Picture that part – that inlet or islet
that only you know, that no other bed-pilot
could dream of reaching, even
were he or she to circle
his or her murmuring plane until dawn,
that miniature crashpad inside a micro-zawn
obscured by a freckle
no darker than the encroaching tan-line,
entirely secreted except on certain nights
and only then when particular rites
are performed – the sweetest part, the most obscene –
his fingerprints are on it
and it likely stars in a sonnet.
Roulade is Wayne Holloway-Smith and Llew Watkins’ one-night-only live walk-through magazine, and for the second issue (theme: Hubris) they had me round up a team of poets to create giant concrete poems in the shape of kaiju from the Godzilla and Gamera franchises.
I’m going to say that again in bold caps. GIANT CONCRETE POEMS IN THE SHAPE OF KAIJU FROM THE GODZILLA AND GAMERA FRANCHISES. Abigail Parry took on GEZORA, the mutant alien cuttlefish from the film ‘Space Amoeba’. Kirsten Irving went extreme with three-headed golden dragon KING GHIDORAH. John McCullough opted for Gamera’s nemesis, the bat-creature GYAOS. And I tackled benevolent insect-god MOTHRA, star of her own film before she became a longstanding frenemy of Godzilla.
For those who don’t get the appeal … I’m not even gunna explain it.
Llew and Wayne printed the poems out on A0 sheets, and we arranged them in a corner of the venue, Husk in Limehouse, which we then adorned with a burning cityscape, replete with toy helicopters. John’s rendering of Gyaos swooped down the stairwell, while Gezora encroached from the bay and King Ghidorah let rip among the skyscrapers. The title of the installation was ‘Giant Strange’, which Abby rendered in tape letters on the opposite wall:
For a finishing touch, we shut off the main lights and spotlighted the poems, then added a soundtrack comprising a compilation of the various monsters’ roars (taken from the films they featured in) mixed in with the aural atmosphere of a city under siege. Helicopters! Fire engines! So much screaming! You can listen to the effect loop here.
At some point in the future I’d like to commission more of these and collect them together into some form of publication. But it would have to have humongous pages. For now, here’s a version of my Mothra piece as a downloadable pdf, with a preview image beneath!
One and a half poems of mine are published in Double Bill, a new anthology from Red Squirrel Press. It’s the sequel to 2012’s Split Screen, both books being edited by Andy Jackson and concerning themselves with popular culture, predominantly TV, film and music.Whereas I was familiar with much of the subject matter of Split Screen, however (a lot of the shows it covered were repeated on BBC2 in the mid-nineties), Double Bill reaches back toward an era I don’t remember, and consequently, many of the poems are delightfully strange, particularly when they presume knowledge or a frame of reference I don’t share. I prefer this experience to the one of reading a poem that nudges you conspiratorially – “You remember this, eh? You and me? When that happened?” I like to see poems acting as vessels for preserving pop culture artifacts – or rather, something of the experience of living alongside them. It is a good use for poems!
My contribution to the book consists firstly of ‘Biography’, a page-length account of the life of football manager Brian Clough composed solely of website extracts I got from googling ‘Cloughie’. Clough was before my time, so I had a word with my granddad, an ardent Derby supporter, to try to get a sense of the man from someone who’d been there during his brief reign. His verdict was … succinct. So the lines are succinct. As a character and a mythic figure, Clough seems to characterised by bluntness.
The second poem to bear my name is ‘Renga! A Dialogue Between Worlds?’, a renga exchange between myself and Kirsten Irving. The subject we were given was ‘manga’. I asked Andy Jackson whether he meant manga the medium, as in Japanese comics, or Manga Entertainment, the UK licensor and distributor of a multitude of Japanese animes. He said, “Take your pick!”, and we plumped for the latter, since it seemed to make more sense when weighed against Pixar, the subject we were paired with.
Every short stanza of ‘Renga! A Dialogue Between Worlds?’ takes place in a different anime property, with characters hotheadedly shouting across to one another. You could buy the book and try to work out which stanza corresponds to which anime, or you could cheat and check out the tags I’ve used in this very post.
Got some major catching up to do here. It’s a good job I don’t have any competitors in the ‘news on Jon Stone’s recent publications’ stakes.
A short poem of mine, ‘Endings to Adventure Gamebooks 17’, appears in The Best British Poetry 2014, edited by Mark Ford and published by Salt. My name also appears on the cover, since I was parachuted in to handle a large part of the admin and some of the formatting of the book. At the time, I was living with BBP series editor – and my own former editor at Salt – Roddy Lumsden, who had been unwell for much of the year, and I sat in our shared front room frowning over the tabulation of long, intricate, structurally audacious poems by Dom Bury and Sarah Howe.
There are two exciting aspects to the selection of ‘Endings …’ – for me, anyway. Firstly, it’s based on a famous scene in Final Fantasy VII, and is the first time a game-poem of mine has found its way into a mainstream poetry book that seeks to represent the full breadth of the medium. In other words, game-poetry has arrived. (Maybe).
Secondly, it’s from a sequence I’ve been working on for years and years, which I’m convinced is hot stuff, but which I’ve struggled to find a home for. True enough, this particular poem was previously published on The New Statesman website, but it’s almost like it slipped in unnoticed amongst a raft of other game-poems when we were generating pre-publicity for Coin Opera 2.
The sequence owes much to the same Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks Nathan Penlington has drawn from for his Choose Your Own Documentary tour. These print-based interactive fictions were written in the second-person and would usually contain one ‘happy’ ending amidst an array of grisly deaths for reader-players who made the wrong choices. Turning to a numbered section, you would find a brief description of your demise, followed by the words ‘GAME OVER’.
