I Lied — Laurie Eaves

Well, sort of. Back in February, I wrote a blog about how I wasn’t working on a book. At the time it was mostly true. I had half an eye on putting together a follow-up to Biceps which in my head was provisionally called Get Human! I was expecting it to be pretty similar, diaristic and exploring the spectrum of intimacy to autonomy and back again. That project might still be on the cards – I’ve got some poems from the last few years that fit that mode and which I think will hang together as a pamphlet or collection at some point.

But I’ve mostly found myself working on something else this year. It’s a bit weird.

Back in April for NaPoWriMo, I returned to a slightly mad idea that’s been kicking around my head for the last several years: to write a sonnet based on every boss character in the 1998 video game Metal Gear Solid as a short pamphlet called Metal Gear Sonnets. I know. What started out as a bad pun has ballooned into something more.

It wasn’t actually entirely a joke-turned-awry. I’ve always wanted to be decent at writing sonnets; to have a better relationship with form. I often read interviews with other poets where they say they find form playful and a great way of pushing their writing – but I always found it made my writing feel forced and insincere. I wanted to change that. At an online workshop for Apples and Snakes a couple of years ago, poetry guru Jacob Sam-La-Rose planted a really helpful seed: to get better at sonnets, start writing poems that are 14 lines. If you start thinking in 14 lines, then your poems will start to fit the form. Jacqueline Saphra’s essay on sonnets in The Craft (Nine Arches Press) also had a big impact – making me want to feel that playfulness with form that other writers described.

My wedding was also approaching in July. I wanted to write a poem for it and I knew I wanted that poem to be a sonnet. My ridiculous idea of writing Metal Gear Sonnets would give me a safe space to practice, to learn how to write in the form decently without any pressure so that by July I might be half-decent at it.

There are a couple of other reasons why I was drawn to writing about a videogame specifically. Games are inherently about playfulness. If anything could make me feel joy in form, it was going to be this; if I could feel the same sense of fun in formal writing as I can when playing games then that’s a positive framework to write in. A game has its characters and plot already in place – writing poems based on a game is fan fiction, a translation. The scaffolding is already there for you to play with. Writing from the point of view of the game’s characters has allowed me to challenge myself by moving away from the diaristic style of Biceps.

By not being “me” in the poems, I’m dredging up themes I wouldn’t have expected to: a very real fear of a nuclear future, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fine line between defence and attack, what pacifism means, complicity in sexism, familial relationships, the space between man and machine, fears of precision bioweaponry. It’s a world away from the introverted, personal tone of Biceps. I worry a little that that (and a lack of familiarity with the source material) will mean it alienates readers.

But I can’t stop myself pulling this jumper thread. It’s made me experiment with the sonnet form in ways that feel… just so much fun. I’m writing English sonnets, Italian sonnets… I’m even learning about Japanese sonnet translations and bringing that into the work. Inuit poetry has influenced the work, erasures are entering the book, line-breaks and layouts feel experimental in a much more conscious way.

Right now, I’m not sure if this project is going to be something I push to publish or just a big rehearsal space. But whatever it is, it currently has 26 sonnets in it. It’s probably going to have about 15 more. I’m not ready to share it publicly yet. But it is hitting the point where I’m thinking this isn’t just fun anymore. There’s work here. And I think it’s good. I’ll write some more little blogs on here in the coming weeks and months with more info on the project. It’s good to get it out there – whatever it is.