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Author: Jon Stone

Fads and Aftershocks: what can poetry and gaming do for one another?


Open mic poetry night in Grim Fandango

This article asks, and attempts to answer, three questions:

1. What can poetry do for gaming?

Electronic gaming culture is expansive and continues to expand, with indie development in particular burgeoning at a phenomenal rate. It’s become almost an umbrella term, in that it covers everything from teenagers playing mass-marketed war simulators with film-quality CGI to commuters idly thumbing through Temple Run on the train to work, to the activist inclinations of the interactive fiction community. Many game-making tools are now freely available on the Internet, and it seems as if every few months a new lone gunman developer surfaces with a breakout hit, earning him enough to quit his job.

But the conversation around gaming comes back repeatedly to its legitimacy as an artform, with gamers frequently expressing their desire for the best games to be ‘recognised’ as works of art. What is missed in the deployment of the term ‘recognition’ is the fact that the behaviour of the audience is an immeasurably large part of what defines a practice as an art, and the principle obstacle to games being recognised as art is gamers. I don’t mean that pejoratively, but as long as the bulk of the audience for games continue to express themselves mostly through financial behaviour – buying, then exhausting the product before moving on to the next purchase – gaming will struggle not to be regarded as a form of disposable entertainment. Shakespeare is not held aloft as an artistic genius because hundreds of Elizabethans and Jacobeans flocked to see his plays night after night; his esteem has been managed and sustained by generation after generation of writers and scholars who have provided intelligent assessment and insight into his work and used it as the foundation for creative works of their own.

There is no sense, therefore, in waiting around for ‘recognition’, or indeed for waiting for the Shakespeare of the game development world. How we act and think now will change how other people think about games, and aside from financial behaviour, the vast majority of discourse is journalistic in character. I have read many, many insightful articles about games, but journalistic copy is written to be succeeded the next day by something else – it is incredibly impermanent. Games studies courses are beginning to find a foothold in academia, but academia is, by its nature, secluded and self-insulating. I don’t want to diminish the importance of either of these areas, but there needs to be as much variety in writing about games as there is in games themselves. (I would go further and suggest that the cause of gaming as art has a serious problem when the most vexed and visible conversation of recent months has been a pitched battle between affluent consumers and corporate spokespeople.)

1997’s Snake, now a thing of nostalgia, is revisited by Cliff Hammett in Coin Opera 2

For games and gaming to be acknowledged and discussed in poetry – in the work, that is, of writers who are, first and foremost, poets – is an important step in the way gaming is written about. It’s not quite the same thing as blending poetry into games or making poems more like games, though I’m an advocate of those as well. It’s also not simply a case of putting a badge on games, saying, “You have been deemed worthy.” Poetry has that reputation of being lofty, but has also, of course, had a sideline in reconstituting detritus into art for the better part of century, so to be plundered for poetic content is not necessarily an honouring process.

No; the importance of poetry about games, as with poetry about anything, is that it suggests new ways of considering the subject, new ways of ‘reading’ games beyond the purely evaluative. It’s a creative-critical approach. I’ve been proffering examples from Coin Opera 2 to people for some time now, so here’s just a couple more: Cliff Hammett’s ‘Snake’ works as a reading of the once-popular mobile game Snake as a visual metaphor for the movement of water across the fissures in man-made structures. It suggests this both through its words and through its shape, and might cause us to return to the original game (now long since superseded as casual entertainment by Angry Birds and its sequels) and find something new and remarkable about it. Prompting the return is important; individual games may sell millions and enjoy a brief period in the public consciousness, but if any are to rise above the level of a fad, we need to find reasons to return to them once newer ones with better graphics supplant them.

My second example is Dan Simpson’s ‘Sympathy for the Orange Ghost’, an extract from a full-length show he’s taking to the Edinburgh festival this year. Pacman is already legendary, the main character already an icon. The game has gone about as far as games can go in embedding itself in our culture. Notably, it has already had a starring role in a one-man poetry performance show: Ross Sutherland’s The Three Stigmata of Pacman. But Dan’s work enriches Pacman further by unearthing a further implied narrative in it: the outcast status of Clyde, the orange ghost, whom he lyricises into a symbol of social marginalisation in general.

Poetry about games extends their life and extends their relevance. It is, in itself, a form of the ‘recognition’ that some gamers crave, but operates through an active creative engagement. This is what poetry can do for games.

Ross Sutherland performing The Three Stigmata of Pacman


2. What can gaming do for poetry?

At first blush, the answer seems obvious. In commercial terms, poetry is a dust mite to the gaming industry’s behemoth. In fact, poetry barely even registers as an industry at all, and therefore by infiltrating the culture of gaming, poets might be seen as making some calculated grab at the larger audience.

But it’s a mistake to think in these terms. Poetry is a much wider, older and potentially longer-lasting cultural discipline than gaming, and while it might look sickly in terms of revenue, its health in terms of the number and variety of its practitioners is booming. Money troubles may slow it down, greatly reduce its reach and hurt individual poets and publishers, but poetry will go on in some form, while the unsustainability of Western opulence may still spell an early end for gaming (in its electronic form at least).

What’s more, poetry’s lack of commerciality is in large part down to its effectiveness. That is to say, a little goes a very long way. Consumers burn through games, novels and even sprawling television sagas in days and find themselves hungry for more, while a small amount of poetry is enough for most people for most of their lives. Contemporary poets struggle for attention not through lack of skill or personality, but because poets of past eras successfully remain instilled in the national psyche, nourishing our cultural discourse far beyond their lifespan. We have an excess of good poetry, and in this sense, one sensible argument is that poetry requires nothing, that it is already the survival specialist of the arts, able to live on water and thin air if need be, growing fat in times of plenty or austerity.

What poetry does crave is renewal. Without renewal, entire generations risk coming across as nothing more than an aftershock of those that came before. Renewal is the sign that poets are in step with the present and prepared to attend to it, rising to the challenge of being the world’s ‘unacknowledged legislators’, rather than wallowing in nostalgia or trying to relive past glories.

