their own. Somehow they must convince a sceptical public and state to give them back their court. They desire influence. They desire stability and standing. Even taking individual poets at their most humble, they want their work to be valued to the extent that it rationalises the effort behind it.
They need to band together, then, operating as a guild or a community, to survive hostile indifference. Members of their profession must double up as both themselves and the representatives of impartial accrediting institutions, to create the impression that there is a civilised order to the production of poetry. Quality control procedures are put in place. Poetry becomes a crop to be cultivated. It is advocated for regularly in the papers. It is administered as a cure and recommended as a health food. It is printed on high quality paper and raised onto a stage at every opportunity. Dense, tangled carpets of hyperbole fill the backs of books.
The scheme is generally successful in convincing some of the public that there are poets who are great and esteemed figures, though by bludgeoning more than persuasion[1]. Many, on the other hand, are alienated by the constant ceremonialising and collective self-importance. There is a conspicuous failure to cajole these readers to engage wholeheartedly with the poem – they continue to stand outside, occasionally prodding with a toe, asking for some empirical evidence as to the nutritional and societal value of this product.
In the meantime, many figures like Layton emerge – imbued with a sense of their own destiny, a sense of the poet as cultural Colossus – and openly engage in narcissistic and misogynistic excess.
Exhibit C. THE SHOOTOUT
Because poetry is now a scene, a culture, an institution, the situation for the individual poet has grown somewhat complex. They have somehow become a resident in a large town populated only by thieves or police detectives. They still intend to perform an outlaw or policing function on the world outside, but they must first contend with the town’s own rules, rituals and religiosity.
Within the town are all the means to have their work legitimised and disseminated. There are exits leading to the stage or the printed page, perhaps even to newspaper reviews. There is remuneration, there are appointments, there are offices. The poet only needs to be authenticated, to have their papers stamped enough times, to find favour among one or two of the various clubs, and then the opportunities multiply.
But the town is in continuous tumult – a range of policymakers thrive within it, often engaging in open warfare with one another. Authority takes the same form it does everywhere else in the world – multitudinous, self-contradictory, variably volatile, precise and imprecise, so that there’s no way to manoeuvre without breaking some rule or other. You must simply choose when and how to disobey, which powers to risk offending.
As the balance shifts between different attitudes of critical accreditation, it becomes difficult to keep the paperwork up-to-date. The red carpet may be suddenly taken from one demographic and laid out in front of another. A poet may spend years or decades amassing the credentials that buy them their passage through one of the town’s gates, only to arrive at the border and find a fresh and seemingly perverse set of documents are required.
An additional complication is that whatever power propels you from the town into the wider world also acts as your spokesperson, and will inevitably have some crude design in mind. For a time, the prevailing scheme was to send poets out into the public as members of a grand dynasty of literature. A narrative arc of English-language poetry was concocted, and those who were lifted onto the stages were introduced as the heirs and inheritors of tradition[2] – at times a fairly brazen attempt to trade on public veneration of the classics, which we know very well has less to do with the exercise of individual judgement than it does fascination with celebrity.
Meanwhile inside the town, everyone’s creative DNA was tested for evidence of lineage – the first port of call in any assessment of talent. This went well for the Oxbridge graduates.
More recently, however, this branding exercise has fallen out of favour – perhaps in part because it cannot produce venerable poets in large quantities, and poetry has become an industry that, like all industries, pursues continuous growth. The emphasis has moved very firmly on to relatability and personal narrative.[3]
The strategy is well-judged: we know the public love a story. They love triumph and tragedy. They love getting the scoop on a person’s private life, and to be treated as confidante. What’s more, poets almost inevitably lean toward the interrogation of intimate matters – their own lives present the most urgent problems and constitute the nearest material to hand.[4] For the purposes of producing poetry in ever-increasing quantities, it’s a bottomless well.
It reaches a stage somewhere between prescription and conscription. Dana Goia, in his introduction to the Best American Poetry 2018, writes: “the essence of poetry is an individual voice speaking to an individual reader”. This is not so much an explanation to readers as it is an instruction to poets to spill and keep spilling. ‘Voice’ means fingerprint, means the means by which you are authenticated[5].
There are now few expectations more insistent than that placed upon the poet writing about their father to include the words “my father”, to collapse all the possibilities of the poem’s semantic galaxy into a single solar system orbiting one unmistakeable glut of subject matter. The poet knows that by omission of those two words they risk being damned as whimsical or obscure, the poem deemed an unnecessary act.
