Bear with me. I’m testing out a new approach, partly so that Share Your Toys, going forward, exactly synchs up with my Substack, Stray Bulletin. Social media being what it is, I don’t expect Substack to last (this blog was itself once a Tumblr), but it’s currently the place to connect with a slightly wider audience. So the aim is to post there, backing everything up as I go.
When I started Stray Bulletin I tried to fully embrace Substack’s ‘newsletter’ model, structuring each post as a multi-item column reporting on developments across the board. It’s a fun way of documenting things, but very hard to keep it up, as you might have gathered from how much I tried to stuff into the multi-part ‘I goon-march …’ post. Easier, from this point, I think — I hope! — to post about one or two things at a time and sort the posts into categories.
It might not work. But let’s give it a try.
For National Poetry Day on the 2nd of this month, the Poetry Society asked me to put together a resource on the theme of ‘Play’, using two poems that had won prizes in National Poetry Competitions of past years. You can access it here. It discusses the poems in questions, poses questions for further classroom discussion, and suggests several writing exercises based on them.
I chose to write about ‘The Crab Man’ by Eliot North and ‘Don’t Put your Daughter into Space, Mrs. Kirk’ by Valerie Laws, two very different, enjoyably juicy pieces. Before I get into either of them, though, the theme itself needs addressing:
Play – the theme of this year’s National Poetry Day – tends to be associated with lightness. We sometimes describe a poem or poetry collection as ‘playful’ by way of reassuring the audience that the poet has no particular drum to beat, no designs on their readers, no dark secrets. But there’s something a little bit dishonest about this. Play, after all, is fundamentally disruptive – that’s why it’s so often confined, spatially and temporally, to sandboxes, games and ‘playtime’ , where a limit can be placed on its effects. We treat it in this way – almost as a volatile substance – because we know meaningful play is a process of discovery that breaks and reshapes boundaries, including those we’ve grown fond of, those we rely upon.
This is by way of excusing the fact that part of the reason I was drawn to ‘The Crab Man’ was the hope that it might be about a half-man, half-crab. It isn’t — not on its surface anyway. But why not try to make this interpretation work?
This is a poem made out of tight, cautious steps — its spare couplets creep ever closer to the figure of its title, who is made more frightening by the capitalised article (not ‘the Crab Man’ but ‘The Crab Man’, like ‘The King’). Whoever is being addressed by the speaker of the poem is headed toward some kind of confrontation with him. And while various contextual clues enable us to recognise The Crab Man as one who breaks open the shells of crabs to remove and sort the meat – a normal enough job – the door is left just wide enough for us to imagine him as a kind of mutant. His ‘red robes’ are reminiscent of the rusty or scarlet plating of various crab species, and his cleaver, ‘Smashed over and over’, could be a giant crushing claw. The ‘chainmail door’ and ‘swish of metal skirts’ obviously refer to the chain fly screen at a seafood processing plant. But then again, what about a curtain of silver sea, the light glinting off it metallically, closing around a person and over their head?
I’ll leave you to explore the rest via the link above.
NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin, and was originally published on October 17th.
With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminentnow well-and-truly arrived, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. This is the last of three parts, released substantially later than the first two!
I write a lot. I just don’t publish a lot — of my own work, that is. Partly because much of it takes a long, long time to fully crystallise — I’m still regularly pulling up and rethinking poems that were first drafted well over a decade ago. But also, I find I drift further and further from the general trend. Easy, I know, to fixate on what doesn’t suit you and disparagingly label it ‘the general trend’, but I think it’s not unkind or too reductive to say that the majority of poetry sought and published by English-language editors today constitutes first-hand accounts of relatable experiences taking place in something like the real contemporary world, in which the poet — or someone you can well believe is the poet — is reassuringly present.
You don’t have to look far, of course, to find complaints about UK poetry being dominated by identity politics. But if we only slightly expand that category to include any poem which revolves around, or circles back to, a persona of the poet conveying something of their values, then I suspect most complainants are caught in their own net.
Work of a different kind is permitted, even celebrated, but less readily, I sense, when the editor or critic does not know the poet from Adam. On the performance circuit, you do find more in the way of fantastical conceits — these, however, are mostly either comically ludicrous or intended as satire. The ‘general trend’, as far as there is one, is surely to look on poetry as, primarily, a performance of the self.
Tiny Assassins
So what do I think I’m doing that’s so damned different?