Gaming provides an obvious opportunity for such renewal. I don’t suggest, of course, that all serious poets should at once turn to games in order to demonstrate an affinity with modern life. Done cynically, this leads to cheap and embarrassing poems (see Wendy Cope’s attempts at text message poetry). But we’re now living in a world where younger people are reading more from computer screens than they are from printed material, and part of the reason for this is the richness of virtual environments, where identity is more fluid and the ways of absorbing information more varied. The opportunities for philosophical and artistic exploration are immense. Thinking, for instance, of identity – a huge preoccupation in contemporary poetry – poets should be interested in the implications of being able to come home from work and role-play as a humanoid plant who can summon the dead until bedtime. Since experience is subjective, is there any reason to believe experiences in virtual environments are less real, less a part of our make-up and a contributing factor to our character, than experiences in the concrete world? Consider this particularly in the light of the increasing amount of social interaction within online communities.

What about how virtual architecture can inform form and rhythm? It’s no coincidence, I would say, that a good number of the poems we took for Coin Opera 2 chose to use shape, space or meter as a way of expressing their engagement with a game. And because the history of game narratives is one of constant, rapid evolution and faltering experiments, often with the reins of authorial control loosened in order to accommodate player interaction, they are, I would suggest, a treasure trove of myth, where ‘myth’ means the opportunity to take elements of a known tale and retell or reinterpret them to explore wider themes.

Games are abundant, often scrambled packages of meaning waiting to be untangled and made sense of. Gaming culture is a cluster of new experiences whose careful evaluation, in any literary form, will help us all make sense of ourselves. That’s what gaming can do for poetry.


3. What else can they do for each other?

Finally, there’s the importance of cross-disciplinary discourse, which I also allude to in my Dr Fulminare interview over at Sabotage. At present, as far as I can make out, there is very little discussion between gaming and literary audiences, much within the bubble of each. Meanwhile, there are multiple issues afflicting both literary and gaming culture wherein both could benefit from sharing their ideas. One example is the problem of gender bias, which I go into more thoroughly here.

There are numerous social and political problems all of us are grappling with in some form or another. There are arguments that poetry can be a constructive force in this respect, and there are arguments that games can be a constructive force in this respect. I believe these arguments, but if they’re right, then both cultures – and both disciplines – could stand to share their ideas a little more freely.

Poetry Guest-Appearing in Games #2: Dishonored


Like Mark of the Ninja, 2012’s Dishonored is an action-stealth game and a shining example of that genre. It’s also credited with introducing gamers to one of the most memorable fantasy worlds of recent times: the plague-ravaged fishing city of Dunwall, a kind of steampunk Victorian East London powered by whalefat batteries (the whales are implied to be Godzillarish mutants with connections to another dimension). Automatic gun turrets and electric ‘walls of light’ exist alongside flintlock pistols and duelling sabres, as the protagonist, Corvo, traverses titanic iron bridges and vast stone fortresses to revenge himself against the corrupt ruling classes.

Taking a design cue from Bioshock, also set in a city gone wrong, the lore of the world is revealed to the player mostly through notes and books he or she finds scattered about the place, often near decaying corpses. Reading them is entirely optional and has little bearing on the plot; they’re there to add flavour to the world, to make it feel inhabited by more than the main characters and a legion of disposable guardsmen. And wouldn’t you know it: out of all the various material I found, two were definitely poems.

The first, found in the second level of the game near a homeless plague victim, is the stronger of the two. It’s called ‘Death in the Month of Songs’, with a notation explaining that it’s both an excerpt from longer work and a translation (from ‘old Serkonan’, if you were wondering). This is a clever move by the writer, as it provides an explanation for the poem lacking the sense of an ending, and also excuses a little of the tinniness, since translations tend to be difficult beasts. That said, it does read like an honest attempt at a decent poem. It consists of four stanzas of three lines, with an implied narrative and use of repetition in the first lines of each: “She was shy in the Month of Hearths” through to “She was dying in the Month of Songs”. It apes the style of the romantics somewhat, and has the odd moment of interesting imagery:

She was wed in the Month of Clans
To her sailor cousin from Cullero
A shrill bird, drilling at my chest

The last line, though, is pretty poor: “A terrible kiss on her distant lips”. ‘Terrible kiss’ has that try-hard vibe about it, and the internal rhyme is heavy-handed. She’s dying from a disease at this point, but why are her lips distant? Distant, perhaps, from the narrator, who is her suitor but who ultimately loses her to the cousin. In fact, I have to hand it to the poem: it does manage to tell a tragic story with very few words. The lady in question marries a sailor instead of the narrator, who loves her, because she has a head for adventure. A cruelly short time later, she dies from a tropical illness.

The second poem is depressingly bad. It purports to be an excerpt from ‘a set of cautionary tales for children’ and is obviously intended as a sort of macabre nursery rhyme or folk ballad:


Here’s the thing about rhymes and ballads though: they tend to scan. The rhythm is such that the lines roll off the tongue. Here we start with:

They say that Jimmy Whitcomb Riley
Was a brawler his mates called Smiley.
He ran around, up and down-town,
Pulling off every kind of crime-y.

Which is all kinds of awkward. And what’s the point of forcing a rhyme with the ending ‘y’ if it’s not even a full rhyme? Two stanzas later, we get ‘a-sleeping’ rhymed with ‘Clavering’. This is as lazy as it gets. On top of that, the rhyming pattern established in the first stanza, which is basically a variation on a limerick, is abandoned in the second through to fourth, presumably because it was too difficult to find more than one rhyme for ‘boys’ or ‘day’.

But the worst thing about this effort is that there’s no real story. If you’re going to half-arse the poetry for the sake of telling a ‘cautionary tale’, you should at least have a tale in mind. This one starts off describing a typical no-good character. Then, in stanza four, he wakes up as a fish! That’s it! Even McGonagall had something he actually wanted to tell us about.

Someone on the Dishonored writing team obviously decided that inserting poetry into the game through these books and documents would help give the world credibility. It’s one of those little details that makes an imaginary people seem real. Indeed, ever since Tolkien, it seems to be an unwritten rule that every fantasy world must have its ballads, tavern songs and poems as a sign of the richness of its culture. This makes sense. But it also leaves you wondering: why, then, don’t games developers hire a poet to write them their poems? Poets tend to come very cheap, and many would embrace the challenge of writing in whatever style you wanted.

