NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s begin with: Part […]

A couple of years ago, I hurriedly wrote three ‘micro roleplaying poems’ to hand out as part of a pamphlet at an conference. Each one was based on a 2022 game I loved: Stray, Sable and Citizen Sleeper. I decided recently to part-digitise them, rewriting some elements, and upload them for people to read/play. You […]

Jon’s Adventures in Space was the title of my earliest attempt at a novel, or rather a full-length book — I’m not sure I was aware of the concept of novels as distinct from storybooks at the time. I would have been in primary school, Year 3, so around 7 or 8. Every page was […]

A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at […]

Note: this post is a duplication from my substack, Stray Bulletin. In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]