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This poem was first published in issue 19 of Gramarye, the Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. ‘Gramarye’ is an archaic word meaning mystical or magical learning, related to the word ‘grimoire’, which refers to a spellbook. Frogs in folklore seem to be strongly associated with magic, and the poem alludes to probably the most well-known example: the Frog Prince of the Brothers Grimm faerytale, who is turned into a human by a princess’s kiss or, in some versions, by sleeping in her bed. Suppose, though, that this prince was not under the spell of a malevolent witch or magician, but that of age and booze? Suppose that his transformation back into a prince was a matter of perception (his own and that of the princess) at the very moment she makes a move on him – a matter of reconnecting with the sexual potential of his own body?

More on the relationship between frogs and sex in a moment. Staying with magic, one of the other intertextual references in the poem is to a Japanese woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshitora, titled ‘Nikushi the Frog Spirit Conjures up a Magical Battle of Frogs at Tateyama in Etchū Province’. The purpose of this feat is to teach sorcery to two heroes; the poor frogs are only given life, self-will and (presumably) feelings of murderous rage for the purposes of demonstration. They are lowly, ridiculous creatures. This is also the reason for their inclusion in the Froschmäusekrieg, originally called the Batrachomyomachia (the battle of frogs and mice), an ancient Greek parody of epic war stories. The frogs lose rather badly to the mice, who have names like Slice-snatcher and Ham-nibbler – but really, the point of the story is that the feud is comically pitiful, the violence inconsequential. 

In Francis Ponge’s short poem ‘La Grenouille’, or ‘The Frog’, the combination of pitiable weakness and perverse beauty is much to the fore. His frog in the rain is called “an awkward Ophelia”. Her legs are “pretty”, her muscles long and elegant, and she is “gloved in waterproof skin”. “Her wild mouth” moves the poet to let her go, since she is also scrawny, easily grabbed, panting nervously. Why this strange eroticism?

My frog poem was written at about the same time as an academic paper called ‘Frog Leaps In: Haiku and the Struggle For and Against the Natural World in Japanese RPGs’. The title refers to the most famous of all haikus: Matsuo Bashō’s ‘old pond’, a brief snapshot of the moment a frog dives through the surface of the water. In the paper I quote Susumu Takiguchi, a Bashō scholar, who notes that in Asian culture a frog is a symbol of spring, of merriment, colour, noises, life and sex. A living, breathing fertility charm.

The abundance of visible frogspawn in ponds toward the end of winter likely has something to do with this, but could it also be connected to the frog’s very ugliness? Like frogs, human sex organs are considered to be comically grotesque – or just grotesque – in perhaps the majority of contexts in which they are displayed. Sex and birth are matters we continue to be squeamish about, in part because of their sliminess. In another poem, Phoebe Pettingell’s ‘Frog Prince’, the prince has always been a frog, because the mother recalls him as a baby, “croaking and splaying”, “come from my sloughy darkness”. The process of sex leading to birth is referred to as a “bleak transformation of passion / into such repulsive matter”, and the frog’s indifferent stare characterised as hostile, comparable to the frustrated bafflement of a newborn. The anguish of the poem, however, is that the frog has not become a man – the love of the mother somehow has not had this dignifying effect, but been sucked from her nevertheless. A frog is a man brought low, or one never raised up.

I think there’s something to be said for appreciating the frog as he or she is, though. I like that in Paul Muldoon’s poem ‘The Frog’, his eye is said to match “exactly the bubble / in my spirit-level”, lending the creature, albeit briefly, the poise of an architect. Muldoon alludes also to its sexual potency, reporting that the entire population of Ireland spawned from a single pair busying themselves over the course of one night. This, by the way, is a genuine historical account, as given by William Thompson in The Natural History of Ireland. 

But the idea of the frog as lusty hero has been taken up much more enthusiastically by video game developers, starting in 1981 with Konami’s Frogger, in which the player must guide a pack of plucky frogs over busy motorways and rivers, sometimes stopping to pick up another pink and blue frog along the way (as one does). Inevitably, the game also serves up many ignominious deaths: your frogs may be crushed under the wheels of a vehicle, or swallowed by an alligator or snake. Somewhat humiliatingly, they may even fall off a log and drown. 

In 1993, Team17 released Superfrog, a platform game starring the frog prince, now powered up by Lucozade and charged – in the manner of so many other protagonists of video games in the early 90s – with rescuing his princess. At the conclusion of the quest, Superfrog is rewarded with a kiss, as well as a faceful of cartoon breasts, only for the princess to turn into a frog as well.

