“A poet of fantastic inversions.” Poetry London
“Multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.” Magma
“Voraciously experimental, precociously accomplished.” Poetry International
I went to see Rashomon at the cinema for my birthday last month, and it reminded me that I published a Toshiro Mifune poem in The Rialto 80 going on a decade ago. So I dug it out and rejigged it, trying to get an anagram of ‘oni’ onto the end of two thirds of the lines:
A text-only version has been uploaded to the main site’s lucky dip.
This is from Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010), picked up in Scarthin Books. Echoes of the 1940 apocalypse poets here — but interesting that the ashen landscape is behind him, seen in a reflection, as if the end of everything has already been and gone.
This is an extract from Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games. When that book was in its draft state, as a doctoral exegesis, I was advised to include a short definition of poetry early on. I found the ‘short’ part close to impossible, so ended up producing the following.
In his Poetics, Aristotle responds to Plato’s condemnation of poets as insidious falsifiers by characterising lyric poetry as an imitative form combining rhythm, language and harmony, the overall purpose of which is to accurately represent human endeavours. Much later, in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Campion set out to demonstrate, in Observations in the Art of English Poesie, that poetry is “the chiefe beginner and maintayner of eloquence, not only helping the eare with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also raysing the mind to a more high and lofty conceite” (1602, para 1 of 44). It achieves this due to being made by “Simmetry and proportion,” just as music is, and just as the world is, in Campion’s reckoning.
Later still there are the famous definitions by William Wordsworth (“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“the best words in the best order”, as quoted in Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge), both in the nineteenth century. In 1944, in his Introduction to The Wedge, William Carlos Williams wrote:
A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words … As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises. (Williams 2009, para 9 of 15)
I choose to highlight these because between them, they account for much of the popular understanding of poetry’s place and purpose, while also appearing to contradict and talk over one another. It is difficult to imagine an alien, faced with this array of descriptions, being able to discern that Aristotle, Campion and Williams are all talking about the same thing.
This functional and conceptual instability is tentatively embraced by many poetry practitioners, as well as those who think deeply about the medium, though there are periodic resurgences in strict adherence to Wordsworth’s creed of spontaneous overflow or Aristotle’s stipulation of verisimilitude. Perloff chronicles two periods in twentieth-century English-language poetry – the period dominated by the modernism of Eliot and Pound, and the counterculture of the 1960s – when the doctrine of natural or common speech came to the fore, such that poets would aim to make the poem a convincing impression of raw communication from the mind or mouth of a thinking and feeling person. Perloff convincingly analyses the results as mere simulations of the natural, increasingly prone to borrowing their effects from televisual media.
As it has become harder to sustain a belief in literary naturality, or in language that speaks to a universal human condition, the public attitude toward poetry has turned toward gentle bewilderment, and poets have increasingly made a pastime out of defending and redefining their art. Pithy or easy explanations tend to be rejected – major poets instead write entire books that recast the poem in new light (Maxwell 2012; Paterson 2018), while newcomers are routinely invited to develop their own personal definition.
Let us suppose that this in itself speaks to something fundamental about poetry’s character, that its reason for being is malleable, equivocal, even provocatively unforthcoming, in a way that paradoxically speaks to its value, as expressed by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska:
Poetry –
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail. (Szymborska 1996, 14-19)
Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry goes so far as to make the claim that poems are an exercise in disappointment, since they are designed to gesture at an ideal that can never be attained. As Lerner puts it: “The fatal problem with poetry: poems” (2016, 32). Then, more comprehensively:
‘Poetry’ becomes a word for an outside that poems cannot bring about, but can make felt, albeit as an absence, albeit through embarrassment. The periodic denunciations of contemporary poetry should therefore be understood as part of the bitter logic of poetry, not as its repudiation. (73-74)
Lerner goes on to cite John Keats, part echoing Peter George Patmore’s 1820 defence of Keats’ Endymion which describes it as “not a poem at all [but an] ecstatic dream of poetry” (Matthews 1971, 136), but more specifically referring to lines from “Ode to a Grecian Urn” where Keats says “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”. Those unheard melodies are mere tantalising possibilities, according to Lerner, that readers of poems are endlessly diverted toward, like gold at the end of a rainbow. In the same way, he says, when Emily Dickinson writes “I dwell in Possibility” she means that poetry is the realm of that which is not yet made, not yet real – what the poem can only hint at. If each individual poem raises the mind to a more high and lofty conceit, it is only by talking of an ecstatic dream, never by embodying it.