(‘Damned’, because the factionalism within the town means that poets softly savage each other all the time, and because raising one hero aloft seems to require making unflattering comparisons with their contemporaries. The poets with access to the newspapers trade broad swipes, between them making the case that the whole art form is trivial and self-indulgent.
Bad news for those poets who are stranded somewhere in between the limited scope of each faction’s ideals, who may find themselves doubly or triply damned.)
The pull and corral of personal narrative, meanwhile, is bad news for the poet-as-thief. Poetry pairs well with narrative, but also offers an escape from it – a means to confront the most serious issues of grief, inheritance, identity and so on by dissolving their oppressive weight in a super-artifice, or by scattering it across a multitude of imaginary plains. Seriousness arrived at through play – the world of the poem as a forge where one may melt down the old, inhibitive narrative templates and weld together a more open-ended construct.
Or perhaps you thought to drown the ‘self’ in poetry, to flee from your own voice into a polyphony or pattern, use that as your vehicle of exploration. The methods you might employ – collaboration, assemblage, generative sequencing – are marks against you in the realm of individual voices speaking to individual readers. The story you’re pursuing is too new, or it’s too far from the surface. You are to be strapped in to your biography instead.
Or suppose there is some element of your identity that people have always used to trap and skewer you. You may have rightfully imagined that in poetry, identity can be endlessly reconfigured, recharted and refined – only to find that passage out of the town is offered on the condition that this facet of you is sensationalised, sent forth like an emissary.
Even if you’re pleased and prepared for that to be the case, you may then find a facsimile of your identity is sold back to you, or that others look on it, jealously or admiringly, as a kind of clever ploy. They may even convince you, if they hit you hard enough, that it is a clever ploy.
And OK, so all that is irksome about this may pass. But the previous arrangement was no good either, and nor is the inclination, past and present, to reduce poetry to political rhetoric. All of these schemes seem to find their strength in the denial of poetry’s shapeshifting, destabilising, function-evading tendency, denial that the reader must play the poem like a game, or play with it like a toy, to make something happen. In all these formulations, potency resides in the poem like nutrients in a grain, and the poet is the provider.
But this is what happens when the poet pursues an idea of their own authority. And it leads to an abundance of revered figures, some of whom will abuse with impunity. Layton’s reputation was secured by variations on the theme of literary authenticity, both in terms of relatability and familiarity with the canon – and, for what it’s worth, political clout. Poetry is freedom, yes, but when power is situated in the idea of poetry, it sours.
Exhibit D: THE WITNESS
I didn’t, er, set out to write this. Much of the above is, simultaneously, a kind of strange dream that I wish to distance myself from, and variations on thoughts that have distracted me for years. I only intended to write a little background to the poem, explaining how I had actually composed it with the Live Canon competition in mind, had considered the tastes of the judge, Liz Berry, and the fact that an actor would perform the poem if it were shortlisted – all of which helped me shape the thing. Once I’d got a little way in, though, I realised I felt anxious about admitting any of that.
I felt anxious about admitting the fact that ‘The Lookout’ is partially based on a character from a computer game called Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine. This lookout is a Haitian refugee, robbed and displaced in the 1991 coup. “There’s a moral debt that’s owed to me,” she tells Inspector Voltaire in the third act of the game. “The law doesn’t apply until I’m paid back in full.”
I felt anxious about the idea that in playing through Monaco in the role of The Lookout, and in writing something inspired in part by that experience, in part by the character, it might be thought that I was making some kind of fraudulent representation – even though, as far as I’m concerned, the ‘I’ of the poem is me, and her, and a 17th century rogue, and an everyman all at once.
I felt anxious about the fact that ‘The Lookout’ was also a piece of research. I’d intended to completely disguise the fact that it was partially inspired by a character in a computer game, hoping to demonstrate that once any prejudice against the medium is removed, computer games are as fruitful a source of material for poetry as any arena of cultural experience.
Then I remembered I was dogged by similar anxieties during the composition of the poem, and that I am, in fact, dogged in this manner throughout all my composing, and that it has become worse as I’ve aged, as I’ve become attuned to all the different ways that poetry is judged, and the ways it is dismissed, mostly by other poets.
I’ve broken a number of unwritten rules: that poetry ought to be a natural, almost-unwilled expressiveness, uninfluenced by ideas about judges’ tastes[6]. That it ought to be written in and for your own voice. That it should not associate with a low form like computer games, and it should not disguise itself.
