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“Voraciously experimental, precociously accomplished.” Poetry International

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

Jon is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher who specialises in amalgams: hybrids, mixtures, collections and crossovers, of poem and game, fantasy and realism, curation and composition. He writes micro-texts that often take the form of character portraits, nature lyrics or puzzles, and combines them with the work of other writers and artists in genre-blurring anthology books.

Poetry London have called him a “poet of fantastic inversions”, but such inversions are just one way of rethinking the poem as an object of readerly play and investigation. His work has been published in The Sunday Times and performed on BBC Radio 4, as well as appearing in a number of British and international journals. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016.

He has also published academic papers in the field of game studies. A monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames, was published in 2022.

For a fuller account of his approach to writing, with examples, check out the short essay 'On Toys'.

Get in touch: jonskeletone [at] gmail.com. Or subscribe to Stray Bulletin for irregular updates.

Card Game for Dirk

(Output of a language-learning model trained on everything I've written.)

If I tap this card, he

will surely know that I am skimming


and look back on everything we did

as a great terrible,


a poor flintlock,


who tucked his leafy bouquet of pearls

in the way of the rain,


who threaded his finger-hand in every snow’s path

he goeth,

and laugh comically,

in the hall marked with cards that talk

Play

Commentary:

This was produced using Max Woolf's GPT-2-Simple, a Colaboratory notebook that allows you to train an early model of ChatGPT on any sample of writing. I put together a text file of everything in my Drive, including a number of unpublished manuscripts, and let it chew on that. The result was, as you would expect, disjointed and occasionally nothing more than a crude collage of several random poems, but this chunk, complete with title, struck me as worthy of archiving.

See also ‘CG Catullus’.



 

The poems accessible on this site are dispensed randomly from a digital capsule toy vendor, or gashapon machine. You could think of it as a broken jukebox that plays whatever track it likes. Or a lucky dip. Click in this box to pick another one.

More projects

Poems

On Toys

Ludokinetic
Literature

Sandsnarl

Unravelanche

School
of Forgery

Dual Wield

The Hipflask
Series

Whispering
Leaves

Adversary

Headbooks

Scarecrows

Hybardrids

Tomboys

Birdbooks

Super Treasure
Arcade

Death Daydream
Season

Sidekick Books

Core Samples

Riotous

Superminis

The
Mechamorphoses

site by jon