Lerner’s essay can be regarded as the culmination of a critical trend which has seen the poem repeatedly reconceived in less powerful and commanding terms. In the 1940s, the New Criticism movement promoted the study of the poem as a self-contained object, divorced from any representative or rhetorical purpose. In a pair of influential essays, “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue for the irrelevance of both authorial intent and the emotional response of the reader, calling for the poem to be approached as an object of close study, a bloodless mesh of intricate machinery. The school of reader-response criticism that emerged in the 1960s and 70s foregrounded the role of the reader in mediating and ultimately deciding the meaning of a literary work, in opposition to New Criticism but continuing its work of de-centring the author. Now we have Lerner’s account of the poet almost helplessly gesticulating through the poem, unable even to provide the reader or critic with a gratifying experience, completing the story of a rapid descent from social influence and oratory power. Poets today are left talking wistfully of functions that no longer seem to be in evidence, or of what poetry could, should or might be.
In order to try to reconcile these fluctuations with an understanding that restores to the poem some degree of potency, let us consider it in more technical detail. Lewis Turco’s handbook of poetics, The New Book of Forms, usefully separates poetry into four levels, to which Turco assigns equal importance: the typographical, meaning the visual arrangement of a poem, its layout, symmetry and shape; the sonic, meaning its sounds and sound-patterns, including rhythm and rhyme; the sensory, meaning its descriptive properties; and the ideational, meaning its various themes and ideas. Two of these levels (the typographic and the sonic) represent what William Carlos Williams calls the physical character of the poem, and it is the emphasis on these that helps demarcate poetry from prose. That is to say, poetry is not merely descriptive, not just a transmission, but a medium that draws attention to its own physical character, that asks to be seen, heard and felt as much as (or more than) understood.
How, then, does it make itself seen, heard and felt? To answer that, let us consider Roman Jakobson’s theory of a poetic function of language. Language’s poetic function, according to Jakobson, is that part of linguistic communication that concerns its own materiality and artificiality, its style and form, the way something is expressed or communicated. It is a feature of all linguistic communication, but its importance in relation to other functions of language varies. As Jakobson puts it:
Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. (1960, 356)
So in poetry, the poetic function is brought to the fore; in other kinds of language it has a smaller supporting role. How, then, is it brought to the fore? In explaining this, Jakobson turns his attention to parallelism, or equivalence – the proximity of two or more linguistic units of a similar character, such that we are able to perceive a connection between them beyond the sequential logic of grammar or narrative:
In poetry not only the phonological sequence but in the same way any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation. Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its throughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence … (370)
What Jakobson is describing is the effect of organising these units so as to make resemblances in their physical character apparent, drawing attention to points of harmony and contrast. Let us look at a typical example of this. In the following stanza of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” all but one of the lines are of a near-identical metrical character, and all can be paired according to the end-sound:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. (Larkin, “Aubade,” 5-10)
Where the penultimate line is shorter, we notice an absence, as if denoting a troubled pause. This is made possible by the pronounced similarity of the rest. Within each line, there is then the similar character of each metrical foot (unrest | ing death | a whole | day nea | rer now), and between pairs of lines, the similar character of the end-sound (now/how, die/-fy, dread/dead). This strategy of organisation allows us to perceive visual and aural structure, and it is this that brings the material presence of the poem into focus so that it is seen and heard, not simply understood. This same strategy can be employed using larger and more complex linguistic constructions. Thus poetry, as Gerard Manley Hopkins says in a citation deployed by Jakobson, “reduces itself to the principle of parallelism” (Jakobson 1960, 368).
But Hopkins goes on to say, in the same quote, that the principle extends to the sensory and ideational levels, to the way in which poetry describes and/or professes thoughts:
[T]he more marked parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or of emphasis begets more marked parallelism in the words and sense … where the effect is sought in likeness of things, and antithesis, contrast, and so on, where it is sought in unlikeness. (368)
Metaphor, then, is also a kind of parallelism, a semantic equation. One thing stands for, or speaks of, an equivalent. It follows that the parallel may reach across and between the levels at which the poem functions, so that the sonic effect of “Flashes afresh,” for example, pairs with the descriptive burden of the word “flashes”. And so long as we encounter poetry in the context of all other texts of which we are aware, the parallel may also be implied to be between a unit within the poem and one without it – as when Byron begins “Sonnet on Chillon” with the line “Eternal Sprit of the chainless Mind,” echoing Pope’s “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” from “Eloise to Abelard”.
Parallelism is such a broad and flexible principle, in fact, that it permits subgenres of and movements within poetry to touch upon the spaces occupied by visual art, fiction and music. Concrete poetry emphasises the typographic and visual arrangement of the poem to the point where it acts in a descriptive capacity, with the text acting as a visual representation of an object or shape. Max Ernst’s “visible poems,” published in 1934 as part of his Une Semaine de Bonté sequence, are collaged and recontextualised pieces of woodcut illustrations, arranged so that they appear to have the grammatical logic of language. One untitled work by John Furnival, printed in John Sharkey’s Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry, closely resembles a puzzle or gameboard:
Figure 1: “Untitled” by John Furnival (1965), reproduced from Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry.
