#harry man

[moonlightsheith]

Idc about other love triangle relationships than harry styles/niall horan/shawn mendes

[gojonstonego]

CONTROL ROOM, GameCity, Interactive Poetry

I made ‘Wounding Blisses’, an interactive poem/analogue fighting game, for CONTROL ROOM, an event I co-organised with Abigail Parry for the GameCity festival in Nottingham.

Before I expand on that short paragraph, a little personal history: between the ages of 12 and 15 (estimated) I wrote and drew detailed plans for a number of different games in the style of Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, One Must Fall, Body Blows and so on, some of which I fully intended to send on to game developers. Content-wise, my efforts were diligently derivative - to the point where the female characters flashed their underwear while performing special moves and one outline bore the title 'Fatal Klash' - but I was remarkably prescient in one respect: I proposed that these games utilise the same technology as 3D cinema and television, so that the fighters seemed to project out of the TV screen.

I only mention this by way of noting that ‘Wounding Blisses’ is a sort of return to the genre after a 17-year break.

The subtitle to the CONTROL ROOM event was 'Poetry Micro Arcade', the broad concept being that festival attendees would 'play' the poems individually, like they might an arcade machine, and we'd have 'em queueing all round the block to figuratively plug their change into the slots. There were four interactive pieces in total, each manned by a different poet. Abby debuted the beta version of her digital riddle-poem 'Room Escape'. Made using the Twine engine, it’s a cross between a Muldoonian textual maze and a Myst-style puzzle box. There’s a particularly clever sequence where the player must turn the ‘lights’ in the game on and off, inverting both the text and the page/screen in order to progressively reveal more words, in a way that’s reminiscent of how the visual echo of a light filament gives the impression of floating symbols in a dark room.

Harry Man came up with 'Jetpack', an input-generated poem based on the 1983 game of the same name. Players re-arrange a kind of countdown sequence in order to create their poem and are then entered into a high score table.

Abi Palmer revived 'The Alchemist', a piece which supplements a player-chosen elemental poem with contrasting sensory stimulus - like the smoke from a blown-out match, or water being poured over the knuckles and wrists.

Then there was 'Wounding Blisses'. The title is from a line in the Earl of Rochester's 'My Dear Mistress has a Heart'. Players pick from a roster of historical/mythical characters who came to ruin through affairs of the heart, including General Revanche (Georges Ernest Boulanger) and Phaedra. An opponent is then picked, followed by a stage (one of five abandoned, wrecked or desolate places from around the world), before the player and the game-master (me) take turns reading lines to each other that describe the course of the battle, in any order. The concluding lines are then picked from a random red or purple envelope.

In short, it's designed (a) so that there are hundreds of possible variations of the poem, (b) so that the performance is an exchange, with both participants reading aloud, and (c) to mimic the structure of rounds in a physical dust-up, but with a surprise ending.

I came away from CONTROL ROOM feeling all evangelical about the potency of interactive performance poetry as compared to the usual stand-up-and-talk poetry reading. Because it involved so much repetition on my part, the words gained a kind of weight as the evening wore on - that is, the poem began to feel more real, more physical, even though it was constantly changing. And whereas I've always struggled, when reading from a stage, to get a lock on what the audience is thinking, it's very easy in a one-to-one performance to make that connection, and therefore to hold someone's attention.

I also really enjoyed it.

Feedback was largely positive, with several people coming over to my table saying, "I've been told I've got to play this." This was a non-poetry audience who were being invited to listen to and recite heroic couplets, senryū, unrhymed tercets and other units of verse - there was no guarantee they would be particularly receptive to it. Younger players seemed the most unconvinced, partly because the twist ending to the poem is always that no one wins. I guess that's what ultimately makes it a poem apeing a game more than a game with poetic elements.

More of this, I think, and about a decade after it catches on someone might even get a Ted Hughes Award for it.

[dancepoetry]

Day Eight // No Landing // Poem Sketches

Target Practice

The gun husbandry of cleaning and turning, the silk charge

three of the gun crew will stretcher to the muzzle.

In the village pub, “Needles in Mist” is coming off the wall 

down comes the dartboard, and the sign for the gents.

The fuze bearer’s lanyard weighs a halfpenny or less,

he can tug the line, clean as umpire’s leg bye.