Poems in the ‘Endings to Adventure Gamebooks’ sequence are constructed like these numbered sections, but describe the deaths of various fictional and historical figures, including Tintin, Rudolph Hess and the U-boat captain in Das Boot. They make use of a migrating end-rhyme that shifts gradually throughout the poem, always ending in the ‘OVER’ of ‘GAME OVER’. Here’s another example from the sequence, this one on the last days of Chamfort:
53.
The bullet is insincere, the blade contrary, swayed by an esteem-drunk jury (for such a weakness there exists no cure). “Pas aujourd’hui!” they seem to chirp. Your signature in blood, at least, is sharp. But dying too, you find now, is farce.
So you write, lighter by about half a face, never more alive, never less. Only when a few plays and you are all that’s left do you depart, as if spending the last of your gift giving life’s unctuous court the slip. Foolishness and wit alike submit to sleep. La mort – un dernier fou à suivre. Game Over.
I haven’t run the French past any native speakers yet, so it’s probably spectacularly wrong. Or mundanely wrong. Take your pick.
So these little things have been our hot cakes over the past week. Each is a small, slender book containing a mere handful of poems, all concerning their cover star. Some of the poems are classics, some new.
I wanted to talk just briefly about being a cover designer. I’m not a cover designer. Not really. But I do design book covers sometimes. So maybe I am! I don’t know. I designed these! I got down the concept after trying a few experiments, and then I made them up in Flash – Flash, because I still don’t know my way around Illustrator, whereas I’ve been using Flash since the 90s.
Designing covers is frequently maddening in the same way writing poetry is. I might find something that works well, that looks just so, only for the effect to diminish rapidly through repeated usage, or simply by staring at it hard enough. No one is paying me and saying, “Good job!” or “What were you thinking??” so the final judge is me, and that’s too much responsibility! Is it finished yet? Is this a good idea? Is this plagiarism? I, I, I, I, I don’t know!
Then you look at, say, the way Faber do their covers, and you think, “For goodness’ sake, it’s just colours and a font!” And you look back at your own latest creation and lo, it seems as a garish, over-festooned clown car that will wound people in the eyes. Almost every single cover I’ve seen to print I would like to take back and tinker with some more, and I console myself by thinking of future projects, saying this time, this time, I’ll do it right.
Still, that blackbird might be one of the best things I’ve done ever.
Hey! As well as reading at GameCity in Nottingham, I’ve co-run two live poetry events over the past month, both in locations as yet untested (so far as I’m aware) by London’s writers and spoken word artists. I also rustled up (and I do mean rustled up – timing was very tight) the above flyers for each of them.
Metamorphic Rock, the programme for which I organised with Abigail Parry, took place at The Huntingdon Gallery in Shoreditch during an exhibition of rock n’ roll photography by Bob Gruen. The conceit for the poets and poems we commissioned was re-imagining New York’s Chelsea Hotel in its heyday, taking a rock icon or related subject and refashioning them according to the poet’s stylistic predilections. Along with the exhibition, one corner of the large, boomy space afforded to us had been furnished with a bed and decorated to look like a teenage pop fan’s bedroom. We had work new and old from John Canfield, Harry Man, Holly Hopkins, Sophia Blackwell, Roddy Lumsden, James Trevelyan, Mark Waldron, John Clegg, Alex Bell, Alex MacDonald and Matthew Caley.
Seven Player Co-op took place at the recently-opened Four Quarters Bar in Peckham, which is rammed with working arcade machines and consoles. Kirsten Irving, my co-organiser, discovered it and liaised with the owners about putting on the event, which featured readings from contributors to Coin Opera 2, and a quiz with prizes. Our seven players were the hosts, plus Gabrielle Nolan, Emily Hasler, Samuel Prince, Harry Man and Cliff Hammett, with a surprise guest appearance from S.J. Fowler.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been so closely involved with putting on readings like these in London, largely because they’re such a demanding pursuit, and over so quickly. It’s hard to find venues that aren’t upstairs rooms in pubs, and hard to build an audience for a one-off literary show, particularly with no budget and no partnership with any of the more heavyweight arts organisations and their networks. But it can be done. And what’s not hard is finding willing, skilled, enthusiastic performers who’re a joy to watch.
Here’s a snippet from S.J. Fowler’s ‘Golden Axe’ poem, dramatically underlit:
I posted a retrospective on my previous appearance in B O D Y back in April. April! Really? That’s half a year ago!
Those poems were translations. But this time the editors have published an entirely original (as far as anything I write is entirely original) poem of my own, entitled The One and the Other. This was originally written as a commission for a project that may be indefinitely delayed. The poet behind the commission, Anthony Adler, wanted us to use for the titles of our poems previous winners of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Hence the poem was originally called ‘Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts’. This is now the epigraph.
Yes, it’s a real book.
I’ve submitted this poem to a few other magazines in the past and not been particularly surprised when they didn’t take it. I mean, I find it slightly disturbing myself. I’m also aware that the male poet deploying breasts – or rather, the word ‘breasts’ – imagistically is getting tiresome. I even had a poem in School of Forgery about the sort of faux restraint in doing it. Murmur ‘breasts’ and your poem has that much-desired ‘erotic charge’ because no one can see you licking your lips salaciously.
I think I’m more in favour of being filthy, or – as with this poem – at least exploring the idea of breasts with a forthright obsessiveness. The One and the Other, although it purports to know a great deal about its subject matter, is really a male voice imposing its ideals, an insidious vizir pouring poison into the ear of the female addressee. I think that’s why it makes me uncomfortable.
To add another layer of complexity, in the meta-fiction of my next collection, this is a poem written by a female persona. So it’s me doing the voice of a woman doing the voice of a man affecting knowledge of a woman’s relationship to her body. Whatever next?