The principle that allows such pieces to declare themselves poetic works is encapsulated in these lines from “March 1979” by Tomas Tranströmer (2011, n.p., as translated by Robin Fulton): “I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language, / language without words.” In other words, since poetry is based in parallelism, it finds a foundation where there is perceived a parallel between written language and some other visual arrangement. Orally performed sound poetry, similarly, draws on the formal conventions of spoken language while abandoning literary meaning, being more orderly than mere noise while structurally distinct from music, and stretches to its limit the extent to which sound can be used in a descriptive capacity. Wherever there is the trace of language, visually or aurally, poetry may be formed.
The wide ambit of parallelism also makes it difficult to conceive of a truly anti-poetic medium. Successive movements in poetry which have sought to invert or oppose the totality of existing traditions have all fallen into the trap that Lerner wittily describes when he says that avant-garde artworks remain, in spite of their efforts, artworks:
They might redefine the borders of art, but they don’t erase those borders; a bomb that never goes off, the poem remains a poem (…) The Futurists – ghosts of future past – enter the museums they wanted to flood. (2016, 56-57)
Thus, deeply fractured compositions that resist sense-making to the utmost still find their central argument in the display of likeness and unlikeness, even if it is by implicit reference to the conventions they flout.
The next question is: what use does the foregrounding of the poetic function serve? What might be the purpose of a medium based in aesthetic and semantic parallelism? To answer that, I turn to Philip Wheelwright’s elegant elucidation of what he calls “tensive language,” which he positions as the character of all poetic language. Likeness, after all, can only ever be inexact, or it is sameness; therefore in accentuated likenesses there is inherent tension, or conflict. This conflict, according to Wheelwright, may be used to reflect reality far more faithfully than can be achieved with conventional phrasing, since reality is animated by struggle, by ongoing turbulence, is perspectival and coalescent, and a negotiation between the particular and the universal (Wheelwright 1968 , 164-173). In making itself seen, heard, felt and understood, tensive language is language that imitates life itself, that “strives toward adequacy, as opposed to signs and words of practical intent or of mere habit” (46). Wheelwright makes a comparison between the way a poet aims to use words and the way a painter aims to represent nature using only a limited number of colours. What is required in each case is a restless concomitance: combination, indirection, suggestion:
Where language in the more specific sense is in question – language as consisting of words and some kind of intelligible syntax – the problem becomes that of finding suitable word-combinations to represent some aspect or other of the pervasive living tension. This, when conscious, is the basis of poetry. (47-48)
More than mere equivalence, it is tension that results in what Jakobson calls the polysemantic essence of poetry. Each of Turco’s levels multiplies the possibilities for tension between units, and by taking advantage of those possibilities the poet moves beyond the constraints of merely descriptive language.
The result is another well-known characteristic of poetry: ambiguity. Wheelwright prefers the term “open language” so as not to imply looseness or vagueness, saying that poetic language, “by reason of its openness, tends towards semantic plenitude … doubleness of meaning … interplay of meanings and half-meanings … plurisignation” (57). Ambiguity, when deployed skilfully, is not designed to frustrate understanding but to facilitate a more complex or subtle form of understanding, by positioning two or more contrasting implications against one another. In Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” for example, the line “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” simultaneously refers to the power and expanse of Ozymandias’ empire at the time of its peak, and to the near-featureless desert that remains long after its destruction. There is nothing to be gained by discarding one interpretation; the import lies in the ironic contrast between the two. Through such positioning of ambiguous elements, poetry finds ways of representing facets of lived experience and reality that cannot be achieved through logical sequencing alone.
The final question I would like to ask, for the purposes of giving an account of poetry that serves the aims of this chapter, is: what role does the reader play in the poem? From the perspective of New Criticism, they have only to recognise and identify what tensive energies and semantic equations already exist within an individual text. But for critics of the school of reception theory, ambiguity results in potentially boundless depth and restlessness, with scope for continual reinterpretation by different readerships. Umberto Eco identifies this as a defining feature of poetry in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, where he writes that the “poetic effect” is “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed” (2009, 545). This capacity can only be demonstrated, however, by the process of reading and re-reading. It is the reader’s engagement with the poem that fulfils its potential as a complex and compelling textual system. We might suppose, therefore, that it is the failure to take into account the role of the reader that leads Lerner to regard the poem as hopelessly gesturing toward a state of completion it can never attain. The reader may be cast as operator, as living component in a dynamic web, rather than the recipient who waits at the end of a single-use delivery mechanism.
