By Alice Seville
In March 2021, still in the depths of pandemic chaos in the UK, Alice Seville met with the lovely Stephen Sexton over Zoom, to talk about his Forward Prize-winning poetry collection (Best First Collection, 2019) If All The World and Love Were Young, in anticipation of his more recent collection Cheryl’s Destinies (2021). The following is an account of their conversation.
Stephen and Alice first met when they both lived in and frequented south and central Belfast and they reunited over Zoom to talk about the ekphrastic form, baby eels and YouTube Super Mario hacks (among other phenomena).
If All The World and Love Were Young was published in 2019 by Penguin. It is a unique, disrupted collection which follows a number of interchanging ‘narratives’: the themes of the collection are both pastoral and danger-riven, suburban and surreal, grief-stricken yet grounded and warm. The collection explores devastating loss but also a number of dazzling, vivid topographies which are all responses to playing Super Mario World (1990) as a child and then again as an adult poet. An ekphrastic is, generally speaking, a poem written in response to (and sometimes to express deep affinities with) a given artwork, and Sexton took on the novel task of writing an ekphrastic after every level of the game.
This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
Alice Seville (AS): You have referred before to If All The World and Love Were Young as a ‘concept album’. Could you elaborate?
Stephen Sexton (SS): I’m interested in the lyric, as we both are, and I understand that it’s a very capacious phenomenon. But we can understand the ‘I’ of the poem as having some relationship to the ‘I’ of the poet. In the majority of cases, they are the same person. This book is pretty close to me. One of the epigraphs is very obviously saying: ‘It’s a-me. Mario!’.
But, I’m deeply suspicious of the ‘I’. I like the idea of the ‘I’ as a character – like the ‘I’ of your poems, or the ‘I’ of Keats’, Shakespeare’s, Anne Carson’s or Emily Dickinson’s poems. I like the idea that it’s a character – ‘I’ – and all poems are just the incredible escapades of I, doing all these incredible things. It’s not really got to do with the person. It’s just this character, that we all agree we’re going to call the person in the poems – who is at one time, really, really lonely – as in Dickinson, Keats is also kind of lonely [laughs] – but we’re all writing the stories of the character called ‘I’. And I guess we both like to think of the lyric in that way.
But in this book the ‘I’ is both Mario and me, and the things that happen in it are ‘true.’ I am suspicious of ‘I.’ I don’t like that ‘I’ is often certain kinds of people and ‘I’ often excludes certain types of people. That concerns me. The ‘I’ in this book, it’s not like me, it is me. The things it records are pretty true and that seemed like a responsibility, in terms of how I wanted to do ‘elegy’. I felt it should be ‘true’, because it matters. Part of my writing this book was that I didn’t want to forget. I didn’t want to forget, however horrifying the experience was. I didn’t want to forget it, because I thought that would be worse.
AS: That desire to preserve comes through strongly. And I think there’s multiple levels of discomfort: there’s discomfort about witnessing illness in the collection, but there’s also discomfort about nostalgia and composition. You congratulate the reader at the end of your work, for getting to the end, and it’s funny. There are a lot of words about pain in your collection, but there’s also something kind of… [laughs] I don’t know how to say this, ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ about the way you present things formally: because there’s a hypervigilance you need to read the poems.
It’s not that the poems aren’t incredibly fun and addictive to read, but they do require a high state of attention from your reader, and there are multiple interpolating ideas coming in rapid-fire sequence as well. So, that made me feel, [in terms of] psychological poetry, as if I was reading the way anxiety feels. I don’t know if you would agree with that? Certainly, something I’m writing about with regard to your work is that Ellen Bryant Voigt is another person who does that form – that literal form – those poetics: completely enjambed, almost no punctuation, very rapid-fire conceptual work. I wondered if you had a relationship with her work? Do you have a relationship with other poets who do that kind of thing? Do you think there is a bit of a ‘revolution’ in doing this sort of thing? [Eliding punctuation. Melting ideas together.]
