Whether you’re reading for pleasure or to learn something (or both), it’s easy to get hung up on the idea you’re doing it wrong.

After all, the impression we get when we read or hear others extolling the merits of a poem, or talking excitedly of its meaning, is that it should all be very obvious. We should cotton quickly to what the poem is about, intuitively grasp its themes and messages, and be able to tell, almost at a glance, whether or not it is a good poem. If we can’t do that, then it must be due to a deficiency of some sort.

It’s also tempting to think that because some critics and readers have a very clear sense of what a poem is doing, and are able to say so convincingly, there must be a ‘correct’ form of understanding, and if we can’t reach this understanding on our own then we have failed, in some way, to read the poem properly.

Thinking like this can seriously get in the way of enjoyment. It can stop you on your journey through a poem before you’ve even started. At the outset, it’s better to think of other readers as climbers making their way up the same mountain, approaching it from other directions. They have come armed with different experiences, different expectations and different interpretative tools to you, so the route they take is likely to be different too. Watching what they do and say can be instructive — it can give you ideas, inspire you to make similar mental leaps, or to linger on the same words and lines. You might even find it makes sense to follow exactly in their footsteps.

But ultimately, it’s up to you how you tackle the terrain. That might mean re-reading the beginning over and over. It might mean starting with a general survey of the poem, or by thinking about its form. It might mean sitting with one particular image or phrase for a long time, or looking up every slightly unfamiliar word. It might mean storming through the poem five times in a row, or jumping between lines and stanzas in an arbitrary order. The important thing is that you are finding a way to stick with it, to get more comfortable with it, to feel out its inner workings.

Conversely, if there is a ‘wrong’ way to read a poem, it’s whatever results in boredom. If you’re feeling bored, and only reading on because you feel you ought to, then something has gone awry. Boredom is usually what happens when we’re spinning on the spot, putting in effort without any sense that our minds are developing.

If this happens when you’re reading a poem, it’s possibly because the poem has nothing much to give, that you’ve heard all its author has to say many times before. It’s possible that the poem is just too messy, or impossible to penetrate for all but a select few. But very often it’s a sign you need a new angle of attack. Look at what other readers say about it — could that give you a foothold? If they’re an experienced reader or critic, it’s likely they can lend a hand. Think about what parts you like and don’t like — can you work out why? Is the poem challenging your beliefs in some way? Does it touch on matters that you find awkward or unsettling? Is it worth paying more attention to patterns or sounds? Ask whatever question is needed to break the spell of boredom.

Suppose you do like what you’re reading — you’re having a good time, it makes you feel good, or impressed at least — but your thoughts stop there? You don’t know how to explain it. You’re not sure what it means or why it’s enjoyable. That’s fine. That’s a normal, healthy way to engage with a poem. But know that if you can find a way to better understand your own reaction, it will likely open the door to a deeper and longer-lasting appreciation. And if you can understand it in terms of some of the devices and techniques the poem is using, the choices made by the poet — if you are able to analyse it at a somewhat technical level — it will likely make it easier to identify features of other poems you will enjoy and learn from. Keep this up, and your tastes will grow and evolve, leading you on to many more kinds of reading experience.

Remember that the point of reading poetry is not to end up agreeing with everyone else, or to prove yourself a capable literary scholar. It’s to enrich the mind and sharpen the senses by tapping into other people’s visions, propositions, thought processes and experiences — people who’ve tried to pass on their most exciting and intimate discoveries and their most intense dreams in the form of shapely bursts of words. If that method of communication sometimes throws up difficulties, it’s because we are all explorers of our own inner lives, charting the unknown, and so much that needs expressing or exploring does not fit into everyday sentences.

Be warned: if your usual method of reading, like mine, is to carry a book with you in your backpack everywhere you go, digging it out on train journeys and in sandwich queues, you will need to take extra care with #Moth (published by Ethel Zine and Micro Press). It’s a hand-stitched booklet, and as well as gold stitching it sports a delicate cover of silver paper, with thread used to add a textured filigree to the moth’s wing pattern and antennae. This is in keeping with the content of the book, which — at least initially — seems focused on the fragility of the human mind, in that it moves from a bus stop setting to a psyche ward in the first two pages, the transition implicitly triggered by the folding door of the bus, or some other simple act this motion approximates.

Holmes describes #Moth as a ‘hybrid text’, and it is — part poetry, part short fiction (it definitely advances toward an ending), utilising a mixture of clinical and lyrical language. There’s no contents page and it’s not always clear where poems begin and end, as there are a few different styles of heading and subheading. It also features a hybrid character at its centre — a woman who is part-moth, or perceived as part-moth by those she unwittingly charms:

brazen midriff, miniskirt:
body hair fine copper fuzz.

wings jostle inside his chest

Once it settles in, there’s a steady alternation between pieces which record fragments of doctor/patient conversation (verso) and miniature monologues by different moth species (recto), the latter preceded by images of the species in question on semi-transparent pages. It’s something of a power struggle; each monologue acts as a different guise worn by the main character — a response to the attempts of the doctor to categorise and contain her. The fragments of conversation and note-taking are at first framed by guidance the doctor is acting on: “Gently steer them, keep them on track” and “a patient’s behaviours may provide insight into their current mental state”, for instance. This falls by the wayside as the patient resists, or rather complies in a manner that brings the doctor no closer to a diagnosis.

Sometimes the patient seems to tease or probe in return. For example, after an extensive examination of her appearance, clothes and possessions, she replies (at this point in the character of an Imperial moth):

it matters not where you look,
i host in splendour

never outshone, this autumn leaf gone gold

mistress of reinvention

Later, as a Gypsy moth, she is more forceful:

my name strikes mortal fear
into the very heart of men.
i’ve made many enemies,
all for what, my lack of house?

It’s an intriguing, beguiling dance of personae, with allusions to creation myth (‘dirt sack of earth / from which I grew’), the colours and markings on wings (‘my four eyes are watching / from inside their leathered shell’) and habitat, the patient seemingly shifting from one form to another in order to avoid the pin through the thorax and — eventually — to turn the tables. There are elements, too, of film noir — the doctor’s name is Holmes (‘Like Sherlock, yes’) and he looks on his patient, at points, in the manner of a private gumshoe sizing up a femme fatale, nothing that “When we sat down in that small consulting room, I knew that we had met before”, then lingering on her ‘elaborate fountain pen’, the tips of her fingers, the fine hair on her ears.

This is an intriguing feature of the work that slightly gets lost in the mix, or certainly left me wondering what to make of it. My best guess is it operates as a representation of how established approaches to treatment tend to view female patients as hostile, or at least unforthcoming. Other parts of the text are suggestive of ways in which women have been mistreated en masse: the line ‘mouthparts removed’, for example, recalls genital mutilation, while an early section on eggs (‘know that I was born with my eggs / already counted’) nods in the direction of fertility-based expectations and constraints.

Sometimes my imagination went a little astray. I really wanted to spot a Mothra reference and thought this section, from ‘Emperor Gum (Opodiphthea eucalypti)’, might be alluding to her ‘poison scales’ attack:

…nursing

simmered rage, how it seeps

slow at first, then fast inflating,
a surprise for all the doubting fools

my life-breath expanded,

sticky substance, sweet revenge,
blown up in all your faces.

But I’m overcomplicating what is, at its heart, an elegant subversion of the ‘woman-as-caught-butterfly’ trope — one that permits its protagonist to leverage her lepidopteral mystique in service of avoiding being reduced to the subject of another’s expertise.

Regular readers will know I’m rather fond of bugs and bug poems, and even pretending to be a bug-man-thing in games.

By page number my first contribution to Sidekick’s Aquanauts anthology from 2017 was a 2:1 scale (as printed) calligram of a lesser waterboatman:

For even longer than that I’ve been working on-off, every now and then, on a sequence called ‘Paper Light Trap’: 1:1 scale colour calligrams of UK moth species. I’ve never quite managed to get on top of this project, despite multiple attempts to sprint to the finish line — too many of the pieces are either visually imbalanced or linguistically rough-edged. There’s also the colours — striking the right balance, that is, between a somewhat accurate representation of the moth and stylised neatness. So the majority are in a folder called ‘Further adjustment needed’.

But I did send a few to Bending the Arc magazine for their Spring issue, including one of my favourites, ‘Herald’:

The other two that BtA took are The Vestal and Brimstone Moth.

‘Paper Light Trap’ will emerge some other day. For now, what I should be talking about hotly and endlessly is the arrival of Instar Hotel, my latest short book, which is available to Americans and Canadians from the publisher, Sarabande, and to UK residents via the London Review Bookshop. (EU residents — get in touch if you want a copy!)

As noted in a previous post featuring an audio preview, Instar Hotel’s poems all happen at the same time and place but in different rooms. In each of those rooms are arthropod-people — an earwig, a silverfish, a flea, a bumblebee, a cricket, and another waterboatman, to name a handful. Each of them is dealing with a different problem — though none of them are especially worried about being bugs.

My previous post on the subject of bad poetry prompted some thoughtful responses, and I felt my own responses to these were worth gathering in a follow-up essay. So I drafted one – back at the end of March, in fact, on a train to Southampton. Since then I’ve only had time to think on it in short gasps, but that process has, oddly enough, resulted in a much more complete thesis than I’d originally envisaged — more cheery too, if you’ll bear with me till the end.

I said previously that bad poems need to be invented, and to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the poetry critic to have a function. But there’s another, simpler reason why bad poetry must be willed into existence. Suppose for a moment that every published poem — or the vast majority of them — were unquestionably skilfully written, greatly rewarding reader attention. There would still be far, far too many of them for any one person to attend to. We would need to come up with a way of deciding which poems to spend our limited time investigating.

That need, really, is the root of literary taste. Whatever system or standard we put into place, it operates as a means of dismissing from our mind much that exists — or, at least, sending it to the very periphery of conscience — so that we can focus on a more manageable portion. And since it’s easier to dismiss something if we come up with reasons to regard it as ‘bad’, or nurture an ingrained distaste for it, this is what we do.

(Another hypothetical: suppose the only poetry that survives the end of civilisation is some small amount of the ‘bad’ stuff. Can we imagine, for a moment, that future alien anthropologists would have any means of recognising that it lacks something vital? It’s difficult to realistically conceive of any kind of metric for poetic quality that would extend beyond our shared experiential context — other than, perhaps, symmetry, which can be found everywhere.)

I should add that literary taste also exists, like many things, for the purpose of forming social bonds. To put it crudely: convincing yourself you find a certain kind of poem to be very fine and another sort very drab is sometimes a precondition of being accepted within certain social circles. I will address this as I go on — partly because I think it bears repeating that most of those who claim to be solely interested in ‘the quality of the poem itself’ are not being honest with themselves.

But I’m mostly concerned with the core function of taste and the role criticism has to play in it. We need taste to direct us to the poems that are of most use in enriching and improving our lives. If we do not cultivate taste of some kind, then we don’t know where to start or how to sort through the mass of poetry available, and so can hardly benefit from the artform at all — which is, in fact, the position of those millions who never read or think about it.