Brian McHale describes a version of this idea in his explanation of segmentivity, the term proposed by Rachel Blau DuPlessis as the chief organising principle of poetry. McHale contrasts segmentivity to narrativity, the latter of which produces meaning by way of linear accretion, or one thing following another. Where segmentivity is the dominant, the text instead seeks “to articulate and make meaning by selecting, deploying, and combining segments” (McHale 2010, 28) in non-linear configurations. So far, this is another way of explaining what we have already covered, but McHale goes on to say that “segments of one kind or scale may be played off against segments of another kind” (29). Then, taking from another poet-critic, John Shoptaw, the terms “measure”and “countermeasure,” he describes how the sense of the poem is conveyed by counterpointing one layer of segmentation against another, so that there is ambiguity in the very way that the poem is intended to be read or pieced together: line against sentence, phrase against stanza, and so on.
This constructional tension constitutes, says McHale, a series of “provocations” to the reader, whose “meaning-making apparatus must gear up to overcome the resistance, bridge the gap and close the breech” (ibid.). In other words, the reader must experiment with perspectives, methods and approaches in order to squeeze meaning from the poem. They are prevented from simply absorbing it, from passively understanding it, instead having to make decisions about the best way to actively derive sense from what is placed in front of them. This is an imposition liable to frustrate readers who maintain an expectation that the primary purpose of language be descriptive (what Jakobson calls the referential function) or emotive, unambiguously pointed to something outside of itself – but it is only by making this imposition that poetry alerts readers to its broader representational capacity. By wearing its ambiguity outward, such that there is a labyrinthine quality to it, poetry envisages a reader of the kind that matches Aubrey Thomas de Vere’s characterisation of Keats, “one who would rather walk in mystery than in false lights, who waits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of truth to the imposing completeness of a delusion” (de Vere 1849, 345).
There have been many other, more comprehensive investigations of the nature of poetry, but for the purposes of this chapter, the important points in summary are as follows: that it is a medium that draws attention to its own form through parallelism or the paratactic arrangement of linguistic units, not just in terms of meter and lineation but across and between typographical, sonic, sensory and ideational levels; that it does this in order to articulate more than is possible through the sequential logic of grammar; and that by doing so it necessarily positions the reader as an operator, one who must be prepared to actively engage with the ambiguities of the poem’s arrangement in order to uncover its “broken fragments of truth”.
Note: this post is a duplication from my substack, Stray Bulletin.
Out picking up ingredients for Christmas dinner, I made a last-minute impulse buy: a pair of blind-bagged Dungeons and Dragons Lego minifigs for me and my partner to crack open alongside our other presents. I’ve a soft spot for ‘what’s in the box’ toys, especially when it’s variations on a theme, especially when that theme has a tangential connection to something I’m working on — and minifigs don’t take up a lot of space.
When it came time to reveal the contents, I found myself putting together a sort of Mesoamerican priest, with robes of fiery orange, green and gold and a feathered mask. The figure ‘floated’ atop a transparent brick and carried a translucent cube or die with a diagram of a mountain range on one side. I wasn’t sure who or what it was meant to be, so I did a bit of research. To my delight, it turned out to be The Lady of Pain, an unseen background character from Planescape: Torment, one of my favourite games of the 90s. She’s the ruler of Sigil, City of Doors — a hub at the centre of the multiverse containing portals to every possible plane of existence. Not a human, not a god either — no one knows what she is. Her die is a ‘cubic gate’, a means of opening further interdimensional portals, and what I’d taken for feathers were, in fact, sparkling blades; those who meet her vanish onto a maze, or become covered in lacerations.
Strange choice for a children’s toy, but a perfect miniature totem for me, thinking back on the year just gone and where to turn my focus going forward! Gateways, doorways, nodes and connections — these have become increasingly important themes in my writing and teaching (eg. the titles of the last two pamphlets I brought to international conferences: Hidden Entrance and Steal Through the Gap in the Hedge). There’s good reason for this: everything that weighs on me, that is a cause for grave worry — the ongoing diminishment of the arts and instability of the university sector, the disastrous tepidity of centrist policymaking, the growing numbers needing support for illnesses and impairments, the racialised murder sprees sanctioned by my government, the toxicity of social media and so on — all of it is tied to a thinning of possibilities, a barricading of doors and filling in of passageways.
That is to say, the failure and volatility of market capitalism has produced louder and more frequent demands that we simply make do with less, stay in our individual pens and think of little beyond toiling away. Everything else is deemed frivolous and punishable. Conservative reactionaries, whose representatives keep securing stronger and more permanent footholds in power, are not shy about outlining their vision for civilisation: dramatically less emigration, education reduced to vocational training, no social safety net, no experimental art, no politics or philosophy in our entertainment media — no politics at all, in fact, outside of nationalist propaganda. The message is clear: we should no longer think of social improvement, except via those technological cures beloved of the culturally disengaged, which encourage emotional isolation and remove ever more autonomy from the workforce.
