It’s Raymond Queneau versus the Skeletons! Three of my ‘Squelettes’ sequence are up at 3:AM Magazine. Any gamers out there will recognise Domino Hurley, Spinal and Undead Hero as the subjects of these short poems.

Background: my PhD explores the overall interplay between poetry and games. At the most basic level, I’m interested in the intermedial conversation – games that are aware of poems and poems that are aware of games, and talk to one another. In terms of my practical work, I’m contributing to this basic level of interaction by writing some short sequences that look in both directions: at other poets and poems, and at games and game culture.

These poems use the ‘quennet’ form that Raymond Queneau invented shortly before he died. It’s a very skeletal kind of poem – all pairs of words strung together, with sonic and semantic echoes as the ligaments. I mean, they basically look like the ribs, spine and hips. Queneau used the form to map out the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching; I’m using it for an exploration of the roles played by skeletons in a variety of computer games.