Well, one thing I’ve done this summer is make four more A8 microbooks to sell blind-bagged for £2 at book fairs. Each one is made of a single piece of A4 paper, folded and cut into a booklet, held together with a cover jacket folded from an A6 sheet. They’re tiny examples of ‘amalgamatic writing’, in that the contents are a mixture of quotes from various media, very short scholarly extracts, lists and poetry.
The theme for this latest set is ‘Action Princesses’ — a short explanation on the inner back page reads “exploring cult evocations of feminine power and sexuality”. I wrote one new piece for each book, and all of them are the kind of poems I would estimate as having a close-to-zero chance of being considered by editors of most journals. They’re mostly in third-person, and where there’s a speaker, it’s definitely not me. They also belong utterly to the cult genres their protagonists inhabit, even as they (mildly) spoof them. There’s no zoom-out to Cambridge, UK, 2025. This is from ‘Space Princesses’:
One is pinned by her skirt to a cosmic dartboard. One is lashed by her heart to a handsome meathead. One is trapped in a shrinking skintight spacesuit. One is frogged, one spatchcocked, sputnikked, splayed out. Not for long, though – nothing can hold them forever. No beam, no jaw, no kiss rolled over and over.
See what I mean? The 21st century’s rejection of b-movie mash-up is Caliban’s fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
Booze Boutique
I have managed to find the odd piece a home. One appears in a wonderful little journal of “computational poetry and literary art” called Taper. Their restrictions on submissions are extreme: “All code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be placed between the template’s closing header tag (</header>) and the closing body tag (</body>), must be valid HTML5, and must fit within 2KB (2048 bytes).”
One byte is one character, so that’s 2,048 characters (spaces included) for both the code and every iteration of the poem itself.
I read these and other guidelines carefully, and figured ‘The Whisky Shop’ would have a much better shot here than anywhere else — not just because of the interactive element, but because it’s in second-person:
You, lolling like a gloomy embryo. The cellar like an exhibition hall. Ingots, many buried long ago – a library of sacred texts to trawl.
You see, I’m not recalling the whisky shop. You are. And while the second-person ‘you’ can easily be another kind of persona, in this case I think it’s clear that it isn’t just a way of writing about myself. I have, in fact, been to a whisky shop (that’s where I got the idea for the poem) but in an entirely different mood to that which pervades throughout this piece. There is no specific experience of my own (other than seeing the contents of a whisky shop) that I’m out to convey.
Do read/play the other pieces in this issue, by the way, if you enjoyed those game poems I mentioned in my last Stray Bulletin entry.
Flood Warning
I’ve previously had three of a set of five labyrinth poems published in various (well, two) poetry journals: Long Poem Magazine and the sadly discontinued Raceme. I’ve sent a fourth one out to a couple of places, but without high hopes — not only is it, again, in second-person, again drawing on old monster movie tropes, but it’s also impossible to read a stanza at a time. You have to read across the stanzas, following a trail back and forth. And you have to do this twice, once for each of the two parts of the poem.
Luckily, the perfect occasion came up to do something with it. Angus Allman, compere of CB1 Poetry and director of the upcoming Cambridge Poetry Festival revival, arranged for a collaborative event with ARU’s MA Illustration and Design courses. As part of this, two students took my labyrinth poem and created a set of artworks based on it.
This was exciting enough in itself (I love what they did and now have two of the pieces hanging in my house). But then there was an entire exhibition of these and other artworks, with the poems displayed alongside them, and a closing night where we performed these to a gathered crowd.
And and and … a souvenir booklet!:
To close us out
That about brings us up to speed with recent publications, except to say that I’ve taken the three micro-RPG poems that I originally made for a miniscule batch of summer pamphlets, converted them to digital-interactive form and put them out in itch.io. Each one is based on a different game I played in 2022. One has been rewritten quite extensively, so it works better in this form.
I’ve also performed a major clear-out, reducing the mass of papers, print-outs, photos, correspondence, essays (and so on) that I have accumulated throughout my life to the contents of a single cupboard. As part of this process, I uncovered enough old stories to think it worth starting to document them. You can find a post about the earliest of those stories here.
And finally — finally, finally, in this massive three-part catch-up entry — one of the tasks that occupied me during the summer was typesetting a project spearheaded by my old friend, Richard Newham-Sullivan. Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereaboutsis by far the biggest book I’ve ever typeset, easily topping Lives Beyond Us: Poems and Essays on the Film Reality of Animals. There are four editions, two with colour photos! And there are dozens of poets in there — about as varied a bunch as you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Who knew Hastings was such a cultural powerhouse?
NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin, and was originally published on September 8th.
With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s continue with:
I know I keep saying it but … I’d love to have more time to review books and write critically. Writing critically about something is a way of wading into it, thinking your way through it, adding something to it. I’ve got pages of notes towards reviews that never materialise. The beating heart of poetry criticism in the UK, meanwhile, is blogs and small-circulation journals —outside of this, it isn’t encouraged very widely or enthusiastically. Even among those who speak passionately of reinvigorating it, too many seem to approach criticism as part sorting machine (a way of ordering books into a hierarchy of quality), part ritualistic act of obeisance, whereby critics contribute to the aura of respectability enjoyed by a heroic figure.
And yes, I complain about this too often as well, but it disturbs me to see people of my own age talking, almost vindictively, about ‘sorting the wheat from chaff’ or lamenting a failure to recognise ‘great poets’ in this, an age of untold poetic abundance. They’ve benefited from a rich vein of work they value … but seemingly won’t be satisfied until their personal choices and tastes are allowed to supersede others’. I’m tempted to say that a golden rule of reading poetry should be that if you don’t sometimes come round to liking something you initially felt cool towards, or wind up disappointed in something you expected to knock your socks off, then you need to rethink your angle of attack. Anyway.
ノo_o)
My published reviews so far this year are thin on the ground: P.W. Bridgman’s The World You Now Own (reviewed for London Grip) was passed on by another reviewer who was indisposed. This can be a risky job to take on — what if you can’t productively connect with the book in question in any way? Luckily, I found Bridgman’s voice to be a ‘gentlemanly presence’ in a well-rounded and skilfully written volume:
The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into “Our Better Selves”, “Our Lesser Selves” and “Our Contemptible Selves”, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.
A little later, I submitted a review of Alex Mazey’s Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition to Tristram Fane Saunders’ new magazine The Little Review. As its name suggests, TLR is particularly dedicated to criticism. There’s poetry as well, but all poets who submit work must also include a review of something recent — I wish this policy were more widespread.
Ghost Lives impressed me a lot— more than half the book is made up of ASCII art poems featuring a character called Ghost. It sustains the atmosphere of a somewhat abandoned, neon-and-rainfall-spattered late-night-bar district throughout. I’ve written a follow-up review of another Bad Betty title — we’ll see if, when and how that one emerges.
Volcanoes, supernovas etc.
How about this for an even shorter section? The only article I’ve published this year outside of personal blog entries is a brisk dive into time loop video games, via Retorisk Arena, a Danish online journal focusing on rhetoric and communication. The brief was: don’t slip into academic jargon. Mission accomplished, I think? I talked about Outer Wilds, an already much-beloved sci-fi time loop game set in a tiny galaxy, and two less well-known titles: The Forbidden City and Pocket Watch.
One might reasonably infer, therefore, that the time loop had been invented as an ingenious solution to the problem of video games jolting players out of their stories whenever the protagonist – their avatar – anticlimactically snuffs it. Instead of having the player artificially retread the same story beats, like someone who’s lost their place in a book, a time loop game follows the lives of one or more characters who are themselves trapped in a temporal circuit. Certain events and interactions recur, but it is the protagonist/s – not just the player – who negotiates encounters differently with each visit, and in so doing learns more about the world and their place in it.
My conclusion? Interactive time loops might just be better at representing certain aspects of modern experience than chronologically coherent narratives.
They added a little drawing of me, which means I’m two for two, ‘24-’25. Can I keep it going?
Barbarian Yellow Crane
What else for this part of the three-part catch-up post? Well, I’ve joined the editorial board of Jordan Magnusson’s Game Poems Magazine, and a chunk of my summer was spent reviewing and discussing with my fellow editors the various submissions for the first issue, due out later this month.
What kind of work is being published? Terminology around the field of poetry-game crossover is still fluid, but Jordan’s term ‘game poems’ roughly maps onto my term ‘poetic games’ from Dual Wield. So: video games that are primarily lyrical, seeking to express or explore a subjective experience through their mechanics and/or audio-visual systems, ideally without too much emphasis on narrative. Most are the work of individual game developers, very short — a few minutes from beginning to end — and either focus on a particular moment in time or offer up an entirely figurative landscape.