Let’s consider three ways in which taste is formed:

1. The Sniff Test … and its Limitations

I’ve often seen it suggested – and not just in response to the previous essay – that when it comes to it, judging poetry is simply a question of waiting to see if it knock your socks off. Emily Dickinson is responsible for the go-to quote: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

In other words: does it pass the sniff test? Do you vibe with it? Does it grab your attention? The appeal of such a test, obviously, is that it removes the need for critical evaluation and gives primacy to our most spontaneous feelings. It’s an especially useful philosophy for anyone made uncomfortable by the prospect of having to defend or rethink their choices, or who worries that if they try to make a judgement using their intellect, they will ‘get it wrong’.

Often (though not always) this approach is paired with a belief that poetry is burdened by the critical and academic culture around it. Teachers and critics, it is proposed, have rendered the artform unappealing to the masses by overcomplicating how we relate to it, and if they’d just butt out, readers might have a chance to find their way back.

The poetry critic still has a role to play here, but is reduced to a kind of race tipster. This is more-or-less how some of my friends explain their relationship to criticism, ie. they seek out one or more critics whose tastes are reliably similar to theirs, and follow those critics’ recommendations. Disagreement is accepted as just one of those things — I like what I like and you like what you like, and there’s an end to it.

This has the merit of being clean, simple and stress-free. But there are drawbacks, and flaws in some of the underlying assumptions.

First of all, while critical and analytical language is sometimes off-puttingly opaque or blustery, it’s hard to believe poetry would fare better without any effort to inculcate appreciation of its finer mechanisms. Other artforms are much more suited to arousing spontaneous feelings (either because they contain significant elements that skip the fiddly language-processing parts of our brains, or, in the case of prose stories, because they engender sympathy for people in peril). Most poetry requires some degree of serious attention by readers who know what to look (or listen) for, and if you like a poem, it’s very probably because you have, at some point, been instilled with a method for appreciating it.

If you don’t know where that method comes from, how do you know it can’t be improved upon? How do you know you aren’t capable of recognising much more that delights and astounds you?

Secondly, the sniff test leaves little room for the possibility of growing to like a poem, or for any conversation about how that might happen. It envisages no route by which those who disagree might come to understand one another’s point of view.

It also assumes there to be little to no value in sitting with negative feelings. If a poem, rather than knocking our socks off, makes us feel vulnerable, sad, angry or foolish — if it threatens our worldview with new insights or suggestions, or imaginative alternatives to what we consider ordinary and sensible — then it is in danger of being dismissed immediately. But can’t such experiences sometimes be useful, even powerfully enlightening, when we give ourselves time to digest them?

Thirdly, if we want to share our enjoyment of a poem, or if we believe it has something valuable to offer, since critical evaluation has gone out the window we instead have to rely on emotional contagion — our in-built propensity to influence each others’ feelings by passing on a kind of energy. That is to say, we rave. We behave as if our socks, or the top of our head, have come off, in order to get others to join the party. Consensus-forming inevitably becomes driven by various kinds of charisma and intensity.

That then leads to rifts opening up between one group and another — those who ‘get it’ versus those who don’t — and because each group only understands the poetry they admire in terms of the feelings it arouses (feelings which are rooted in the social context which gave rise to them) they are poorly prepared to mend those rifts. So much for stress-free.

Finally, on a more personal level, whenever I’ve genuinely encountered off-top-head moments, the sensation doesn’t last. I come back down to earth and the poem soon starts to look more ordinary. I’ve found that these momentary flashes of feeling are a poor indication of the overall effect of a poem on my life or learning, such that if I allowed myself to be led by my nose instead of scrutinising more closely, I think I would admire very little poetry at all. I suppose I think of having the top of my head come off as something akin to being impressed by a great magic trick.

For all these reasons, there need to be additional processes at work in taste-forming. The poetry critic must have a bigger role to play.

Let’s move on to …

2. The Shared Narrative … and its Limitations.

It’s widely agreed that taste should be improved upon. Capitalism demands it, since people spend more money when they seek to sophisticate themselves. Cultural cohesion demands it, since continuity of belief and sensibility requires a degree of intergenerational harmony – children coming to value and respect a proportion of what their parents did. And survival logic demands it, since learning ever more about our surroundings, about the depths of our own and others’ minds, betters our ability to breast chaos and madness. The ignorant and incurious, we know, end up baffled to the point of rage by what they perceive only at surface level. To stubbornly hold on to those models of the world we form early in our lives invites an increasing sense of alienation – the feeling that a flood of indecipherable otherness is rising to unseat us.

Art is not, therefore, an end in itself, but a practical measure. Making and studying it is both research and communion — it puts us more in touch with how others understand things, and spurs us towards an ever more complete, more finely calibrated view of how things really are.

Consider: we know a certain style of poem can sell hundreds of thousands of books and make its author famous. We’ve seen it happen. If what poets and poetry critics want most is for poetry to be popular, to dazzle a larger audience, shouldn’t they all celebrate and imitate this style? Why do so many insist that the poetry in question is bad poetry? I would say it’s because they think it has nothing to teach them. They suspect, in fact, that the very reason for its success is that it asks nothing of its readers in terms of advancing their range of empathy or awareness or their grasp of reality, instead repeating back to them what they already think and feel.

Whether or not you think this is a fair or correct judgement, it demonstrates an inherent sense that poetry exists not just to be liked, but to ‘make your soul grow’ (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut). Against that background, poetry criticism functions as a way of persuading readers to look beyond spontaneous emotional responses and pursue something longer-lasting. “You should push past an initial lack of interest, awkwardness or sense of difficulty,” says the critic, “and trust that there are greater rewards than instantaneous stimulation. They are found in some places, and not in others. I am here to guide you to them.”

How does the critic say this convincingly? Using narrative. Using mythology. The critic positions the poet as the hero of a story. Heroes usually win, of course, so the critic employs criteria: the rules of a game at which some (but not all) poets must triumph. To read their account of a successful book is like following the commentary on a sporting event.

Often the story is of a recent or not-so-recent moment in history where the poet wins by, say, inventing something new, or saying something that needed to be said, or embodying a movement or generation, or cutting through an impasse. The biggest story of all, of course, is the canon, which imagines a nation’s poetry as a succession — almost a dynasty — of great men and women renovating and rejuvenating language itself.

This overlaps, both tidily and messily, with arts academia — which is concerned with identifying focal points for phenomenological excavation — and with education, which aims to arm students with the best possible cognitive toolbox. Maintaining a category of great-but-difficult poetry produced by a cadre of key figures serves both these purposes.

And it works — to an impressive degree, I think. Cogent criticism and commentary helps readers to develop rewarding and self-elevating styles of appreciation. It improves our collective ability to digest and synthesise all manner of ideas, and to find pleasure and/or meaning in all manner of aesthetic delivery systems.

So where does this tactic — telling the story of the poet-hero — fall down? The main problem is that people forget (rather quickly, it seems) that a story is a man-made device, a framework. They begin to treat it as gospel. Just as careful maintenance of a canon can lure the reader to new and challenging territory, so can it stop them going any further when presented as a definitive map. I’m thinking in particular of the number of times I’ve heard an ostensibly literary-minded person — a person who prides themselves on their good taste — say they don’t recognise any notable contemporary poets at all, seemingly due to the fact that critical consensus has yet to deliver them a sufficiently compelling tale of a modern conquering hero. Like languid emperors, they wait for a critical mass of authoritative nodding and cooing to be reached before they consider any writer’s oeuvre worthy of consideration.

Then, where a tale is convincingly told, there is the tendency for appreciation to be shallow and vibe-based. The poet having been painted by critics as a grand and imposing figure, some readers will contrive to be overawed by their poetry without ever properly engaging with its themes, ideas or language. I guess we could call that ‘bathing in the presence of greatness’? A nice feeling — but hardly something that grows the soul.

Similarly, there is the tendency to fixate on one narrow set of criteria, one kind of success story. Whenever a poem hits the news, internet comment sections fill up with posts bemoaning a lack of pure end-rhyme or regular meter, since this is way some commentators have learned to judge the quality (or otherwise) of a piece of work. Over-emphasis on a few pronounced features actively inhibits an ability to recognise others. Just as I’ve had students describe Dickinson as a writer of free verse simply because their sensitivity to pure rhyme hides the possibility of half-rhyme from them, readers who get too attached to well-told stories often miss the wood for the trees. This can solidify into some rather eccentric perspectives. One poet I know, who took exception to the first part of this essay, continually wages war against long-dead modernists – his lens of appreciation is romanticism, and he measures all poems by their adherence to pre-20th-century fashions.

Now, this poet would say — has said, in fact — that his lens directs him to a bounty of high-quality literary artefacts. To feed his intellect and inspire him to strive, he needs nothing else. This may be true. In a similar way, readers of those much-derided mass-selling Instapoetry books might say they have an abundant harvest – plenty to stoke mind and heart, and an online community of like-minded individuals to boot. So is there really a problem?

As per the point about survival logic, there is. The development of taste should surely engender mutual understanding, rather than fragmentation into totally irreconcilable viewpoints. It ought not to leave us all manning isolated outposts. The aforementioned poet, for all his wealth, believes that he has been cursed to live in a kind of heathen wasteland, which does not seem a very healthy place to wind up.

Further evidence of unhappy enclavism abounds: competing diatribes on who is out of touch, who sullying the artform. Bitter criticism that uses the stature of one of the critic’s favourite poet-heroes as a beating stick. A general endless grumble among readers of poetry – the very people who need to be advocating on its behalf – that the artform is in dire straits.

Stories, ultimately, don’t have room for a large main cast. That means there will always be many contradictory accounts of which poets are triumphant, via different accompanying sets of rules. And when critics get too competitive, too invested in the idea that the story they’re telling trumps all others, the effort to convince quickly slips toward feverish proclamations of genius — a mix of just the sort of windbaggery which is felt to make poetry inaccessible and just the sort of charismatic soapboxing that deepens existing divisions.

One might say that the overall problem with this approach is that it centers the critic too much. Which brings me onto ...

3. The vocational network … and its limitations

If relying solely on intuition limits growth, and listening too avidly to critics is liable to make us rigid and disillusioned, perhaps what we need is more time on the scene? Let’s consider the idea that those involved in the practice and industry of poetry — poets, editors, publishers, funders, organisers — are the ones who shape taste most reliably, continually guiding and challenging each other in rivalry and friendship. Criticism remains a vital part of this ecosystem; as well as being one strand of a generally fluid and robust exchange of views and ideas, it puts these views and ideas on the record and generates the analytical language which participants use to express themselves ever more exactly. The critic is no independent judge and rule-maker, but one who reflects and articulates a much more democratic process by which certain poets and poems come to be highly regarded.

There’s a lot about this arrangement that works — the existence of convivial relationships across different styles and schools of thought, for example, discourages open warfare, and thriving artistic communities are less vulnerable to outside manipulation than individuals going it alone. That is to say: if a poet trusts they have a place within a community and is trusted in turn, they’re better positioned to be bold and exploratory, to develop their work in a unique direction, less likely to try to conform to the harshly narrow expectations of wider society.