I suppose the answer is that for all that the ‘idea’ of poetry still holds sway, the average person’s familiarity with it is so lacking that they can mistake an awful, rushed attempt for a convincing approximation.

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To recap: this month, we’re trying to crowdfund half the printing costs of Sidekick’s next book, Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge. This means we’re asking our allies and admirers (and, more to the point, the wider gaming and literary communities) to effectively pre-order the book, or the deluxe edition, or pledge more for bonus extras, through a Kickstarter page. If you pledge £12, you’ll be buying the book and helping us to reach our target of £1,500, but if we haven’t hit that target by the end of the campaign, we get nothing! Any money you pledge won’t be taken from you until the second week of July.

What follows is our week 1 update:

Progress report from Dr Fulminare:

“The sun rises, albeit in leisurely fashion, upon my empire! The task is under way and a score or more fearless pioneers have dared to join me and my team in our most radical mixing of two unstable elements. You are to be commended, you most intrepid of intrepids! But still we need more, of course. More curious cats, drawn in by the smell of conflict and crackling words. More wandering wildmen, unable to ignore the sound of poets taking games apart to see what makes them tick, unleashing their characters, recklessly confusing our world with theirs. Let us go out together and find them, so that this most unnatural thing may live!

Yours,

Dr F (still alive / doing science)


Progress report from the editors:

Huge thanks to all the backers who’ve helped us pass the quarter-way mark in the first week!  As Dr F says, you are adventurous souls – this project is an unusual proposition, almost a one-of-its-kind, with the first Coin Opera being more of a tentative experiment. A quarter of the way there is exactly where we need to be right now, but from our point of view, it’s no excuse to rest on our laurels. Most of the work still lies ahead of us!

Here’s a round-up of the publicity we’ve managed to snag for ourselves in the last week:


We’ve also been hard at work producing related features and writing, just to keep things a bit interesting. Here are two articles we posted to our blog this week that explore matters related to both literature and gaming:


We’ve also added a short Q&A:

Is Coin Opera 2 a light-hearted sort of affair or a serious literary endeavour?
It’s both. We believe games are under-appreciated as artifacts and as both abstract and non-abstract art, and that their forms, their mathematics, their ways of expression ideas and conflict, are ripe for fruitful exploration. A better understanding of the way games work, the way  they engage us, informs a better understanding of ourselves, and poetic expression is one of the ways humans reach towards this greater understanding.

But at the same time, the way games engage us is through play, and one of the best ways of engaging them is through play. Most of the poems we’ve collected for this anthology demonstrate a creative-critical approach, a light touch, and an awareness of tropes and of the surreality – sometimes absurdity – of game-worlds. These are not poems which need to be run through a factory of academics in order to be understood. They’re packed with visual and verbal jokes, and a sense of wild experimentation runs through the collection.

I don’t know much about games. Is this book going to be pretty heavy-going for me?
While there’s obvious a lot that will be familiar to gamers, the poems collected are not rammed with in-jokes, and are no less accessible than poems about countries you’ve never been to or events you’ve never witnessed. At least a part of the delight in a literary focus on games is the re-recognition of their strangeness, the way they occupy a space similar to dreams or myth: recognisable, but at one remove from our own world. If you have a taste for literature that falls in any way outside the bracket of domestic realism or historical account, you should find much to like in Coin Opera 2.

I don’t know much about poetry. Is this book going to be pretty heavy-going for me?
Poetry is, of course, like any art, easier to grasp the more you read of it, but many of the young writers who are included in the book are well practised in writing for new audiences and have a background in live performance. If you’re remotely interested in the subject matter, and so long as you’re willing to embrace a certain amount of ambiguity and word-play, you shouldn’t have any difficulties with Coin Opera 2.

Gender / Gaming / Literature


That there is a major issue with gender representation within both gaming and literary culture is now so widely accepted that it’s easy to forget the claim is even contested. But contested it is; the worst that can be said about Anita Sarkeesian‘s Tropes vs Women series so far is that it’s a succession of statements of the obvious, but that hasn’t prevented a wave of antipathy and attempts to discredit Sarkeesian, even to the point of publicly accusing her of fraud for asking for too much money from her supporters.(1)

Even if we ignore this resistance to eminently sensible criticisms, just because a problem is widely acknowledged doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be discussed. One argument deployed when feminist critics like Sarkeesian emerge, or when statistics are released that point to comparable problems in literary culture, is that we’re only seeing a reflection of wider problems with equality in society. Games developers cannot employ more women if women aren’t applying for the jobs and female authors can’t be published if they aren’t submitting work. Similarly, if there is a lack of female protagonists, characters and perspectives in games and literature, it’s because the public aren’t interested enough in them.

Firstly, it should be pointed out that this is a case of neutrality as complicity. The metaphor of the travelator(2) is useful in characterising what’s happening. There is a cultural drift towards inequality – not just to the detriment of women, but to the detriment of minority ethnic groups, the poor, gay people, transsexuals, the disabled and others. We can debate about who is responsible for that cultural drift and whether or not it’s part of human nature; what’s important for now is to understand that if you aren’t resisting – if you aren’t walking in the opposite direction along the travelator – then you’re being pulled towards accepting greater and greater inequality, into a position where you’re more likely to find basic notions of freedom and fairness unrealistic or fanciful. The most common complaint against feminists is that they’re too visible, too attention-seeking, too forceful. This complaint ignores cultural drift and the fact that you can’t create a countercurrent without considerable noise and activity, nor without making demands.

Secondly, literature and gaming in particular should be at the forefront of positive change. Games are spaces where we can play. Books are spaces where we can exercise our imaginations. Creative mediums are where we can take stock of what is unhealthy in our world by imagining a better one, where we can test outlandish theories, and explore our most dangerous instincts in a safe environment. They’re where we can visualise and articulate internal conflict. In short, they’re areas where notions of what is realistically achievable in society should give way to idealism and social experimentation, where everything we think we know should be regularly turned on its head. This already happens; it just needs to happen more.

