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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.

Mifune!

‘I saw a raging man.’
—Akira Kurosawa

We all feel the tug of oblivion:

black dot at the edge of the eye.

Few, though, circle it of their own volition.


One such is he, who is chain reaction

and hot (as in scorch-your-fingers) ghosty-boy

trapped in the fizzing television.


In pinstripe, in lacquer, stock-still or in motion,

wearing as crude neck jewellery

one bloodied arrow or a bag of ammunition,


part blizzard, part dog, cop-bandit-boss fusion,

beard a smear of iron filings and fury,

he rips at shadow and earth and fortification,


drags a belt of beaten silver bullion

through bristling rain to the mouth of the sky.

He’s tarsmoke. Sword a fresh-plucked pigeon pinion.


Human coruscation,

chorus of do-do-die,

hellion.

Commentary:

An earlier version of this poem was published in The Rialto 80. This version was written with an additional formal stipulation – I wanted to keep suggesting the word ‘oni’.

See also: my collage-poem tribute to Seven Samurai.



 

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

What is
Ludokinetic
Poetry?

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