The most memorable frog in video gaming, however, is surely the aptly named ‘Frog’, who joins the player’s party of heroes part way through Square’s 1996 role-playing game Chrono Trigger. “I am no pet. I am an accomplished swordsman, green as I appear,” he declares – and he is indeed the size of a full-grown human, dressed in armour and a cloak, albeit with an aptitude for water-based magic. What is perhaps most unfroggish about Frog – what makes him a memorably tragic character – is his impeccable chivalry, his gentlemanly mannerisms. There is some sense (even if the game never so much as alludes to it) that he must work to overcome his lewd and bestial nature. He is heroic in the same way Francis Ponge’s frog is beautiful – that is, in defiance of the shamefulness that is attached to being muculent, fragile and full of desire.

The Playing Poetry exhibition is on display at the National Poetry Library from now until 15th January, and includes one of my digital ludokinetic poems, Erratum (a work in progress), as well as Adversary, a prototype poetry card game I made with Abigail Parry, pictured above. There was a neat write-up in the Financial Times this week. I’m very excited that this area of literary crossover is starting to flourish, after tentatively making the prediction that it would in Dual Wield. The challenge from hereon in is going to be keeping pace with it!

“[Contemporary] fiction is about society,” says Clare Pollard, in a short essay asking how writers can respond to the present moment. I wouldn’t have thought this statement at all controversial, but somehow it prompted a fierce rebuttal from A. Natasha Joukovsky on ‘literary moralism’ and “the Rampant Conflation of Fiction and History”, full of much more dubious statements. Social reform is distracting novelists, Joukovsky says, from their aesthetic responsibility to beauty. Fiction and history are ‘discrete’ – never the twain shall meet. The success of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has nothing to do with its politics, but is due to it being “stylishly written”. While Pollard’s essay is addressed to people for whom writing and reading are ways of negotiating the world, Joukovsky’s is squarely aimed at those who consider themselves capital ‘w’ Writers – members of a sacred order – and so rounds off with a list of commandments, in the form of a hodgepodge of aphorisms that have little to do with the preceding argument.

At first I found all of this merely haughty, its passion misplaced. Once I started to look at the parts that were being quoted admiringly on social media, however, I began to recognise the animating concern behind the essay’s proclamations. It all clicked into place during an exchange online with one particular supporter, who insisted that ‘talent’ and ‘politics’ were two separate qualities, that one can admire a work of art purely for the ability it displays without having any sympathy whatsoever for its creator’s outlook. I said – and I tried putting this in various ways – that any work of art which seeks to represent or engage with some aspect of reality has a political dimension to it, and admirers of that work of art almost certainly find something useful about that political dimension. In response, my interlocutor served up a series of familiar ‘culture wars’ talking points: so anyone who admires Céline is a Nazi, then? Are Chaucer and Shakespeare persona non grata because of their outdated views? And the coup de grace: this is all just one step away from Stalin and Pol Pot! 

I’ve been through all this before. It’s the same conversation I’ve had with certain members of the Transformers fandom when they decry modern Transformers comics for ‘forcing politics down our throats’ and look back misty-eyed on the 1980s Sunbow cartoon, with its good vs. evil storylines. There are people who currently earn their living making Youtube videos every week which repeat this argument with respect to each new fantasy film or TV series that comes out. Until recently, they say, art and pop culture were reliably apolitical, at least on the surface. Their qualities were ones which could be admired and enjoyed irrespective of the state of the intrasocietal conflict. But now everything is tainted by a modern fanaticism with meaning well, or rather, with being seen to mean well. As my interlocutor put it, citing Martin Amis and Milan Kundera, we live in an age where the talentless “take revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic”.

This is not an argument which withstands much unpicking. Suffice it to say works of art and literature have been occasioned by moralistic, empathetic and societal concerns for as far back as we can collectively remember, and while the presence of blatant finger-wagging in a work is often a weakness, it can also be a major part of its enduring appeal (try to imagine Father Brown without Chesterton’s Christian humanism, Dickens without his parade of grotesques, or Swift having any reputation at all). I’m more interested, however, in the psychology behind the argument, so often delivered in a tone of impotent fury by people who seem well aware they’ve already lost the battle.