More importantly, they’re areas where change can occur relatively rapidly because of their accessibility. In most industries, systemic prejudice is so ingrained, so threaded into the system that change is generational at best. Women don’t land corporate jobs, often, because they lack the requisite aggression and competitive edge. They lack aggression and a competitive edge because these are qualities that, early on in children’s development, are identified as masculine, as unfeminine. In other areas, women lack qualification or experience or self-assurance, all because they are undermined at an early point in their lives and placed at a disadvantage. But you don’t need to land a job to become a writer. And with game creation tools like Twine and Construct 2 constantly evolving, you don’t need a job in technology to become a game developer. Best of all, the Internet provides the necessary tools for disseminating the resulting work and building an audience for female critics and creators alike.

Twine is a simple, window-based development platform for text adventures.

So what needs to be done?

One of the most important things to challenge in both literature and gaming is the idea of a type of book or game that is aimed at women, and the accompanying notion that addressing the gender imbalance will mean more of these types of games and books, at the expense of the type that we (men) typically enjoy. The scare story is that political correctness demands an overall reduction in quality.

But these are industries/environments where the full spectrum of what appeals to boys and men has been heavily explored and is collectively well understood, while women’s tastes are very poorly understood, in part due to a deficit of widely disseminated critical writing by women. The kind of games and books that are marketed to girls and women – chick-lit and dolls’ house games – are the result of this poor understanding. That’s not to say women don’t like these games and books, but that it represents only a tiny part of the full spectrum of what they might like – a spectrum which, in all likelihood, overlaps to a massive degree with men’s tastes.

If women’s tastes were more thoroughly explored and understood, what I suspect would come to light is that a multiplicity of minor changes would do much to bring more women on board while sacrificing little of what appeals to male audiences. To take an example from gaming, one of the reasons women can feel excluded by the content of a game is the proliferation of female characters whose sole purpose appears to be titillation. This is frequently misunderstood as an objection to partial nudity or attractiveness, when in fact it’s a complaint about deficit of personality and relatable goals. It would be easily resolved by introducing female characters who fill out a much wider range of roles, as well as genuinely sexy male characters. It does not necessitate censorship.

GLaDOS, one of gaming’s most unusual and memorable female characters.

Although literary culture prides itself on sophistication, there is a similar issue with crude understanding of what women want and what is distinct, if anything, about women’s writing. Famously, VS Naipaul last year attempted to reduce the entire scope of women’s fiction to ‘sentimentality, the narrow view of the world’. If this isn’t a clue as to a greater problem in how we envisage women’s role in literary culture, I don’t know what is. Even within poetry, there is a barely-remarked-on but, in my opinion, noticeable stylistic pigeonhole that women’s writing slots into. Women who write in this way (broadly: confessional, relationship-focused, formally loose) are, in my judgement, more likely to be published than women who write in any number of other ways. I would suggest that there is a subconscious, male-led selection process at work that highlights this style of poem as ‘representing’ women better than some of the other styles women choose to write in.

Let’s address the argument that better representation of women in either medium means a drop in quality, means opting for the poorer candidate to fulfil a quota. Women make up over half the world’s population. There is no scientific basis for the assumption that men are more intelligent, more creative, more individualistic or harder-working than women. If you have two local sports teams who, in totality, are equal to one another, and you make up a national side that is heavily weighted to one of those teams, as a matter of logic, you must have picked the weaker players from one team at the expense of stronger players from the other. In any culture, subculture or industry where the gender balance is skewed heavily in favour of men, the weaker candidates are already being picked. More equality should logically amount to higher quality.

Finally, I want to say a few words about Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge and our approach to gender equality. The final ratio of contributors is 23 male to 18 female, which is 57:43 in favour of men. I consider this not ideal but within the boundaries of acceptability considering our limited resources. During the process of soliciting poems, three male poets approached me with unsolicited poems, while no female poets did. At one point, I did make a concerted effort to get more female poets on board because I felt we didn’t have enough. Not one female poet turned us down on the basis that she didn’t play games, and the games they played ranged from pinball tables to Skyrim. Some found that the games they wanted to write about had already been covered, and so declined. One, whose relationship with games was mostly through her children, specifically bought and played the game they wanted to write about for the first time, in the interests of getting a more in-depth perspective. Some poets of both sexes said they would have a think but ultimately didn’t get back to us.

I would say that, on the whole, the collection is definitely richer for its inclusion of a good number of female poets and gamers and that their work does not betray any notion that there is a strict segregation of tastes or styles between men and women. I don’t think of this as providing a service to women (albeit I hope that providing a platform for more women to respond to games and gaming is helpful) but as something that improves the overall quality, accessibility and range of the book.

Further links

Coverflip: Maureen Johnson on gendered book covers
Jane McGonigal, game designer and games culture activist
Helen Lewis writing in the New Statesman on female protagonists in games

Footnotes

(1) Prior to writing this article, I’d only seen the fraud accusation made in the seething jungle of comments sections on news sites. But I only had to type ‘Sarkeesian fraud’ into Google to find this page in the top two results.

(2) I first stole and redeployed this metaphor here.

Poetry Guest-Appearing in Games #1: Mark of the Ninja


Mark of the Ninja is a 2012 stealth action game developed by Klei Entertainment. It’s a first rate example of the stealth genre, forcing the player to stick to the (plentiful) shadows, glide through vents and take advantage of distractions in order to get the jump on an enemy. The protagonist is a nameless ninja charged with mounting a solo assault on a private military company in revenge for an attack on his clan, although a broader and more sinister picture reveals itself to him as he advances through the various missions.

The game’s writer, Chris Dahlen, blogs here about the research he undertook in order to create a realistic history for the fictional Hisomu clan and the decision to employ poetry – specifically haiku – in the telling. Conscious of the fact that using audio logs to relate a non-interactive potted history is difficult to do well inside a fundamentally interactive medium, and concerned that these audio logs should fit the pace of the game, Dahlen opted for haiku “because haiku are short, and they’re enigmatic”.