SS: I don’t know when you came across Ellen Bryant Voigt’s work. I wonder if it might have been the same time I did – which is to say, in our master’s class! Headwaters? At that point I probably had a draft done. I was on a second draft. And one of the things I felt when I read that book, I felt seen. I was reading it and I thought, this is exactly what I’m trying to achieve: where you have this dazzling effect. I was coming at it in a different way, where I was trying to find a way to make language feel visual, to create that dazzling effect, I wanted that to happen in language. And I felt the way to dazzle was to send this incredible energy outwards, knowing that some of it might miss, but the effect would be striking. But with [Bryant Voigt], it wasn’t a part of the original composition, but when I read Headwaters, I felt a certain kind of permission.
AS: You spoke in the Irish Times piece about ‘seriousness’ and the ekphrastic. And that — doing ekphrastics – we might argue, as people who’ve done a (partially creative) master’s in poetry, is kind of a rite of passage. You’re often compelled to do it at some point, in terms of the study of poetry, or you encounter it at some point, in terms of the study of the most famous (or the most canonised) poets. So, my argument is that your relationship to the ekphrastic is somewhat ambivalent, satirical, irreverent… because you wrote a poem after every level of Super Mario! And, [laughs] people might say it’s an unserious topic to devote so much labour to: that there’s a seriousness / unseriousness interpolation in your work. Also, did you really play every level of Super Mario World when you were writing?
SS: The second of those questions is really easy: I did! I revisited the game frequently. Most of the time I used a longplay on YouTube if I needed to get into something, but yeah, I did go back through. But, yes that seriousness / unseriousness thing – that’s exactly what I was aiming for. It was partly [that] this was a PhD project; this book [was] a creative component. I was writing typical ekphrastics and at a certain point I got tremendously bored. I was trying to write this idea of a collection and – expecting a kind of coherence – and, I just couldn’t find a way because it seemed like every single image required a different angle of approach. I thought: what other kind of visual images am I interested in? I suppose it’s also worth saying that when I was writing these poems, about paintings or photographs, never did I actually see any one of these paintings. They were online. I was very aware of that frame, you know, that I’m seeing a representation. In fact, I think a working title for my thesis for a little while was ‘Representing Representing’, which I thought was funny. You know because I’m not getting the actual thing. I’m interested in these frames: that I’m looking at a screen, or just an image on a screen; that I’m not actually looking at the real thing.
I had read Sam Riviere’s book, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (2015) – that was around the same time – and I was aware from talking to Sam, that he was working to a certain kind of system: there were seventy-two poems I think, in that book. And oddly too, there are seventy-two levels in Super Mario World. There are ninety-six exits from levels, but there are seventy-two levels in total, though I might be getting that wrong. I was interested in what Riviere was doing, because he had a system, and he could complete it. He knew how many there were going to be. There had to be that many. I was interested in that kind of completeness.
I thought: what other kinds of images can I write about? And I thought it would be kind of funny: you know, why not, as you say, devote this grand tradition of you know, Auden, or ‘The Shield of Achilles’, these (historic or famous or well-known or canonised) examples of this. It’s kind of an exclusive word: ekphrasis. Because I really happily spend a lot of my time talking to people who have no interest in poetry whatsoever, and occasionally one of my friends will say like, well, what are you working on? And I’ll say, well I’m really into ekphrasis, and they’ll say, what, I thought you did poetry!
This might be a bit of an aside, but I’m much more interested in ekphrasis as a kind of fan fiction. They’re not really dissimilar: you’re taking an image – an icon – and you’re making it do things it doesn’t do itself. And that doesn’t strike me as being very far away from fan fiction. I started trying to use all this stuff – knowing I was, as you say, in this tradition of Auden, of, Musée des Beaux Arts, and all the Greeks, and The Starry Night – and all these things. I thought why don’t I just look at something else and use the same principles.
AS: Yeah. I mean so, I know it’s a cliched example – ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ – of the form, but I’m actually a huge fan of that poem, partly because what’s so interesting about it is the fact that, as you say, well less that it’s fan fiction, but I feel that poem is not about the Bruegel – I know there’s been some contestation about whether actually it is his work, now – but it’s not really about the Bruegel at all, it’s about his [Auden’s] psychological state as he looks at it. He [Auden] manages to find something sinister, and just troubled, in a work that really isn’t that troubled or sinister.