I suggest one cause is the need to reconcile a belief in one’s innate goodness with an inability to act or speak decisively on urgent moral questions. Exposure and addiction to social media has the marked effect of stripping away comforting illusions. It’s much harder to believe you belong to a clear moral majority when most of the people you interact with tell you you’re in the wrong, harder to believe you’re a great thinker and agitator when dozens of strangers are able to make fun of you at the drop of a hat. Likewise, the number of places we can retreat to in order to bathe in our own innocence, to put out of mind our evident complicity in an unjust global society, has greatly diminished. That all art has a political dimension – and, not uncommonly, a complex and troubling one – is something we were able to ignore as long as nobody talked about it. But now that kind of talk is everywhere. And what, indeed, does it say about us if we continue to look for solace in the work of artists who had reprehensible attitudes, or committed unforgivable acts?

There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but wouldn’t it be such a relief if it were “Absolutely nothing”? Hence the zeal for separating art from social responsibility, for making it a safe space. It mirrors exactly the desire of members of fandoms to preserve the version of a media property that existed in their childhood. Fantasy has started to realign with metaphor; it no longer means an escape from the real world. As a genre, of course, it was never free of real-world politics, but as children we were able to pretend otherwise, just as any number of artists and arts aficionados have been able to hide behind a belief that art (or beauty) makes its own damned rules.

One fantasy still pointedly persists, however, and serves as a call to action. It is the idea that those who are in favour of re-examining the political implications of a work are traitors, weaklings and monstrosities. On the one hand, we are smug and self-satisfied, breaking into the palace and trashing our own cultural heritage. On the other, we are totally joyless, unable to experience art and media as anything other than statements of agreement or disagreement. I’d like to think the panic and pain of reactionaries would be eased if they knew that in general others suffer from the same needs, fascinations and anxieties as them, but have chosen to navigate these in a different, less embittering way.

It may not help at all though. That different, less embittering method of navigation is based on an acceptance (difficult as it is to maintain) that everything is in flux, that even that which is figuratively and literally set in stone can be torn down and replaced. If you see someone raging about ‘postmodernism’, this is what they mean. If everything can be replaced, then it means we are involved in a continuous negotiation to maintain that which we value, and on that score (so their thinking goes) the plebs cannot be trusted.

So the real anxiety that grips these reactionaries, I would suggest, is the scale of their own responsibility; to have to decide for ourselves what kind of culture is really worth having and then to make the case for it convincingly is a serious undertaking. Are you able to explain why Shakespeare is a great writer, or were you just relying on the logic that stature proves greatness, accompanied by some blather about artfulness? If so, Shakespeare being dropped from the school syllabus deals you a blow – an absurdly minor one, but one you feel nevertheless. Live by hierarchy; die by hierarchy. Those who do not really know or think about why they value the things they value – or who are perhaps aware that their only reason for doing so is blind adherence to ‘the way of things’ – have every reason to be deeply afraid of the current appetite for cultural renovation. Their cited ideals of ‘talent’, ‘stylishness’ and ‘aesthetic beauty’ are, it turns out, eye-of-the-beholder stuff whose only foundation is settled consensus. When that consensus appears to come under threat, the last recourse they have is to eulogise or don sandwich boards.

Or, I suppose, present as an unsung cultural elite. Just before dispensing her nuggets of writing advice, Joukovsky implores us to join her on her ‘high horse’, promising “The view is superb”. But the previous paragraph sees her complaining about having to read “a litany of mediocre novels by palpably anxious authors that read like they’re trying to win oppressed-identity bingo”. That doesn’t sound very appealing as a view. That sounds exactly like something Scrooge would say.

Lyonesse (Bloodaxe, 2021) presents a problem. On the one hand, it’s tricky to talk about because I don’t feel able to map out the book’s depths. Parts of it remain sunken and mysterious to me – I can claim no commanding vantage point, despite having browsed it on-off for a couple of months and read some of the poems upwards of a dozen times.

On the other hand, it’s tricky to talk about because it describes itself, its themes and its subject matter clearly enough without any need for me to add gloss. In the preface and on the cover and in the poems themselves we are introduced to Lyonesse as “a submerged land”, “a city under the sea”, “an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change”,  “a fluid magical world”, “a feasting-cup city”, “just what you want it to be / streets paved / with the sea”. And in a sense, this is all we need to know; the poems expand on and exemplify these core traits, even foreseeing my present dilemma by referring to Lyonesse as “a place of paradox”.

The poems are also characterised as a series of ‘soundings’ that test the weight and the character of the Lyonesse concept through propositions, and by answering their own questions. How are bells made in an underwater city? They are cast out of lobster carcasses. What would a church service there comprise? Well, the ‘Crayfish Christ’ would have this to say:

Beloveds
you must live for pleasure alone!
This is my gospel
Am I not half-brother to the moon?
Are not the deeds of my claw everlasting joy and delight?