The resulting poems can be accessed by finding hidden scrolls, three per level, scattered throughout Mark of the Ninja. After touching each scroll, a poem is recited by ‘the voice of the Hisomu’. Taken together, they fall under the title of ‘A History of the Hisomu Clan as Written by its Masters’.

From the first recital, however, it’s apparent that these are not really haiku in the strict sense:

Five hundred men lie
vanquished before Tetsuji.
Takes off his blindfold.

Dahlen uses the 5-7-5 syllabic form that is commonly taught as a rough approximation of the rules governing haiku in Japanese, but in most of these poems, he misses the most fundamental element of the form: the kigo, or seasonal reference. Without this, the form is much closer to senryū, a similarly structured poem whose subject is usually people, rather than nature.

More arguable is the presence of a caesura or kireji (cutting word), which is used in haiku to implicitly compare two images. This is not necessarily easy to recognise, but Dahlen achieves, at the very least, a similar effect here by ending the second line with a full stop, which suggests we reflect on the relationship between the removal of the blindfold and the dead five hundred.

The second poem is more troublesome:

We snap off a branch
to make a weapon; but the
tree must bear the wound.

Here, the syllabic structure is rather more forced, conflicting with the natural intonation. In the game, the voice actor audibly pauses after ‘the’ to denote the line break, but it sounds odd and adds nothing to the meaning of the poem – the natural pause is after ‘weapon’. Also, ‘but’ makes the intended contrast explicit where it should be implicit. It would be a stronger poem, and more ‘haiku-ish’, if it went something like: “We snap off a branch / to make a weapon / The tree bears the wound.”

This poem is, however, a clever allusion to the role of the player in the story, and Dahlen’s aim here, and with many of the poems that follow, is to provoke the imagination, to get the player guessing at what various strange and slippery images refer to. While some of the poems are blunt and direct in moving the storyline along, others apparently relay no information at all. These, however, are all the more interesting for that, and closest to the effect one might expect from poetry:

On a starless night
an unkindness of ravens
lands along the wall.

A raven, or something similar, signifies a checkpoint in the game. When you pass these points, the raven appears to fly away. Does this poem allude to them being set up beforehand, and consequently the fact that the protagonist’s path through the game – and through his life – is the result of his being manipulated?

The poems in Mark of the Ninja ultimately achieve two things: they are a foreshadowing device within the plot, causing the player to anticipate various revelations and the protagonist’s ultimate fate. They’re also a flavouring device, grounding the story more thoroughly in elements of Japanese culture and creating the illusion of a succession of writers contributing to a generation-spanning narrative.

You can listen to the compiled audiologs here.

Very Short Essays: Salt / Marketing / Individuality

Note
Many of these short pieces refine views I’ve already aired, either here or on other forums.

On Salt
Last week, Salt announced they would no longer be publishing single author collections of poetry. This decision should be understood as commercially sensible at least: over their 13 years of poetry publishing, Salt barely made a dent in the major prize shortlists, one of the few known routes to respectable sales for poetry collections. Last year, however, one of their novels was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, proving that in the world of fiction at least there’s still room left for independent presses. As the publishing industry leans more and more heavily on break-out success stories, it would certainly be risky for Salt to continue to pin its hopes on a medium whose major prizes might be said to be almost entirely culturally and critically aligned with the lists of older, more established presses.

But Salt authors (including myself and Kirsty) still have reason to feel gipped. Salt were generous when it came to making room on their list; even in recent years, they courted young and new poets through the Crashaw Prize. This meant they stood out as one of – if not the –  main delivery mechanisms for a major new wave of poetry, characterised by writers like Luke Kennard, Chris McCabe, Sophie Mayer and Mark Waldron. At their best, the quality of book production also outshone their heavyweight contemporaries. The flipside of this was no author advance, an often-strained system of promotional support, and the perennial instability of the press itself.

Some poets will almost certainly have opted for Salt when the possibility of a more secure deal with a bigger press was not entirely distant, and done so in the spirit of joining in a mutual endeavour to challenge the existing hegemony, or at least join a fresher stable. An adventure in parallel with one’s contemporaries, rather than in competition. Faith in the quality of work over faith in marketing weight. They may have done so in the full knowledge that Salt might fail, that all would go down together. What they won’t necessarily have expected is for Salt to take off in a newly discovered lifeboat, leaving them stranded. It’s the non-transference of the publisher’s good fortune to its authors that is most disappointing.

The most cynical commentators could accuse Salt of harvesting an optimistic and richly talented generation for the sake of finding what they eventually found in Alison Moore – an unexpected overnight success – the kind of behaviour that mainstream publishers are often charged with. This would, however, be to forget the genuine and infectious enthusiasm with which Salt’s Chris Hamilton-Emery publicly spoke of his list and the consistent quality of his selections.

What the move appears to be symptomatic of, however, is a literary culture which struggles to contend with that greater part of the writing spectrum between established seniority and hot young thing. It’s no surprise that, as Clare Pollard astutely observes in her post on the subject, the notion of ‘emerging talent’ has grown more and more elastic, as this is where the bulk of funding is targeted and where money is to be made from courses, academies and ‘sensational’ debuts. Ultimately, Salt, in taking on so many such debuts, put itself in a situation where it would have to market second and third collections by poets who were not heavyweight prize-fighters, a daunting challenge for any press.

On marketing
Here’s a quote from that same post by Clare Pollard:

It seems to me there are choices to be made. One option is for arts bodies to start supporting ‘emerged’ poets as actively as those who are ‘emerging’. Another might be to accept that the days of the physical, 60-page collection are over and find a different model of poetic success.

Marketing poetry books is difficult. This is especially true of the slim single-author collection, a medium whose main role is arguably to confer an illusory status on the author (this is true of prizes even more so, but that’s another matter). It doesn’t help that so many are sold as if they were almost the same book with a different name: a significant poet’s debut or latest collection, breaking new territory while remaining grounded in human (ie. relatable) experiences. An intimate connection with history/the past, a gift for words that resonate, and so on. This is not because poetry publishers are so much less imaginative than fiction or non-fiction publishers; it’s because reflecting the individuality of a book of poetry in blurb and cover image is a mystical art in itself. Style and voice do not lend themselves to summary the way plot and subject matter do.

