"My skeleton a scree of spoons and saucers"
Sand monarchs -- Urban carnage -- Arctic democracy -- Armed resistance
An end-of-May update covering a few notable happenings from recent months.
Fire engine, raspberry, emerald
Just recently, one of my ludokinetic poems, ‘L and the Empress of Sand’, was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize. The winner, Florence Walker’s ‘I Dreamt of Something Lost’, is a ghost story told through the medium of a simulated chat programme on a PC desktop — it’s incredible well realised. ‘L …’ was the only poem on the shortlist, however, which is both a compliment and, I think, a sign that poetry still struggles to assert itself as an interactive form (though Charlotte Geater’s ‘Head Girl’ made the longlist). More broadly, you could say that poetry will always struggle when up against fiction in contests, among other reasons because it’s harder to break down, to summarise, and therefore tougher for a panel of judges to discuss critically.
The judges said of ‘L ...’, simply:
A truly great work with an interesting format and mechanics.
I would say it’s a poem about the effort we have to put in to win back even a sliver of self-determination from those who rule over us.
Man the barricades!
In April, the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair returned for the first time in four years, at St. Columba’s Church in West London. Kirsty and I were there with old and new Sidekick Books titles — including Ten Poets Defend Their Cities From Giant, Strange Beasts, which isn’t officially released until September, and a small number of mystery mini-pamphlets. It turned out to be our best year yet, both in terms of sales and the general enthusiasm of the public — but we’re still struggling a little with the cost of keeping old titles in warehouses. A really good way to support the press and our future plans at the moment, if you’re so inclined, would be to order Sidekick titles into your local bookshop, or from online retailers.
Lessen the Sting
Also in April, I gave a talk to Computer Arts and Technology students at Norwich University of the Arts:
It was largely a condensed version of some of the key points from Dual Wield, updated to include a showcase of some of my latest experiments — which I’ve been trying to keep as simple as possible, for the purposes of passing on the formula in future workshops. One thing I wanted to emphasise: a ludokinetic poem doesn’t have to be a digital poem. To give an example, I passed round a physical print of ‘Three Snow Shrines’, a poem which is completed by having multiple readers add a cross at the bottom. It’s a kind of poll, but also a paper-and-pen imitation of a site of votive offerings or communal graffiti.
Men Like Us
Most of my fiction-reading this year so far has been made up of Japanese murder mysteries and Ursula Le Guin. I finished The Word for World is Forest a while ago, but it’s stayed with me, in part because (and I knew this going in) it’s quite obviously the template for the Avatar movies and similar fare: futuristic colonisers brutalise a peaceful, pre-industrial, forest-dwelling species and provoke a guerrilla war. Le Guin’s book is very slim — a novella, really — and notably avoids relating events solely from the point of view of a sympathetic turncoat colonist. It also doesn’t shy away from portraying the natives, once roused, as murderously violent.
Just as with Marvel’s recent cartoon revival X-Men 97 — which depicts an island nation of mutants being viciously blown up by expensive military hardware — it’s difficult not to see the parallels with the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, except that in both fictional storylines, the victims are given a means to fight back and ultimately defeat their enemies. Le Guin’s Athsheans massively outnumber their colonist oppressors, while Marvel’s mutants have super-powers. Hard to see what Palestinians have to fall back on, as Western powers once again betray their own stated principles and allow religiously motivated massacres to take place with their blessing.
