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A-Z of Villainy / Aquanauts Live at Hay

Two upcoming events: I’m co-hosting an A-Z of Villainy this Friday, from 7pm at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon. It’s a simple premise: writers reading pieces inspired by villains. 26 writers, 26 villains. Some of the writers may or may not be undercover villains themselves, and liable to hatch a scheme in the midst of proceedings. If no one else does, I will. If I can think of something dastardly enough.

I’m co-hosting this event with Kate Potts and Holly Hopkins, and contributing writers include Will Harris, Astra Papachristodoulou, Theophilus Kwek, Nisha Ramayya and Rishi Dastidar.

Then on Friday I’ll be in Hay-on-Wye with my Sidekick co-editor Kirsten Irving and two Sidekick poets, Abigail Parry and Clive Birnie. The fabulous Poetry Bookshop have invited us to host an interactive poetry performance linked to our interactive handbook, Aquanauts. We’re bringing party bags.

Aquanauts / Saboteur Awards 2018

Public voting in The Saboteur Awards ends midnight tomorrow night (9th May).

Sidekick Books, the small press publisher I co-run with Kirsten Irving, has been shortlisted in the Most Innovative Publisher category. We publish exclusively collaborative books – sometimes team-ups between writers and artists, sometimes multi-author anthologies that might mix poetry with visual art, essays or comics. But our major claim to innovation of late is publishing the Headbooks series: interactive handbooks that fuse scrapbooking, game and activity pages with visual poetry, factual content, collages and calligrams.

The first book in the series, Aquanauts, is also shortlisted this year for Best Anthology. I spent a large-ish chunk of 2017 soliciting work for this book from some of the finest poets and experimental writers I know, editing it, designing it, creating the cover artwork (see above), choosing the right printer, organising a semi-immersive/immersible launch party and gently sliding the finished book under the noses of bookshop owners, so I’m immensely pleased that it’s made the shortlist.

If you own or have seen a copy and think it does the trick, please consider heading over to the Saboteur Awards website to vote for it, and for Sidekick. Equally, if you have any familiarity with and interest in the half-underground world of British poetry, head on over and vote for the best in any of the fields. Make the process as democratic as possible.

Eborakon (Vol 2 Issue 1)

Belatedly drawing attention to the newest issue of Eborakon, published by the University of York, a handsomely produced, neat little poetry journal that also includes visual art and reviews. The editors have included a poem of mine entitled ‘Terminal Ballistics’. It’s one of the poems I salvaged from my years working as a transcript editor in London courts and arbitration centres, and takes its cue in particular from a case concerning naval ordnance. Terminal ballistics (or ‘wound ballistics’) is the study of the behaviour of projectile weapons when they meet their target. I noted down as many pieces of terminology as I could from the experts in the case and substituted them in to lines from various poems of love and tenderness. So it’s a love-hate song of sorts.

The photograph above was taken in Hunstanton on the West Norfolk coast, while waiting for the bus, shortly after having met the dedicated squad of axolotls pictured below.

Sunday Review: Beckett

I’ve reviewed Beckett by The Secret Experiment for Sabotage Reviews. Follow the link to read the full review. Here are some extracts:

The visuals are an impeccable homage to Dadaist art by way of Jan Švankmajer. The whole game is an unsettlingly animated interactive collage (…) boiled down to a murky, minimalist colour palette.
Beckett is far more stripped down than any of the aforementioned games – progress is mostly linear, people are represented by symbols (a bottlecap, a typewriter, a toy soldier) and voices by cycling sound samples (coughing, scissor snips, jangling coins).
It disrupts its own narrative with perspectival and chronological jumps, switches between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, and extends the symbolic reach of its game-world so as to thoroughly blur the line between expressionism and interactive simulation.
If visual poetry is ‘the word made flesh’, to borrow Willard Bohn’s Biblical metaphor, then this is flesh that creeps and crawls (…)

No, Robot, No! Final Days of Submissions

Broadcasting on all channels! The next collaborative interactive experimental Headbook I’ll be editing and publishing with Kirsten Irving will be No, Robot, No! We’ve been looking for proposals from writers and artists as to how they would fill 3-5 pages of this book, and the deadline for proposals is midnight this coming Monday. Full details of the call for submissions here. Please share with anyone you know you may be interested.