Faber’s block-colour approach serves them well. Colours carry associations of mood and temperament that aid us in intuiting character and making personal choices. Display seven block-colour books in a row, innocuously titled, by equally unknown authors, and the reader will still likely be drawn to one or two over the others. Their copy, however, is no better than anyone else’s, and whatever your promotional tack, you will almost certainly be relying, at some point, on the copy.

Put simply, as I’ve noted before, poetry is difficult to talk about, and that is as true for its publishers as it is for its audience. This is not how it has to be – it’s partially the result of publishers and promoters (including, manifestly, poets themselves) circling the same expressional formulae, those that have served poets well in the past. The unspoken assumption here is that describing poetry is not itself a creative process but an analytical one, a matter of judiciousness. Supposedly, the tools are in the box and it’s a matter of using them appropriately. In fact, what we need are new tools. And lots of them.

I suggested in the previous set of micro-essays that the sheer abundance of new poetry being written is a positive thing. Where there is, perhaps, a failing is that instead of this abundance of poetry striking out in many different directions, much of it ends up advancing on the same spot, promoting itself to the same slowly shrinking audience – the known rather than the unknown. I don’t want to be absolute about this – clearly, there is considerable effort to do otherwise, at grassroots level at least. I also don’t wish to suggest that there is some obvious alternative tack that is being unaccountably missed – who knows what other audiences truly exist? But I would suggest that it’s this predominantly conservative (commercially sensible?) approach that has led in itself to a lack of marketing options and to the difficulty we now collectively experience in finding ways to individualise poets in the eyes of potential consumers.

On individuality
Why do I suggest, earlier on, that there should be a particular problem marketing second or third collections? Partly it is the funding situation with its emphasis on ‘emergence’, which itself seems to be founded on the myth that a first collection represents the final stage of a poet’s journey towards his or her appreciative audience. Funding is tight across the board, but see if you can find anything anywhere earmarked for nurturing writers who are just past the point of their first collection.

Partly, however, it’s an issue of individualisation. Poets (with the help of their publishers) aim, one way or another, to project an identity, and a successful first collection will usually evince that identity. The title, cover and copy all play their part in setting out the poet’s stall. If all the elements work well together, they will imbue the work with a sense of supreme freshness and individuality. Here he/she is, like nothing you’ve ever read before!

Second and third collections inevitably risk coming across as a repeat. They can’t reset the poet’s identity, and so they fall to reemphasising it or attempting to convince the audience of some meandering ‘evolution’. Fiction has a double advantage here: the plot, at least, is always new, and, more importantly, fiction is easily spent. Once the story is exhausted, the only way to get more of the same is to buy the author’s next book. But poetry boasts depth. It has a far longer half-life. It releases its secrets and its flavour slowly at first, and always seems to keep some held back. Very often, therefore, readers who want more from the same well can return to it and keep drawing. The second or third collection is not just a repeat but a surfeit.

It’s therefore far more urgent for publishers to individualise not just every poet, but every book of poetry, in order to appeal to the widest range of tastes and partialities imaginable. That is, unless they have that most unlikely of things: a cash cow or runaway success, for which no surefire formula exists.

Very Short Essays: Political / Travelator / Abundance


Note
To an extent, these pieces refine views I’ve already aired, either here or on other forums. You could think of this as a progress report.

On political poetry
I wonder how many people today know the name and figure of Castlereagh for anything more than a cameo in Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy.

I’ve read and heard good examples of political poetry, including polemics. But I’m still wary of it, and particularly wary of writing it myself. I’ve tried various angles of attack, ‘attack’ being the operative word here. There’s an undeniable attraction to using words – art, even – in an offensive/defensive capacity. I would like to see my moral rage and discomfort transformed into a weapon for myself and others to wield. I’d like to feel that some pure lava of truth had flowed through my fingers onto the (electronic) page, and that it would never cool.

But in taking up arms in this manner, don’t we always cede the choice of battleground? The enemy has set the agenda for political debate and conversation, and always so that the ground tilts in its favour. Arguing over Thatcher’s legacy, for example, already admits the reach of that legacy – which I, for one, would prefer to contest. Do we really want to shore up politicians’ dreams of immortality, achieved through demagoguery and unapologetic bullishness?

Every poem begins in a white space, not preceded by a question or demand, and asserts its authority over the world it chooses to reflect, recognise or invent. The author does not have to answer ‘strivers versus skivers’ rhetoric. There is no burden of proof. Surely, here is the chance to reset the playing field completely. While recognising that political timidity can be a symptom of decadence in poetry, we should also realise that art has the potential to outlast the fashions of its era, encasing in amber the figures it elects as representative or principal players. I would not want Thatcher, or Blair, or Cameron to survive in this form.

On the travelator metaphor
Writing about sexism and misogyny in gaming culture, Anita Sarkeesian used the image of an airport travelator to describe the inexorable pull towards anti-women attitudes in an industry dominated by men, marketed mainly to male players. The point of the metaphor is that if you stand still, you still drift towards a morally undesirable position, and only by actively walking in the other direction do you actually stay in the same place, let alone make positive progress. A position of apparent agnosticism, therefore, is actually one which allows itself to drift to one extreme.

This is the perfect metaphor for many other things in life, but I’d like to suggest it particularly as a way of understanding the issue of the erosion of critical integrity in contemporary poetry. It is fairly pointed out that the scene is too small for the judged and the judges not to frequently know each other, whether we’re talking reviews, prize committees or publishing. The idea of cabals and conspiracies, of log-rolling and traded favours, however, is rejected on the grounds of personal testimony. “These are decent, scrupulous people. I know them.”

However, the reason independence is often regarded as crucial in making qualitative judgements is that even decent, scrupulous people are prone to the subconscious influence of trusted sources. A poem is always more arresting for having been written by a friend or person of some repute. Any judgement made without a conscious examination of one’s own biases is almost undoubtedly influenced by those biases. All of us are on the travelator, moving slowly toward the point where our actions as judges are merely to confirm and reconfirm what we already know, so that the already crowned are crowned again, all that is comforting relentlessly cradled, all that is threatening shunned.

