Bird Superminis
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.
from ‘Death Daydream Season’, originally published in ’School of Forgery’ and now available as a set of seven greetings cards from Sidekick Books.
David Keel was John Steed’s original partner in the first series of The Avengers.
Two Recent Live Events
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:
B O D Y Literature
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?
Poetry London
Not exactly quick off the mark with this, are we, Jon?
I won first prize in the Poetry London competition this year, and they published my winning poem, ‘Nightjar’, in the Autumn issue. I also read it at the issue launch, which was held at ZSL London Zoo, near the emus.
On the poem itself: I wrote it for the as-yet-unpublished third volume of Sidekick’s Birdbook series. This was originally projected to be four books published over four years, containing between them a new poem and a new illustration for every British species of bird. My co-editor, Kirsty, and I each permit ourselves a single poem per book. I wrote ‘I’m Naming the Swifts’ for Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens and Woodland and ‘Sandy Swallows’ (about sand martins) for Birdbook 2: Freshwater Habitats.
‘Nightjar’ is an exercise in camourflage – I try to work the title into the poem in as many ways as possible without actually outright using it. But it’s really about something being there and not there at the same time, particularly in the context of the mind, of circling a thought or idea that you can’t name or understand. The epigraph is just an explanation of some German slang, “You have a bird”, which means “You’re mad”. If generally having a bird implies madness, what would having a particular species of bird mean? Having a particular species of madness, I suppose. And in the spirit of the thought-fox, I imagined that a thought-nightjar might be something forever moving, sounding, flickering between trees, never letting you quite glimpse it.
Cartridge Lit
I have two new poems up at Cartridge Lit today. As far as I’m aware, this is the only literary journal that specialises in game poems and other game-related writing, and the fact that it’s updated frequently with work of quality suggests that the genre is starting to take off, in the US at least. They’re even publishing an e-chapbook in the coming month: Prepare to Die by Jess Jenkins.
The poems are paeans to two characters from the same game, and the game isn’t even out yet. Nuclear Throne, developed by Dutch duo Vlambeer, is available on Steam as an ‘early access’ prototype. This means you can play it while it’s a work in progress, with the developers adding a new update every week, partially responsive to player feedback.
Nuclear Throne is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where disfigured mutants – the remnants of humanity – gather to swap stories of the fabled throne, and occasionally set out to find it. It’s a roguelike (or, pedantically, a roguelikelike) game, which means that the levels are procedurally generated and different each time, and death always means starting over, not from a checkpoint or save file. It’s bloody difficult. I’ve only reached the throne twice, and neither time survived the encounter.
The poems celebrate my two favourite characters: a sad assemblage of bone and sliding flesh called Melting, and a very small, spidery, gun-chomping robot called Robot, who may once have been a person. As with a lot of the characters I write poems about, they are doomed and broken, but always up for one last scrap.
Drawn to Marvel
American poetry is a whole ‘nuvver thing and I barely know where to start with it. There are high profile exports like Timothy Donnelly and Michael Robbins, and then, beyond them, billions and billions more poets, some very interesting indeed. I paid through the nose for Cunt Norton by Dodie Bellamy, and it was worth it. I’m also going to be reviewing two pamphlets of computer game poems by separate US poets, published by separate US presses. But honestly, I’ve barely touched the dust on the surface.
Anyway, I have two pieces (‘Dearest Wolverine’ and ‘Chamber’) published in this absolutely massive anthology from Minor Arcana Press, edited by Bryan D. Dietrich and Marta Ferguson. They’re both poems that first appeared in my Silkworms e-pamphlet, Thra-koom!. Fellow Brit Harry Man also makes an appearance, with a cut-up entitled ‘J. Jonah Jameson’, and literary stars like Albert Goldbarth and John Ashbery are likewise present and correct.
Oh, it is a very generous collection indeed, with a Foreword, Editors’ Note and and Introduction, followed by nearly 300 pages of poems. With that, though, comes the observation that it might have benefited from tighter editing. Once you’ve read Michael Marton’s brazen and memorable ‘The Sex Life of the Fantastic Four’, there’s really no need for any other Fantastic Four poems. Similarly, all the very well known superheroes you can think of – Batman, Superman, Spiderman and, yes, Wolverine – are over-represented. You have to dig around for work that probes more deeply into the Marvel/DC universes.
Most of the pieces play, as you’d expect, with the tension between our ‘real’ world and the idealised world of comics, or juxtapose poetic tropes with those of superhero fiction. A few – the more successful ones, in my opinion – have clear ambitions to tamper with the mythology. I do wonder sometimes – chiefly for the benefit of my own work – about the purpose of poetry engaging with pop culture in this way. I think at least part of it is putting in a claim for public ownership of certain intellectual properties, taking them and making them malleable in an age of copyright lock-down. If corporate juggernauts want to sell us their stories and make us care about their creations, then they must submit to the human impulse to tear off, reshape and share.