In fact, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the richness and variety found in contemporary published poetry is due almost entirely to the latitude afforded by scenes and communities. On top of that, close ties between poets can form a sort of treasure trail for the casual reader, leading them to expand their reading more vigorously as they bounce from poet to protégé, to partner, to publisher, and so on. Good for extending and improving on individual taste while still allowing oneself (to some extent) to be led by the nose.

But here, too, there are drawbacks. Put simply: it can get way too cosy.

Easy to imagine a small local scene that’s dominated by a few big personalities and stifled by an adherence to their way of doing things, though not too troubling, perhaps, because there can be many such scenes, and when they start to join up they’ll have to start having interesting conversations. Much more problematic is when the poetic output of an entire nation appears to be managed by a coterie.

As well as raising suspicions among readers — for example, when recipients and judges of large prizes seem to trade places annually in a choreographed dance — this gives rise to the probability of said management committee floating away from reality (and a significant proportion of their fellow artists) in a self-satisfied bubble. Criticism and discourse, instead of representing a genuine melting pot of carefully laid-out opinion, becomes heavily weighted toward chummy interviews, traded fluff and hotly-worded tributes as a vague but inflexible orthodoxy takes hold. Critical reports on the most well-regarded work forget (or aren’t able) to make a proper case for it; they just say things like “one of our finest and most distinguished poets” and “the height of his powers”.

Eventually, as always with empires small and large, power changes hands. The first part of this essay was provoked, some of you may remember, by a disgruntled reaction to centrally funded arts journals reneging on their offers to publish poems and reviews that were seen to be tainted by reactionary prejudices. That disgruntlement needs to be understood in the context of poetry’s vocational network; the real story behind it is simply that one orthodoxy has lost its grip and another has begun to take its place.

“No, no,” representatives of the old orthodoxy would say: “Our objections are principled. Judgements now are being made based on a poet’s politics, whereas we would seek to base them on the quality of the work itself.”

This, as I’ve previously indicated, is simply not true. Within the ever-shifting hurly burly of a nationwide network of artist-managers handling various pots of money and opportunities for publicity, ‘the quality of the work itself’ is unavoidably viewed through multiple prisms: politics, personality, personal and professional allegiances, publishing record, and so on. Innumerable poets on the outskirts fall foul of the resulting biases, finding their work rejected, dismissed or very coolly received, rarely with any sense as to why.

One merit of the new orthodoxy is that it is crystal clear, at least, about one way you can put yourself on editors’ black lists, and leaves itself open to challenge on this front. Close-knit arts communities with a few key figureheads rarely operate in this way — while they can serve to shelter and nurture their members, and to direct public taste in new and exciting directions, they can also easily become inscrutable and protectionist in character, gradually delegitimising any claims they have to be able to help us delineate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poetry.

4. Taste as solo expedition

Where does that leave us? I’ve argued taste is shaped by haphazard instinct, reductive storytelling, and insular networks, and I’ve come down pretty hard on the reliability of each as a process. But I don’t set out to campaign against them — even if I thought these methods could be discouraged, it’s hard to see how to throw out the bathwater without losing the baby. Something needs to govern what we choose to read.

So how can we ever know we’re on the right track? How do we know we haven’t been coaxed, conditioned or misled into giving our limited time and attention to substandard stuff, while the real treasure — the poetry which would energise us most reliably, would help the most to structure our thinking, reveal to us the most essential truths — has been hidden from view, perhaps behind a slight tweak of perspective, a crucial insight that was never delivered to us?

This, after all, is what readers of poetry accuse each other of (if a little circuitously). It is, accordingly, an anxiety that almost certainly informs the wider public’s hesitancy about diving in. Why risk wasting time on examples of an artform that might turn out to have been poorly selected — pushed to the top of the heap via nepotism, critical chicanery or shallow marketability?

I can’t answer these questions exactly. What I can do is suggest a different perspective. I’ve been careful from the start to avoid talking of ‘bad’ poetry in terms of what any individual poet has or has not achieved. That framing, so frequently deployed in criticism and commentary, is designed to position the value of a work an objective fact, centered on its author. The state of the reader is of no consequence; if the poet has achieved something of note, it is implicitly the reader’s responsibility to be appreciative. If the poet has failed to achieve something, then the reader should stay away.

But that’s not really how it works. As I’ve said, the entire notion of a poem having value is rooted in the reader’s needs: to be invigorated, enlightened and instructed, acknowledged, relieved or reassured. And exactly what kind of invigoration, enlightenment etc an individual needs very obviously varies — not just from reader to reader, but over time.

That means the best and worst poetry to read is not a fixed point. It will change depending on your personal experiences, on what you have read before, or recently, and so on. To exercise good taste is to keep moving, to continue on a journey. A ‘bad’ poem is one that, in your present circumstance, has little new to show or teach you, or instills in you an attitude or belief that ill-serves you, or disheartens you in a way that fails to bring about any redoubling of strength or resilience.

Our individual taste journeys are likely to be very different, but that isn’t to say that categories of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ become entirely personal. There is, we know, a lot of overlap in what we come to steer away from, and what we pick our way toward. The import of the metaphor is that just because a work is very highly regarded by others, it doesn’t mean it’s the best next stop on your own expedition, and likewise, just because a poem has nothing to show or teach you does not mean it has no value to someone else. There is no single road and no single destination — no mountaintop representing the ultimate refined palate. Those who shortcut to what is popular and prestigious just because it is popular and prestigious risk getting lost, turning their reading into a performative act or form of presenteeism, rather than something that truly nourishes them.

And in fact, I think I can answer the question “how do you know you’re on track?”, because that’s where criticism comes in. Its role shouldn’t be to direct us to the poetry we ought to be reading, but rather, to provide insights into the taste journeys of others and how they decide what is of value to them. Criticism guides — but indirectly.

Can you get it badly wrong? Well, you can read a succession of poems that do absolutely nothing for you, but then you know something is awry and will probably try to fix it. The more insidious problem — and here I do sound a note of resistance — is avoiding growth and change, sticking to mild variations on what you know and can immediately grasp for the very reason that these are unlikely to shift your thinking. This is a trap that I — and others, it seems — suspect some fans of simplistic confessional verse fall into, but it’s equally possible for advocates of ornate and avant-garde styles to settle in one spot and never move forward. Ultimately, it’s a hard thing to judge from outside, because each significant step of a journey takes time, and we all rightly linger on the poetry that satisfies us.

But stagnation is what’s suggested to me whenever someone speaks very negatively of ‘most poetry’, whatever justification they offer. They imagine they are maintaining a high standard; I think they are retreating from the exercise of taste altogether — retreating, that is, from using poetry as a source of connection, wisdom and wonder, and allowing it to become, for them, a static hiding place.

So that is what I caution against, along with, obviously enough, an excess of insincere or skin-deep admiration based on a vague sense of a poem’s (or poet’s) power. Outside of that, the task of finding the best poetry to read, and of avoiding the ‘bad’ stuff (including, of course, actually writing more of the ‘bad’ stuff) is one each person must undertake for themselves, with critical discourse as a strategy-sharing system. Relieve yourself of any concern about your choices being objectively right.

What I will say is that I’ve been actively interested in and messing around with games of thievery, trespass, intrusion and so on for a little while. Starting exactly when? I’m not sure. I’ve always liked thiefy characters: you can find a poem about Ishikawa Goemon in School of Forgery, a smuggler in Sandsnarl, and so on. I went to Mexico two years ago to deliver a conference paper entitled “‘Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!’: Simulated Trespass and Intrusion in Virtual Playgrounds”. The basic premise of this paper was that the appeal of trespass is to pull on a thread — to stress-test a system by experiencing first-hand the meaning of its boundaries, what it seeks to hide or apportion. Doing so gives us insights into whether those boundaries might stand to be drawn in some other, better way.

Of course, the consequences of such stress-testing in real life can be dire. I tried to illustrate this in the slides with the ending lines from Rebecca:

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

So we channel our impulses into the unreal spaces of simulational and fantasy media, where forbidden zones almost always contain something which has been unjustly kept from us.

Thieving is just an extension of this — it’s a socially destructive act because outside of a fictional context the victims are usually poor and innocent. But the romance of the thief is that they function as a redistribution mechanism, tipping the scales in the right direction, overturning established rules just enough for a more evolved moral logic to take hold. So given the chance to steal in games, or to root for outlaws in books and movies, we take it readily.

Oddly enough, I found myself touching on the same theme in a chapter I’ve contributed for a new edited collection, Crime Plays: Detective Fiction in Video Games — that is, even the detective archetype, once turned over to the control of the player via game media, becomes an instrument of indelicate intrusion, the better to experiment with changing the world.

So that’s one bit of work I’ve been up to. I’ve also been invited to deliver no less than three keynotes this year. At the end of the first, at Norwich University of the Arts’ Rhymeposium in March, I introduced a workshop exercise for making a simple ludokinetic poem. It involved taking a few cards or similarly sized sheets of paper and writing, on each one, a one-sentence description of a scene — metaphysical, naturally — and an instruction. The cards could then be mixed up and handed out to the player, acting as a kind of maze for them to traverse.

I took this idea for myself and mixed it up with a long-running burglary-themed game project called Hot Hot House. Below are images of some of the notes I made to myself:

By the time of the third keynote — which I’ll talk more about in a later post — I had put together a basic prototype, introducing this as an example of a labyrinth poem where the aim is to stay in the labyrinth as long as possible (the labyrinth as forbidden space). The basis of the game is Concentration — you must remember the cards you’ve turned over and come back to them in the right order. The act of placing cards and returning to them simulates that of infiltrating a mysterious, shifting mansion, poking your nose into rooms and hiding whenever you’re in danger of being spotted.

I tested it out with a few people at University of South Wales, Cardiff at the start of July, as part of the BDiGRA Annual Conference, adjusting some rules on the fly. Didn’t have time to print tokens so I used actual leftover change from various trips abroad to represent in-game money.

I have other half-developed games and poems with similar motifs to this, and am weighing up how I might approach a short monograph on the subject. I guess if I’m honest, part of my interest is because the feeling of being an intruder — of being, more specifically, an uninvited guest, taking from tables that were laid for others — has dogged me for much of the time I’ve spent trying to participate in literary and academic culture. Yeah, I know — me and every other bleeder. But rather than just marinate in the feeling of outsiderness, or use it as a kind of battering ram against those doors that are closed to me, I like the idea of embracing it as a role, and showing others how to play it.

Below are some Insta posters I made to go with it. The photograph of artificial eyes in metal sockets was taken at Hospital de Bonecas (the Dolls Hospital) in Lisbon. I was there over the Easter break — alarming to think that I just haven’t had the time to post anything substantial to this Substack since before then, but a long essay and several shorter posts are on their way.

1.

In the simplest terms, a bad poem is either (a) missing something fundamental or (b) possessed of something that offends a sensibility.

The problems with this understanding should be immediately apparent. What, after all, is truly fundamental to an artform which has gone through so many phases and fashions, evolved into so many sub-strains — where the contemporary critics of now-revered figures so often appear, in retrospect, to be foolishly fixated on long-discarded scruples? All attempts to identify the single essential technical quality that any poem must possess seem doomed to ridicule.

