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“A poet of fantastic inversions.” Poetry London

“Multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.” Magma

“Voraciously experimental, precociously accomplished.” Poetry International

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On the poem itself: I wrote it for the as-yet-unpublished third volume of Sidekick’s Birdbook series.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

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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

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A poem of mine, Tiberius and the Kid, is included in the latest anthology from The Emma Press, which was published on 29th May, just in time for Fathers’ Day in the UK.

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

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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.

Revision Diary #1: ‘Seasonal Cartoon’

‘Seasonal Cartoon’ is a draft poem I wrote, I think, about two years ago, originally with linebreaks. These were removed in order to make it a narrow, column-like paragraph, a shape it now seems to have lost through being copied between various documents. The title has also been revised a few times. Here’s the version that’s sat untouched in a Googledoc for months:

Scrooge is at the strip club, clutching the brim of his top hat, each bent finger the leg of an albino crab. He is half-buried in his scarf and winter coat, both of which are blotched here and there with candle wax, snow and ink. The stage is a bleak, flat nest, feathered with lightly crumpled notes and, where Scrooge sits, a single dull farthing. Most of the other patrons are bankers with girlfriends. The song is ‘Money For Nothing’. The dancer’s name is Tuti. She was born in Singapore. She has just whipped off her bikini top and to Scrooge’s horror, in place of her knockers are two matching apparitions of Jacob Marley’s face.

Now, obviously the whole poem turns on one very creaky, obnoxiously signposted pun. In my defence, this was intentional; the piece is intended for a sequence of poems pretending to be something other than poems, in this case a tacky cartoon on the front of a Christmas card. Hence also the ho-hum title. I don’t want these imitations to be remotely tricky to guess, and in the context of the sequence, the pun could be forgiven.

However, nothing really excuses:

(a) The Dire Straits reference. The thematic link is obvious, but it’s not doing anything else.

(b) The weak attempt to humanise the stripper. I suppose I must have been conscious of how the strip club is often deployed as the setting, with the strippers as furniture. But Tuti? From Singapore? It’s nothing more than a facile gesture.

© The time it takes for a poem with a very simple, blunt punchline to blunder apologetically through lots of so-so description. If we’re really seeking to imitate a Christmas card here, the effect of the joke should be as close to immediate as possible. Obviously I wanted to get another, smaller gag in there – the idea of the dedicated miser tossing the stripper a mere farthing. I also like the description of his fingers, which is at least wintry. But ideally, this poem should aim to be as short and spare and bleak as possible.

It also needs a new title. The rules of the sequence forbid me from straying beyond the bounds of a precise description of the thing being imitated, but hopefully I can do better.

Here’s what I’ve come up for the revised version:

Season’s Greetings

Scrooge in the strip club,
his pale, crab-leg fingers
clutching his top hat brim.
On the stage before him,
a single dull farthing

and the stripper, stripping,
with Marley’s face gurning
from both bouncing tits.

I expected this to take me a stupidly long time, but I managed it in about 10 minutes. Must be because it’s 4.15 am in the morning and there’s a thunderstorm outside. Anyway, the revised version is much improved. The title now, as well as being a little snappier, performs the double function of making plain the imitation while also commenting ironically on the situation described. The poem itself retains the narrow, card-like shape I aimed for by turning it into a prose-poem, but uses functional line breaks that facilitate easy reading.

Why did we ever need all that stuff about hats and scarves and bankers? Everyone knows what Scrooge is supposed to look like. Everyone knows what kind of people are supposed to go to strip clubs. Ditching the reference to ‘Scrooge’s horror’ was an easy choice as well. The image of his white knuckles ‘clutching’ intimates that he’s spooked. ‘Two matching apparitions’ – also redundant. We know what Marley is, and we can know that breasts come in pairs.

Removing the word ‘knockers’ also leaves readers just a very small amount of work to do, and that might be the single most decisive change here, the thing that changes this piece from a prosaic description with a joke at the end to what is, to my mind, a decent, dark poem. Why ‘tits’? Because ‘breasts’ seems coy and over-mannered.

And no characterisation for the stripper? No, sorry. The central conceit of the poem hangs itself on the squalor of rich men ogling nameless girls and there’s no sense in trying to take the edge off it. This would not do at all as an excuse for routine shallow depictions of women, but I think it’s permissible in the case of one as brief as this.

The Mimic Octopus

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The Mimic Octopus is a new anthology of the imitative and derivative from 13 Pages, edited by Richard Osmond and Will Harris, with illustrations by Aisha Farr.

It includes a poem by Anthony Adler which mimics the form and content of my ‘Near Extremes’ poems from School of Forgery, as well as a contribution of my own, ‘The Submission of Alan’. While most of the imitations and pastiches in the anthology are respectful, affectionate, even admiring, ‘The Submission of Alan’ is from a sequence of poems I’m writing which use the imitative mode as a form of criticism (or ‘imitation as impertinence’, as I put it when reading at the launch last night). The target of the criticism is the predilection establishment-sanctioned male poets have for writing sleazy poems about women, particularly when these are dressed up as some else, like, say, revelations about the nature of beauty.