Not coincidentally, my third article for The Conversation — by far the most popular in terms of reads — was about the recent Porter and Machery study showing people can no longer tell the difference between AI poetry and that written by humans. The article is hopeful rather than angry; I dismiss the idea that there’s any threat to the existing demand for human-written poetry, paltry though that demand is. But the offensiveness of AI poetry doesn’t really have anything to do with how good the poetry is, or how easily it fools us; rather, it’s the very idea that poetry should be viewed as a product, an output. This makes it a matter of routine, something that might as well be done mechanically, as opposed to an engine or cognitive process, a way in which we generate new ideas and ways of thinking.
In turn, this makes me think of one of the books I finished reading toward the end of the year: Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, in which a fugitive discovers an island full of facsimile humans who play out the same sequence of actions every day. They turn out to be the solid-light projections of an advanced recording and playback device. The inventor of this device, Morel, wants to preserve his friends and the object of his desire for all eternity. In using it on them, though, he accidentally kills them, replacing them with lifeless dolls that only convince as humans to the degree you don’t directly interact with them. Not far off the corporatist-conservative ideal, then: everything captured and replicable, predictable, hard-coded. Nothing left to chance.
Chance is a doorway. Randomness and unplanned — or only loosely planned — meetings are a route to new opportunities, potential ways forward. That’s why a roll of the dice can be so exhilarating — sometimes it nudges everything into place. And that’s why I jumped at the chance to be a part of Collusion’s ART / TECH / PLAY event in November, despite a ridiculously busy term and the fact that I’d said yes to doing another presentation just a week later. For this event I wanted to talk about card game poems, or what chance mechanics bring to poetry. I brought my long-abused prototype of Whispering Leaves (in which doors are a prominent visual motif, the leaves in question being door leaves), along with some new, just-about functional digital simulations of other card games.
But the real joy was mixing with other practitioners in the same area, include Danny Snelson, who was coincidentally in town for a lecture on ancestral intelligences in visual culture, delivered by his partner, Mashinka Hakopian. Danny’s work combining poetics and gaming/VR technologies slotted neatly into the theme of the night, alongside talks by Jon Ingold, narrative director of Inkle and writer of Heaven’s Vault, and Laura Trevail, a ‘contextual artist’ — someone who combines tech, writing and visual art in response to specific sites and situations.
Laura’s work had been recommended to me not two weeks earlier, by the poet Sarah Wedderburn, on the way back from another gig which I’d said yes to in spite of the heavy schedule — this time involving a five-hour round trip to Oxford on a Monday night. This gig, organised by Helen Eastman of Live Canon — long-term stalwarts and allies on the poetry scene — took place at the Former United Reform Church, and due to a last-minute change of readers, I found myself following up Glyn Maxwell, the poet whose work had first inspired me to throw myself into poetry, age 17. More doors: present to past, from one kind of performance to another, conversation to conversation.
Due to an unusual and painfully costly arrangement with our Scottish distributor, I now keep several boxes of Sidekick Books stock in my garden shed for posting; as a result of this, we are now officially — I would say, anyway — an East Anglian as well as a London-based publisher. This qualified us for a spot at the Norwich City of Literature Christmas Publishing Fair — back in the city where Kirsty and I first met and started making lit magazines together. We made some good sales, including of the new Ten Poets series.
Which brings me on, finally, to some projects forthcoming in 2025, while continuing the theme of portals and crossings. Out very soon with Calque Press is Ragged Band of Travellers: Writing from the Threshold of Dungeons and Dragons, taking us right back to the opening topic of this post. This is a short anthology of poems and stories written for one of our Future Karaoke nights at ARU, with some extra pieces by George Herbert, Christina Rossetti and Edmund Spenser sprinkled in, the idea being to cover a whole bunch of the D&D classes and species. The title and theme evokes the idea of different people with different backgrounds coming together, and chance meeting leading to adventure. A preview snippet from my introduction:
For my part, I believed then (and do now) that the relationship between distinct-but-adjacent voices is just as important as what any one voice conveys to a reader or listener, especially where there are gaps and awkwardnesses to be reckoned with – where the voices could almost be bickering. (…) As such, you’ll find there’s no common setting to the pieces in this anthology, nor any shared lore informing them. This is not a love letter to D&D, or a commemoration. The way in which these poems and stories work together – belong together – is instead akin to the way the spells, skills, attacks, traits and equipment of different player characters combine in sometimes useful, sometimes surprising ways that must be tested to be discovered.
