"The cold black pearl of you"
Cave Maze -- Monkey Love -- Ice Play -- Demon Throttle
A catch-up on December/January news.
Labyrinths and Long Poems
Previously, two of my shorter labyrinth poems have been published in Bristol-based Raceme. The third of five has now appeared in Long Poem magazine (the only magazine of its kind), and combines the theme of cave exploration with the form of a Snakes and Ladders-style dice game. It’s a version of a poem I’ve worked on for about a decade, and is partly inspired by subterranean video game mazes — particularly the kind that the player tumbles into from a high plateau and must work their way out of with only a fragile light source and a scant few items.
Obviously it’s intended as a metaphysical adventure as well. From the short introduction in the magazne: “[This] form seemed very well suited to describing the experience of becoming absorbed in a system or subject, or even an intense personal or bodily encounter; there is a pronounced tension between the idea of a numerically ordered sequence of events and the stumbling, back-and-forth movement dictated by dice rolls and penalty squares.”
A very short sample of ‘A Labyrinth’:
‘I know not what Instructions to give you, you must herein trust to your own Judgment, and the Chance of the Dice.’
— Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester
Cave, your flesh is bunched up, barbeled.
1. You are the inside of an instrument.
2. You are the inside of a death mask.
3. My torch beam tastes every caruncle and papule.
(I MISS A TURN
AS THE BATTERY BURNS LOW)
4. Gloom is pumped through your blood vessels.
5. You wring the neck of the match-flame.
(I MOVE ON THREE STEPS
AND LIGHT ONE MORE)
Towards a General Theory of Love
This year I’m creating, shaping and teaching my first MA module, called ‘Writing To Stand Out’, on the theme of expressive use of form and structure across all genres of creative writing. One of the first books we looked at was Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love (Bloodaxe, 2022), a book of interlaced sequences, which positions itself as part philosophical investigation and introduces the character of Monkey, who (so it seems to me) scrambles across and between the themes and shapes of the poems, trying to understand love in his own way — reminiscent of both Sun Wukong and Ted Hughes’ Crow.
The students really took to this book; those who were the least conversant with poetry had the most to say about it, finding that it developed its own legend or language of images across the whole body of poems. As part of the focus of the module, I asked the students to describe what kind of author Shaw is in the form of a job or role, and they opted for ‘therapist’. In other words, rather than these poems coming across as therapeutic or cathartic for the poet, they stood out as tools with which the poet means to reach out to and heal the reader.
“Under the ice, a hole in the fabric of the universe”
In December, at about the time the streets of Cambridge were at there most trecherous with black ice, I published ‘Ice Play: What Ice Does in Lyrics, Novels, Toys and Games’ on DeGruyter Conversations. It’s a roaming essay that touches briefly on my own Unravelanche and Ice Dive mini-projects, but also Anna Kavan’s Ice, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Celeste, Disco Elysium, Doctor Who, Lego and ice shows. It also contains another stereogram/magic eye poem.
“That demon kissed my wife!”
As a fortieth birthday present, my cousin Jim bought me Demon Throttle, a retro scrolling shooter in which you play a “beautiful vampiress” and a “dusty gunslinger”. These two join forces to fight the demon who stole her sacred chalices and made frantic, satisfying love to his wife. It’s available only as a physical game cartridge for the Nintendo Switch, and is all straightforward shoot-and-dodge mechanics. I’ve not even managed to make it through the first level yet but I adore the simplicity and teeny, blocky sprites. One of the things I enjoy most about video games which hark back to — or are actually from — the late 80s and 90s is how the foregrounding of gameplay, game ‘feel’ and movement permits an odd mixing together of different, sometimes clashing cultural tropes. Narrative and aesthetics are let off their leash, so why not a game that’s part gothic fantasy, part western revenge tale, with the briefest flash of softcore porn in its opening titles, animated like a cute cartoon?