Back to School

School of Forgery is out in paperback, after being out of print for nearly half a decade. I’ve written a new version of the blurb for my website, and it goes like this:

School of Forgery is handily divided into two sections: Originals and Fakes. It’s possible, however, that there might have been some cross-contamination between the two. One or more of the translations of classical and contemporary Japanese poets in the Fakes section may, in fact, be made up. Some lines from the autobiography of Harpo Marx could somehow have found their way into the tale of the bandit Goemon. There are rumours that the liars, hoaxers and plagiarists who are both subject matter and tour guides in the first part have infiltrated the ranks of the dashing heroes and agents of the second. Some of these poems even steal, shamelessly, from each other.

Innocent believers in literary authenticity are advised to take especial care. This work may be, in its entirety, nothing more than a fabrication.

Drafts: Jun the Swan

OK, something for International Women’s Day. Here’s the first handwritten draft of ‘Jun the Swan’, which was published as part of the Tatsunoko sequence in School of Forgery. I wanted to write something about Jun because she’s the archetype – and possibly the prototype – of the lone woman on a superhero team. The team in question being Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, a Japanese animation from 1972 that was dubbed and released in English-speaking countries as Battle of the Planets in 1978.

Being the sole female protagonist, Jun is treated rather poorly by her costume designers and animators – clad in pink, and saddled with the swan persona where Ken, Joe and Ryu (the other adults on the team) get to be an eagle, condor and owl respectively. No talons for you, Jun! And of course, she’s in the miniest of miniskirts, so flashes her pants whenever she hoofs a villain.

But there’s more to her than that. As well as being the team’s electronics and demolitions expert (ie. the Donatello of the outfit), she’s a small business owner, successfully running a café and somehow raising her adopted brother Jinpei at the same time (they’re both orphans). Plus, she’s an outrageously skilled biker. In one episode, ‘Bird Missile of Bitterness’, she clearly fancies her old biker friend, Koji, but rightly suspects him of being a wrong’n and insists on blowing him up herself to save the team.

So anyway, I tried to write about someone steely, brilliant and daring, with dreams and appetites, who’s somehow got lumbered with being the girl of the group, and with all the attendant impositions.

End of 2017 deskjam #2: TICKETS & THINGS. First image, clockwise from top left: The Japanese House exhibition at the Barbican, with handwritten amendment permitting re-entry the following day (Abby successfully argued we had been misinformed about how long it would take to see everything); Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction, also at the Barbican, which I saw with visiting family; The Great Gatsby, interactive theatre experience (tickets generously offered for free by a friend who couldn’t go); Vanishing Man at the High Tide festival, which the lovely Tom M invited me to see with him.

Second image, clockwise from top left: The Cabinet of Dr Adam, a lecture on film set design at Arnolfini in Bristol followed by a screening of Dr Strangelove; Robots at the Science Museum; Guzzle, who is there just to square off the shot; the Great York Ghost Search, a map of York City Centre marked with the general location of tiny hidden ghosts.

End of 2017 deskjam #1: NOTEBOOKS. First image, three notebooks finished this year: x-ray one was a gift from Abby, the other two were cheap purchases from the Barbican, picked up on visits to the Into the Unknown and Japanese House exhibitions respectively.

Second image, still-active notebooks. Clockwise from top left: all-in-one address book and planner, a gift from Abby; softcover lined book for general notes, also a gift from Abby; outgoing 2017 Dodopad, a gift from parents; ‘Play With Us’ Ladybird notebook, specifically for collecting new and unusual words; relatively expensive ‘Monokaki’ Japanese paper notebook specifically for drafting poems.

Headbooks Exhibition

I’ve done a very poor job of keeping this Tumblr updated for the last year. Here, however, is the culmination of two of the big projects I’ve been working on: the exhibition of pages from Aquanauts and Bad Kid Catullus, the first two titles in Sidekick’s Headbooks series: anthologies of visual and lyrical poetry mixed with collage, handy information and interactive/scrapbook pages.

The launch is tonight, from 6.30pm at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden. It’s a toga party with an added underwater twist – transmediations and versions of the poems of Catullus are on display on the ground floor, while below deck are the visual poems from Aquanauts, including an entire wall for our collaborative oarfish renga, which has been blown up to the size of a real-life oarfish.

There will, of course, be wine, grapes and honeycakes. We’re also taking custom orders for prints from the book, and selling copies. One final big blowout before I get my head down to prepare for 2018.