And what weight can we reliably place on the fact that we are, in one way or another, offended? I use the word ‘offended’ pointedly. There are those who would like to differentiate sharply between a purely aesthetic offence — a perceived fault in the artistry of a piece — and an offence of impropriety. For reasons I will go on to explore, this is not a viable distinction.

For now, though, I merely observe that while most people seem to agree that a tremendous quantity of bad poems exist, there is desperately little consensus on how one might go about identifying one.

2.

There are two opposing existential threats to any artform: on the one hand, “anything goes”; on the other, “hardly anything goes”.

In the first case, the definitional boundaries of what constitutes worthwhile examples of the form become so loose that it is no longer associated with any kind of skill or use of technique. Poets have some reason to fear this — the general public’s ability to differentiate between the work of an experienced practitioner and an absolute beginner (or even the last generation of LLMs’ instantaneous output) may be at an all-time low.

In the second case, the qualifying restrictions are either so abstruse or so lofty that almost no range or innovation is permitted, and the art form recedes into itself as it becomes ever more disconnected from people’s lives. (Poets have reason to fear this too).

Arguments about the quality of poems are frequently unproductive because one side views the other as representative of the “anything goes” camp, while the other consider their opponents to belong to the “hardly anything goes” faction. It is depressingly rare for a conversation to involve any substantial unravelling of the precise criteria anyone is using.

3.

I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Cochrane’s scathing review of David Harsent’s Skin in the latest issue of The Little Review. An extract:

Do you like it? Me neither. As a standalone piece, ‘Sub Rosa’ might have found some kind of pungent identity. But by this point, on page 143 of a 193-page book in which there are no standalone pieces, the reader has long been bludgeoned into despair …

It’s a relief when a critic cuts loose like this in response to a book that is elsewhere being spoken of in tones of strained awe. But let’s be honest: it’s trivially easy to adopt this pose, or something like it, with almost any poet or book, and appear discerning. Cochrane lends gravity to his judgement by including some measured analysis of the technical features of Harsent’s poem, but this too is within the reach of any talented English graduate. The positive effects of reading (or listening to) poetry are rarely, if ever, undeniable; it requires some exercise of the reader’s skill to access them — a politeness that may be silently withheld. At the same time, almost every poet will possess tics and habits that are liable to be irritating, while those they don’t can be accused of excruciating dullness.

Without casting any aspersions on Cochrane, then, (contributors to TLR are encouraged to be brief), no great powers of perception are required in order to accuse an Emperor of being naked. It may involve a certain degree of bravery if the poet or their friends have the means to exact revenge on you, but it does not automatically equate to the critic applying a higher-than-normal standard.

4.

The idea of “judging a poem on its own merits” is almost meaningless. A poem’s merits are inextricable from its context — or rather, the reader’s apprehension of that context. The same words in the same order have a different effect and meaning depending on whether they constitute, for example, (i) the work of an established poet reiterating or refining ideas they are known for originating, (ii) an account of or response to real-life events, (iii) an anonymous competition entry encountered after reading dozens of similarly worded poems, (iii) a case of cut-and-dried plagiarism, (iv) the newly uncovered jottings of Jeffrey Epstein, and so on.

Some of these contextual factors can be temporarily negated, or purposefully ignored by the reader, but not all of them. They are innumerable. Most are subtle, impossible to describe or account for. Where it is claimed that a poem is “judged on its own merits” we may generously assume that the person or organisation making the claim means to make an effort to ignore or negate contextual factors that might tip the scales too decisively one way or the other — for example by putting firmly out of mind any strong personal feelings toward an individual or their previous work.

Less generously, we may assume they mean to make no such effort, and considerate it sufficient that no individual factor will be consciously weighed. Our judgement will be fair, they assure us, because our notions of merit are so deeply instilled that we are not even aware where they come from. Which brings me onto:

5.

In general, people who claim their judgement of art is not influenced by politics or ideology are those with a desire to conceal the extent to which politics and ideology influence their judgement of art — very possibly from themselves. They may, with some justification, regard any judgement which is both knowingly and heavily informed by a stipulated political goal to be weak and narrow-minded. They are reluctant, therefore, to understand and express the ways their own ideological commitments steer their thinking, for fear of admitting a limitation they despise in others.

5.

One of the ways a conscious effort is made to scrub political (and other contextual) factors from the critical processes of those afraid of admitting to inherent partiality is by assessing a poem on the basis of similarity in form and feel to other well-respected poems. This is a sort of ideological money laundering operation; the reader/critic claims politics and personal favour never entered their mind, and further that the stature or antiquity of the poetry used as measuring stick puts it beyond politics. (The latter is a bad claim, of course, but certainly the more distant a poem is from a contemporary political milieu, the more work is involved in articulating how the two are connected.)

The secondary effect of this approach, conveniently, is to make the criteria for a good poem almost circular. A good poem is one that sits neatly alongside other good poems; a bad poem is one that deviates. This is an excellent entrenchment from which to open fire at all those who dare to put forward alternative criteria — criteria which might then be adopted by those less familiar with all the ‘good poems’. Which brings me onto:

6.

Power and authority are at stake when we talk about what makes a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ poem. This is what animates much of the discourse. Without power and authority, the critical judgement of poetry experts has no answer to the popular appeal of Insta-poems and other money-spinning media forms — they are reduced to customers reviewing niche products.

But power and authority is hard-won; genuinely illuminating, convincing evaluations of individual poems and books take time to muster. Meanwhile, there is the constant need to promote interest in those same poems and books, as well as related events.

So shortcuts are taken. Agreement among a small and insular group is presented as widespread consensus. Authority is extended far beyond its natural purview, as when a poet who is successful and well-liked among his coterie, but limited in range, makes pronouncements on the state of the whole scene. Bad poems need to be invented, and need to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the authoritative critic to have a function. What’s more, the criteria must remain somewhat hazy in order to avoid the average reader learning how to consistently apply it themselves. Periodic trenchant denunciations of work that, to the untrained eye, is remarkably similar in character to that which the same critic praises are a smart move.

By the same token, the real offence committed by those editors and activists who rule out work by avowed political reactionaries, or are overly interested in poets’ claims to membership of an oppressed group is that their criteria are too transparent. They make it too easy to jump through the hoops, and in so doing threaten to mortally wound the power of other editors and critics — which is wielded on the basis that they possess an exceptional capability when it comes to judging poems.

7.

The Worst Poets Club — a touring venture consisting of four best-selling ‘bad’ poets — is set to capitalise magnificently on the inability of the UK poetry community to reflect with much lucidity on its own processes of judgement, such that any criticism of a popular poet can be instantly recast as peevish snobbery. Rebecca Watts’ infamous 2018 article on one of these ‘bad’ poets, ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’, is notable in part because Watts was not in any way stepping out of her wheelhouse. She had been asked to review a book. The publisher of the book was well-known for applying, in its selection process, a stricter version of the very critical standards Watts brought to bear in her review. Her confusion was evident; why had Picador’s poetry editor, Don Paterson, entirely rowed back on the values he had previously both vociferously advocated and put into practice whilst in a position of tremendous influence? Paterson’s claim, in a response piece in The Guardian? “I changed my mind.” “I’m not paid to indulge the narrower of my own preferences,” he added.

Now retired from that role, Paterson is back to railing against the state of poetry, suggesting that much of it is nowhere near good enough to be published. This would seem to be an expression of, in his own words, the narrower of his own preferences. And yet, when sternly lecturing publications that wish to disassociate themselves entirely from the ‘gender critical’ movement, he condemns their “refusal to countenance any diversity of viewpoint”. He detests, he says, all ideologies. The effect of his own preferences, were they applied, would place far greater restrictions on diversity of viewpoint than the decisions of the editors he takes issue with. How is that not the true measure of ideological narrow-mindedness?

(NB. This article now has a sequel, ‘What is a ‘bad’ poem exactly? Part 2’.

Turns out an even pace is beyond me, so before I get to the stage where there’s far too much to sensibly recount, here’s a round-up of what’s happened event-wise since October, as well as a little of what’s round the corner.

Actually, let’s start at the end of September, just before the start of the teaching term, when I co-ran the last of three summer writing workshops for Cambridge Libraries. These were free, and all fully booked — different people at a different library each time. The last was themed around ‘Conjuring Place and Home’. A few simple exercises over an hour, aimed at beginners — one of the ways the university tries to serve the local community. (I mention it now partly to remind myself to set up something similar this year.)

On to October, and back to my favourite venue — ARU’s Recital Hall — for guest poets and the first Future Karaoke of the academic year. The theme for FK this time was The Major Arcana — inadvertently (my co-organiser Freya chose the theme) a repeat of a Roddy Lumsden poetry night from, oh, a billion or so years ago. Perhaps I should be borrowing from Roddy more liberally? I honestly can’t remember many of this themes at this stage: the Vulgar Tongue, food … wonders of the world?

Anyway, here are the posters to FK: The Major Arcana and the other early autumn event, Silence Speaks: Christian Thatcher and Alice Willitts.

Above: Tristram Fane Saunders reading on the theme of The World.

Alice and Christina, meanwhile, came up with a great format: rather than just performing a run of poems each, they sat and conversed as friends, one occasionally prompting the other to read something from a recent book which related to the topic of conversation. It made for a very natural, unhurried flow — the audience were sometimes included in the conversation, and a few students read at a mini open mic at the start of the evening, for which Alice and Christina made generous allowance.

That wasn’t it for October — I also ended up compering at one of Love Mill Road’s Poetry Showcase events at Thrive café (sadly, recently closed). The theme for my night was Transformation, so of course I dug out a handful of transforming robot figures from various eras to demonstrate to the audience — by way of a transition from one poet to the next, you understand. The last one I had in the bag was Solitaire, a 1987 Rock Lord made of translucent blue plastic, with moulded angular breasts and nipples (!! yeah). She transforms into a diamond that looks awfully like a human figure squatting and clasping their arms to their head.

(Extra info-nugget: in the 1986 animated film GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, Solitaire was voiced by Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the original run of Superman films).

Just a few days before the Transformation Poetry Showcase, I also ran — at the request of several students — my first online Twine workshop, focussed on building a simple ‘start the car’ puzzle out of words and code. Poster below, with the Showcase one (not designed by me) on the right:

November was less busy. I was invited to talk on a panel about ‘The Future of the Book’ at the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival, which was fun — even though it’s too huge a topic to cover in an hour and I felt like I was racing through my answer to every question far too frantically. Aldeburgh is a seaside town, and I arrived too late to see the earlier tranche of acts, so I warmed up by ordering a plate of bangers and mash and then exploring the beach:

I didn’t get much of a chance to take photos of the event itself, as we were very quickly shepherded onto the stage, then all asked to clear the hall at the end, but here’s the chair of the panel, Rishi Dastidar, who has a new book of poems out next month. I’m not sure who he’s talking to!

I also read some new material of my own at Ely’s Fenspeak night on the 19th — two sets of poems from two so-far unpublished books. A warm, long-running event series with a number of veteran performers as regulars.

Two December events, back at ARU: the Cambridge launch of Ten Poets Prowl the Seas in Search of Plunder and Ten Poets Spend the Night in a Vampire’s Castle, and then, for our Christmas party, the 14th Future Karaoke, themed around retro toys (no transformers this time).

