"You were described as 'posh, loved culture and poetry'. You probably do still love culture and poetry. 'Lewd', 'made sexual remarks' and 'creepy'. Then you are described -- you were branded 'a creepy oddball' by ex-pupils."
Mr Jay, questioning Christopher Jefferies
1976
Colossal Cave Adventure
You are in a twisted lip.
You are on a lip of ledge, a little twist of ledge, before a deep pool.
You are in a pool of passages, an inverted brain, a cave-cool lap.
You are lip-deep in a loop of cool lip, on the brain’s ledge of sleep.
1982
Dig Dug
Hori Taizo! How dare
you dig up my land again! You plan it as if it were a night-time raid,
arrive with your makeshift harpoon and a tank of oxygen-rich air.
But there are no dragons buried here. Go spade your own hectare.
1985
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
In bed, Carmen smokes
a red cigarette, claws for her red knickers, leaves reedy red marks
across your back. The dawn is meat-red, and there is even beauty
in how she stokes the cabin fire to red sparks, her hair slightly sooty.
1990
The Secret of Monkey Island
We who went a-roving,
lean for the sweet trade, all of us foundered on the garnet-haired governor,
her brazen calico, who left each heart a capsized coracle, each body
run through with loving, every rum cove and ravener drunk for her custody.
1993
Gunstar Heroes
Me and my brother
mixing rare gunpowders – letting the various chemistries breathe.
The shafts they’ve bored are veined with rails and heck-deep,
but we were born to scupper. We seethe with colour and lack of sleep.
2009
Muramasa
I’m thinking of our shared
furious flush in a mountain spring that steamed like boiled radish
the second time we met, me with my memory a shorn stem,
you with your girlish bottom bared and reddish, each wound a diadem.
2010
Angry Birds Seasons
Night and day and night,
they blitzed the weakest joins of the house, leaving it scare-torn
and clotted with powder down, us scrummed, half shaken apart.
Rage made them bright. Greed had drawn us like an applecart.
"When Kirsty and I talk about what we’re trying to do with Sidekick Books and Fuselit, and with our own writing, the words I’m most sick of hearing myself repeat are ‘collaborative’ and ‘engage’. These are positive, active, optimistic words that seem to fit the enthusiastic tone I want to strike, but our work is probably better defined by what we’re against.
"We are anti-specialist; that is, against adages like ‘write what you know’ and ‘stick to what you’re best at’, or any philosophy that drives a kind of self-ghettoisation - limiting oneself increasingly to one’s strengths and areas of expertise, creating an environment where the individual avoids straying into a field in which they might be shown to be ignorant or incompetent. In terms of poetry, this means we are against a poetry that only looks inward - towards other poetry - to measure its success, the belief that a poem can be good merely because it is like other good poems, or because it is the next step in an assembled narrative of poetry.
"We are anti-‘universal’. That is, we don’t believe in the concept of a poetry that speaks to everyone. There are some poems that are for some people and other poems that are for other people. Not as clear cut as that, of course, but in general, we distrust attempts towards the definition of a ‘human condition’, or any claim that a poem is characterised by a lack of cultural specificity, entirely inclusive, cleansed of any target demographic.
"We are anti-saviour, or, if you like, pro-ensemble. In other words, we reject the narrative of the genius or fated leader who defines their generation (in marketing terms, ‘the next big thing’) and, by extension, the micro-cast of significants - the artistic hegemony. We believe damage is generally done to our poetic culture by forcing a narrative of progress (replete with ‘key figures’) upon it and by searching for a way to comfortably disregard the contributions of the many in order that that narrative be easily digestible.
"What does all this rejecting add up to? It starts with the principle that the widespread practice of any art is more important to our cultural moral health than the results, that we should encourage engagement (there’s that word) over worship. More people writing is therefore not a bad thing. A lack of visible ‘stand-out’ talents is therefore not a bad thing (and no more an indication of a lack of generational talent as it is an abundance of it). Diversity is to be valued over authority. A masterpiece is just a creation of critics and readers in search of a measuring stick.
"It also shares some of the character of the Scottish informationist movement of the 90s, in that we favour a ‘crossing of wires’. We think poetry should be reaching outwards and across, that good poetry is always defined by its connection to something outside of - as well as within - the poetic canon. We think it should engage (again) freely with all the various strands of other lexicons, jargons, histories and subcultures, rather than striving for a kind of blank-slateness or nothing-and-everything appeal.
"We favour the idea that poems - and people - exist in overlapping groups which we move freely between and among. Thus, a book of poems and illustrations celebrating British birds is designed to exist at an intersection of different groups, to facilitate the flow between them. Fuselit, which started it all, uses a single word as a hub, with the idea that poets and other artists come to us from different directions - their personal pathways crossing at the point where an issue is created. All organisation is, essentially, in flux, and loosely defined, and largely non-hierarchical. Rather than celebrating trends or defining moments in poetry, we believe in placing the emphasis on the individual character of a work in the context in which it appears. A practical example of what this means would be that there is nothing ‘lesser’ or easily dismissible in a strong or interesting poem written by someone who was only testing out poetry before moving onto something else. With Fuselit, we have been very happy to catch these occasional oddities and place them alongside the work of those who go on to publish pamphlets and collections.