As well as those submitted to the journal, many are shared by their authors on the Game Poems Discord. Here are a few recent ones I’ve looked into:
Kibble, by Andre Almo — a brief account of feeding a (stray?) dog. It takes the of-replicated bomb-catching mechanic from Kaboom! (1981) and uses it to represent how fragments of memory must be caught and accumulated in the telling of even a simple story, via the image of dogfood and bowl.
The Sun Lights Up by Jack Kutilek — Based on a monostitch by John Wills (“the sun lights up a distant ridge another” is the entire poem), this game poem comprises three scenes and a soundtrack. You can take it very slowly if you like. As in the poem, one ridge, then another is lit up, but only if the player moves their tiny avatar along the road — as if to say that for sunlight to appear to ‘strike’ something majestically, there must be a witness moving through time.
A dying snake by Koway — This is a neat inversion of a very familiar game mechanic that lends it pathos; it’s Snake,except the snake gets shorter and the game gets slower, until there’s no snake left. A single note rings out at the moment of each collision, suggestive of softening footsteps or gradually dimming senses.
黃鶴楼 by PublicDomainFriend — I’m not entirely sure whether this is offered as a game poem, a translation (of a Mao Zedong poem), a tech demo, or all three at once, but it simulates the process of translating from Chinese in a novel way, pushing the player to click through multiple possibilities in order to assemble an English version of the work, using a single line of framing narrative to suggest the experience as an autobiographical retelling.
The Sun Lights Up was made in Bitsy, an incredibly beginner-friendly game engine!
Tonight I’m trying something new: a fighting game and poetry night for students. They can take turns at 4-player arena battles on Power Stone 2 or team up for 2-player ‘Dramatic Battle’ mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 (both from the recently released Capcom Fighting Collection 2 ). I’m bringing some thematically linked poems for volunteers to read aloud in between bouts. Here they are:
NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin.
With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s begin with:
I’ve never considered events-organising to be my strong suit — let alone drumming up an audience, generating anticipation, compering an evening’s entertainment. But I have ideas, access to rooms, equipment and noticeboards, students who need opportunities to perform, and now a number of friends and colleagues who are as eager as I am to build a busy poetry scene in Cambridge. So this year, I’ve been involved (in some capacity) with an almost overwhelming number of live readings and gatherings, while managing a growing mailing list of interested parties.
Thanks for reading Stray Bulletin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
(The mailing list is driving me up the wall, by the way — it keeps dropping people I know I’ve added!)
Spread the jam
To start, there have been three more Future Karaoke lit jams: Memories and Dreams (that is, poems and stories inspired by time travel tales); Mixology (poems and stories inspired by classic cocktails) and Brew It Up! (poems and stories inspired by Milton Brewery Beers, which themselves happen to be named after mythological figures). The latter two were held in, respectively, a restaurant and a pub, so gave rise to a rowdier, sort of ‘round-the-campfire’ atmosphere as we entered the late spring/summer months.
Emma Gant reading at Future Karaoke: Mixology at d’Arry’s Restaurant in April
We’re returning to the ARU Recital Hall for the next one (Major Arcana) in early October, while the Future Karaoke brand/event format is also spreading to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, under the stewardship of my former student, Lisa Sargeant, which is very exciting.
“Feather — Stone”
We’ve also had readings from poets with brand new books to promote, kicking off with Yang Lian and Yo-Yo in March. I hadn’t seen Yang Lian perform since Poetry Parnassus, a huge global poetry event at the Southbank Centre that was occasioned by the 2012 London Olympic. Not to repeat the publicity all over again, but he currently lives in exile after rising to prominence in China in the late 1970s. Yo-Yo, his partner, is a writer of short fiction, as a painter.
The event was multilingual; the writers read in their native language, and we were joined by their translators, Brian Holton and Callisto Searle (Brian via Teams link — he serenaded us with guitar during the set-up). We booked the big lecture hall for this one, and all books were sold!
Yang Lian read from the Chinese edition of A Tower Built Downwards
Not long after, we hosted Rebecca Watts, Claudine Toutoungi and Matt Howard, who performed individual sets before coming together on stage for a ‘poetry Q&A’, where I asked three carefully crafted questions, and each responded with a current or back-catalogue poem. I then had to dash to the bookstall with my new card machine, since the audience were, again, very keen.
I know Rebecca and Claudine well — Matt I met more recently. All are lovely — they’re very different writers and readers, but in a way that mixed extremely well.