I did feel that there was some aspect of that in your work: you manage to find some quite frightening things in a rinkydink and childish landscape. And I think that this has all sorts of interesting ramifications for what it’s like – this sounds very grand – but for what it’s like to be alive now. For what it’s like to be in a postmodern landscape, where you’re being ushered into a realm which is supposed to be playful, all the time, and yet somehow there are shadows lurking. There’s escapism. Escapism to a realm in order to avoid certain ideas, and then the ideas percolating through that environment anyway. We’re trying to escape through various virtual technological modes, but through these modes, we’re still being trapped.
SS: I want to pick up on a couple of things about the escapism, but also about the question of context. Me looking at Super Mario as a nine-year-old is very different to me looking at Super Mario as an adult. But one point for me was that this was an object of childhood that was given to me and my brother by my mother. And to look at that as a child and not to be aware of exactly where things come from… Sometimes objects just appear, and, you have no concept of that. Obviously, you do realise they came from somewhere, and just trying to understand how you can look at the same thing twice and not be able to determine – the it itself has not changed remotely, but you have changed. Or you know that phenomenon: you look at a photograph of somebody who has died, and the photograph has not changed, but somehow, it has. It has changed.
AS: there’s a great scene in The Sopranos where [the] psychotherapist has a picture of a tree outside her therapy room, and at some point, Tony Soprano gets absolutely furious about this picture of the tree: he’s like: why have you got this picture of this really spooky tree, outside your therapy room? what are you trying to do to me? And it’s just like this perfectly pleasant bucolic scene. There’s this scene where he’s staring at it and it’s imbued with all this sinister potential. But I asked you, did you know what the subject matter of [the collection] was going to be when you embarked on it?
SS: Not at all. When I was writing it, I found it hard to pinpoint exactly what I was doing, but I was motivated purely by mischief, so there were certain parts of my brain that weren’t really active. I also wanted to do it quickly. And most of it I wrote over five or six weeks, or something, like a first draft, then fixed it.
AS: Wow. All the poems over six weeks?
SS: Yeah, yeah! Maybe there were a few of them at the end that I didn’t do.
AS: Bonkers.
SS: Some of them were very short – sometimes I was doing two or three in a day. I had a marvellous attention where I didn’t really want to do anything else. And that’s because I thought I was being kind of cheeky, about it. And it had to be complete. It’s not okay to do just one. It’s a bit like Mario, the gesture, for it to work, it has to be too big – it has to be kind of campish, to some extent! It has to be too much for it to work at all. But at a certain point, about a third of the way in, I had this feeling where I kind of revealed myself to myself: you’re not actually doing this for the joke, are you?
The way that I translated Mario was to translate it into the house that I grew up in in the countryside, and by doing that, then people started to show up around the edges. And eventually I thought yeah, that’s what you’re doing. But this was maybe three years after my mother had died. I hadn’t written about that. Because I didn’t really think I wanted to, or needed to. Whether or not it’s my subconscious being active in making me do this or not… but I felt like I was in this state of subconsciousness, or unconsciousness, where I was doing this as a joke, it was just like – banging out these things – and whatever state that was, allowed other things to come in.
So, I didn’t start this as an elegy – as a pastoral elegy – but part of the way through, I started to feel this presence at the edges. Which was either myself, or something like that. But I made a very conscious decision at that point. And I did make the choice for it to be an elegy. There was something of the Rorschach test to it. I’m aware of that – like, I was thinking, how can I make the tree and the screen look like something else, and oh yeah, that’s like a tree from there – and I did have to be in a certain frame of mind.
AS: Yes. Like, how to find out what you really want is for people to ask you lots of questions in quick succession! I also think the associative quality lends itself to myriad forms of interpretation. I’ve been reading some of the poems to my parents actually, when I’m going to see them. They want to know what I’m writing about [for my PhD], and they take enormously different things from each poem. Which is a mark of one kind of successful poetics, if you’ve got two people listening to the same poem thinking desperately different things.