The next Future Karaoke, meanwhile, is likely to be in early February, on the theme of mixology.
As for Sidekick and Ten Poets, the series has been successful enough for us to think about making it a regular thing, and as such, we are currently reading through the results of our first open submissions call in three years. Four submissions will be chosen to be published alongside six commissioned pieces to make up Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon, out at the end of April. I’ve been seriously impressed with the range and quality of everything sent in, and the number of ways different poems could be fitted together to make completely different kinds of book is making my head spin somewhat. Onto the shortlist!
I’m going to finish up with a shot of one of my Christmas presents — The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Aatsuji — in order to keep with the regular pattern of Stray Bulletin cover images. It’s a book which converses with the past (all the main characters are named after golden age crime writers) while rearranging those familiar elements just enough to make something new. That’s the kind of business we need to keep up, right? Happy New Year!
Recently I published my first short article in The Conversation, the title of which is the same as the title of this post! It’s a very swift account of much of the same ground I cover in Dual Wield, but with mention of some more recent artefacts: Calum Rodger’s ‘Gotta Eat the Plums! with William Carlos Williams‘ and Aster Fialla’s In a Minute There is Time. It also makes mention of my aborted custom level for Free Lives’ Broforce — an attempt to creative an interactive version of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Une Saison en Enfer’ — so I thought I’d upload a video showing how far I got with it.
I have a new poem published in Magma 89: Performance — and for the first time ever (I think) I’m named on the cover! Magma is a long-running, elegantly produced poetry journal which rotates its editors with every themed instalment, ensuring a wider-than-normal range of content from issue to issue. I co-edited number 64, Risk, nearly a decade ago, and had written for their blog before even then. They were also one of the first journals to take a serious interest in my work, offering me a few spotlight pages back in 2012, for which I have Julia Bird to thank. This time my thanks go to editors Mariam Chaudhri, David Floyd and Josiane Smith.
The poem, ‘Magician’s Trick with Scissors’, is from a sequence of Magician poems. The character last appeared in poems published in Berlin Lit Issue 5; he is a magician who has fled his Circle with a stolen something, and is half hiding out, half preparing for an unwinnable battle ahead. Here’s the beginning of his latest outing:
The rest of the issue contains abundant reviews, the winners of Magma‘s annual competition (poems on the devastation in Palestine, linking birth to the Scapa Flow in Scotland, being overwhelmed by scenic beauty), an article by Niall O’Sullivan on the impact of the internet on the spoken word scene, and poems by, among others, Martha Sprackland, JP Seabright, Rebecca Watts and Jerold Yam. The theme of the issue lends itself readily to consideration of what, if anything, is not some kind of performance, or can avoid being construed as such. I noted two closely related titles: Harper Walton‘s ‘Baby Let’s Roleplay’ and Erica Hesketh‘s ‘Live action role-play’, both of which work through miniature sequences as if trying on clothes. In Walton’s poem, it’s metaphors being tested:
I’m an amoeba splitting
into two smaller amoeba
and you’re the wholeness I no longer feel
I’m an all black outfit
you’re the rainbow scarf a stranger
strangles my wearer to death with
I like how you have to unpick the image of that second stanza to appreciate it fully.
In Hesketh’s poem, meanwhile, a whole cast of characters are paraded, their stories glimpsed in a way that reminds me of the way epic poems recount battles (hence the title, which alludes to medieval reenactment):
The paramedic arrives to deal with a minor incident
while the folk musician leads all the cows and beds
in song. The PA glances at her watch and nudges
the photographer, who is cleaning her lens again.
I feel like there ought to be a recognised subgenre of poem, related to the list poem, of which this is an example — one in which many persons put in an appearance, but each enters and leaves the poem very briskly.
I’m on the shortlist for the New Media Writing Prize — the only poem, I think, though digital literature tends to blur the line. I recommend playing through the other, varied and brilliant entries.
My piece, ‘L and the Empress of Sand’, is a new, single-player version of a performance piece I originally wrote for the Kendal Poetry Festival. It takes place in the same world as the poems of Sandsnarl.
Why do artists feel threatened by AI? Loss of income on the one hand; on the other, the fear that art as a medium of communication — as a testament to subjective human experience and the reach of the individual human imagination — will be replaced by art as mood lighting, as mechanism, as a grey soup of reiterated styles and trends. Remember the promo ad for Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, where the tech bros interrupt their poker game to check out some ‘3D street art’? “Wow, this is stunning”, “That’s awesome”, “I love the movement”, they chime, before drifting onto the next thing — because in a capitalist utopia, the purpose of art is to inspire a warm, fuzzy feeling, either by representing some kind of accomplishment, or by recalling that which is comfortingly familiar.