We also incorporated another launch event into the evening: Ragged Band of Travellers: Writing from the Threshold of Dungeons and Dragons, which had started life as the 5th FK event two years ago. First non-Sidekick title I’ve edited, and the second book I’ve published with Calque Press after Poems Are Toys (And Toys Are Good For You).

Below I’ve substituted in the poster for the upcoming, London-based launch of the two 10 Poets books because frankly, it’s a lot better than the one I threw together last year:

Above: Candie Smellie reading ‘Dust Slayer 2: Carmella’s Lighthouse’ from Vampires, and Adam Crothers reading a piece inspired by He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

2026 has been quieter so far, but with my Cambridge Poetry Festival hat on, I co-ran an ekphrastic poetry workshop at the Fitzwilliam Museum on the 11th of this month. Once again fully booked, and tremendous fun.

Now for the upcoming.

Even more Future Karaokes are happening in March. This is the first time I’ve scheduled two at the same time: Ancient Weapons is part of Cambridge Festival, and being held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in the afternoon. I’m not sure what that time slot means for our usual crowd, so with that in mind (and because Jan/Feb have been a mad scramble to stay on top of things) we’re also doing In the Pink a couple of weeks earlier, in the evening.

As per the above poster, Kirsty and I are doing the London launch for Plunder and Vampires this coming Friday, with a slightly different selection of readers. Final two posters for you to take in:

Phew.

Join me next time as I sleep for an eternity.

Here is my third or fourth published version of an essay with this title, the eighteenth or nineteenth draft – three times as much of it on the cutting room floor. It used to be a tirade. It’s still too much of a sermon. It’s the imperfect expression of an analysis that informs (and is braided from) my understanding of all that’s going on about me, and it returns in its final paragraphs to poetry, since that’s what I write about most often.

To begin with (and to start with my conclusion, as it were), a list of very strong recommendations:

Search more widely. Look more closely. Look again at what you’ve set aside, what you thought commonplace. Cultivate some degree of suspicion toward whatever fits too comfortably, sits too easily (as if it were a bribe). Side-eye every simple law. Savour, and examine, your own distaste. Apply generosity – or, at the very least, curiosity – where you’re at first inclined to feel nothing much at all. Feel indifference, instead, to stature and fame. Keep expanding the range of what you contend with, attend to. Lean toward the overlooked. Lean away from the overexposed. Read what you don’t enjoy, as well as what you do. Read to be troubled, to be changed, to be shaken loose. Read to be reminded of how much wilderness is out there, and in you, and in the alien depths of other people. Read to make headway into that wilderness. Limit the degree to which you surround yourself with media and furniture that smooths it all over. Build yourself an outpost, not a bunker.

Now, as to the why:

One way of understanding our ongoing predicament is through Manuel Castells’ theory of decentralised versus centralised networks. Simply put: the modern, digitally-connected society can be diagrammed as a dense mesh, with each node linked to numerous other nodes. Information, ideas and value are distributed across the mesh, such that their flow is not easily controlled by any lone actor.

A traditional centralised or hierarchical society, in contrast, looks more like a series of exploding stars: nodes are connected to central, powerful hubs, which are in turn connected to even more central, even more powerful hubs (from patriarchs to churches, landowners and employers, to states, broadcasters, etc). The larger and more central the hub, the greater its control over information, ideas, value.

Two important things to note. Firstly, Castell is modelling the relationship between autonomous units: people, communities, organisations. But the nodes in these diagrams should also be envisaged as concepts, ideas and symbols that have taken on a life of their own. Participants in a society do not blindly follow the whims of people and organisations higher up the chain; they’re also loyal to shared internalised principles, traditions and habits of thought. For example, ‘the nation’ is arguably a more central, more powerful hub than ‘the state’. ‘God’, ‘human rights’ and ‘science’ are all mega-charismatic concepts; people cluster round them and categorise one another according to who follows what.

Second important thing to note: we are not really living in a decentralised network at all, but a chaotic hybrid of the two models. Not an earth-shattering revelation, I know (“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born”) but it’s useful to diagnose the problem in precisely this way: the more centralised and hierarchical the society, the greater the requirement for equilibrium across and between its various hubs. To the extent that equilibrium is shaken, conflict ensues, as different centres of influence vie for power.

This loss of balance is unavoidable. As a society grows, grows more diverse, mingles with other societies, discovers new physical and intellectual machinery, encounters more problems and requires more specialist knowledge, the chances of hierarchical equilibrium being maintained get ever less likely. “The centre cannot hold.” The decentralised network emerges not just as the result of advances in communication technology, but as the only viable alternative form of civilisation outside of a totalitarian state.

For many, this process feels like a great, continuous unravelling. The past, it seems, was somewhat coherent, orderly; the present is full of contradictions, and the future looks unfathomable. This is no recent development – here is Stephen Spender, in The Struggle of the Modern, 1963:

“From Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris and Arnold, to T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Years, Eliot, Lawrence and Leavis, there is the search for a nameable boojum or snark that can be held responsible for splitting wide apart the once fused being-created consciousness. The Renaissance, the puritan revolution, have all been named as villains. There runs through modern criticism the fantasy of a Second Fall of Man.”

It’s amusing to read this today, amidst a never-ending flurry of hare-brained treatises locating the downfall of Western civilisation somewhere in the last half-century. Clearly, the theory of a historical ‘wrong turn’ is comforting to some; the alternative is to accept that whatever end is coming has always been coming. Or, if we are prepared to put serious effort in, to make it a beginning, rather than an end.

Easier said than done, of course. Not only is there a practical need to retain some sort of centralised network – standardised tax and legal systems, national and regional governance and so on – but it’s also tough, psychologically, to do without the assurances a balanced hierarchical system gives you. Where is your place in the decentralised network? Who serves you, and whom do you serve? How do you categorise other people? What is it that unites us?

People’s attempts to answer these questions vary wildly and are often totally incompatible. In place of ideas like ‘the nation’ and ‘God’, which once served as the most central of all societal hubs, we have various woolly principles that excite a lot of support when named but (and increasingly) deepen conflict when used to adjudicate. Take ‘freedom of speech’, for example – it sounds appealing, and suggestive of the kind of bedrock principle all could agree on. In practice, though, there is insufficient consensus on what it means for it to function as any sort of social glue. ‘Basic decency’, ‘civility’, ‘justice’ – important concepts to debate, but none of them markers of commonality, or explanations of who we are.

Lacking ways to locate themselves in the broader panoply of their society, individuals are susceptible to the lure of the cult and the coterie, and of fantasy worlds: smaller, less unwieldy spaces in which they feel more secure in their purpose. Fandoms, followerdoms, fictions and games, clubs, sects and scenes of various types. These are also social hubs, of course, often with their own hierarchies, but their relationship to one another and to traditional institutions is often ambiguous, even vexed – a melange of counter-cultures, a jigsaw where every piece is from a different box.

Is that good? It can be. As well as offering temporary relief from the pressing question of where and how we otherwise fit in, these smaller networks can act as a sort of mental gymnasium, in which we exercise the very cognitive muscles we need to make sense of our wider surroundings, so that we grow wiser and more considerate.

But it can all go wrong in two ways. First, a minor cult or fantasy scene can become so fundamental to a person’s sense of belonging that they cannot contemplate its loss, its displacement, or even its evolution into something else. (See, for example, the reaction of male gamers to relatively tame feminist critique, and to the game industry’s ongoing pursuit of a more mainstream market. See also some of the darker manifestations of stan culture).

Secondly and perhaps more obviously, a cult can be a crucible in which a person’s entitlement and sense of disconnection from wider society is relentlessly fed.

This is where opportunists and power-hungry egoists enter the picture – and capital, of course. Like all drug-pushers, they exploit and feed a deepening cycle of pain. In their hands, the cult or fantasy is not a respite, nor a doorway to a richer understanding of other people, but an endlessly withheld promise of better things to come. Buy into it, goes the promise (whether with literal money, or devotion) and the whole world will be remade. You will now be at the centre of it. Whether that is because your new, expensive possessions will make you more confident and efficient, or because alien invaders will be repelled and proper roles and expectations reinforced, your pain will be excised. But only if you buy, buy, buy.

Now we have the only formula we need for resurgent fascism and other reactionary movements, as well as conspiracy theories, obsession-fed loneliness and frantic, self-destructive excess. The manosphere. Eugenics. Nativism. Internet Gaming Disorder. Incel culture. Lots more besides. Of course, all have other causes as well – but I would argue that a major driving force behind each of them is horror and rejection of the decentralised society, and the idea of being adrift within it, to the point where the normal socialising instinct becomes utterly warped.

Two questions, then: 1) What do we do about it?, and 2) Is the same malady also, as some would contend, an explanation for (and hence reason to dismiss) left-wing activism, and identity politics in particular?

I’m going to take the second of these first, because it touches on an important nuance, which is this: challenging the current state of society remains a legitimate enterprise. There are a vast number of problems to be solved and a large number for which no past iteration of society had anything close to a solution. The centralisation of pure power in a sprawlingly complex modern society is corrosive – particularly where there is no holding it to account, as in the case of massed wealth, authoritarian states and corporate thuggery. The failure of our political systems to adequately distribute wealth and opportunity exacerbates all problems, and further radicalises everyone in the camps I’ve listed above.

There’s nothing, therefore, inherently wrong in advocating for radical change. As George Bernard Shaw said, “All progress defends upon the unreasonable man.”

There is, however, a difference between doing so out of a sense of social responsibility, with due consideration to the needs of all members of a society – with little expectation, even, of direct personal benefit – and doing so as a form of self-aggrandisement, in order to be vindicated or to see one’s enemies vanquished. Reactionary/right-wing radicalism is almost entirely rooted in the latter. It flows from the conviction that there is a natural, non-arbitrary order that must be restored or permitted to take shape – usually something that revolves around patriarchs, churches and great men, with ‘Western culture’ or our old friend ‘God’ as unifying concept – and that in this natural order I, the right-wing radical, will get my due.

To test this hypothesis fully, it must destroy most of the culture that currently exists and brutalise or murder a lot of people. But according to its own moral logic, that’s fine – the victims are worthless in the soon-to-be-established scheme of things.

Even allowing for great calamities, sweeping political victories and mass murder, the right-wing radical will never see his dream come true – his existential crisis cannot be solved in this way. This means he will continue to fight and hate, and to be a perfect instrument of societal rot – one whom political conmen can rely on as a stepping stone to power.

Purveyors of identity politics are accused of being in much the same boat, except that they seek to invert traditional hierarchies and install different sacred certainties. And while it’s true – unavoidably so – that some of the individuals who undertake this kind of activism use it as a vehicle for a bottomless grievance, or are lesser opportunists, the ideas themselves are insufficiently grandiose for this to be endemic. They primarily concern shifts in language, organisational policy and moral posture – aims to which, as is frequently pointed out, it is trivially easy to pay lip service. Their effect is often characterised as insidious precisely because it’s so limited in scope.