L-R: Rebecca Watts, Matt Howard, Claudine Toutoungi (one Bloodaxe and two Carcanet poets)
The Winding Road
2025 happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Cambridge Poetry Festival, and I’ve joined a committee dedicated to bringing it back, headed up by Angus Allman, the host of the monthly CB1 Poetry night. Sadly, we couldn’t put our ducks in a row in time to bring back the full festival this year. Instead, we rolled together a number of chronologically and spatially dispersed events under the CPF banner and promoted them with a hastily whipped-together brochure.
A few of the CPF 50th anniversary brochures dropped off at Cambridge University’s English Faculty
These included: a reading from Theophilus Kwek at Magdalene College — which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend — and a one-off anniversary reading at the new refurbished Pembroke Auditorium, uniting contemporary poets with some of those who read at the original 1975 and 1977 festivals and celebrating the work of these older poets in particular, including those — like John Ashbery, Ted Hughes, Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Roy Fisher — who’re no longer with us. This attracted about 100 attendees — a good sign for the future of the festival.
The final event listed in the brochure was Summer in the Square: actually a broader, month-long event organised by Cambridge Bid which we were invited to take part in. That involved coming up with poetry games that would be of interest to passers-by, since we were set up under a marquee outside the station and left to our own devices for a few hours. No need to overdo it, of course; I made a simple racing game, with counters and dice, using quotes from various poems, and brought along a mix-and-match-the-couplet exercise — to which another former student Freya Sacksen (also a trustee of the Festival, and an endlessly inventive poet in her own right) ably contributed.
On the other side of the sign: an incomplete D. H. Lawrence poem that guests were invited to finish …
“I need ya, Deck.”
Finally for now I’ll mention the Transmedia Reading Club, which is reaching all the way back into April again. I came up with this as a way to generate some kind of active exchange between the different arts-related departments of the university, so that this image of excitable cross-medial conversation might then be promoted image to the wider public. The idea is simple: meet to discuss three different artefacts, each in a different medium, united by a theme. The first theme was Retro/Future Noir and we’re following this up with Gothic Americana in October.
Happily, it required only minimal organisation — a room, a flyer, a mailout — and was designed to work with a small number of attendees. I’m not sure how the format should change if it grows in popularity — so far, we’ve simply sat in a large circle working through some very general questions and opinions.
I briefly covered the two spring Sidekick launches in the last Stray Bulletin; I haven’t included here the cross-university open mic or any of the events where I was reading/giving a talk myself, but this seems a good point to draw a line under Part 1.
A couple of years ago, I hurriedly wrote three ‘micro roleplaying poems’ to hand out as part of a pamphlet at an conference. Each one was based on a 2022 game I loved: Stray, Sable and Citizen Sleeper. I decided recently to part-digitise them, rewriting some elements, and upload them for people to read/play. You can access them via your browser (including mobile browsers) here.
Don the one-gone-mad mask! Make music for the trogg-folk! Siphon water for a bath!
Jon’s Adventures in Space was the title of my earliest attempt at a novel, or rather a full-length book — I’m not sure I was aware of the concept of novels as distinct from storybooks at the time. I would have been in primary school, Year 3, so around 7 or 8. Every page was illustrated, and it was supposed to be epic. In fact, it was repetitive — or rather, iterative — in a way that might have suggested I would end up more invested in poetry than narrative. Every few pages, ‘Jon’ would encounter a new space alien, and a lengthy description of its various colours, appendages and instruments of attack would ensue. Then Jon would take a photo of it and proceed to destroy it with … and here would follow a long list of guns and missiles that were fitted to his spaceship. Laser cannons, heatseekers, tracers, ion beams etc.
There was only ever one copy of Jon’s Adventures in Space, and unfortunately I no longer have it. I do have copies of various other stories from around the same time — impossible now to put them in an exact order. I seem to have started out writing in Memo books acquired from my grandparents’ village shop — in these are recorded the adventures of several bears and other soft animals. An ecological theme swiftly emerges; below are several short chapters of Animal Wars, a story in which animals from across the world join forces to eradicate the evil of mankind.
Undoubtedly, this was influenced by the TV series The Animals of Farthing Wood, based on the books by Colin Dann, which aired from 1993. The story doesn’t get very far — the animals ride a dragon over Scotland, meet a puffin, and try to discover the location of the Loch Ness Monster, which requires that Cheetah don a diving mask and breathing apparatus. In the first chapter, ‘Old Dodo’ dies after pleading with the others to build a mighty army.