The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood
Firstly, on the matter of the poem, it’s part of a new-ish book I’m putting together which has nothing to do with anything else I’m writing. All the poems are about a character called Kid Jupiter, a cartoon tyrant prince based on Caligula (via interpretations by John Hurt, Malcolm MacDowell, Albert Camus and Tim Turnbull – not the more generous and realistic Balsdon/Barrett characterisation). It’s children’s poetry, with an emphasis on word games and rhythm. Tiberius and the Kid concerns Kid Jupiter’s relationship with his adoptive father, who is also his predecessor as emperor. It includes phrases like ‘jumped-up jake’ and ‘terminally gruff’.
Secondly, on the matter of the publisher, The Emma Press is one of the most distinctive small presses to have emerged in recent years, unashamedly leaning towards an aesthetic of sweetness and light and focusing its energies on gift books. They want to publish “the kind of books you want to carry around in your pocket or handbag, to dip into on the train or while you’re waiting for the bus as well as have on your e-reader or phone like you would an mp3 of a favourite song”. Their launches usually involve bunting.
Among those who remember the Daisy Goodwin years, this may set faces to stone. Those plush pink books that framed poetry as micro-therapy or health snack may have sold well, but seemingly did so by declawing the medium, tying a ribbon round its neck and calling it ‘Mr Fluffy’, while Goodwin herself was the golemification of something generated by a BBC spreadsheet. But Emma Wright’s press is better than that. The charm is natural, rather than part of a design spec, and the aesthetic exists to serve the books themselves, as objets d’art, not as a method of prescription.
In fact, both The Emma Press Anthology of Mildly Erotic Poetry and A Poetic Primer For Love and Seduction: Naso was my Tutor are far more focused, thoughtful compilations than Penguin’s bloated The Poetry of Sex, and, unlike that book and those administered by Goodwin, do not rely on famous or long-canonised poets for stuffing. Fundamentally, Emma Press books and pamphlets feel young and genuinely interested in making friends, rather than a cynical exercise in persuasion.
The Rialto #80
A poem of mine, Mifune, is published in issue 80 of The Rialto, which is available to order from here. The first thing I’d like to say about this poem is that I have no plans for it to appear anywhere else, ever. It will certainly not appear in a second collection.
The second thing I’d like to say about it is that it’s about Toshiro Mifune, an actor best known for appearing in Kurasawa movies and for channeling animalistic rage and petulance. His characters were often moody, wildly unpredictable, frenetic and dangerous. I’ve imagined him as a malevolent spirit caged in film reel. I wrote the poem one afternoon in the Genesis cinema in Whitechapel because I was thinking of entering a competition and didn’t have anything else suitable.
The third thing I’d like to say about it is that I submitted this, along with a few other poems, to The Rialto upon being kindly invited to do so by Fiona Moore, who shared editing duties on this edition. These days I very rarely submit anything to any publication without being invited to do so. This isn’t because I’m confident of being asked; it’s because I have very little idea how to go about selecting work for submission to any magazine that lacks a particular remit. I enjoy putting together selections for smaller projects that have a narrow specification – like The Mimic Octopus – but well-known journals like The Rialto, The Poetry Review and Poetry London, which exist to publish ‘the best’ poetry, leave me in a state of some perplexity. What is it they want exactly? Their own editors regularly admit to not knowing, via the various interrogations they’re submitted to. Guidelines will sometimes suggest you read the journal first to get an idea of what they publish, but that leaves me none the wiser – some good poems, some poor ones, usually, with little uniformity of character. (Isn’t it inexplicable and endless variation that adds up to blandness, rather than arch-regularity, which is beautiful, if menacing?)
I don’t know for sure why I get hung up on this issue of specificity, but I think it has something to do with wanting to know what I’m applying to be part of. If I’m invited, well, at least that means someone has some idea, presumably, that they would like me to be part of this thing they are working on, and that’s good enough for me. But in the past, when I did send poems off more freely, I remember the strange anticlimax – the feeling of almost having cheapened myself – when some freak creation of mine would be accepted and made to sit among so many others without any particular relationship to them, like a poor shy kid thrown into a new school. People sometimes talk of ‘finding a home’ for their poems. I don’t think being published somewhere is the same thing.
But this poem, Mifune, didn’t fit in with any of my other poems anyway, so it’s nice that he gets to hang out somewhere.