Complaints against identity politics are voluble, nevertheless, because it’s a form of activism that increases the degree of complication and anxiety at surface level. People and organisations scramble to keep up with recommendations on the best pose to strike, which words and phrases to adopt and which to dump, who carries the most moral authority in any given situation, and so on. Each digs their heels in at different points, leading to acrimony, and to two sides of a relatively minor matter going at each other for years on end.

In other words, identity politics insistently draws attention to the fact that a decentralised society has to negotiate its terms with itself, and that all accords are temporary. Activists keep re-opening negotiations, sometimes re-opening wounds in the process. Where right-wing reactionism seeks to reforge absolute certainties, the left, it seems, means to contribute to the unravelling effect we all feel. (This is why, incidentally, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have become the unlikely poster boys for civilisation’s downfall in the eyes of the right-wing commentariat, since it is they who popularised what ought to be, by now, an entirely uncontroversial observation: that we are making it all up as we go.)

There isn’t space here to explore the exact extent to which identity politics is indicative of the left’s approach more generally, so I will simply make a tendentious claim: unlike conservatism and the far right, which are obsessed with the reinforcement or reimposition of cultural hierarchy, left-wing politics – broadly, and despite its tunnel vision in some areas – anticipates a future of constant flux. It emphasises struggle, protest and fuss-making because it does not envisage a point where we will again be able to trust some fatherly centre of power.

Which leads me back to my first question: what can we do to make that future less dangerous? What is to be done/isn’t being done already about the widespread toxic inter-alienation I’ve described above?

In an ideal world, we’d see more government intervention in the spread of inflammatory, cynical propaganda. First, however, we’d need governments who understand what inflammatory, cynical propaganda is, or who don’t actively promote it for their own ends. So let’s put that problem aside for now and think about what ordinary people can do, outside of direct political activism.

A lot of what I see proposed still amounts to some kind of re-centralisation. Not as hierarchical as the right envisages – more a sort of coming together. People talk over and over, for instance, about the importance of community – and while this sounds entirely right on its surface, it seems what they’re often envisaging is a freshly reimagined, powerfully attractive group identity.

I don’t think this can be magicked up. Any approach that is, in some sense, one of bringing stray lambs back into the fold is likely to fail, because we cannot agree what the fold ought to look like.

Similarly, a lot of hope seems to be placed in the idea of strong figureheads, role models and leaders emerging. Leadership of some kind is a necessity – anyone who has ever tried to decide anything as part of a large committee knows that. But a head can’t function without a body, and leaders and figureheads nearly always let us down, sooner or later.

So the way I see it is this: we need to get better at being a decentralised network.

What does that mean? It means we need to make an effort to get outside of the clubs, cults, sects, scenes, fandoms, followerdoms, games and fictions we most agreeably inhabit, and find ways to connect them up with others. Rather than simply tuning in to the frequencies we already think in, which are personally affirming – rather than armouring ourselves in these to weather the maelstrom of everything else – we ought to be habitually testing others, trying to find points of overlap, ways in which they rhyme.

This is, in a sense, to echo another famous statement, José Martí’s “The knowledge of different literatures frees one from the tyranny of a few” – but applied to more than literature.

It involves, I think, some degree of detaching ourselves from the centres of each of these little worlds – consciously working against their centripetal pull (their tyranny, if you will). That means paying less heed to the people, organisations and events that most powerfully define each scene. It means giving less thought to noteworthy figures and brands, to what everyone else in that particular social hub is talking about, and looking instead to the fringes of their orbit.

Yes, this is a way of saying “Try to stop fawning over famous people”. It’s also a way of saying “Try not to be a culture snob”.

Consider that our tendency to heap attention (and compassion) on the already-glutted all-too-often leads directly to abuses of power. How corrosive it is when people defend harmful acts because the perpetrator, whom they do not know, is somehow important to them.

Consider also that our lack of interest in, or warmth toward, those not gilded by success and adoration – especially when they belong to other clubs and scenes – is what really robs us of our sense of community. There’s great wisdom in “Love thy neighbour” as an edict, and we should be able to do so without need of a baseline of commonality. ‘Loving’, in this context, should mean being willing to value differences.

Consider, thirdly, that it’s better, as a matter of personal resilience, to be a member of many distinct, over-crossing realms of thought and interest, to have many different strands of identity – so that as and when one of these becomes less of a home, less of a good fit, you have others to take refuge in. We want to avoid being the gamer who turns on women for ‘ruining’ his hobby. Or the faded star who has nothing but bitter contempt for those who’ve taken his crown. Or even the sensitive millennial left bereft when their hero author is revealed as a monster. Nothing outside of our close personal relationships should be so central to our idea of who we are that we cannot let it go.

So we are aiming for tensile strength at two levels. A decentralised society is made up of many smaller societies. For it to resist tearing – for it to not be vulnerable to violent revolt from those who want to impose arbitrary order – its smaller parts should not just meet at their edges, but be messily, tightly, inextricably interwoven. Similarly, for an individual to have real durability – for them to be able to withstand their safe certainties being obliterated – they need to be suspended within a web of possible selves.

Or, as John Berger writes about Chaplin’s Tramp:

“Every time he falls, he gets back onto his feet as a new man. A new man who is both the same man and different. The secret of his buoyancy is his multiplicity. The same multiplicity enables him to hold on to his next hope, although he is used to his hopes being repeatedly shattered.”

Yes, this is contrary to some aspects of our nature. We like being followers. We like regulation, a sense of order. That’s why this still needs to be something of a sermon. It’s why ‘search more widely, look more closely’ has to be a command, a mantra.

The part of our nature that likes to grip the same hand-rail every day is failing us. It is ill-suited to our predicament. So we must try to become something better. As Jonathan Miller said in a debate with Enoch Powell in 1971, “Difficulties are in the nature of human co-existence (…) Social cooperation is a hard and difficult thing.” But it can be hard in a way that precedes expansion and enrichment of the mind, or hard in that we are just beating at the walls, asking for the guards to come in and flatten our enemies.

I echo what Miller went on to say: “What I ask for is … a sense of the variety of human existence and also an attention to the capacity of human beings to absorb each other’s differences.”

Part 2 (the much shorter part): Poetry

In my list of strong recommendations at the beginning, I should have included: Read lots of poetry. Writing and publishing a poem costs little in both time and physical resources – arguably less than any other artform – which means a fairly wide range of people earnestly attempt it at some point in their lives. Some percentage of those then work sufficiently hard at mastering the associated skills that what they produce can be said to bear more than a trace of their own uniqueness. To read across many poets is, therefore, to encounter many intimate perspectives and styles of thought.

But as poetry is also a kind of scene, it serves as an appropriate case study for me to end on – especially since the manner in which it’s avidly recommended, marketed and talked about all too often falls into one of the traps I’ve described above. What I mean by that is: poetry is simultaneously offered as a means of withdrawing deeper into one’s own world, and as a way of reconnecting to some inscrutable shared human essence which the poem documents. Neither framing is very helpful, either to us as a struggling society, or to poetry as an artform.

I won’t quote from specific promos or book blurbs. Instead I’ll try to summarise three of the general ways in which the value of a particular poem or set of poems is communicated: “Read this – it will touch your heart.” “Read this – its themes and ideas are universal.” “Read this – it’s a work of supreme and dazzling merit.”

Taking those promises in order, the first sells reaffirmation (and manipulation) of a person’s existing sympathies and fondnesses. So much already exists for this purpose, and poetry is not especially well-suited to the task. In fact, I’d argue that the persistent presence of this expectation is one of the reasons most readers don’t get on with the artform; little speaks to them directly, and little ever could, because of our increasingly distinctness from one another. Poetry is far better suited to capturing those distinctions; it challenges us to extend our sympathies and fondnesses, because its weirdness is the weirdness of others we don’t yet know or understand.

Then comes the next promise: “Read this – its themes and ideas are universal.” Similar objection: no, they aren’t. There are no universal themes and ideas, and encouraging a small number of readers to think that the point where their own perspective aligns with the poet’s represents something neutral, apolitical, primordial – above the petty disagreements of others – is only likely to make them more stubbornly closed off to other systems of understanding. Areas of commonality between the concerns of poet and individual reader, reader and reader, poet and poet are always likely to be numerous, and recognition of them may occasion revelatory joy, but this ought to be seen as a starting point, not the purpose of the exercise.

“Read this – it’s a work of supreme and dazzling merit” may just signal harmless enthusiasm. Such recommendations go awry insofar as they imply a universal scale of quality — positioning poets as literary darts players all aiming for the same spot on the dartboard. We should be very wary of this – often, a narrow aesthetic criterion is simply a codification of a person’s taste, and their taste exists solely to avoid tangling with the unfamiliar. In other words, it becomes just another way of affirming a static perspective – “I like it because it’s good” as a front for “It’s good because I like it.”

On top of that, this particular promise is usually an attempt to set the poet on a pedestal – to recommend them as grand, leaderly figure, as cultural lynchpin. So too is it often made in the same breath as a disavowal of most of the rest of the poetry available and/or a lament that poetry has lost or abandoned its cultural centrality. The overall strategy, then, is another weak protestation against the decentralised society and attempt to restore a charismatic hub.

We can see the negative effect of this in the numbers of people (many, in my experience) who dismiss nearly all contemporary poetry on the basis that it doesn’t adhere to the same arbitrary rules as poetry from 150 years ago. What they mistake for exacting standards is actually a peculiarity of taste that cuts them off from a substantial vein of up-to-date intelligence. They are convinced great poetry is of importance but have closed their minds to most of the forms it might take – like those who, awaiting the Second Coming of Christ, will accept nothing less than a halo’d man in tunic and beard.

We see a further manifestation of the effect of each of these sales strategies in recent research showing that in a blind test, people prefer A.I. poetry to work by even long-canonised poets – deeming the A.I. pieces to be warmer, more ‘human’, more formally competent and fuller of feeling. To be clear, they still didn’t like the A.I. poems enough to want to read more, but the A.I. achieved its goal of showing them something comfortingly familiar – a version of other human beings’ ways of thinking and meaning that reflected their own limitations of imagination back at them.

That is, to my mind, a strong indicator of how we might lose the battle: by choosing that which makes immediate, vague sense over that which is harder to fathom but more truthfully represents the tremendous variation in personhood among our communities.

These sales strategies also cause strife and division within the poetry scene itself. It’s not unusual now to see even relatively successful poets bemoan slipping standards – or even, in the manner of Carlyle et al, describe some kind of great recent catastrophe – without any evidence but the fact that increasing numbers of poems do not speak directly to their heart, or conform to the criteria they developed to codify their increasingly out-of-touch tastes. For all that it teems with articulate writers, the scene struggles to have meaningful conversations with itself, falling instead into rhythms of contestation: who is or ought to be ‘winning’, etc.

And unfortunately, because these strategies are still thought to work, the range of contemporary poetry which is pushed hardest on the public is not very representative – often limited, in fact, to work that deals in already emotive subject matter and relies chiefly on this for impact. What’s missing is widespread understanding of the fact that for reading to contribute to any kind of societal closeness, it must involve work on the part of both writer and reader, that the distance cannot be closed from one direction only. In its place is the much more troubling idea that our reading, like our other pursuits, ought to reassure us that we belong to a core (a corps, even) of right-thinking people.

