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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.

C.G. Catullus

(The entire surviving oeuvre of the classical Roman poet fed into a Markov chain text generator, the results then being translated into English. Selected extracts.)

Oh best of the thieves and you, my house, my nose,

I may have slipped my silliness.


Perfume of the gods

slackened my fate.

My good intentions were sweet,

drawing out the weft when gazing on the girl.


We wished for the list, the loss of the bridge,

the breast of the voices.


Alas, he says the bottom, to himself that here, now here, now,

brings some to my old age.


For as far as she closes the chamber,

the woman will kiss weapons.


honey;

or words,

written by slow jerk, sure as sunset.


When you restore the page, Lesbia,

at the beginning of your eyes,

there is just so much.

Commentary:

First published in Bad Kid Catullus, this poem was produced by feeding the Latin versions of Catullus’ poems into a simple predictive text programme, such that new lines of poetry could be generated based on the originals. These lines were then put through Google Translate and arranged as above.

See also ‘Card Game for Dirk’.



 

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

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