(The thieves’ cant is the cause of a three-pronged anxiety. It may be viewed as overly opaque, or as theft of a dialect to which I have no claim, or as an unoriginal stylistic affectation.)
None of these rules are enforced in every place and circumstance, but they are enforced in some places, some of the time, at a varying level of transparency, and so negotiating them is difficult. Together with all the others, they seem to make up a system of tripwires.
I know it doesn’t have to work this way. If you’re lucky, you may be able to drift easily into the graces of one or other presiding authority. Or you may have the serenity of spirit to trust that patience and application will see you through the system eventually. Or you may have such clear and strong ideas about what is right and wrong that you can look on any disagreement contemptuously and barge your way through.
Or you may not need to bother with Poetry Town at all, if you have money and influence, or a bright enough idea. Or you may, in any case, only regard poetry as something to be worn lightly, to be straightened out and draped about the shoulders of some other, truer cause.
You may fluctuate wildly between all these positions and find that it suits you. And once it has all meshed together into a stability of reputation and a certainty of destination, you may choose to be contemptuous of others who find themselves compromised.
I can only say that for me, I find it a tangle – a narrow and well-sentried pass – and the more I read and take in of others’ positions on the matter, the more it is so. Although I write obsessively on serious and personal subjects, I rarely name them directly. I don’t aim to be anyone’s successor, or to be part of some literary pantheon. And I don’t want ‘I/me’ to be at the centre of everything I write.
So I find myself struggling to fulfil the expectations others have of poetry, and unable to maintain my own sense of its justification in the face of all these well-evidenced ideals. This doesn’t just halt me at the point of submitting or publishing; it gets to work at the earliest stage of composition, so that I see immediately, almost before I’ve written anything, the many ways in which it is inadequate.
What’s that really got to do with ‘The Lookout’, which has, after all, won me a competition? It’s just that I came to realise that this is in part what the poem is about. Somewhere in the experience of playing as lookout in a computer game, stowing my impulse to dash for the loot, and in the characterisation of the Lookout as a refugee who says she’s owed a debt, and in the linguistic disguise of thieves’ cant, there was a way toward reflecting how I have felt the need to hide and watch, and watch myself, and see myself as intruder.
I see it as a positive account – an account of what methods remain open to you when all the roads appear blocked. Which is also an account of the instinct for poetry.
But honestly, I only really wanted to make the point, when I started writing this, that a poem is something of a caper. Something like, in fact, a stage from Monaco – where reader and poet are thief and policeman, sometimes chasing one another, sometimes in collusion, sometimes operating independently. Hungry but not too hungry.
[1] Once critical language has arrived at pronouncing a work “important”, it has given up trying to demonstrate that its subject is enticing or beneficial to the reader in any immediate way, and moved on to coercion as a tactic.
[2] Even as I write this, I’m uncomfortably aware of my inability to reinforce my assertions by reference to this literary figure and that, also of how clumsy it looks on the occasions that I do.
[3] I’m writing about these as if they were carefully devised monolithic approaches, but of course they arise from a mix of idealism, pragmatism and cynicism, driven by different people at different times for differing reasons.
[4] Unambiguously personal subject matter also means the poet is likely to be more protective of and fiercely loyal to the poem, and renders others, in their decency and sensitivity, less eager to issue criticism. It’s striking how often plagiarists will clumsily edit the precise language of the poem they are lifting from, because what they intend to steal is the story and its attendant good will. Thieves stealing from thieves, however, is a completely different essay.
[5] There is a slipperiness of meaning here that can be exploited both ways. ‘Voice’ may of course mean the individual perspective of an artist, as communicated across the entire body of their work, whether they are novelist, photographer or film-maker. It may also be used, as I suspect it is being used here, as a measure of purity.
[6] I’m aware of the irony: that I’m claiming to be constrained from writing to others' tastes because of other other's tastes.
Strike A Light
Set myself a challenge over the weekend: write and build a ludokinetic poem for Bonfire Night. Problems with the Game Maker export module meant I couldn’t get a fully interactive version out until this morning, and it still doesn’t work on Safari or Silk browsers, but for everyone else, here’s a link to Strike a Light.

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Cover design process for ‘No, Robot, No!’, a miscellany of lyrical accounts, visual poems, lists, facts and interactive pages concerning robots, automata and AI, out now from Sidekick Books.