I was also writing plenty of fan fiction. The oldest typed story in my archive is a one-pager called ‘Paddington Goes Swimming’, with accompanying pictures on a separate piece of card. The water park manager in this story is named ‘John Turnip’, and Paddington, naturally enough, forgets to take his duffle coat off before jumping into the pool.
But after Jon’s Adventures in Space, the next significant landmark, according to my memory, is The Darkest Adventure, a grim attempt at a fantasy novel (I knew what one was by this point, though not how long they were supposed to be). I was so serious about it that my form teacher at the time, Diane Thomas, took it upon herself to type up my handwritten pages, bind them and give them to me as a present. I recall her estimating that it was about 20,000 words in total, though I only seem to have retained the first ten pages:
Again, ‘Jonathan’ is a main character in the novel, and the other two protagonists are based on childhood friends. I don’t think I quite meant to call Adam ‘half-witted’ in the first paragraph — I probably just meant ‘witty’.
Within half a page, the three have visited a ruined church, nearly been struck by a meteorite, witnessed a howling wolf and discovered a magical trinket. This leads to them developing the power to turn into their respective Zodiac signs — in Jonathan’s case, a goat with a fish’s tail. Why I thought these would confer any advantage whatsoever in anybody’s guess, but the three boys are simultaneously charged with the mission of … sigh … saving the world from the evils of mankind. This involves liberating animals, sabotaging factories and compelling armies to lay down their weapons until the world is transformed into one giant national park. Obviously, the first port of call is Calais, to organise frogs, oysters and snails into a revolt against the French.
Imitative comedy aside, the main preoccupation in these stories is either saving innocent lives or dealing with some kind of threat — which is an indication, I would suppose, of what kind of stories we start to tell children once they’ve passed beyond the phase of being entertained by characters engaging in daily routines and have begun to wonder what greater purpose there is.
This is part of a series of blog posts lightly documenting my early writing, mostly to satisfy my completist tendencies, but also with the aim of reintegrating some threads of it into current work, and to better understand the process of writerly development.
A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.
To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.
It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.
The rest of the issue is full of interesting work, from Helen Shewolfe Tseng‘s textual simulation of a sonic landscape to s. hickory‘s ‘night train’, a short film-poem conjured through code (and which, bizarrely, contains a line almost identical to one of the ones I cut from ‘The Whisky Shop’!)
In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, specially commissioned poems, it includes an appendix, in the form of an alternative timeline of Moon landings utilising characters from European comics, and images from James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.
Last week we launched the book in London at one of Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover readings at Senate House, hosted by the wonderful Briony Hughes. This week (tomorrow, that is), we’re doing a Cambridge launch at Waterstones, so as an extra little promotional push, here’s a list article, wherein I will introduce you to three more books of space poems, and deliver my run-down of the Top 5 space-themed Transformers.
Three more books of space poems
1. Space Baby by Suzannah Evans (Nine Arches, 2022)
Kicking off with an epigraph by Edwin Morgan, one of the first poets to consciously attempt sci-fi poetry, Space Baby is full of poems that fuse astronomical imagery with earthbound scenarios: above a shopper laden with bags, Betelgeuse goes supernova, ‘lurid across the cosmos / like an overripe peach leaking / wet and gold’. Factions of poets — the ‘moon-purists’ and ‘moon-maximalists’ — start seeing moons wherever they go, while in ‘Cassini Love Poem’, the loss of a NASA probe, burning up on entry into Saturn’s atmosphere, becomes a metaphor for self-immolating infatuation.
Evans has a light touch; the poems are zippy and easy to follow, and there are some wonderfully lurid conceits (‘The Glacier Attends its Own Funeral as a Ghost’, ‘Inside Each Universe is Another Universe’, ‘The Dreaming Octopus Colour Chart’) fuelled by a host of intertextual and factual reference points. Here’s the second half of ‘Supermassive Black Hole’:
Above your head the dilating pupil of sky will show you how everything turns out — the pinkblue future of undiscovered galaxies possibilities forking like lighting. The air is treacly with gravity and you fold yourself inside it — you chose this — the rest of time will go on happening.
2. A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue) (Carcanet, 2001)
Elson was a scientist first and foremost — she worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in the 1990s, researching globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. A Responsibility to Awe was published posthumously, after her early death, and is made up of material gathered by her husband and close friend, including extracts from notebooks.