Each of us has to resist, particular those with the most influence, or else the conclusion is clear: recognition for being eminent, critical praise for being well-liked, prizes for repeating variations of the same poetic tropes. There is no artistic movement, no revolutionary force, no generational uprising or watershed moment that will save us from this – only constant motion in the opposite direction.

On the abundance of poetry
There is too much of it, runs the complaint, or else too much of it is mediocre. Sturgeon’s Law is invoked – most of it must be crap, because most of everything is crap. It’s all ‘landfill’, says Geoffrey Hill (I know, I’m always rolling that one out).

There’s an overlap here with anti-capitalist argument. Too much of too much – consumer-zombies feeding a habit for spending and owning, ever unsated. People read widely but shallowly. Production goes up, quality goes down, and all poetry blends into one advancing agglomeration, along with the rest of culture.

But the idea of ‘too much’ in this case is itself grounded in consumerist principles. The abundance of poetry, mostly published in freely available formats, makes ever more difficult the maintenance of central figures and the pretence of evaluative legitimacy. “One of our most important poets” – how can you know, oh critic, when you’ve probably only read the most miniscule fraction of the poetry being published?

This in turn affects marketability, because the narrative on which most reputations in poetry turn is one of smooth ascendance to the very highest branches of the tree, and of a uniqueness that can only be described in abstract terms. But with so many poets making that claim across countless similarly worded book blurbs, backed up by review copy, whom does the consumer trust? Who is the real Spartacus?

Thus, the cry of ‘too much’ is really an objection to an overcrowded marketplace and the strain that places on our publicists. Perhaps we should accept that while the ‘new’ is intensely fetishised, the constant flow of it is nevertheless a sign that we are actively interested in shaping our own future, and that the real moral deficit in consumerist culture is the unthinking rejection of the not-new. If we regard poetry not as product, but rather as evidence of the exercise of creative faculties, of attempts to address directly what left-brain-thinking merely skirts around, of unmonitored channels of communication and linguistic development, how can there ever be too much of it? The mistake is surely is to believe too readily in a common front – that we are all in the same place at the same time in terms of the progress of the art. Really, we’re not even all going in the same direction.

The Next Big Thing #2

‘The Next Big Thing’ is essentially a chain of blog posts prompting writers to interview themselves. Kirsty has already taken part in the exercise. Now it’s my turn.

I’ve been tagged by the editor of US online journal Toe Good Poetry, Jerry Brunoe. Jerry’s post is here. I’ll be answering questions not about my next collection, but about the anthology I’ve been working on since the publication of the Domesday Books.


Title of the book?
Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
It’s the sequel to Coin Opera, a micro-anthology of computer game poems, and mimics the form of sequel titles in 90s console gaming, where it’s not unusual for an antagonist to ‘return’, ‘resurrect’ or ‘revenge’ themselves upon the heroes.

What genre does the book fall under?
Poetry anthologies and, to a lesser extent, gaming.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A massive collection of poems inspired by the lore, inhabitants, environments, limitations and rules of gaming titles and franchises spanning from the 1970s to the present day.

How long did it take you to write/edit the first draft of your manuscript?
I was soliciting for poems as early as spring 2011, and had a draft of everything ready to go in spring 2012. Since then, there’s been a lot of careful tweaking, but most of the work has been on the design front, in particular the accompanying artwork.

Good grief. How come it’s taken you so long?
Put simply, you blink and a month goes by. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on editing a book quite this complex in terms of the balance and layout. Many of the poems employ unique shapes and forms and can’t be just splashed across the page without due care. I also want to structure it in a way that makes it easy to navigate, and I’ve had to think carefully about what extra information readers might find useful.

Also, every single poet contributing is represented by a sprite in the style of Samurai Shodown for the NeoGeo Pocket Colour. I badly underestimated how long this would take me – the gradual improvement in handling the style meant that by the time I’d drawn everybody, the first dozen or so at least needed to be redone completely, since they were noticeably cruder.

What can I say? I’ve become obsessed with getting this book right, possibly out of an abundance of sensitivity to all the criticisms that could be used to dismiss it. And yes, ‘right’ does include the sprites, for reasons that I can only attribute to some kind of artistic instinct. At the same time, I’ve rarely been afforded the time to work on the project at full tilt – life has seen fit to land me with an endless conga line of higher priorities and exhausting distractions. I would estimate about a third of the time I’ve spent on it so far has been after midnight, when I barely even know what I’m looking at.

So when is it out?
I’ve given up on estimations and will update you on this when we finally get the pdfs safely to the printers! There may be a Kickstarter campaign before that to help with the initial costs.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Oh, it’s incomparable. It’s got that going for it at least. I mean, have you ever read a poem which is the result of two poets battling for control of the page? Or a five-page sensory exploration of the universe of Planescape: Torment patchworked from lines in pre-existing poems?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Over 40 poets contributed to the book, under the explicit instruction that they should be inspired by games. Not the generalised act of gaming or a broad overview of gaming culture, but individual games.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
There will be a special edition that comes with an extra pamphlet of procedurally generated ‘core sample’ poems – word-based imaginary imitations of the strata patterns unearthed in virtual environments.

The people I’m tagging … well, it’s a TBA, really. Would anyone like to be tagged?

The Debris Field + Special Offers


Sidekick Books’ latest publication, The Debris Field, is available now for £6 plus postage. It slots into our team-ups section, as it’s a collaboration between three poets: Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe, and a project which began (and continued) life as a multimedia performance with film-maker Jack Wake-Walker and Oli Barrett.

We’ve also got two special offers on the go. You can buy The Debris Field together with Simon Barraclough’s previous project (also featuring work by Dixon and McCabe), Psycho Poetica, for a combined price of £10 plus postage …

… or you can buy it together with our previous team-up pamphlet, Confronting the Dangers of Art, by poet Ian McLachlan and illustrator Phil Cooper for £8.50 plus postage.


Take advantage of either offer from the product page of any of the books.