For instance, your reference to eels and the Sargasso Sea. My dad immediately started going off on this long story about how eels migrate, and the impossibility of the eel migration cycle, and how far they migrate to get from one place to another, but they end up kind of near the Northern Irish coast. But this was emotionally resonant to him and he thought that a statement was being made about the impossibility of the eels’ migration cycle as a reflection of the impossibility of the things we do too and the weird, tenuous ways that we live and maybe you intended that, or maybe you didn’t. The side effect of having so many densely layered concepts and frameworks moving through, is that people will get something totally different from the collection depending on who you ask. Maybe, you’ve discovered that?
SS: I have, a lot, and thank you very much! Thank your dad! I mean I know nothing about eels, but I do know that their migration cycle is quite mysterious, and they spawn in Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, although I put that there – as part of the stupid jokes I make to myself – but, the second world of Super Mario World is Donut Plains, because it looks like a donut, and arguably Northern Ireland also looks a bit like a donut, with Lough Neagh in the middle of it. And in that world, there’s a lot of weird, geographical things, like there’s some caves over in the west, in Fermanagh, but also like – the westernmost point of that world is an underground level. Then, at the northernmost point, there’s a rope bridge over the top, as there is in Northern Ireland, and all this stuff! Just amusing things, that are lovely coincidences!
I think the main point of that mention of eels is it’s associated with a simile, like ‘needles of glass’, so there’s this way of reinforcing this illness narrative: that everything looks like a needle; that chemo is going on here. It’s not got much to do with the eels… it’s more, what the eels were like, or rather what this thing is like, that I’m not talking about. You know I’m not talking about the chemotherapy, so, I’ll find a way of saying what it’s like. And in this case, it’s like eels. Like these young – I think they’re called elvers – in their spawning stage, they’re these fine transparent things. I really loved the idea that it goes off on all these angles, because it’s pacey, and we all like a short book, but you can read it really quickly – most of the poems aren’t really longer than eight lines, so you can fire through it, but it is going out in all directions. That’s probably the subconscious just trying to find ways of describing things, and being comfortable showing the imagination at work. That’s what’s interesting. It was something I was very aware of as I was writing this book: I’m showing how I think. I’m allowing how I think to be seen, that it becomes associative. And that’s kind of exposing in a way. It didn’t concern me too much, but I was aware of it.
AS: In terms of, as you say, lyric voice, it’s radical to leave things raw, in that potentially self-exposing way, because, there is a tension now to do with questions about lyric voice. Have you read Sandeep Parmar’s essay? It’s called ‘Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK’? (2015) It’s about – it’s basically about canonised British poetry. It’s seismic in some of the things that it says. Parmar talks about studying poetry and reading this big stack of canonised [anglophone] lyric poetry, and she says that a singular [lyric] voice emerges from the works:
“Gradually as I laboured through postwar British poetry, the technical, lyrical sameness — a self-assured universal “voice” — began to rise from the pages, forming into homogenous, efficient, and consumable vehicles of meaning. The conservative, mainstream British poem behaved like modernism had never happened. Its low-risk game of truth and meaning left little room for nuanced poetic subjectivities that challenged the singular British voice.”
To some people that would be sacrilegious and awful to say, but I understood that, and there’s a drive at the moment to acknowledge that the lyric mode is not unproblematic. There can be a staginess with the lyric mode – in terms of what [you said] about ‘truth’, that doesn’t always feel so ‘true’. And then there seems to be almost this urge to try to negotiate [with] that. I know Hera Lindsay Bird has [a poem] at the beginning of her collection, essentially about how embarrassing it is to be a poet.
[‘As urine cascades down your black lace stocking And onto the / linoleum / Is to comprehend what it means to be a poet / To stand in the tepid under-halo / Of your own self-making / And want to die…’, ‘Write A Book’, ‘Hera Lindsay Bird’, Hera Lindsay Bird (2016).]
SS: Yes, I’m actually looking at it. I’ve got it right here.