So there is my case study. Poetry is an artform that, to my mind, speaks to our sincere efforts to function as a decentralised network – to find other ways to connect to one another, and to trust one another, without the need of an absolute common denominator or charismatic centre. But because old habits die hard, it remains a frustratingly marginal art, beset by thoughtless factionalism, dressed up as something it isn’t.

I see this as indicative of a general pattern: reason to believe we are becoming something better, on the one hand; on the other, reason to think we’ll keep clawing at the ghosts of centralised networks until we come apart at the seams. So I make my list of recommendations, as found at the beginning of this essay, to myself and to you, in the hope of lending my shoulder to the former. Happy New Year.

Link to full ludokinetic poem

It’s a shame we can’t embed playable text into Substack, isn’t it?

Also a shame that I didn’t have time to make a new version of Ice Dive, as I’d been planning to. This version is a little buggy, the mechanics are unbalanced and many of the lines need further shaping and shuffling.

But I wanted to end the advent calendar on a ludokinetic poem and this is the only ice-themed one I have — even counting the many pieces sitting around in various states of completion in the workshop. It was originally devised so as to be playable over a Zoom call — the player merely has to shout “Stop!” when they want to come up for air, whereupon I (the person in control of the game) click once to bring them back to the surface.

For what it’s worth, it is possible to finish the game, collecting all seven pieces of the ‘something’ it is you’re collecting. I’ve only managed it once, though.

      Powerful magician, this Or.
Eyes? White stones. The mountain made him.
The mountain, even from here, is the source
of both his power and his heavy melancholy.

      He glows with it — ivory,
white-blonde, bone, moonlight. His eelish skin
is a gauze of stars. As snow and ice blacken
on and about the roads, sightings of him increase,
 
      coasting amongst cars, shops, 
a moving thicket of wild spells. The wind keeps
a claw on his hat brim. The doings of people,
as told by the papers, make a slipknot of his stomach.

      He stands, a silvery hunk
of asteroid, still afire from entering our atmosphere.
His heart is a bowl overflowing with liquid metal.
His lips are set hard enough to mint coins.

      Something escapes them,
quite suddenly, and he's skating atop a beam, already
miles away, a sort of stain on the eye — fainter than
a scarecrow in a blizzard, the ghost of a summer swift.

Thra-Koom! was an e-pamphlet published 15 years ago by Silkworms Ink.

It’s a short sequence of superhero poems — comic-book-based, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t really made its appearance yet. For this little advent calendar, I should arguably have revived ‘Iceman’ — but I’m not sure that poem has a lot of heart or depth to it, and I’m not quite as invested in Iceman as I am in the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer, of course, appeared in this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, portrayed by Juliet Garner, in a mildly controversial (though ultimately inconsequential) bit of casting. A male version, played by Doug Jones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and other monster movies) appeared in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — Jones did a better job of brooding philosophically, aided by Laurence Fishburne’s baritone voiceover, but neither portrayal really connected with the version of the character I’ve found most affecting, which is rooted in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s run of Silver Surfer comics from 1968 to 1970. Here, the Surfer is almost wretchedly noble and introspective, frequently shown in poses of contorted anguish as he faces godly adversaries, existential crises and the self-destructive stupidity of vicious men.

“In every voice … in every human heart … a smouldering hostility!” he laments, squatting on a rooftop while Spiderman tries to pick a fight with him. The messaging is fairly crude — these are comics for children, after all — but it remains refreshing, even today, to read about a superhero who is made vulnerable, even driven to despair, by his sensitivity to man-made horror.

Why is this version of the poem called ‘Or, from the Mountain’? I suppose because I wanted to revise it into something with more of a folk flavour. What if, rather than being coated in silver, the character had an association with orichalcum, the mythical metal referred to in Ancient Greek texts (from ὄρο / óros / mountain and χαλκό / khalkós / copper)? The mountain as a source of power, rather than the space god Galactus, is also a little more grounded.

The broad-shouldered scout squats –
portable radar squared away
beneath a ripped, rumpled
poncho – fresh snow
bunched in his eyebrows.

This is from a sequence called ‘The War Between the Meadow and the Garden’.

It’s got something of the Batrachomyomachia about it (also referenced in the only podcast episode I’ve ever uploaded to Substack) and emerged from my wanting to do something with a bunch of tiny poems I’d written for Christmas cards some years back. (Long-term readers will recall that Unravelanche also started as Christmas card poems). Since I’m still working on it, and since I’m nearly at the bottom of the bag in terms of previously published ice-themed poems, I thought I’d use the advent calendar as an excuse to add one more soldier to the crew.

It’s eight years since we published Aquanauts.

If I won the lottery, one of the things I would pour money into is revisiting Sidekick collections like this one and building new, luxurious expanded editions. Aquanauts was sprawling in a sense — it moved from ponds to deep-sea creatures — but there was so much more it could have covered, had we the time and money to bring on board more contributors, or commission the ones we had to do more work. I would have loved a whole section on the arctic.

“As we passed back along that trail which none had seen before or would ever see again, certain reflections intruded themselves.”
	— Robert F. Peary


A mold                             has grown                       the tent
                    of snow                               inside
A lock                               is tucked                         your ear


                      last night                          was on
And just                            the snow                        its leash 
                      like you                         has slipped


The map                             is torn                           and skin
                      you wove                         to snow
the way                             returned                           again


                     the stove                          the scrim
so light                               against                           of snow 
                     can claw                           the gaze

This poem probably doesn’t look right on your mobile device.

You might have to try landscape mode. If any of the lines are broken, it’s unlikely to make sense. Sorry about that — I should probably have uploaded it as an image. Apologies, also, for it being six days late, if you were actually following this as a 10-day advent calendar! As long as I can manage ten within the normal 24-day period, we should be fine, right?

Dick Higgins calls this form ‘leonine verse’ in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, but I can’t find reference to it anywhere else. In fact, Wikipedia has an entry for ‘leonine verse’ that describes a totally different form. Whatever you care to call this, it looks more complicated than it is — each stanza is really a couplet, but the second and fourth (or, alternately, the first, third and fifth) metrical foot of each line in each couplet is identical. These are placed in a third line that sits between them and is read twice, once as part of the first line, once as part of the second. Effectively, the lines are woven together.

Also, if you read it across diagonally from just inside the top left corner, it goes snow, snow, snow, snow.

The blizzard comes on
and the cave-in comes on
and the landslide comes on
and the avalanche too.

A whistling that freezes more deeply
the spines of icicles
goes on and on like a siren.

Out of the fog and the thunder
and the smoke and my shadow
a figure as pale as milk comes tottering, sloshing
staggering.

It's me. Me but a sliver
shed from the iceberg's shoulder
as it groans toward some future.

This is part of a sequence called ‘Second-Hand Kite Feathers’, all but one of which is genuinely derived from the Japanese.

I can’t speak or write Japanese, but using a combination of Google Translate, Wiktionary and existing English versions (in this case Robert Pulvers’ translation from Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems of Kenji Miyazawa), I sometimes write down versions of Japanese poems in English. I published a few in School of Forgery because the underlying theme of the book was ‘the volatile relationship between fakery and invention’.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” goes the well-worn Eliot quote. It continues: “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But isn’t the defaced object automatically made different? Did he mean that it should no longer bear any resemblance to what it once was? That is has to have been pointed to a new purpose? One thing I like about remakes and readjustments — the principle of them (something which seems to occupy film-makers more than poets) — is how they make it seem as if the paint is not yet dry, as if nothing is really finished.

This is a stereogram poem.

The form has not taken off in any big way as far as I know, in part because hardly anyone, it seems, is able to read them. It takes me some effort every time I test it. As with conventional stereograms, the trick is to cross or unfocus your eyes, or start with the screen close to your face before drawing away, until one set of words stands out from the rest. In this case, you’re looking for a narrow strip just left of centre.

In God’s name, why? Well, it ought to have something to do with the meaning of the poem, of course, and for that reason my only examples of the form are what you see here (where the business of reading the poem is supposed to mimic the act of squinting through a snowstorm, trying to make out a distant object) and a set of three ‘masks’, such that holding the page up to your face simulates putting the mask on. You can read those in Look Again: A Book of Hidden Messages, under a pseudonym.

‘Undoing’. The ice pilot thinks this an odd term for the end. As if we were each a single, awkward knot tied in the mooring line of a balloon, perhaps. So that when we expire, we release something that is not ourselves.

She has come far enough, she supposes, to be somewhere near the core of it. Deep into a wing at least. Her supply of plates is running low – but the noise is much diminished. The library has howled and howled at her through dinners, report-writing, nights on research and leisure vessels. Now its voice is a gentle croon.

I wonder what sense this makes, set by itself.

Unravelanche is really a very short story divided into prose poems, interrupted by snowy collages. But it’s standard practice in literary writing these days to present extracts from other works, shorn of context, and I’ve found I rather like doing it. I’m a little addicted to it, in fact. So now I’ve done it to myself.

Always plunged, not swung as with the sickle
or ice-axe, and never by lackeys
but by oneself, pommel-deep into the silk
centre or through a window in the skull.

Notably, it is the best of all weapons to slake
a thirst for the mingling of certain colours,
namely Berrymush, Rose Petal, Alaska.
Favoured by tatter-hearted, fog-headed killers.

At one point, we were planning a Sidekick title called A-Z of Weapons.

This may have been what I had in mind when I wrote this, since it reads as a brief entry in a pocket directory. Or I might have been remembering an account of the murder of Trotsky from an old Eagle annual. Likely I was browsing Observer’s Books at the time as well. It’s an exercise in fuzzy rhyme — a term Andrew Osborn uses to describe a technique deployed repeatedly by Paul Muldoon, where roughly the same group of consonants is repeated in a different order.

Actually, I’ve formularised this much more rigidly than Osborn — Muldoon’s rhymes are often very fuzzy indeed, to the point of challenging readers to pick out any kind of marked similarity of sound. I don’t find this as satisfying as Muldoon’s many avid fans seem to; I was much more taken with the idea of trying to find as many words and short phrases as possible that use the same set of consonant phonemes in a slightly different order. It’s a variant of the anagram-rhyme technique I picked up off Roddy Lumsden and used in ‘Mustard’ — probably my most successful poem in terms of reach.

Of course, it’s hard to get it exactly right. ‘Lackeys’, ‘killers’ and ‘colours’ end in a /z/ rather than an /s/. I like the movement from ‘silk’ to ‘skull’ to ‘slake’ though, especially as it’s a sort of imitation of the noise of dripping water.

Come to think of it, at the time of writing, I was playing a lot of Team Fortress 2, a game in which you can play a balaclava’d spy armed with a ‘spy-cicle’. When you use this to stab a member of the enemy team in the back, it instantly transforms them into an ice statue, back arched in pain.

The saddest thing of all
is the scarecrow, a lonely bird,
snow blowing in through broken windows.
In the first sunlight: three children
who circle their terrible father,
the moon is his arms a modest lamp.
Oh Gorōbei, Gorōbei, Gorōbei, Gorōbei.

This is actually from a set of seven seven-line poems, one for each of the samurai in Akira Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai.

