Let’s break more poets out of University English departments: Game Designer Raph Koster’s “Sunday Poems”

This is kind of interesting–a friend who I went to Washington College with wrote to let me know that he’d just self-published a book of poetry.  My initial reaction was that I don’t usually blurb self-published books…but then I became intrigued by the story of the book and by the audience it’s already found, even though it won’t be “officially” released until later this week. (Amazon is selling the hard copy here and the Kindle copy here.)

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Raph Koster has a graduate degree in poetry-writing, but he didn’t follow the usual academic become-a-college-professor route.  Instead he went into the world of game design, and became rather famous in that world.

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The popular website Boing Boing writes that

 

Game designer Raph Koster is a polymath. A legendary game-designer (Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, etc), author of one of the seminal texts on game design (A Theory of Fun), visual artist, musician — and poet.

Raph has a blog about game design. In 2004 he also started posting a poem to it every Sunday. According to the blurb for his book,

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These are verses written to an audience that didn’t necessarily care about poetry; verses about whatever was happening that week. They comment on the news, on his children’s homework, on books he was reading or music he heard. 

 

What’s fascinating to me is the number of people who have already read some of these poems.  One piece that I just checked has at-the-moment-I-write-this received 13078 hits.  I haven’t crunched numbers yet, (I’d love to do a comparison to some of the poems out on other on-line literary publications,) but this seems good for a new contemporary poem. 

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I’m  interested in watching how Koster’s book fares. When we corresponded last,  it was  “the #14 “hot new release” in the poetry category of Kindle, the #3 hot release in American poetry, and #37 on the American poetry chart….”

 

Might Koster, who is doing his best to bring computer geeks to poetry, also be able to have an influence on the also-geeky (albeit in a different way) literary world? We could especially use more poems on  programming and game design and other important technological subjects from people who truly know them.  Good poems might be able to help the rest of us better understand our relationships to them.  

 

(After all, programmers also currently are trying to help robots and computers better understand the human world via teaching them to write poetry!)  

 

Here’s an excerpt to and a link from the Koster poem that so far has 13078 hits and was written, according to Raph: 

 

 in blank verse: iambic pentameter, with seven-line stanzas, and one extra coda line (alas, not 440 syllables — 290). The stanzas arose organically, but each verse really hated being in lines — words broken across lines, etc, like strands that shouldn’t be interrupted. So then I re-broke the lines to be in a sine wave.

 

Ode to Code: A Geek Poem

 

Raph Koster

 

Just think:
The twine of sine
and cosine, twang of tangents,
tangles of angles and twirls of tris,
the way each curve is wavelength,

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Read rest of poem at Raph Koster’s website

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Read three more of his poems at Boing Boing