AS: Yeah, and I know Luke Kennard writes on something similar, [in Cain, 2016], he has poems that are about how I was never very good at sports – so I became, you know, a poet! Big surprise!
[‘See because looking back the wonder is that I wasn’t picked on / a lot more. I was a terrible sportsman. I mean no shit, right? Poet / has inferiority complex: stop the presses. I had an anti-talent for all / sports…’ ‘On Being Very Annoying’, ‘Cain’, Luke Kennard, 2016]
There’s this ambivalence about the lyric mode, in terms of its capability to see itself from the outside, if you know what I mean – being irreverent about it. But I think one radical way of transposing it into something else is to be so exposed in a sense.
SS: I agree. There’s a great poem by Brenda Shaughnessy called ‘A Poet’s Poem’. It’s trying to describe, somebody working. It starts something like – ‘all day’ I’ve been trying to get the ‘word freshened out of this poem’. And then she goes outside, and like has some coffee or smoking or something, and she describes pulling an icicle from the ceiling. And with it, she writes the word ‘snow’ in the snow, and I think the last line is, ‘I can’t stand myself.’
AS: [laughs]
SS: I mean, is that broadly right? Do you have it there?
AS: I’ve got it here now. Yeah – I like it already, even just scanning, it reminds me of John Berryman, the poem that starts, ‘Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so’, and it’s a deliberately irreverent lyric which is about having no sense of reverence. [Laughs]
It’s in the nature of the business, people will ask you, what is your collection ‘about’, and you will have to talk about that! I was wondering whether you hoped your collection would bring gamers to poems and whether it would bring poets to games? And whether those two demographics share something? And whether that something has anything to do with ‘intensity’, at all? [Laughs]
SS: I was aware I was writing a book that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to people who like poems, and probably wouldn’t appeal to people who like video games. Because it’s too much of the opposing one for either of them. And there have been nice people that I talk to who have said lovely things, and said, I really, really loved the book! I don’t know anything about Mario… I just know he’s a little hedgehog, and he runs about and stuff!
AS: [laughs] I know slightly more than that.
SS: I thought, I hope that someone will go along with it, because it’s not really about Mario. That’s just a landscape. And when I think about Michael Longley’s poems, or nature poems of any kind, no part of me says, well I’ve never seen that garden, so I don’t know how to read this! For the people who like video games, there have been a lot of people who have read it. Most of the time it’s been, people saying, I never really liked poetry all that much but I really like Mario. This also felt a bit like one of those permission things, which I certainly got from other places. Probably from Sam Riviere. Like, who’s going to stop you, from just doing this?
I’ve been interested in all the Big Thoughts I don’t really have – the things that move me are like, watching The Simpsons. You know, all those thoughts I have in response to something, they’re as valid as the thoughts I have in response to Shelley and Plato. For me, it’s the same feeling. I don’t really care about the source. I’m always privileging that kind of feeling. It’s just as valid coming from anywhere else. And I’m not so interested in that higher culture / lower culture thing, ‘cos you know… they’re my feelings. I don’t care where they come from. The feeling is the same. But maybe there has been a tiny bit of cross-over [between the demographics]. With intensity? There’s definitely an intensity towards completeness.
But there are other things as well that kind of amused me: these are the things I kind of forgot that I put there. There’s this constant sweeping left to right action: Mario runs most of the time, left to right, and in English we read left to right, so there’s always this cycle.
I made jokes about the sixteen-syllable line and the idea of a processor processing these bits of information and you know, a terrible pun on memory, but I don’t regret it. There is also this idea of translating how a processor acts. I figure that a comma, for example, is an indeterminate pause. It’s not – we don’t pause for one second, or one and a half seconds, or two seconds. There’s no rule for how long a comma takes. I don’t think you can ask a computer to do that. A machine must happen, you know, with precision. It must happen in a very specific way. And I just figured, if I’m trying to mimic a processor to some extent, I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t ask it just to ‘pause’. It doesn’t do that. It just does what it’s told. So, I figured, there are those two things: trying to create these little obstacles in the line that are like jumping over things, but also, it didn’t feel right to have punctuation.