Science and poetry aren’t entirely incompatible, and some exciting projects have arisen from attempts to bring them together (see Simon Barraclough’s Laboratorioand Project Abeona, run by Andy Jackson, one of the poets featured in … Dark Side of the Moon). But there is something of a tension, since scientific writing aspires toward precision, literalness, practical conclusions, while poetry attempts to leave room, lean into the figurative, pose ever wider questions.
Elson’s grappling with this tension resulted in a singular voice — spare, for the most part, with quick turns, and a focus that rarely drifts from its chosen subject matter, instead pinning it in place. In the punchy ‘What if There Were No Moon’?’, she lists: “No bright nights / Occultations of the stars / No face / No moon songs”. There’s more than space poems here — moths, nuns and salmon are equally keenly observed, while eels and kites are deployed as metaphor — and like Evans, Elson worked hard to connect concepts from her astronomy research to everyday phenomena:
‘Dark Matter’
Above a pond An unseen filament Of spider’s floss Suspends a slowly Spinning leaf
3. Watcher of the Skies, edited by Rachel Piercy and Emma Wright (The Emma Press, 2016)
A children’s anthology, made eminently more readable both by Emma Wright’s simple, scratchy line illustrations and the plethora of accompanying notes supplied by University of Edinburgh’s Rachel Cochrane. Many of the poems are by adult-audience poets trying their hand at children’s writing, and while this can result in some clumsiness at times, it’s also freed the poets up to be sassier and more direct. Cheryl Moskowitz’s ‘The Algonquin Calendar of Changing Moons’ is mostly a gorgeous list poem (“Wolf Moon / Snow Moon / Worm Moon … Pink Moon / Flower Moon / Strawberry Moon”) while Inua Ellams delivers a lesson in basic astrophysics both teasingly and succinctly: “Everything we are is everything they were. / Everything they were is everything we are.”
I contributed to a short sequence of pastiches called ‘Poets in Space!’ which is also included in this book. Here’s my take on ‘The Thought Fox’:
‘Ted Hughes in Space’ Guest-starring Fox McCloud AKA Star Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s starfield: Something else is blasting Through the vacuum’s loneliness Past the moonbase where my instruments tick.
Through my telescope I see no comet: Something more near With a flamier tail Is entering the lunasphere.
Hot, hurtlingly as an asteroid, A combat spaceship rips through dark; Fine paws serve a moment, that now And again now, and now, and now
Slips the ship between debris And satellites, and neon laser fire Lights up the sky and the cockpit Where the pilot boldly plots his course
Through systems, his eye A narrowing deepening greenness, Brilliantly, pluckily Striking at an evil empire
Till, with a sudden sharp shot, Star Fox Is gone again into a hole in space. The telescope is empty still. The instruments Have gone crazy.
Top 5 space-themed Transformers
5. Moonrock
Moonrock is a member of the Astro Squad, a ‘Micromaster Combiner Squad’, meaning his original 1990 toy was only a couple of inches tall in robot mode and transformed into the front half of a lunar missile transport vehicle. He’s made no appearances in any Transformers narrative media, so we only have a couple of back-of-the-box profiles to work off, but he sounds like something of a daydreamer and introspective philosopher, inclined to gaze at the stars all night long in wonder, or endlessly speculate on the nature of the universe.
Cosmos, who transforms into a bright green Adamski flying saucer, sounds like cyborg Peter Lorre in the original Transformers cartoon. This was a deliberate choice on the part of his voice actor, Michael McConnohie, for reasons never elaborated upon. Because of his novel alt-mode, Cosmos is also a rather squat little robot with gorilla forearms and what appears to be a severe underbite — and since his job is orbital reconnaissance he spends most of his time on his lonesome, making him a rather eccentric character in the round.
As the first major character to transform into a space shuttle, Astrotrain gets heavy rotation in Transformers media as a means of interplanetary transport. Yes — the other Transformers ride around inside him, despite him usually standing the same height as them in robot mode. Unfortunately, his original character profile failed to give him a distinctive personality, which means he’s taken on all sorts of odd roles within the various fictional continuities: a dim-witted petty schemer who tries to take over the world with an army of locomotives; an abused underling who turns against his master; a vengeful widower (?!?); and a non-sentient ‘devil train outa Perdition’.
His second alt-mode, as his name suggests, is a train, which means that if Transformers fictionaimed a few notches higher on the realism scale, he would face the choice of changing into a land vehicle which can only move in a straight line, or a flying vehicle which can’t leave the ground without the help of a solid rocket booster.