On Clarity

What exactly do people mean when they demand, commend or recommend clarity in poems, and are they even referring to the same thing? Are we clear on what clarity is? I don’t think I am, even though I’m conscious of exactly what Randall Jarrell identified in the following quote, which I’ve thieved from a post by Tim Love on the subject of poetry and communication:

The general public … has set up a criterion of its own, one by which every form of contemporary art is condemned. This criterion is, in the case of music, melody; in the case of painting, representation; in the case of poetry, clarity. In each case one simple aspect is made the test of a complicated whole, becomes a sort of loyalty oath for the work of art. … instead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret those new worlds which new works of art are, the public can notice at a glance whether or not these pay lip-service to its own ‘principles’ …
Randall Jarrell

Interestingly, poets themselves do not present a united front against such reductionism. Some are scornful of attempts to resist clarity. Some treat it as a moral obligation. There seem to be several intermingling but subtly distinct rationales for this. The one I’ve encountered most is characterised by Adrian Mitchell’s famous proclamation: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” When poetry doesn’t play fair, doesn’t make itself readily understandable and relateable, it is responsible for its own failure as a communicative medium.

But here’s where I tentatively come to the conclusion that accounts for my opening quizzicality: Mitchell’s complaint, when analysed, seems to have been not that there is too little clarity in poetry but that there is too much of it. I’m not kidding! Here’s how I’ve worked this out: I’m supposing for now that clarity means that the reader is able to almost instantaneously grasp the literal meaning and the implications of the poem he or she is reading or listening to. They understand the common usage of all the words involved, the relevance of any names mentioned and how to make sense of the sentence construction. More than that, however, they see how it all fits together. They find it a relatively simple task to intuit the intentions of the poet in writing the piece, and may even feel the faint thrill of a connection. The poem ‘speaks’ to them. It understands their condition as a human being, and addresses it. If the poem is particularly good, they might feel it achieves a state of being “what e’er was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”.

A crude example sometimes used by those in the Mitchell frame of mind is the ‘poetry nod’ that a supposedly snooty poet gets when his obscure classical reference is picked up by an equally snooty audience, the enjoyment being one of exclusivity. “I get it. Others wouldn’t. I’m in the club.” But this is a fallacy; the little sighs and nods that occur throughout intimate poetry readings are far more likely to be the result of an experience of clarity, where a phrase or line seems to have achieved a sublime level of meaning, where the channel of communication is suddenly exquisitely open.

Anyone who has ever discussed films or art or stories with friends knows that this kind of experience is uncannily, almost frustratingly subjective. We can turn to the person who has just sat through exactly the same two and a half hours of cinema with us and find that they were unable to follow the plot that we found almost simplistic, loathed the characters we found sympathetic and successfully predicted the twist that caught us completely off guard. This could be a person we know very well, someone who shares our interests, and as such we often find the difference in personal experience baffling.

Clearly, though, the way we react to art is not wholly a matter of unfathomable randomness. Different styles and genres can be marketed to different demographics with a fairly secure expectation of broad understanding and enjoyment. Collectively, we’re fairly good (but not brilliant) at working out what works for each other by reference to certain distinguishing traits, and unsurprisingly, many of us have a real knack for knowing how to effectively communicate with people who are … well, more or less exactly like us.

The poem-reader connection I describe above, therefore, is more than likely in each case to be attributable to something beyond what the words themselves are doing. The ‘clear’ poem is one expertly pitched to its target demographic – probably someone who thinks in a similar way to the poet, who can draw from similar experiences, for whom certain words have the same significance. That’s not to say, of course, that the poem can’t have a meaning or significance, even beauty, to anyone outside this narrow beam; just that it’s the most obvious explanation for the particular experience of clarity.

So if Mitchell deplored the writing of poetry that ignores the majority but is tuned specifically for a particular group, then, well, he was against the surest route to providing readers with that experience. The pursuit of clarity must surely involve that narrowing of focus. To write for ‘most people’ is to give the poem up entirely to that uncanny subjectivity that causes us to react in all manner of different ways. Even the most hopelessly ambitious marketing strategy sells the line ‘something for everyone’, not ‘the same thing for everyone’.

I would assume that most poets do not recognise ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ as a binary choice. Rather, they’ll attempt to keep in mind various possible readers while trying principally to please themselves. That is, the ultimate criterion they use is: “Would this poem speak to me, if I’d just happened upon it?” I don’t see anything wrong with this method, but the natural consequence, in most cases, is going to be a spread of reactions and personal experiences in the minds of the range of readers the poem may eventually reach.

Here’s where the difficulty really starts. In being fortunate enough to experience clarity while reading poetry, critics and commentators often discount the idea that their own particular qualities – the possibility of their shared interests and knowledge with the poet, for example – is a principle factor in that experience. When they subsequently demand, commend or recommend clarity, they’re really importing the idea that all (or most) readers are just like them.

I shouldn’t be surprised then (although in truth, I usually am) when their conclusions as to which poems ‘play fair’ and which are self-indulgently opaque differ wildly from mine. It’s not at all unlikely that the most sincere attempt to pin down a difficult truth – one that seems just beyond the scope of language – will fail in what it aims to do for most readers. It’s somewhat less likely that readers will be more receptive to such difficult truths than to something that they know they want to hear, something that has an affirmative aspect to them. How often are poets praised for ‘challenging expectations’ by readers whose hopes and expectations were happily fulfilled?

What should and does seem odd, then, is the importance attributed to sincere attempts towards clarity when the results of such attempts are so unpredictable. Odder still in a medium where many of the pleasures come from lack of clarity. Maybe I’m playing with words here, but I’m reflecting on the poems that first led me to take an interest in contemporary poetry. For the most part, I didn’t understand their literal meaning very well at all, and it was that that led me to notice more intently the texture and music of the language used, and to find pleasure there. I’m still not sure, when I look around at poetry audiences, how many really notice or care about texture or music, and how many are jonesing for their next hit of clarity – the next line that will tell them exactly what they’re hoping to hear. And if this is 90% of what poetry is to them, is poetry criticism fated to be muddied by expressions of the subjective?

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