This particular poem is a travesty or burlesque of a section of ‘Missing’ by Alan Jenkins, in which he pictures a former lover planning to betray him while she bathes. It’s from Harm, which won the 1994 Forward Poetry Prize, and which I picked up cheaply in Scarthins, Cromford. Jenkins came to my attention because he was one of the more prominent figures on the board of the Poetry Society a couple of years ago, when they managed to oust (and later, under pressure, reinstate) their director and expend worrying amounts of public money hiring a well-known law firm to spin the story in the press so that it became about two warring women who had to be separated, rather than reconfiguring the Poetry Society to serve some alternative purpose.

Retrospective: Medieval Welsh Translations on BODY

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I’d like to write something every now and then about poems I’ve had published in the past, since at the time I hardly said anything, and because most of the online and offline publications that have posted or printed something of mine are well worth further exploration. BODY, for instance, is a seriously international publication that’s free to read and puts up performance texts and videos alongside work from poets across the world. It’s got a slick website too.

The pieces they published are only a half or a third mine, since they’re translations – in this case, of work by medieval Welsh poets Dafydd Ap Gwilym and Gwerful Mechain (the links here are to the poems). I’m (still) frustratedly monolingual, despite efforts in recent years to upgrade, so my approach to ‘translating’ poetry is this: I run the originals through Google Translate, in whole and in part, and marvel for a while over the weirdness produced. I read other translations, as many as I can obtain, and try to map parts of them to the raw automated translation. I read and reread the original texts, often aloud to myself, to try to get a measure of the rhythms and sounds employed. I read around the poem, if there’s any commentary on it, or interesting biographical information that surrounds it. Then I take my best shot, I suppose in much the same way someone might attempt a portrait from a series of colourful descriptions.

I don’t actually think dead-on accuracy matters that much. Translations of poetry are always necessarily defective as pure translations, so their purpose must be to create something new – albeit related. It’s more worthwhile to think of them as collaborations of a sort, or ‘reimaginings’, to borrow the cinematic term. It turns out, for instance, nearly everyone else has a preferred translator of Celan which differs from mine – I like the Ian Fairley versions to the point where I can hardly be bothered with the rest. It might be that’s because I like reading Fairley as much as (or more than) I like reading Celan.

As for these Medieval Welsh poets – well, I happened on them because I’ve been on the look-out for obscene poetry from the past and from other cultures for some time. They’re hardly obscure poets, and the poems I’ve chosen are among their most famous, but the existing translations I found are all somewhat grim and ponderous in the face of what seems (to me) to be their obvious exuberance and comic energy, so my versions attempt to bring that out, at the cost of metrical fidelity. And though the authors are separated by more than a century (Ap Gwilym was around in the 1500s, Mechain in the late 1600s), these pieces seem to go together as a pair.

I also wrote a short essay for BODY about a poem by Rimbaud in which he remarks on a barmaid’s ‘enormous tits’, which seems not entirely unrelated.

Pull Out All The Stops

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**Update** Link to the poem read out on Radio 3

I’m peripherally involved in the South Bank Centre’s Pull Out All The Stops organ festival/extravaganza. I’ve written one poem which is currently on display in the Clore Ballroom as part of a free exhibition that runs until 13th April. It’s loaded into a typewriter! I’ll also be reading this poem on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow as part of In Tune, live from the Southbank Centre itself. The show starts at 4.30, and I’ll be on sometime around 5.30.

The piece is called ’Warning Notice in the Key of Bm’, although I was thinking more of the chord of Bm when I wrote it – lots of ‘b’, ’d’ and ‘F/sh’ sounds. In fact, each stanza starts with the syllable ‘be’, just to hammer the point home. It’s written in fairly strict terza rima, but with the same two slant rhymes looped round and round. The subject matter is, loosely, Ralph Downes and his approach to designing the Royal Festival Hall organ; or the genius as monster. Downes was an individual with his own radical ideas about organ-building, which were inevitably met by fierce opposition from traditionalists. If that all sounds very quaint and parochial, it at least makes for a neat metaphor for the inevitable conflict between new ideas and old habits – “Beware the man with music in his head …”

I’ll also be performing at Pipes V Mics, a free event at the RFH this Sunday, alongside organists and beatboxers. I’ve been writing a collaborative piece with Abigail Parry called ‘Obliteration Fugue’. It really is a fugue! We’ve written it in four overlapping registers, from the refined soprano to the bass/base, and it’s essentially a creative deconstruction/destruction of the monstrous organ itself, which will be lurking in the background while we’re on stage.