Level Up Your Poetry, Part 2: Anatomy of Two Gaming Poems

Level Up Your Poetry, Part 2: Anatomy of Two Gaming Poems

In the first part of this two-part essay, I laid out my approach to writing poetry inspired by video games. If those three criteria felt too prescriptive for your tastes, then by all means, please use them as inspiration to rebel! Personally, I find the criteria open-ended enough to allow a multitude of outcomes. In this second part, I’ll use two of my gaming poems, one free verse and one formal structure, to illustrate the approach in action and how it helped me produce two vastly different results. (more…)

Level Up Your Poetry, Part 2: Anatomy of Two Gaming Poems

Level Up Your Poetry: Video Games & Ekphrastic Verse

Poetry about video games? You bet. It follows a fine tradition of ekphrastic poetry, or verse inspired by visual arts. Just as a poet might depict a painting in detail, you can portray the sights, sounds, and experiences of digital games through verse. The realm of video games contains its own cultures and subcultures, its own mythologies. It can be an exciting source of inspiration, one that doesn’t feel as saturated as other sources given its relative newness in the grand scheme of all media. (more…)

Game Enjambment: Restoring Order to a World Hooked on Strangeness

Game Enjambment: Restoring Order to a World Hooked on Strangeness

Game Enjambment is a reoccurring poetry series on games and gaming.

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Game Enjambment: Fear (Doki Doki Literature Club!)

Game Enjambment is a reoccurring poetry series on games and gaming.

Doki Doki Literature Club! has quickly become one of the internet’s favorite games. Disguised as a cute visual novel where the player joins his best friend’s new literature club, it drops its innocent facade after less than an hour of gameplay. I made the mistake of not knowing anything about this game before I played it.

This poem contains spoilers for the game’s “twist.”

Doki Doki Literature Club!, Dan Salvato, Team Salvato, 2017

What scared me was not
that Monika was awake.
Neither did her love

push me away. No:
It was the way their faces
snapped, shattering fast.

A twisted head. A
glitch. Memories gone far from

this place. I was

alone,

Read the rest of the Game Enjambment series.