In that sense, there’s absolutely intensity involved in both of them, and I guess, the organisation as well: it’s organised into worlds. I’m straddling two things: on the one hand, I’m modelling it after Mario. On the other hand, I know there are nine circles in Dante’s hell – there are nine worlds in this scheme, with another Italian man going on journeys (!). I’m balancing these two positions and I’m more ashamed of one of them than the other. But nevertheless it becomes kind of literary to have this backing.
AS: We spoke about ekphrastics, but I think there’s something about Oulipo in there as well. I don’t know if anyone has described your work as Oulipo and, I suppose it would be testing the boundaries, but there are actually quite a lot of rules [in the collection]. There is quite a few constraints. There’s the sixteen-syllable phenomenon. There’s the sixteen-line phenomenon coming up, sometimes. There is the fact that every poem is an ekphrastic after a level. There’s the elision of punctuation. Once you combine all those rules, I think that’s the joy of Oulipo. It ought to be constraining but what it actually is, is liberating.
SS: It helped me, mostly in the sense of confidence. I figured because I was following a pattern. And latterly I realised that I was doing so many things that are really typical of elegies anyway, like an obsession with repetition and things being in a particular pattern. These were totally subconscious but really typical hallmarks of elegy works: a repeated theme which happens over and over, because you’re trying to overcome what can’t be overcome, but you just keep trying it, like you’re trying to do what can’t be done; you keep trying.
By the way, you might know the Super Mario Maker phenomenon – I think it’s for the Nintendo Switch – where you’re given all the tools you need to make your own levels.
AS: I have no idea about that…
SS: Yeah, I don’t know so much about it, but I feel like I’ve kind of done that anyway. I was very aware of the numerous hacks of Super Mario, because the tech is so comparably unsophisticated! It was absolutely sophisticated in the early nineties but not so much now but people go in and hack them, and there’s loads of wrong hacks of Super Mario World. It’s an uncanny experience, where all the feelings are right, but nothing’s in the right order. There are these on YouTube: it’s a real art, I guess. But for me there’s something profoundly disturbing because it feels right, but nothing’s right. But similarly, I wanted to build in this possibility of breaking my book to some extent.
I can’t count sixteen syllable lines – that’s too much – but I can count eight syllable lines, so for a while I did get locked in. I’m still locked in a tetrameter, like when I try to get an iambic line I get a four beat line. Like – my brain – I ruined it! I spent so long doing this.
But the reason I did was because apparently, the Super Nintendo, its processor is a 16-bit processor. According to people in the know, it’s not actually a true 16-bit processor, but two 8-bit processors working together. I don’t really know how all that works, but I was really fascinated. My book is written in 16 syllable lines – but the actual line is actually an 8-syllable line, it’s two of them joined together. So all of these lines can be broken exactly in half, after their eight syllables. I hoped that I could just one day break them all apart, like I could use a randomiser. I wanted to write the book again, randomly. Where an 8-syllable line would join one from the end. A hack, basically. I wanted to make the book hackable. In principle, it should work!
AS: That’s amazing and I think there’s something extremely charming about the fact that the limit of the way your mind processes the meter is commensurate with the limits of the processor. That’s like, spooky but wonderful. In terms of, eight-bit and eight-bit, and eight syllables and eight syllables.
SS: I haven’t shared that information with anybody! So do with it what you will…
AS: [laughs] I will!
Stephen Sexton’s latest collection is Cheryl’s Destinies (2021).
Alice Sevilles’s poetry has previously appeared in a pamphlet for The Lifeboat series (2016) and in The Literateur, and she was published in the anthology Happy Browsing: An Anthology in Praise of Bookfinders (by The Lifeboat associated with The Tangerine) in 2018. Alice completed her MA in Poetry & Criticism at Queen’s, Belfast, and is currently studying for her PhD on post-millennial poetry criticism at the University of Birmingham. She co-runs a feminist network called PGR Feminisms. You can find it here: @PGRfeminisms.
Contemporary Irish Literature 