"In some ways, it is a response to the dilemma of cultural fragmentation, but while the conservative reaction to the same problem is ultimately backward-looking - a vision of reintegration, repairing of boundaries, pruning back of individualism - ours is an attempt to find some kind of harmony with it. We are frequently presented with the false choice of socialism versus capitalism - either everyone (and no one) is special, or natural selection must weed the weak from the strong. What we suggest instead is that on both a social and artistic level, people’s work must be viewed in terms of these overlapping groups, and the meaning of their work must be understood first in relation to its place in their extended families or spheres, rather than how it fits in with the whole, messy, irreducible formula of a whole generation or era. There is room then for everyone who has a serious commitment to being involved. Members of an audience are, on another night, in another context, the figures on the stage."
"In an age in which plinths are crowded, bronze scarce, poetry proposes itself as the ideal form of public sculpture."
For years now
I've had this
whistling
sound in
my ears.
"... there is nothing sadder than seeing the rebel angels (the poets) falling out among themselves."
 |
| Not me, except in the karmic universal sense. |
The methodology I was following through the spring was something I've called 'errant gaming'. It's a way of exploring the relationship between jokes and what I'm very crudely calling anomie. By anomie I just mean zones of indeterminacy, areas outside of social norms or formal rules. And by jokes, well, the rough formulation I'm working with is nonsense that makes sense, or mistakes that work. So something crazy which seems to have coherence, or taking it less linguistically, it could be when you kick a broken computer and it starts working.
The above diagram divides these interactions into two 'zones'. The first is jokes as agents of subversion, of detournement. But what I want to focus on is joking as a means of dealing with indeterminacy. If you think about it, once the rules break down, nothing you do is going to be right so you need some other strategy, and joking represents one of them.
Errant gaming tries to generate these zones of anomie in game contexts, in such a way they can be resolved by the players using different means. A errant game therefore needs two properties – it needs a hole, it needs indeterminacy, but it also needs a way of being shifted or changed to run, there have to be forces outside the game you can bring in.
So my first conception of an errant game the a card game I called 'Anomie', which I described some months a go. It's a card game whose dominant feature is that playing the joker that lets you do anything. So you could burn the cards, eat the deck, whatever. And in one game where I tested it, this card really became the point of the game – no one could follow what was happening, but everyone wanted a chance to do something silly.
My second experiment was quite different. It's called 'automata chess' - it's played like normal chess, but each time you take a piece you set it a rule – almost pseudo-computationally – which governs its movements. They're the pieces with the blue thimbles on them.
And here are the rules at this point.
The main thing to note with the game was the sheer level of mental exhaustion caused by having to constantly invent rules – and how this caused us to start cross referencing rules in order to retain sanity.
Now, at this particular moment of the game we had a bit of a weird situation – I'm in check, but automata 1 will block my check at the end of the move. So do I have to move out of check? We had no way of resolving this, and in the end had to resort to a randomised system – guessing what colour counter was in her hand.
Those two, and other minor tests, constitute what I call the basic model for Errant Gaming. And I then moved to working on the temporal model – which is an attempt to introduce this indeterminacy into game time. Why the shift to time? Well, I'll explain later...
"What are you supposed to do when someone doesn't like you?"
"Kill them," I said.
The line went dead.
At 7.30pm tomorrow night a group of performers and poets will be gathering at The Rugby Tavern, 19 Great James Street, London, WC1N 3ES. This gathering, which goes by the name of Lifelines, will showcase a fabulous concoction of poetry, spoken, word, music and comedy.
Your lineup for the evening includes the founders of Sidekick Books and crafters of the written word, Jon Stone and Kirsty Irving. Richard Evans is the author of two beautiful collections of poetry, The Zoo Keeper and Orbiting. Nick Hunt is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, The Economist and the BBC. Chris Rusbridge is an electro folk musician and Major Horatio Hebblethwaite is a decorated Knight Commander in The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
I will be introducing this eclectic lineup and giving each performer 15 minutes to dazzle, delight and tickle you (no hands allowed!).
You will be asked for £7 (£5 concessions) on the door and this money will be donated to Oxfam's Japan appeal to help reconstruction efforts after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Here is a picture, map and more details of the venue http://www.shepherdneame.co.uk/pub/wc1/rugby-tavern.aspx
As Churchill once said, on the fearful eve of the battle of Normandy, "See some of you there."
"Men get it fine. They just don't switch their brains off when they hear the word 'rape'. How come majority opinion on CIF can be quite detached when discussing murder, or burglary regarding it as a complex issue and even asserting that the perpetrator may be a victim of society, that the vengeful statements of victims is misplaced, that the indignation of public opinion is merely the frothing of ignorance fanned by the malice of the right wing press.
"But when it comes to discussing rape ..."
"Imagine that a woman voluntarily goes to her boyfriend’s apartment, voluntarily goes into the bedroom, voluntarily undresses and gets into bed, perhaps anticipating sex, or naïvely expecting merely a cuddle. But at the last minute she gets cold feet and says “Stop!”. The young man, in the heat of the moment, is unable to restrain himself and carries on."
BIRDBOOK: TOWNS, PARKS, GARDENS & WOODLAND
Over 100 new poems and illustrations celebrating British birds, with an into by Dr Fulminare.
SCHOOL OF FORGERY
A Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation! Jon's School of Forgery has been called "an inspired, integrated debut, endlessly inventive, with a lively intertextuality and a wide frame of reference. The language is both playful and hard-wrought, words at high voltage, words as collector's items."
WHAT TO DO
Kirsty's debut pamphlet! Full of characters in trouble and containing a sequence that sees figures from Greek myth eking out an existence in a psychiatric hospital. £4 from Happenstance.