Each is a sort of portrait (or ‘lyric golem’) of the character in question, collaged from the contents of seven separate books: Seven Samurai by Joan Mellen (a study of the film); Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, translated by Jay Rubin; Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut; Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber; The Annotated Thursday, a version of The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, annotated by Martin Gardner; The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, translated by Geoffrey Brownas and Anthony Thwaite; and Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage 1780-1830 by C. Andrew Gerstle.

Gorōbei is my favourite character in the film and the second to die.

Strike a Light

Tell me:

which would you like to be buried alive in?

1. Gunpowder.  2. Treason.  3. Plot.

And which of your daughters might be sent to haul the beast in?

1. Gunpowder.  2. Treason.  3. Plot.

And what do you stow
in that jar
                                       in the kitchen?

1. Gunpowder.  2. Treason.  3. Plot.

And how would you transcribe
                                    the sound
                                    of your engine?

1. Gunpowder.  2. Treason.  3. Plot.

Three score barrels laid below (gunpowder, gunpowder)
but below what? (plot, plot, treason, plot)
What is living in the slow, slow
ache                      there
that cannot be touched? (treason, gunpowder, plot and treason)

                                            Go! If you must

with burning lantern

                                        blackened match.

Now, I’m not sure this is very appropriate to the celebratory mood.

It’s a spare, cruel little thing, interrogatory in tone — though the poor conspirator is released at the end. Threats are made, and it’s clear the speaker will only accept a certain kind of answer, that they see everything a certain way. Those three familiar words are intended to be repeated and recontextualised until they’re just sounds and mutterings. So much for the revolution! Its weapons are turned against it, then turned into abstractions. The heart may still be full of fire, but the instrument, all too often, is reduced to a damp wick.

I think that’s what I was going for anyway.

Why not a simple author bio? I have that too, but since I increasingly view my editing and publishing work as deeply integrated with my own writing, and since I find a need to repeatedly explain to myself what exactly I’m doing and why (the borrowed accounts of others just don’t cut it), a short essay, from the heart, is the way to go. A fair stab at summarising the underlying logic to two decades of feeling alternately hopeful, energised, enthusiastic, furious, anxious, vulnerable, divided, determined and zealous about poetry and its possibilities.

So here it is. You can also read it with hover-over asides and links to existing work here or just continue onward for the plain-text version.

The Amalgamist’s Workshop

I call my website ‘Various Toys’. I named the accompanying blog ‘Share Your Toys’. I titled a (slightly) ranty little pamphlet Poems Are Toys (and Toys Are Good For You). Why toys? What’s that got to do with amalgamism? What is amalgamism? Who am I?

Let’s start with my name. ‘Jon Stone’ sounds, to me, extremely ordinary. It’s got a dull internal echo, like something dropped into a well, and I’m at least the fifth or sixth writer to have it, not counting the volcanologist or the Independent journalist. I should go by something else, if I want to, as they say, make a name for myself. Yet the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’d prefer not to. Names are useful for identifying who or what you’re talking about, but when it comes to the arts, they already have a tendency to take up too much space. “Who are your influences?” “Who are the best writers?” “Who are you reading at the moment?” “Who will be remembered, a hundred years from now?”

Who cares? What I like best about writing – and reading, for the matter – is being able to lose myself in a text, like a bug burrowing into fruit. When I write, I become self-contradictory, diffuse – not whole. Not amplified. So far, most of the books I’ve written for, or been involved in bringing to publication, have been multi-author anthologies. Sometimes I’m a contributor, sometimes a co-editor. The latest of these don’t even have my name on the front or the spine or in the contents.

In my few solo titles, meanwhile, there’s copious re-use of other writers’ compositions – in collage, mistranslation and so on. In currently-planned future solo titles, there’s even more of this stuff.

I also think readers should see themselves as actively, imaginatively involved in what they read – even partly responsible for what they get out of it. That being the case, some of those aforementioned anthologies include blank pages, with accompanying suggestions as to how they might be filled. Others are put forward as hybrids of poetry and puzzle book, or poetry and game-book. My academic research began with ‘poetry games’ and ‘video game poetry’, and led to my coming up with a fresh term for the kind of poem which incorporates the reader into its circuitry, implicating them in action and outcome.

The corollary of this is that as a writer, it seems I’m avoiding responsibility for the things I make. Unwilling to ‘say’ anything. Reluctant to produce anything nice and straightforward. I try sometimes; I can manage the odd ‘normal’ poem, but the books always ends up as some kind of mutant text. I always have to go a little bit Dr. Moreau.

I think I know why. It’s the same reason I’ve expanded, less than wisely, into the odd polemic, the odd chunk of argumentative criticism, the odd piece like this. Same reason, too, that I’ve never gone in for the kind of full-throated cheerleading that befits a writer on the fringes looking to make friends.

And it’s to do with why I write poetry. I didn’t always. Looking through my folders of juvenilia, it’s clear I originally meant to publish stories and games. Prose, comic strips, game design concepts — loads of it, hashed out in notebooks and on primitive word processors. Sci-fi, fantasy, martial arts stuff. Same as what I read, watched and played.

I started reading poetry from the age of 18, when I at last came to appreciate that a poem was part work of literature, part physical object. A book of poems, I told myself, is like a drawer-full of machine-parts, or a sticker album, or a jigsaw box – you can pick through it. Different pieces do different things when you put them together in different ways.

When I began writing poems, I discovered a whole other appeal. For someone who thought of themselves as shy, inexpressive and alienated, poetry seemed to offer an opportunity for low-key exhibitionism. I could use it to expose the turmoil of the inner life, show off my bruises on the page. And I could play-act – test new versions of myself, the better to formulate a public persona that was commanding, alluring, endlessly sympathetic.

After all, isn’t this what so much successful art amounts to: the societal equivalent of a giant mecha suit, amping up its author’s presence and power to superhuman levels, simultaneously unleashing and cocooning them? Especially so in the case of poetry, where the public knows the personality (flamboyant Byron! Sensual Keats! Intense Plath!) better than the work.

This romance was short-lived. Soon, I’d surrounded myself with others who had the same sort of thing in mind — and many of them were very, very serious about it. Some were serious to the point of being, I felt, quite abrasively egotistical. But even when I was among those who weren’t, the formulation made little sense. We couldn’t all be superhuman misfits, could we? Not every poetry book can be a trailblazing miracle, erupting onto a stagnant landscape, can it?

Yet this is what the poetry publicity machine proclaimed to its tiny-but-enthusiastic audience, over and over. Where there were claims to greater scrupulousness — more discerning taste — it all too often amounted to factionalism and favouritism. Poets and poetry critics were terrible, it seemed, at articulating a coherent, consistent critical standard, individually or collectively. If you hoped to be thought of as a rising star, your best bet was a deepening network of influential friends, and/or an adherence to a style and philosophy your target audience found reassuringly familiar.

That’s not to say I disliked other poets or their work. Far from it. It seemed to me this whole arrangement ill-served them, and that there must be a better way to frame the value of poetry — the poetry that people are writing now, today, in copious quantities — than making endless competing claims for some breath-taking feat of insight, sensitivity or wit. A way of framing it that makes a virtue of the numbers of poets actively writing, and the dizzying variety of modes and aesthetics.

What it comes down to, I decided, is that poetry is a combinatorial art. A poem puts different and similar things alongside one another, in highly concentrated fashion, through spatial arrangement, metaphor, intertextual referencing. The effect is cumulative, connective, cross-pollinating. Mud is trodden from one field to another. This thing and that thing, hooked up, gathered into the same apron.

It’s anti-hierarchical. It’s lubricating. It’s freeing. So often in a poem, the everyday struggle is equated with the heroic, the vulgar married to the refined, the consequential paired with the peripheral. And we are in dire need of such conceptual fluidity, because the world is, in so many ways, dangerously arthritic. If we value truth – if we mean to uncover more of it, to seek as-yet-unthought-of solutions to pressing dilemmas – we need to continually experiment with glimpses of wildly different orders.

Unfortunately, this feature of poetry does not sit comfortably alongside some of the more rigid precepts governing the artform, principle among which is the role of sensibility – the expectation that a poem, however mysterious, is primarily an emotional or perceptive response to the author’s first-hand experiences. This, it seems to me, is one of the instruments by which poetry is put under the thumb of conservative gatekeepers. If the poet can only testify to their own experiences, then they can be judged and categorised according to those experiences. Hence there are topics of poems which are codified as inherently virtuous because they relate to civic duties (parenthood, filial piety, mourning) while others have cachet due to their association with wealth and leisure (nature walks, travel, gardening).

The elitist nature of such standards hsas been thoroughly criticised, of course. As a result, there have been well-meaning attempts to recognise other kinds of experiences – chiefly those associated with oppression – as worthy of a place in the hierarchy. But it’s the retention of sensibility as a lens that does most of the stifling.

Combinatorial agitation is a much more democratic prospect, riddled as it is with possibility, with openings. Not that it can’t also be subject to a constraining orderliness — where a poem’s nods and references become a way of establishing that the poet moves in respectable circles, for example, or where its uses of fragments of literary canon and mythology are meant and received as an act of deference, a salute to the general.

But where poetry escapes this tendency toward parochial self-regard and cosy traditionalism, it has tremendous capacity to synthesise and interrupt other linguistic frequencies. It can remix almost anything, and — in large enough quantities — act as a massive cultural laboratory.

To the extent poems amalgamate material in this way, are engaged in radical recombination, they should be regarded as sites of distributed autonomy, activity and enmeshment, composed of parts that both writer and reader test and turn over, collect and calibrate, modify and personalise. This means they should be played, and played with, very liberally — not regarded chiefly as a discrete performance or speech act by the poet, but as a node in an ongoing, turbulent, multilinear conversation.

Having come to this conclusion — or something like it (it’s been hard to find a way of expressing it succinctly) — I’ve found that most of the things I choose to make in some way embody it. They emphasise the combinatorial, collaborative potential of all writing by being, conspicuously, not entirely (or at all) my own, not entirely any one thing, and sometimes not entirely complete.

I eventually settled on ‘amalgamism’ as the term which best encapsulates this emphasis. If all poetry amalgamates to some extent, then to say that something is positively amalgamatic conveys that it is pushing this principle beyond the norm.

To characterise poems as ‘toys’, meanwhile, is to suggest (in what I hope is a friendly way) that the reader is also part of the amalgamatic process – that a poem is something to get involved with, not just observe or absorb. “Here is a toy. Do something with it. We learn through play.”

And there it is: the best explanation I can give for how and why I’ve reached this point. It doesn’t mean that I think of my writing as having little to do with me, or don’t recognise it as the result of my effort – I am, after all, exerting some kind of will by joining things together (words, stanzas, poems, pages, other people’s poems). But to consider myself now to be some kind of great artist in the making — to want to be recognised as any kind of figure, with the poetry acting as an extension of myself — would be to go against my reasons for making it. I want to be in my workshop, one part of a global megalab, busily reconfiguring what I know into what I might yet come to know, drawing in and on as many others as I can make room for. I want to disrupt the boundaries between myself and those others — what each of us sees and feels, so that they might be better aligned.

And, you know, maybe pick up some readers, and a bit of funding, along the way.