Free Verse Book Fair 2018
I’ll be at the annual Free Verse Book Fair in central London this Saturday, manning the Sidekick Books table with long-term collaborator Kirsten Irving. We’re expecting to have copies of the latest two books in the Headbooks series - No, Robot, No! and Battalion - available for sale alongside all the books currently available on the Sidekick site. See them in the flesh! Meet us in the flesh! The Fair is moving to a new location this year at Senate House, in the William Beveridge Hall. More information can be maintained from the official website.
Some Cannot Be Caught / Fox Interview
I have a new poem published in Some Cannot Be Caught: The Emma Press Book of Beasts, edited by Anja Konig and Liane Strauss. It’s a semi-concrete poem called ‘Documentary on the Pangolin’ and – with apologies to those who don’t like hints as to how a poem should be read – I’m afraid I wrote most of this with the voice of David Attenborough in my head.
As a follow-up, the Emma Press conducted a super-quick interview with me and other contributing poets about our animal alter-egos. Extract from the article:
Jon Stone, author of the poem 'Documentary of the Pangolin', replied instantly with “a fox”, explaining that he too is “scrawny, crepuscular, an occasional nuisance, and an inveterate rummager.” He added, “I like travelling between the gaps in the figurative hedges, and I often find myself sniffing around on other people's lawns. Humans make me uneasy, but I hang around in close proximity to them anyway.”
They did ask me another question, which was left out of the version published on the blog: Do you think humans have anything to learn from this animal/animals in general? After some thought, I typed back: From the fox specifically? We could learn how to live alongside our enemies.
Soho Poetry Nights #6
I’m reading at Soho Poetry Nights this Friday, 29th June, in a double-act with Abigail Parry (we’re reading from each other’s books) and alongside Sarah Fletcher and Ana Hassan. The event kicks off at 7.30 at Library Club, 121 St Martin’s Lane, and there are open mic slots!
Very short point on language
Graham Linehan (Father Ted, Black Books) has been pinning his colours to the mast for some time when it comes to trans rights, ie. he is not entirely on board. A major plank of his argument seems to be that the logic of "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman" is circular.
But language has always evolved in part through circular reasoning. We call something 'X' because it seems very similar to another thing we call 'X'. The definition applied afterwards is never absolute, never perfect, and the more a word encompasses, the less likely it is that its meaning is fixed to one particular feature, let alone a concrete feature. The word 'woman' has a sprawl of associations, and it's not surprising that during a period of societal change, we should have to have a serious think about what it means to all of us going forward. Nor is it surprising that for different people it is strongly associated with different sets of experiences, or aspects of their identity.
Obviously, there's a lot more to this subject, but for now I think the point about language is self-contained, and in itself defeats the complaint that as a matter of logic women cannot self-identify.

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A-Z of Villainy / Aquanauts Live at Hay
Two upcoming events: I’m co-hosting an A-Z of Villainy this Friday, from 7pm at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon. It’s a simple premise: writers reading pieces inspired by villains. 26 writers, 26 villains. Some of the writers may or may not be undercover villains themselves, and liable to hatch a scheme in the midst of proceedings. If no one else does, I will. If I can think of something dastardly enough.
I’m co-hosting this event with Kate Potts and Holly Hopkins, and contributing writers include Will Harris, Astra Papachristodoulou, Theophilus Kwek, Nisha Ramayya and Rishi Dastidar.
Then on Friday I’ll be in Hay-on-Wye with my Sidekick co-editor Kirsten Irving and two Sidekick poets, Abigail Parry and Clive Birnie. The fabulous Poetry Bookshop have invited us to host an interactive poetry performance linked to our interactive handbook, Aquanauts. We’re bringing party bags.
Aquanauts / Saboteur Awards 2018
Public voting in The Saboteur Awards ends midnight tomorrow night (9th May).
Sidekick Books, the small press publisher I co-run with Kirsten Irving, has been shortlisted in the Most Innovative Publisher category. We publish exclusively collaborative books - sometimes team-ups between writers and artists, sometimes multi-author anthologies that might mix poetry with visual art, essays or comics. But our major claim to innovation of late is publishing the Headbooks series: interactive handbooks that fuse scrapbooking, game and activity pages with visual poetry, factual content, collages and calligrams.
The first book in the series, Aquanauts, is also shortlisted this year for Best Anthology. I spent a large-ish chunk of 2017 soliciting work for this book from some of the finest poets and experimental writers I know, editing it, designing it, creating the cover artwork (see above), choosing the right printer, organising a semi-immersive/immersible launch party and gently sliding the finished book under the noses of bookshop owners, so I’m immensely pleased that it’s made the shortlist.