Church of Crayfish Christ

Thus Lyonesse accumulates history and character. A close reading seems redundant; the book is a Lonely Planet guide. It fills you in on all the details, and repeats its own title so often that ‘Lyonesse’ becomes a spell in itself, a magic word, the repeated hissing and breaking of waves.

I found as well that the poems flow into one another – that it’s hard to recollect, when I don’t have the book in front of me, which images came from which poem. Their forms are varied, making use of different margin alignments, stanza shapes, spacing, titling conventions, and so on, in the manner of different wind-driven slices of the sea colliding and dispersing (or pieces of shipwreck washed up on the shore). The collection avoids feeling like it’s settling into a routine or iterating a pattern.

There are several poems where the lions of Lyonesse make an appearance (sometimes they are princes) – and there are owls of Lyonesse too, and gownshops and quaysides, and echoes of other myths drawn in and chewed in the surf: an interview with Neptune, plus mermaids and sirens, the devil, Davy Jones. Sometimes the narrator is a resident (a survivor, or a fortune-teller), other times someone hearing and passing on the story. 

Many of the poems allude to Lyonesse’s fate, and it’s in this respect that the book is most beguiling, since there’s no actual timeline to be grasped; the city is now and was always both sinking and sunken, destroyed and renewed. It is sea-ravaged, sea-remade, of the sea and entwined with the sea, there and not there. There’s a central  ‘Account of the Submergence’, which is composed in full paragraphs and more than two pages long. This poem feels like the anchor, the true tale at the heart of all those others swimming about it, but even here the story remains evasive, partial and teasing (‘Now that we have wiped Lyonesse from the Departures Board (the starry way to Lyonesse no longer valid) let us record what we know so far’).

I think of this line from Auden: “In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.” What truth is being told here, about human frailty or climate change? Perhaps that we have made these such a central part of our collective identity that we can no longer imagine what it would be like to not be in the midst of a vast, drawn-out episode of avoidable calamity. We don’t regard the end of civilisation as a series of events so much as a state of being that has been with us throughout our time as a dominant, sentient and self-directing species.

The preface is an interesting and unusual inclusion – I know others tend to find explanatory essays needless at best, an imposition at worst. In this case, I think the only issue is that it ought to be at the end of the book, not at the beginning, since it provides such a ready key to the poems that it risks turning them into a mere demonstration of a thesis. I preferred, for the most part, to put out of my mind the climate parable aspect, and become lost in Lyonesse as a tourist with an outdated, part-perished map becomes lost in a ghost town. 

The preface also makes clear the role of grief in the poems, and I should mention here the second and final section of the book, ‘New Lamps for Old’, which moves away from Lyonesse (though not entirely) and into a house deeply haunted by the author’s memories. The poems here are more straightforwardly personal and direct, a little more terse and spare and grounded. The effect is like reaching the end of an animated film and then being shown a reel of the animator getting up from their desk. I like this – it avoids the usual disappointment I feel when a book’s major sequence is too short to stand on its own and seemingly needs to be bolstered by a lot of scattered miscellaneous pieces. ‘New Lamps for Old’ seems set both inside and outside Lyonesse, as if we could zoom out one stage further and find we had been lingering in a snowglobe in one of the city’s gift shops.

This is really a testament to how fiercely (but delicately) the book evokes a sense of place. To open it again after a time away is to return through a portal to somewhere that can never be comprehensively charted, a shattered Narnia that is at once very, very far away and right on the cusp of our own world.

Added a new version of this old (2010) poem to the website’s gashopon machine/lucky dip today:

I have two new poems in Bristol-based journal Raceme no.13, both titled ‘Another Labyrinth’. Below is a poster I’ve made for one of them. If you find it a little difficult to understand at first, that’s likely because it’s actually a puzzle-poem based on the well-known ’15 puzzle’ — a set of sliding numbered blocks which can be rearranged into the correct sequence. The solution is presented in Raceme itself (upside down at the bottom of the page), but I won’t be putting it online. Can you work it out?

Order/subscribe to Raceme here: https://www.racemepoetry.com/

I’ll be posting something about one of the other poems published in the issue imminently.

I’m reading alongside Astrid Alben, Rose Gibbs, Sophie Herxheimer and Lucy Mercer at Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston this Thursday. Tickets are £5 and can be ordered from here.

I’ll be reading a few poems from Sandsnarl, but also from a new work-in-progress which happens to be set in the same universe, in a hotel full of half-human half-insect guests.