Down in the lane, they’re ready for action, 

there’s paper in the windows, the parish bell tied to

Number 3 is hoisting the tackle and removing the rammer

the gunnery sergeant is bringing the black bucket of water.

At C L Knight and Son, they usher the terriers to the back

of the shop, hang the sign on the door, “Open after the bang.”

Number 7 is inserting the tail of the fuze into the eyebolt, 

calling all clear, Number 8 wheels the cartridge to the barrel.

Tilting in time, Lenny and Mikey let their crabs scuttle down

the uneven shingle, one hesitates, a bright slick ariel of claw.

Trailing right, the 360 kilo bullet is turned with a coil, 

until the brass aligns then 4 checks the vent server’s in place.

Out on the Solent two drenched men, lift the target plate

its freshly painted chess board colours are tacky to the touch.

The pocketwatch homework shows the shell is home and on time

earplugs in, the fuze is pulled, all stand away, and a sparkle

splits the cobalt flash as the gun kicks, like a sleeping man

finding the end of a labyrinth, and the plate ducks into the thrash.

The gun vents, the lighthouse panes crickle, the mantlets swing 

in the wind, the terriers shiver, the men salute.

[dancepoetry]

Today we explored the castle’s keep, looking at these elements of keeping a close eye, of defence and remaining primed and unseen and of some of the frustration there must have been. In Mei Mei Berssenbrugge’s book, ‘Empathy’, written in collaboration with the choreographer Theodora Yoshikami for the Morita Dance Company she describes movement in literal terms, pulling down the studio walls and creating her own context for the action in the studio,  “When she turns, the ice she has been standing on is changing into foam...a delicate glittering accent.” Breaking down the walls of the body, what remains?

[dancepoetry]

No Landing // Poem Notes // 1

No Landing // Notes /// And before 1997 and in plain sight, the whale road watcher 

drove acetylene light to skip the gap and pierce the eye of the Needles. 

  And here and now, three towers stand so the spit will

grow a samphire line of yellow into the marshes, 

  and electrification has brought such even spaces to halogen 

pinning back the horizons with two unrevolving rays

  penning a clear day to its ward, the shingle and the rose brick 

of fallen cottages which look bombed out or shaken to the root, 

  though not a single shot has crossed the bay in anger,

maybe a round in roll-call, duty or display – it’s what you fear.

  So now on the creases of the water, epaulettes of foam, 

a speedboat, sunglassed pilot, barely breaks the flux 

  of tide against the tillers. Fennel’s gradient lens 

fingerprints the water, seventeen seconds for off

  seventeen seconds for on. The light augurs “red over red 

this ship is dead / red over green, you’re a sailing machine”

  The three tonne doors withdraw before the sea rises.

  Gun bolts rust to truffles in the concrete-setting sun.

[dancepoetry]

Hurst Castle has a central, hexagonal tower, and two long wings stretching out from its north-west and north-east  bastions, along the spit towards the lighthouse, tall, automatic, storybook white. Rails run through the grass and across the drawbridge where artillery shells were wheeled to Hurst Castle’s elephantine 38 tonne defensive guns. To the north, the salt marshes where the ferry runs to and from Keyhaven and to the south, the nit-comb of the Needles jutting out from the Isle of Wight’s coastline, and the Solent. 

[dancepoetry]

The castle has been designed such that, in the event of an attack, the castle’s interior spaces could be sacrificed. The hexagonal tower - the keep - at the centre of the castle, brought us into a conversation about the castle’s anatomy, how its original Tudor centre had been surgically altered through the addition of its Victorian wings, the ventricular portcullis, and its aortic chambers and antechambers. 

[dancepoetry]

One of the first signs you see on the salt marsh is ‘No Landing’. Its indicative of the importance of preserving the habitat which is home to wildfowl, terns and gulls.  It lead us to looking at forms, and the possible marriage of poetic forms to movement.

    In poetry the sestina has a structure of six repeating words or ‘telutons’ which occur at the end of each line. Each teluton is assigned a number 123456. These telutons are repeated and then repeat in a specific pattern 615243 and then 364125 and so on. This order can be remembered by drawing a spiral going anti-clockwise from the last number to the first, and working your way inwards, so in the original order 123456 you draw the spiral from 6 through 1, through 5, through 2, and so on. The spiral pattern is bringing us back to the heart of the castle.