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“Voraciously experimental, precociously accomplished.” Poetry International

“Multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.” Magma

Jon is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher who specialises in amalgams: hybrids, mixtures, collections and crossovers, of poem and game, fantasy and realism, curation and composition. He writes micro-texts that often take the form of character portraits, nature lyrics or puzzles, and combines them with the work of other writers and artists in genre-blurring anthology books.

Poetry London have called him a “poet of fantastic inversions”, but such inversions are just one way of rethinking the poem as an object of readerly play and investigation. His work has been published in The Sunday Times and performed on BBC Radio 4, as well as appearing in a number of British and international journals. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016.

He has also published academic papers in the field of game studies. A monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames, was published in 2022.

For a fuller account of his approach to writing, with examples, check out the short essay 'On Toys'.

Get in touch: jonskeletone [at] gmail.com. Or subscribe to Stray Bulletin for irregular updates.

‘I could kiss, say,’ is a playable digital poem in which the player is able to alter the trajectory of a bounding comma by using the title text as a laterally adjustible paddle, or by clicking or tapping near to it. Directing the comma in this way permits the player to explore and interact with the rest of the poem, most of which is initially off-screen and beyond reach.

The comma denotes both a pause and a connection between the parts of a sentence, with the title forming the first part of the sentence and optional qualifiers scattered through the poem inside paranthesis. Each ‘kiss’ can therefore be read as completing a clause. The more phrases are ‘kissed’, the higher the comma may travel, making its way from the less salubrious options to those associated with altitude, depth, and the natural features of the Earth.

I made this as part of my research into poem-game hybrids, which was funded by the University of the West of England.

More projects

Poems

On Toys

Ludokinetic
Literature

Sandsnarl

Unravelanche

School
of Forgery

Dual Wield

The Hipflask
Series

Whispering
Leaves

Adversary

Headbooks

Scarecrows

Hybardrids

Tomboys

Birdbooks

Super Treasure
Arcade

Death Daydream
Season

Sidekick Books

Core Samples

Riotous

Superminis

The
Mechamorphoses

site by jon