AI poetry will be up to this task soon enough. But it needn’t bother — human beings have already produced more than enough to meet demand. Whereas in the case of visual art and prose fiction, AI can potentially fill a gap created by the exactitude of an audience’s desires — ‘a portrait of this person in the style of this artist’, ‘a story in this genre featuring a protagonist of my own design’ — poetry of any specific character is barely imagined. As Brian Phillips notes in ‘Poetry and the Problem of Taste’, it’s not that the reading public have poor taste in poetry, but rather that they have no taste at all — no sense, that is, of how their own personal preferences differ from anyone else’s. Poetry is poetry, the way table salt is table salt. You like a little, a lot, or none at all.
Relatedly, it’s become a lot easier for more people to write and publish poems. They’re short, and there are no rules left to break. You can study to be a better poet, of course, but no one is going to stop or even chide you for sharing whatever comes into your head and calling it finished, in which case AI really isn’t much of a time-saver. In the future, it might double or quadruple the scale of poetry production, but what does that matter when the current rate already exceeds our collective ability to respond to its existence?
I’ll just make this clear, in case this is your first time reading one of my commentaries: I don’t think too many people are writing poetry, and I don’t think that the low quality of some or much of what is written is an issue. My position is that the whole artform is diminished by the narrow way it is persistently framed, such that the threat AI poses to other artforms is already a present reality for poetry: that is, we have a landscape where everything looks like a mash-up of everything else, and most of it seems designed to serve its creator’s aspiration to be regarded as an artist, rather than having any clear communicative or explorative purpose. Note: ‘looks’ and ‘seems’. This is an issue of perspective, of fogginess.
For as long as I can remember, people have complained that all modern poetry is indistinguishable. And for as long as I can remember, the principle way critics have tried to separate the ‘good’ poetry from what they implicitly agree amounts to a rubbish heap is through insistent use of subjective epithets. In other words, in place of an ongoing exercise to document what distinctive characteristics may or may not be possessed by an individual poem, book or author (the appropriate answer to accusations of sameness) we have perpetuated a game of ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’. The loudest, the most repetitive, the most passionate, fawning or grandiloquent claims are those that stick, and these on behalf of, inevitably, the better-connected, better-resourced, more shrewd and more well-behaved poets — though that point matters less than the fact that the qualities which are thereby attributed to them are vague, bland and frequently preposterous. Rather than teaching readers to discern and prize myriad specific attributes, and thus to tell one kind of poem from another by sight and feel, this process teaches them to think predominantly in terms of how ‘important’ a poet or poem seems to be, and to feel warm, fuzzy feelings that should on no account be interrogated further. It is one almighty confidence trick, at the expense of any sense that the new thing is much of a departure from the last thing. Gaze! Gasp! But do not look behind the curtain.
This in turn affects the way poems are produced and distributed:
Most frustratingly, for me at least, it steers what ought to be healthy debate about and around the artform toward a sluggish kind of territorial warfare. Disagreement over which poetry deserves what kind of attention is rife, as it should be. But trapped within the confines of a metanarrative that characterises poems as sources of fleeting, powerful feeling, too many interested parties end up huddled around their shared prejudices and faiths, failing to mount any argument beyond “Thing bad, other thing good” — albeit spun out across thousands of words. Others, wary of outbreaks of ugliness, stick resolutely to “Thing good”. Tower-of-Babel-style, we are not really talking to or understanding one another, except where we already see eye to eye.
I mean this, as ever, at a general level. There is good criticism and there are productive exchanges that lead to one or both parties being able to say, “I now see a little more of what you see”. But so much of what is supposedly the serious attention paid to poetry by its champions is barely more than gestural, tribal, phatic. Basic maintenance of the same rhythms and rituals of praise and complaint. As long as that continues we will struggle to shift the impression that the artform amounts to anything more than a piquant condiment which some consume in greater quantity than others.
If you enjoyed the thrust of this short piece, I explore a closely related topic in my essay pamphlet, Poems Are Toys (And Toys Are Good for You), and try out a different approach to poem critique in this article for The Friday Poem.
On Tuesday, I attended ‘Making A.I. work for writers’, part of a series of workshops organised by ARU’s A.I. working group, in collaboration with my own Cambridge Writing Centre. The emphasis here was on Lynda Clark’s concept of A.I. as ‘creative amplification’; that is, as a tool to use in conjunction with one’s own writing practices to produce new and surprising effects.
For the second half of the workshop, we wrestled with Max Woolf’s GPT2-Simple, a Colaboratory Notebook for training your own pet text-generating A.I. Think of it this way: freely and commercially available language-modelling software like Google Gemini and ChatGPT 3.0 is trained over months, using vast swathes of harvested data so that it can produce statements and respond to prompts in human-like fashion. We trained ours over the span of 20 minutes, using about 50,000 words (or, in my case, almost everything I’ve written in the past decade), so that each one could produce random assemblages of text which crudely resemble the work fed into it.