Countdown is another Micromaster, and has only very briefly featured in the stories. His character concept is outrageously good though; he’s a Cybertronian space explorer, landing on alien worlds long before the other Transformers characters and intervening in their politics, Flash Gordon style. As a result, the diminutive size of his 1989 toy and his minimal impact on Transformers lore stands in stark contrast to his standing on thousands of distant planets, where there are presumably statues of him and public holidays held in his honour.
The reason he’s so high up this list, however, is because he’s the only character in the franchise, to my knowledge, who transforms into a moon buggy.
Apparently his toy was a Woolworths exclusive in the UK.
1. Sky Lynx
Sky Lynx is ludicrous. He’s a space shuttle and NASA crawler-transporter that traverse space together and transform into a pair of creatures who share one conscience. The shuttle becomes something like a giant archaeopteryx, the transporter a blue puma with sleek golden head. These two forms can also join back together as a six-limbed monstrosity (a griffin?) that walks and flies, negating the need for the shuttle mode entirely.
Personality-wise, he’s constantly telling everyone how great he is, and providing commentary on his own escapades: “Everybody out! Another perfect flight completed by yours truly, Sky Lynx. Flawless, right down to the landing.”
This review was published last week in London Grip.
The poet himself is a gentlemanly presence throughout this, his fifth collection, never more so than when he’s introducing ‘Deliverance, 1961’ the novella-in-thirty-two-cantos which takes up the back half of the book. Like a good-natured aide conducting us to the office of an eccentric royal, he’s at pains to explain the poem’s form (so that we may better appreciate it) and prepare us for the dubious views and behaviours of his period characters (so that we might refrain from judging them unkindly). The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into ‘Our Better Selves’, ‘Our Lesser Selves’ and ‘Our Contemptible Selves’, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.
It’s light on symbolism and metaphysical conceit (‘Icarus Foiled’, with its debt to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, is the most out-of-place poem – a political parable using figures from myth) but rich in cultural bric-a-brac and recollected fragments of dialogue. Sometimes these are presented as tragic remnants (“a toy, a Styrofoam / ramen cup, shoes (many shoes), a broken yellow / spatula, a black Yomiuri Giants baseball cap” begins the list in ‘Japanese Debris Field Arrives on B. C. Shores After 2011 Earthquake’), other times as precious keepsakes. Bridgman is unquestionably modern and liberal in his outlook – poems concerning a pompous, controlling patriarch and a child learning to ride a bike, for instance, are likely drawn from first-hand experience, but could easily be ads for life insurance products, such is their familiar relatability. I had never heard of Irpin before I read ‘A Mercy Undeserved: Irpin, March 2022’, but I knew within a few lines that it must be a Ukrainian city, since the book is elsewhere eager to acknowledge the contemporary global milieu. This is not a criticism, by the way – just to note that I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite so much like what I would expect from an evening’s conversation with a thoroughly polite, well-adjusted and socially conscientious dinner guest.
Similarly, in terms of form, smart-casual dominates – clean, lightly patterned lines, some very long, with one tightly cinched concrete poem and occasional unforced rhymes. It’s a warm, welcoming volume, keenly demonstrating both tonal range and worldliness – not to mention that Bridgman is an attentive student of key figures in the 20th-century poetical canon. But its best moments might be its sloppiest and nastiest: ‘A Pie in the Face of the Betrayed’ is a viciously surreal portrait of an emotionally reticent husband or boyfriend splattering his partner with half-eaten pudding as he finally snaps. She’s memorably described going down in a burning plane – except that it’s surrounded by “billowing meringue” as his “false, sticky reassurances / drip down from the overhead / speakers”. And the two poems ventriloquising a curmudgeon – part of a longer sequence, it sounds like – are deliciously petty:
Joshua rights his head slowly, as if it’s being winched up off a welding table by an invisible block and tackle. He sighs in resignation.
I decide not to correct him, for now, on his use of “Dad”. I’m not his father. I’m not even his father-in-law. (They’re shacked up.)
(‘Ariana Grande Comes to Lunch: A Modern Tableur en Famille’)
The novella, meanwhile, is a mellifluous double character study, set mostly on a sleeper train and told through flashbacks. It’s a sort of melancholic, grittier, muckier spin on Brief Encounter; the protagonists’ paths cross just the once, and they’re likely totally ill-suited for each other, despite the fact that each is fleeing a life of bleak disappointment. The takeaway might be that a few hours of embarrassed kindness are all we can reasonably hope for, and make something of, in the wake of our mistakes.