If you own or have seen a copy and think it does the trick, please consider heading over to the Saboteur Awards website to vote for it, and for Sidekick. Equally, if you have any familiarity with and interest in the half-underground world of British poetry, head on over and vote for the best in any of the fields. Make the process as democratic as possible.
Eborakon (Vol 2 Issue 1)
Belatedly drawing attention to the newest issue of Eborakon, published by the University of York, a handsomely produced, neat little poetry journal that also includes visual art and reviews. The editors have included a poem of mine entitled ‘Terminal Ballistics’. It’s one of the poems I salvaged from my years working as a transcript editor in London courts and arbitration centres, and takes its cue in particular from a case concerning naval ordnance. Terminal ballistics (or ‘wound ballistics’) is the study of the behaviour of projectile weapons when they meet their target. I noted down as many pieces of terminology as I could from the experts in the case and substituted them in to lines from various poems of love and tenderness. So it’s a love-hate song of sorts.
The photograph above was taken in Hunstanton on the West Norfolk coast, while waiting for the bus, shortly after having met the dedicated squad of axolotls pictured below.
Sunday Review: Beckett
I’ve reviewed Beckett by The Secret Experiment for Sabotage Reviews. Follow the link to read the full review. Here are some extracts:
The visuals are an impeccable homage to Dadaist art by way of Jan Švankmajer. The whole game is an unsettlingly animated interactive collage (...) boiled down to a murky, minimalist colour palette.
Beckett is far more stripped down than any of the aforementioned games – progress is mostly linear, people are represented by symbols (a bottlecap, a typewriter, a toy soldier) and voices by cycling sound samples (coughing, scissor snips, jangling coins).
It disrupts its own narrative with perspectival and chronological jumps, switches between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, and extends the symbolic reach of its game-world so as to thoroughly blur the line between expressionism and interactive simulation.
If visual poetry is ‘the word made flesh’, to borrow Willard Bohn’s Biblical metaphor, then this is flesh that creeps and crawls (...)
No, Robot, No! Final Days of Submissions
Broadcasting on all channels! The next collaborative interactive experimental Headbook I’ll be editing and publishing with Kirsten Irving will be No, Robot, No! We’ve been looking for proposals from writers and artists as to how they would fill 3-5 pages of this book, and the deadline for proposals is midnight this coming Monday. Full details of the call for submissions here. Please share with anyone you know you may be interested.

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Back to School
School of Forgery is out in paperback, after being out of print for nearly half a decade. I’ve written a new version of the blurb for my website, and it goes like this: School of Forgery is handily divided into two sections: Originals and Fakes. It’s possible, however, that there might have been some cross-contamination between the two. One or more of the translations of classical and contemporary Japanese poets in the Fakes section may, in fact, be made up. Some lines from the autobiography of Harpo Marx could somehow have found their way into the tale of the bandit Goemon. There are rumours that the liars, hoaxers and plagiarists who are both subject matter and tour guides in the first part have infiltrated the ranks of the dashing heroes and agents of the second. Some of these poems even steal, shamelessly, from each other. Innocent believers in literary authenticity are advised to take especial care. This work may be, in its entirety, nothing more than a fabrication.
Drafts: Jun the Swan
OK, something for International Women’s Day. Here’s the first handwritten draft of ‘Jun the Swan’, which was published as part of the Tatsunoko sequence in School of Forgery. I wanted to write something about Jun because she’s the archetype – and possibly the prototype – of the lone woman on a superhero team. The team in question being Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, a Japanese animation from 1972 that was dubbed and released in English-speaking countries as Battle of the Planets in 1978.
Being the sole female protagonist, Jun is treated rather poorly by her costume designers and animators – clad in pink, and saddled with the swan persona where Ken, Joe and Ryu (the other adults on the team) get to be an eagle, condor and owl respectively. No talons for you, Jun! And of course, she’s in the miniest of miniskirts, so flashes her pants whenever she hoofs a villain.
But there’s more to her than that. As well as being the team’s electronics and demolitions expert (ie. the Donatello of the outfit), she’s a small business owner, successfully running a café and somehow raising her adopted brother Jinpei at the same time (they’re both orphans). Plus, she’s an outrageously skilled biker. In one episode, ‘Bird Missile of Bitterness’, she clearly fancies her old biker friend, Koji, but rightly suspects him of being a wrong’n and insists on blowing him up herself to save the team.
So anyway, I tried to write about someone steely, brilliant and daring, with dreams and appetites, who’s somehow got lumbered with being the girl of the group, and with all the attendant impositions.