Here is my favourite thing it produced. I’ve added it to this website’s lucky dip with a short explainer:
This isn’t the first time I’ve made a foray into what may be loosely termed ‘A.I. poetry’. For 2017’s Bad Kid Catullus I used a simpler Markov-chain-based text generator to come up with a new Catullus poem via Catullus’ existing oeuvre and Google Translate. I’ve added this to the lucky dip too. Here it is in its Instagrammable square-image form:
Note: this post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin.
A post-January update covering the start of this year and the end of the last one.
My first publication of the year is a short essay called ‘Next time you dive’ (or How to play a poem), published online in The Friday Poem. It’s a follow-up to my winter pamphlet, Poems Are Toys (And Toys Are Good For You), a considerably longer essay which began as a talk I gave for a conference at York University some years ago. Poems Are Toys argues, in short, that readers and critics ought to treat poems as tools of imaginary play, rather than exhibits to be admired, or coded messages. It’s an anti-elitist screed which took me most of the summer to write.
Here’s how it begins:
Essays making grand statements on English-language poetry are usually pointed in one of two directions: either they’re intended for a general readership, seeking to persuade indifferent readers that poetry is sorely overlooked, or else they’re aimed at poetry’s scattered, somewhat fractious community of readers, practitioners and critics, looking to put some fresh cat among the pigeons. This essay is pointed in both directions at once, with the attendant risk that I fail to meet either audience on terms which they find comfortable. But since my concern is eroding the boundary between general reader and reader of poetry—since I believe, in fact, that this ingrained separation of interests is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction in how we relate to one another—I feel obliged to make the attempt.
‘Next time you dive’, meanwhile, is an attempt at a practical demonstration of what I argue for in theory in Poems Are Toys. I take a poem — ‘Swimmers’ by William Thompson — and discuss it in terms of how I imaginatively engaged with it, batting it around my brain, rather than adopting a pose of critical distance.
Two other reviews in The Friday Poem take a similar approach, one by the journal’s editor, Hilary Menos, and one by my old editor, Helena Nelson. To my mind, both of these pieces are far more readable and instructive than the average critical run-down of a poetry book, because they show us reader-and-book together, in the act of creative negotiation. This is an aspect of writing on/about poetry that has always existed, but it tends to get squeezed out by the impulse to act as salesman for a book we like, or headsman for a book we don’t.
For just about my final trick of 2023, I published three ‘Magician’ poems in Berlin Lit, edited by Matthew McDonald. The Magician is the star of his own book, forthcoming … when? I don’t know.
Here’s the first stanza of ‘What’s First Learned of Magic is Later Learned of Love’, a prose poem:
That it cannot be summoned, bid, baited, beckoned, smithed or shook from a tree. That it isn’t made from this or that raw material – and to the extent it’s sealed inside a fortress whose circumference you’ve begun earnestly to map and probe, that fortress is entranceless, its polished walls rising steeply into a sort of smudge of moon and sun.
Towards the end of the year I helped organise and host a launch for the Cambridge Writing Centre — a new research group based at Anglia Ruskin University, where I work. I’ve also been hard at work developing a website, logo and podcast for the Centre, as well as planning various events for 2024 with my colleagues. The idea is (a) to have an umbrella brand for the different strands of writing-related research going on at ARU, inside and outside the writing department, and (b) to work more closely with other local literary groups to cross-promote readings, workshops and other activities.
The budget for doing all this is … well, let’s just say we’ll have to take it as it comes, and get a little creative. But hopefully the more we put ourselves on the map, the more opportunities will open up to us.
Before returning from the Christmas break, I managed to finish Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. I read the first half the previous Christmas, but it’s my mum’s copy, so I left it a year before resuming. It’s gorgeously written, and the Manderley house and estate makes for a haunting, memorable setting (if only Emerald Fennell had paid as much attention to the titular mansion in Saltburn). It also becomes, gradually, a thriller, a page-turner, and in this respect it presented me with an interesting problem: while reading the final third I found myself wading through the paragraphs of sumptuous description as if they were snow drifts, almost leaping over some of them, since they stood between me and the coming revelations. The book seemed caught between moods, in the same way its protagonist lurches between passion and paranoia. This is almost a kind of ghostly ancestor to ludonarrative dissonance, the term coined by Clint Hocking to describe how a video game can have divergent narrative and ludic priorities, eg. the story demands a pressing-on, a sense of haste, while the game element rewards you for stopping to look under every stone.
